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Only a point up in a year, but that's a 50% leap for Linux gamers The latest edition of Valve's monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out, showing a rise in Steam usage on Linux. Penguin likes to play!...

PEP 810 approved following lengthy debate among developer community Python programs are set to get faster startup times with PEP 810 "Explicit lazy imports," which allows scripts to defer loading imported libraries until they're actually needed rather than at startup....

Trust me bro, says GitHub Copilot. And programmers just... do Developers who "pair code" with an AI assistant stand to learn as much as they do in traditional human-human pairings, but also show a less critical attitude toward their silicon-based partner's output, academics have found....

Norges Bank Investment Management votes against excessive award, automaker's share price skids Norway's sovereign wealth fund has opposed Tesla CEO Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion share award, which the carmaker's board says is necessary to retain him....

Popular operating system much more sticky than Windows 7 was during its EOL As the dust settles over the end of support for many versions of Windows 10, the operating system remains a significant presence in the Windows market....

Check Point lifts lid on a quartet of Teams vulns that made it possible to fake the boss, forge messages, and quietly rewrite history Microsoft Teams, one of the world's most widely used collaboration tools, contained serious, now-patched vulnerabilities that could have let attackers impersonate executives, rewrite chat history, and fake notifications or calls - all without users suspecting a thing....

Eaton and Vertiv splash cash as HPC infrastructure and AI factories run hot Liquid cooling tech is hot. It's only Tuesday and already infrastructure specialists have forked out more than $10 billion on companies proffering tech that promises to help ease energy bills of datacenter operators....

France-based victims hit especially hard, while UK named most-targeted country generally Researchers are seeing a "dramatic" increase in cybercrime involving physical violence across Europe, with at least 18 cases reported since the start of the year....

Redmond uncovers SesameOp, a backdoor hiding its tracks by using OpenAI's Assistants API as a command channel Hackers have found a new use for OpenAI's Assistants API - not to write poems or code, but to secretly control malware....

Plans for investing in AI and service transformation held up as treasury pulls plug, NAO finds Police forces in England and Wales spend around 97 percent of their 2 billion ($2.6 billion) annual technology budget on maintaining legacy systems, an official report has found....

Microsoft accidentally tells supported users that they aren't Microsoft says a broken update left some Windows 10 users staring at an out-of-support message despite having an activated Extended Security Updates (ESU) license or a version of Windows 10 that is still officially supported....

How to build a trillion-dollar industry: Step 1, invest in your customers. Step 2, sell them stuff Feature In late 2025, a series of multi-billion-dollar deals in the artificial intelligence sector is causing deja vu among industry veterans. Money, computer chips, and cloud credits are rotating in a closed loop among a handful of companies: Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, AMD, CoreWeave, xAI, and a few others. This has fueled a trillion-dollar AI boom or bubble built on intertwined investments and contracts....

Government spending watchdog eviscerates penny wise, pound foolish approach Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is being criticized for undermining its F-35 stealth fighter program through years of short-term budget decisions that have increased long-term costs and left the fleet understrength and undercapable....

Experience leads company boss to decide 'I cannot rely on having a Google account for production use cases' The founder of a service that manages SSL certificates says Google Cloud has suspended his account three times, without good reason, and recommended not using the G-Cloud for serious workloads....

South Korea's president laughed, so perhaps it was funny? Unlike China's censorship and snooping Chinese president Xi Jinping has joked that smartphones from Xiaomi might include backdoors....

Superapp company that chased Uber away built its own model to do the job right Proprietary large language models are bad at interpreting Asian languages, according to Singaporean super-app company Grab, which has built its own model instead....

55 cuffed last week after court ruled sting operation was legal Australian police last week made 55 arrests using evidence gathered with a backdoored messaging app that authorities distributed in the criminal community....

'Unified Edge' designed so even retail workers can replace a server Cisco entered the server market in 2009 because the company thought incumbent vendors weren't satisfying customers. On Monday, the networking giant entered the edge infrastructure market for the same reason....

If you want your First Amendment rights, make money the Palantir way Palantir CEO Alex Karp used his quarterly shareholder letter to take aim at critics after the company beat Q3 2025 earnings estimates....

Even AI has doubts about the claim that '80% of ransomware attacks are AI-driven' Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont....

Rogues committed extortion while working for infosec firms A ransomware negotiator and an incident response manager at two separate cybersecurity firms have been indicted for allegedly carrying out ransomware attacks of their own against multiple US companies....

Still available via API, the developer-facing AI isn't even really designed to answer general-purpose questions If Google's Gemma were an employee, it might be facing HR right now. The company yanked the model from AI Studio after it allegedly invented criminal accusations about a US senator and a conservative activist. However, it seems like the aggrieved parties went out of their way to get the offending output....

Last year's winner scored a $65M funding round on a $300M valuation Cloud and AI security startups have two weeks to apply for a program that fast-tracks access to investors and mentors from Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike, and Nvidia....

Amazon deal still dwarfed by $250B Azure commitment made as part of OpenAI's for-profit transformation OpenAI has signed a seven-year, $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services, adding another hyperscaler alongside Microsoft Azure for its growing AI compute needs. Where it's getting all this money was not disclosed....

Accenture to poke around the beleaguered airline's IT infrastructure Alaska Airlines has called in consultants to advise it on what went wrong during a late October IT meltdown that grounded flights and wreaked havoc for two days....

The spending will continue until ROI improves Tech companies continue to sling crazy amounts of money at AI, with Microsoft announcing deals worth billions in Texas and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), while Google parent Alphabet is selling bonds in Europe to raise cash for more AI expansion....

Old-school cargo heists reborn in the cyber age Cybercriminals are increasingly orchestrating lucrative cargo thefts alongside organized crime groups (OCGs) in a modern-day resurgence of attacks on freight companies....

Researchers point to risks in high-stakes applications as well as the potential to spread misinformation Large language models often fail to distinguish between factual knowledge and personal belief, and are especially poor at recognizing when a belief is false....

Memory safety trumps retro computing: Alpha, PA-RISC, m68k, SH4 face the chop in 2026 Debian's APT package manager will have a "hard requirement" on Rust from May 2026. This move may make some rather big waves....

Help me, HOBI-WAN, you're my only hope for lunch The European Space Agency (ESA) has coined a tortured acronym for its project to feed astronauts on long-duration missions: HOBI-WAN (Hydrogen Oxidizing Bacteria In Weightlessness As a source of Nutrition)....

IEEE survey of senior techies in six countries finds recrutiment for data analytics, and machine learning on the up Demand for software development skills in AI-related roles is set to fall next year as agentic AI accelerates across business markets, according to an IEEE industry survey....

But question marks remain over the tech's biases London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) says the hundreds of live facial recognition (LFR) deployments across the Capital last year led to 962 arrests, according to a new report on the controversial tech's use....

Does Discord need some stars for when Management is watching? The maker of the Grand Theft Auto game series, Rockstar Games, has fired more than 30 coders and graphic designers in an act described by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry."...

Christmas is coming, the GNOME is getting fat... please put a penny in the old red hat? Ubuntu Summit System76's POP!_OS is one of the more substantially modified Ubuntu based distros out there, and so it was something of a surprise to see the company's substantial presence at the Ubuntu Summit. And its stable release along with version 1.0 of its custom desktop, COSMIC, is imminent....

Ukraine first to demo open source security platform to isolate incidents, stop lateral movement Feature It was a sunny morning in late April when a massive power outage suddenly rippled across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southwestern France, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity for hours....

Boffins say outsourcing your homework leaves you sounding less knowledgeable, short on facts A study of how people use ChatGPT for research has confirmed something most of us learned the hard way in school: to be a subject matter expert, you've got to spend time swotting up....

Jon Seager, VP of Engineering, talks exclusively to The Reg Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical's vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation....

Taking belief in LLMs very literally indeed Opinion It's not been a year since his ouster as Intel's CEO, but Pat Gelsinger is firmly back on the tech leadership pony. He's done hardware with Intel, software with VMWare. This time, it's faithware....

One SQL slip-up is survivable. Not learning from the first mess meant change Who, Me? Another Monday is upon us and The Register therefore presents a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed confessional column in which you admit to making mistakes, and explain how you made it out alive afterwards....

It's less bonkers than it sounds given the challenges of wiring Africa African carrier Seacom is investigating the feasibility of building a submarine cable that would run across the heart of Africa, on land....

When operators see danger, innocent users are dragged down along with bad actors Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that understood its importance managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses, actions that today mean many users in the rest of the world are more likely to find their connections throttled or blocked....

PLUS: Google's massive AI giveaway in India; Raid on Australian software company; Alleged scam camp owner's assets seized; and more! Asia In Brief Last week's trade talks between the USA and China have seen the two countries ease some trade restrictions....

PLUS: Cyber-exec admits selling secrets to Russia; LastPass isn't checking to see if you're dead; Nation-state backed Windows malware; and more Infosec in brief Australia's Signals Directorate (ASD) last Friday warned that attackers are installing an implant named BADCANDY" on unpatched Cisco IOS XE devices and can detect deletion of their wares and reinstall their malware....

No datacenters required Fortytwo, a Silicon Valley startup, was founded last year based on the idea that a decentralized swarm of small AI models running on personal computers offers scaling and cost advantages over centralized AI services....

The Sunseeker Elite X5 can mow on its own, but it doesn't come cheap The tentacles of AI seem to be reaching everywhere, even to the humble lawnmower. We tested the Sunseeker Elite X5, a robotic mower that uses machine learning to steer around your lawn, to see what happens when artificial intelligence meets whirling blades of doom....

AI promises to find bugs and gaps in your apps After helping expand the modern software attack surface with the rise of AI services prone to data poisoning and prompt injection, OpenAI has thrown a bone to cyber defenders....

The bit barn will run on gas power first. Texas is set to get another nuclear-powered datacenter project thanks to Blue Energy and Crusoe, but any atomic action isn't likely until the next decade....

You click and think you're getting a download page, but get malware instead Imagine searching for Microsoft Teams, seeing a text link at the top of the results, visiting it, and then getting hit with malware. The Rhysida ransomware gang, an especially insidious criminal organization that has stolen millions of people's info, has been placing fake ads for Microsoft Teams in search engines and then infecting victims who make the mistake of clicking them....

Creators baffled as videos on local accounts, unsupported PCs vanish under harmful acts' rule Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions....

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