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ICO fined Bharat Singh Chand 200,000 after receiving 19,138 complaints Britain's data watchdog has fined a sole trader 200,000 for nearly a million spam texts targeting people in debt - almost 20 pence per message....

Onboard cores use a Linux stack based on Ubuntu Ubuntu Summit One of the more unexpected talks at last week's Ubuntu Summit 25.10 in London was by Antonio Salvemini of Bolt Graphics, who introduced the company's forthcoming range of Zeus graphics accelerator hardware. These are very unlike any conventional GPUs - or indeed anything else....

Dangles 100K for someone to fix 23B tech mess The UK government is on the hunt for a new CTO after incumbent David Knott announced his departure, citing family reasons....

Judges agree broadband biz didn't follow its own procedures when booting boss UK ISP Zen Internet has lost an appeal against a ruling that it unfairly dismissed former CEO Paul Stobart....

Cybersecurity agency urges organizations to upgrade or risk total network compromise Germany's infosec office (BSI) is sounding the alarm after finding that 92 percent of the nation's Exchange boxes are still running out-of-support software, a fortnight after Microsoft axed versions 2016 and 2019....

But the data describing where they're used - which is help to fight crime - isn't very useful Internetworking wonks have investigated Starlink's use of IP addresses and found some interesting facts....

Five Eyes intel alliance has created a team to target these scum who prey on kids Australia's Federal Police (AFP) is working on an AI to interpret emojis and the slang used online by Generation Z and Generation Alpha, so it can understand them when they discuss crime online....

Internal dependencies again prove problematic UPDATED Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region, which last week caused massive disruption to online services, is having another bad day as internal dependencies again prove problematic....

Corporate restructuring will benefit ... uh, humanity OpenAI has obtained a new lease on life....

A report from cyber-insurer At-Bay fingers Cisco and Citrix VPNs as most likely to lead to ransomware trouble Organizations using Cisco and Citrix VPN devices were nearly seven times as likely to suffer a ransomware infection over a 15-month period, according to At-Bay, a provider of cyber insurance and a vendor of managed detection and response products....

Olafur Waage has an unusual take on "will it run Doom?" Ubuntu Summit Doom takes place on Mars, but up until recently, it has only been played on Earth. However, at the Ubuntu Summit, one enterprising developer explained how he extended the well-established "will it run Doom?" meme all the way into space....

100,000 Blackwell GPUs and 2,200 exaFLOPs make for a big system The US Department of Energy is partnering with Nvidia and Oracle to build seven new AI supercomputers to accelerate scientific research and develop agentic AI for discovery. Two of these systems, located at Argonne National Laboratory, will together form the DOE's largest AI supercomputing infrastructure....

The pair intends to develop cellular infrastructure for running edge AI workloads Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday announced a partnership with Nokia to integrate AI technology into its mobile network infrastructure, bringing accelerated computing to the edge and paving the way for 6G-ready networks. As part of the deal, Nvidia will invest $1 billion in Nokia. Team Green's gear will boost spectral efficiency and make AI inference more accessible from mobile devices....

By appearing more human, it evades detection A new Android malware strain, Herodotus, steals credentials, logs keystrokes, streams victims' screens, and hijacks input - but with a twist: it mimics human typing by adding random delays between keystrokes to evade behavioral fraud detection systems....

'Electrons are the new oil,' ChatGPT maker claims, demanding 100 GW per year OpenAI wants the Trump administration to build 100 gigawatts of additional electricity generation capacity per annum to avoid the US being overtaken by China in the AI arms race....

Scratch Grokipedia and Wikipedia bleeds What do you do if you're the richest man on Earth and don't like Wikipedia? Start your own imitation encyclopedia, call it Grokipedia, lift a bunch of pages from the site, and let AI fill in the rest. Obviously, that's a recipe for success....

Gap between vendor promises and business results set to trigger market correction, research firm predicts ai-pocalypse Bubble, meet pin. Large organizations are set to defer a quarter of planned AI spending from next year until 2027, forcing a market correction....

More countries are prioritizing national security over scientific discovery Why can't we all just get along... for the good of science? New research suggests countries prioritizing national security over the greater good are hindering global research and economic development....

CISPE says post-VMware conduct raises fresh antitrust concerns Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has issued its third European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO) report, praising Microsoft's licensing concessions while accusing Broadcom of worsening anti-competitive practices....

Good luck to the 1,000 enterprise guinea pigs on the initial preview Anthropic has opened a waitlist for Claude for Excel, promising spreadsheet devotees that its LLM will be able to understand their entire workbook....

Noyb says New York-based facial recognition biz flouted GDPR orders and kept scraping anyway Privacy advocates at Noyb filed a criminal complaint against Clearview AI for scraping social media users' faces without consent to train its AI algorithms....

From natural disasters to stray bullets and exams, it's been a shaky quarter for the world's connectivity Cloudflare's latest internet disruptions report reads like a global disaster log, with exam-related shutdowns, natural calamities, stray bullets, and even a Starlink software failure all taking chunks out of global connectivity....

Agentic features open the door to data exfiltration or worse Feature With great power comes great vulnerability. Several new AI browsers, including OpenAI's Atlas, offer the ability to take actions on the user's behalf, such as opening web pages or even shopping. But these added capabilities create new attack vectors, particularly prompt injection....

Research submitted to Parliament details deaths, raids, and mental trauma linked to 2022 relocation leak Research submitted to the UK Parliament has revealed explicit threats to life and the deaths of family members and colleagues directly linked to the Ministry of Defence's 2022 Afghan relocation scheme data breach....

Layoffs are part of an efficiency drive, not a sign of struggle, says HR exec Amazon is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs, blaming the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence for changing how the company operates - and how many people it needs....

Ad and cloud biz rubbishes claims that 183 million accounts broken into Panic spread faster than a phishing email on Tuesday after claims of a massive Gmail breach hit the headlines - but Google says it's all nonsense....

Fake views from Moscow's pet media outlets appear in about one in five responses Popular chatbots powered by large language models cited links to Russian state-attributed sources in up to a quarter of answers about the war in Ukraine, raising fresh questions over whether AI risks undermining efforts to enforce sanctions on Moscow-backed media....

Procurement delays and lock-in fears see framework balloon in size and scope The UK government has launched a competition for cloud services worth up to 14 billion over four years - nearly triple the 4.8 billion over 18 months announced in an earlier market engagement....

Move follows months-long procurement process as retailer refreshes parts of its IT support setup UK retailer Marks & Spencer has replaced Tata Consultancy Services as its IT service desk provider following a procurement process that began in January....

Blames Broadcom's licensing changes that haven't caused other hyperscalers to pull the pin IBM has announced it will stop marketing its VMware on IBM Cloud service to new customers....

As negotiations stalled, Broadcom feared Tesco no longer saw it as a long-term partner Tesco's lawsuit against VMware has taken a twist, with Computacenter filing a claim against Broadcom and Dell....

House of the Snapdragon promises - without much detail - this kit will enable coolly efficient inferencing Qualcomm has announced some details of its tilt at the AI datacenter market by revealing a pair of accelerators and rack scale systems to house them, all focused on inferencing workloads....

If at first you don't succeed, patch and patch again More threat intel teams are sounding the alarm about a critical Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) remote code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-59287 and now under active exploitation, just days after Microsoft pushed an emergency patch and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the bug to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog....

How many 1080p screens can you fit on a pinhead? These German physicists reckon about one Micro-OLED displays with 1080p (1920x1080) resolution have been around for a few years now, but a group of German researchers has taken things to the next level. They've engineered an OLED pixel so small that an entire 1080p display could fit into a single square millimeter, potentially changing the game for wearable displays....

Foundation says it won't compromise policy of inclusivity even if that cash would've really helped The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security....

'The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn't really another choice' Messaging service Signal may be unusual in its deployment of credible end-to-end encryption, but it shares a common availability vulnerability with many other internet services - dependence on Amazon Web Services (AWS)....

It can do a lot more than just play 'Eye of the Tiger' daily In yet another reminder to be wary of AI browsers, researchers at LayerX uncovered a vulnerability in OpenAI's Atlas that lets attackers inject malicious instructions into ChatGPT's memory using cross-site request forgery....

Oak Ridge's $500M system due in 2028, paired with a separate Lux AI cluster arriving two years earlier HPE is set to build a successor to the Frontier exascale system for America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, based on the next generation of its Cray supercomputer platform, plus a separate AI cluster to advance machine learning with a multi-tenant cloud-like platform....

Ravin Academy confirms the intrusion on Telegram, says student data was stolen Iran's school for state-sponsored cyberattackers admits it suffered a breach exposing the names and other personal information of its associates and students....

Nations previously exempt from scraping now in the firing line If you thought living in Europe, Canada, or Hong Kong meant you were protected from having LinkedIn scrape your posts to train its AI, think again. You have a week to opt out before the Microsoft subsidiary assumes you're fine with it....

Cloud giant says choice and flexibility matter more than standardization - for now Interview As agentic AI solutions flood the market, users will face a complex environment in terms of deployment and commercial models, with standard practices yet to be resolved, says Olawale Oladehin, AWS director, solutions architecture....

Brussels' framework muddies the waters and could hand advantage to foreign hyperscalers, says trade body Europe's efforts to reduce reliance on US hyperscalers is under fire from many of the local cloud providers it is designed to help....

NeuralTrust shows how agentic browser can interpret bogus links as trusted user commands Researchers have found more attack vectors for OpenAI's new Atlas web browser - this time by disguising a potentially malicious prompt as an apparently harmless URL....

Social media site dispatches crucial clarification days after curious announcement X (formerly Twitter) sparked security concerns over the weekend when it announced users must re-enroll their security keys by November 10 or face account lockouts - without initially explaining why....

Jen Easterly says most breaches stem from bad software, and smarter tech could finally clean it up Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly claims AI could spell the end of the cybersecurity industry, as the sloppy software and vulnerabilities that criminals rely on will be tracked down faster than ever....

AI wasn't the cause, and multi-cloud is for rubes Column AWS put out a hefty analysis of its October 20 outage, and it's apparently written in a continuing stream of consciousness before the Red Bull wore off and the author passed out after 36 straight hours of writing....

Poor data standards across government hamper scaling, says Parliament spending watchdog The UK government's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has saved 4.4 million over three years by using machine learning to tackle fraud, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). However, the public spending watchdog found the department's ability to expand this work is limited by fragmented IT systems and poor cross-government data standards....

No, it's just good at mass-production copy and paste. And yes, we're correctly applying Betteridge's Law Opinion Remember ELIZA? The 1966 chatbot from MIT's AI Lab convinced countless people it was intelligent using nothing but simple pattern matching and canned responses. Nearly 60 years later, ChatGPT has people making the same mistake. Chatbots don't think - they've just gotten exponentially better at pretending....

When it rains, it pours - and nobody packed an umbrella Opinion When your cabbie asks you what you do for a living, and you answer "tech journalist," you never get asked about cloud infrastructure in return. Bitcoin, mobile phones, AI, yes. Until last week: "What's this AWS thing, then?" You already knew a lot of people were having a very bad day in Bezosville, but if the news had reached an Edinburgh black cab driver, new adjectives were needed....

Four back-to-back weekends of work - and disastrously bad documentation - will do that do a techie Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward....