The Register

Framework aims to lure investors into powering the compute boom The British government today launched the Advanced Nuclear Framework to attract private investment in next-generation nuclear technology for factories and datacenters....

It's a threat straight out of sci-fi, and fiendishly hard to detect Sleeper agent-style backdoors in AI large language models pose a straight-out-of-sci-fi security threat....

Picks chap who used to lead Redmond's security, lures replacement from Google Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has decided Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar, and shifted Charlie Bell, the company's executive veep for security, into the new role....

On the upside, House of the Snapdragon has started shipping its own AI silicon Qualcomm has warned that soaring memory prices will mean the smartphone industry will slow, news that so spooked investors they sent the company's share price sliding by 11 percent....

With revenue topping $400B for the first time, the Chocolate Factory is at no risk of putting itself in the poor house Google's parent Alphabet is doubling down on generative AI in 2026. On Wednesday's earnings call, the search and advertising giant boosted its full-year capital expenditures target to between $175 and $185 billion, roughly twice what it spent last year....

Proposed bills in New York and elsewhere threaten makers, Adafruit says State and federal lawmakers have stepped up their efforts to prevent the creation of 3D printed guns. But Adafruit, a maker of electronics kits, warns that the proposed legislation is so broad it threatens everyone involved in open source manufacturing and technology education....

Job cuts to fall hardest on non-revenue generating roles on the Global Customer Operations team Workday is laying off about two percent of its staff in a bid to align its people with its highest priorities," but at a significant cost to its margins for the quarter and the year, the company announced on Wednesday....

RAG bots could overtake human visitors on publisher sites this year, trackers tell us The AI bot takeover of the internet continues apace, and the latest data suggests the surge is being driven less by model-training scrapes and more by the growing use of AI tools as a stand-in for web search....

Pleb-tier LPDDR5x apparently good enough for Arm-backed AI startup's next-gen Asimov accelerators On paper, Positron's next-gen Asimov accelerators, no doubt named for the beloved science fiction author, don't look like much of a match for Nvidia's Rubin GPUs....

LLMs automated most phases of the attack UPDATED A digital intruder broke into an AWS cloud environment and in just under 10 minutes went from initial access to administrative privileges, thanks to an AI speed assist....

As profit-starved AI companies scramble to monetize chat interactions, Claude bets on trust Anthropic has taken the high road by committing to keep its Claude AI model family free of advertising....

US agencies told to patch by Friday Attackers are exploiting a critical SolarWinds Web Help Desk bug - less than a week after the vendor disclosed and fixed the 9.8-rated flaw. That's according to America's lead cyber-defense agency, which set a Friday deadline for federal agencies to patch the security flaw....

The writing is on the wall as AI companies race to add vertical functionality Software stocks have taken a beating over the last month as investors grow concerned that AI could put vertical SaaS vendors out of business....

Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-assisted threats It's bot versus bot! Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-made biological and chemical weapons, the US Army has plans to fight autonomy with autonomy by getting its hands on some bot-based chemical weapon cleanup tech....

Silicon manufacturing issues to blame Datacenter servers will face a double whammy this year as CPU supply constraints pile on top of an already severe memory shortage. Even so, shipments are still expected to grow at a double-digit rate....

Riigi IT preps European escape plan as it herds civil servants into Redmond's cloud An Estonian government IT agency is trialling European alternatives to US software providers, even as it moves many of the country's civil servants to a centrally-managed cloud computing service provided by Microsoft....

Only cool dudes should wear a HAT backward Microsoft is no stranger to things breaking unexpectedly - and now one of its engineers has added a Raspberry Pi to the list....

Tool speeds up searches and first draft emails, becomes 'comfort blanket' for Whitehall workers Microsoft Copilot saved civil servants 19 minutes daily on routine tasks, according to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) research comparing users to a control group of non-users....

Gang walks away with nothing, victims are left with irreparable hypervisors Cybersecurity experts usually advise victims against paying ransomware crooks, but that advice goes double for those who have been targeted by the Nitrogen group. There's no way to get your data back from them!...

CMA's Subsidy Advice Unit reviewing state aid linked to redress and off-payroll tax costs The UK competition regulator is set to report on a request for 246 million in subsidies to the Post Office, a publicly owned company, to cover its costs in compensation for the Horizon IT scandal and tax liability for IR35, a mechanism commonly used by tech consultants....

After years of bolting AI onto everything, Redmond remembers admins exist There is good news for administrators: Microsoft has delivered on its promise to build Sysmon functionality into Windows....

Catch platform sinks under weight of bugs, missing species, and postal code gaffes while containers pile up at ports Problems with a new digital European system for certifying fishing catches are hampering producers and delaying exports, according to ministers from several EU member states....

Affected police officers squeezed mental health services, relocated over safety fears Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) employees who had their details exposed in a significant 2023 data breach will each receive 7,500 ($10,279) as part of a universal offer of compensation....

Failed deorbit burn grounds workhorse rocket SpaceX has paused flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 after a second stage failure resulted in the spent rocket tumbling uncontrollably back to Earth....

Open source gains urgency as Europe reassesses reliance on US tech Open Source Policy Summit 2026 European tech leaders are waking up to the risk of the US simply turning off their IT services....

Service terms update removes infringement cover tied to audio and video encoding tech Exclusive Amazon is warning users of its media services that it will not protect them against patent infringement claims relating to media codec technology supported by those services....

Bring your own sound effects to a Technic-enabled Space Launch System The launch of the Artemis II mission to send humans around the Moon is fast approaching. The Register had a go at building Lego's latest SLS set and found it a lot of fun, particularly making whooshing noises as the rocket "launches."...

As Spain announces stern laws for social media, and Elon Musk's response shows regulators keep looking his way The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has launched a probe into Elon Musk's xAI, after its Grok chatbot produced sexual images of real people, without their consent....

As analyst house Gartner declares AI tool comes with unacceptable cybersecurity risk' and urges admins to snuff it out If you're brave enough to want to run the demonstrably insecure AI assistant OpenClaw, several clouds have already started offering it as a service....

Single customer accounted for 63 percent of surging revenue In recent years, Supermicro's regulatory filings often have delivered dramas such as losing its listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange, an admission its books may not be accurate, another possible delisting, and missing the AI boom....

A diverse portfolio is usually a good thing, except when AI is the only thing Usually diversity is a sign of a healthy and resilient business. But for the folks on Wall Street, the breadth of AMD's portfolio is a bug, not a feature - one that sent the House of Zen's share price down by more than eight percent in after hours trading on Tuesday....

Versions installed via Snap don't delete files when users empty system trash Linux users who installed Microsoft's Visual Studio Code as a Snap package may want to check to see whether files they sent to the trash with the app have actually been deleted....

Don't relax: This is a 'when, not if' scenario AI agents and other systems can't yet conduct cyberattacks fully on their own - but they can help criminals in many stages of the attack chain, according to the International AI Safety report....

Many vital open source resources rely on the devotion of a few individuals It's hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive....

Code community site begins to see that AI could drive people away GitHub, the Microsoft code-hosting shop that popularized AI-assisted software development, is having some regrets about its Copilot infatuation....

E-commerce giant has watts of bit barns to deploy but nowhere to plug them in Amazon Web Services' European expansion has hit the buffers as the American cloud provider grapples with aging grid infrastructure and lengthy interconnect delays....

Less popular in Canada and Northern Europe Palantir is shaping the "under-the-hood" practices of the US Defense Department as demand for its software grows across warfighting, shipbuilding, and weapons procurement, CEO Alex Karp said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call on Monday....

Too slow react-ion time Baddies are exploiting a critical bug in React Native's Metro development server to deliver malware to both Windows and Linux machines, and yet the in-the-wild attacks still haven't received the "broad public acknowledgement" that they should, according to security researchers....

DoE trims NEPA paperwork for advanced reactors The Department of Energy says advanced nuclear reactor designs - many of which have so far existed mainly at the experimental, testing, or demonstration stage - generally pose limited environmental risk and can qualify for a streamlined environmental review for future projects....

Yes, it already had Unistore Snowflake is launching a PostgreSQL database-as-a-service within its AI data environment to place transactional workloads alongside analytics and AI under a single set of governance rules....

GreyNoise's Glenn Thorpe counts the cost of missed opportunities On 59 occasions throughout 2025, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) silently tweaked vulnerability notices to reflect their use by ransomware crooks. Experts say that's a problem....

CEO Alex Karp meets criticism with soaring revenues and a sermon Opinion Palantir had a whopper of a Q4, showing accelerating revenue growth, beating Wall Street's profit estimates, and enjoying a share price jump of as much as 11% during pre-market trading on Tuesday before coming back down to earth....

Managed Identity and virtual machine failures triggered knock-on problems throughout cloud platform Microsoft has reported two Azure service wobbles in as many days, including a disruption affecting Virtual Machine management ops yesterday and a Managed Identity for Azure resources outage in East US and West US regions today....

Robotics is forcing a fundamental rethink of AI compute, data, and systems design Partner Content Physical AI and robotics are moving from the lab to the real world- and the cost of getting it wrong is no longer theoretical. With robots deployed in factories, warehouses, and public settings, large-scale simulation has become tightly coupled with real-world operations....

Governments and businesses respond to Trump pressures by upping spending in domestically controlled infrastructure US tariffs may be squeezing Europe's trade balance, but they are also pushing governments and businesses to spend big on keeping tech closer to home....

Multimillion-dollar tenure could have bought a couple of crates of toner Longtime HP CEO Enrique Lores is decamping for a top job at PayPal, handing the reins to an interim chief while the business hunts for a permanent successor....

Algorithmic bias probe continues, CEO and former boss summoned to defend the platform's corner French police raided Elon Musk's X offices in Paris this morning as part of a criminal investigation into alleged algorithmic manipulation by foreign powers....

Azure Storage now requires version 1.2 or newer for encrypted connections Today is the day Azure Storage stops supporting versions 1.0 and 1.1 of Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS 1.2 is the new minimum....

DDoSer of 'strategically important' websites admitted to most charges Polish authorities have cuffed a 20-year-old man on suspicion of carrying out DDoS attacks....

South Yorkshire becomes ground zero for nationwide experiment with 500K seed funding AI-pocalypse Barnsley, a town in South Yorkshire, England, best known for coal mining and glassmaking, is being thrust into the limelight as the country's first "Tech Town" - shoehorning AI into everything from local businesses to public services....