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Plan to standardize consent dialogs aims to lighten burden on devs, users, reviewers Mozilla plans to make life easier for developers of Firefox browser Add-ons, aka extensions, by reducing the burden of presenting custom consent dialogs to those installing extensions....

Says they're done right as they don't lean so far left Meta has debuted the first two models in its Llama 4 family, its first to use mixture of experts tech....

Fixed it the next day but a few lucky folk may have dodged a five percent Copilot price hike Exclusive Microsoft published inaccurate price lists for some of its products on, of all days, April the 1st....

PLUS: Qualcomm acquires Vietnamese AI outfit; China claims US hacked winter games; India's browser challenge winner disputed; and more Asia In Brief Asian nations and tech companies are trying to come to terms with the USA's new universal import tariffs and additional reciprocal tariffs"....

PLUS: Google re-patches Quick Share flaws; Critical Cisco flaw exploited; WordPress plugin trouble; and more Infosec in Brief How did journalist Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number end up in a Signal group chat? According to The Guardian, US national security adviser Mike Waltz accidentally saved it into the contact file of a campaign staffer who later took a job at the US National Security Council official....

Pixel Watch 3 boots Microsoft's OS in latest feat of delightful pointlessness Windows on Arm has been around since the Surface RT - but this is another kind of arm altogether....

Heads up to those living on lunar base in 2032: DUCK!! The likelihood of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon, during Christmas 2032, has more than doubled....

Shock and ore, -style Beijing has responded to the Trump administration's latest round of import taxes with retaliatory tariffs and new restrictions on rare earth minerals....

'Nonpartisan' intelligence chief booted less than two years into the job President Trump yesterday fired the head of the NSA and US Cyber Command and his deputy....

Panel finds plaintiffs should get a chance to prove docs not submitted too late Updated IBM may have seen off a lawsuit accusing it of using outdated mortality data to underfund retiree pensions, but an appeals court has now reopened the matter to further litigation....

Experts in IT services held up while other sectors fell over the last 5 years, says report Ukraine's technology industry has held up during Russia's invasion, with activity falling markedly less than other industries and increasing as a proportion of national exports since 2019....

Prosecutors said individuals were scammed repeatedly until they had nothing left Five romance scammers-turned-money launderers were convicted in the UK today after police shuttered a multimillion-pound fraud operation....

But analysts say tariffs could disrupt equipment supply chains The US Department of Energy (DoE) is looking to co-locate datacenters with energy generation facilities to further America's AI ambitions, and is putting up its own land for this purpose....

Market share increase accelerating, but Microsoft's flagship OS not yet at the 50% mark The gap between Windows 10 and Windows 11 continues to narrow, and Microsoft's flagship operating system is on track to finally surpass its predecessor by summer....

'Pudgy' might be more apt given the download size The beta version of Ubuntu 25.04, the next interim release of this Linux OS, has arrived....

The industry's approach to keeping quality backups may be masking the importance of other recovery mainstays Maintaining good-quality backups is often seen as the spine of any organization's ability to recover from cyberattacks quickly. Naturally, given the emphasis placed on them by experts of all stripes, you'd be forgiven for thinking that prioritizing them over anything else would be the way to go....

The need to scale still battling security worries ... on both sides Governments continue to adopt cloud services, for better or worse, hoping to modernize their IT services, leading big cloud operators to aggressively court public sector bodies for lucrative contracts....

'Full benefit' of replacement will not be realized until old one is shut down, projects watchdog warns The effectiveness of new IT systems designed to speed up asylum claim processing in the UK continues to be held back by the Home Office's failure to decommission its 25-year-old case management database, five years after it promised to retire it....

Law enforcement facing huge gap in 'AI adoption' The National Crime Agency (NCA) will "closely examine" the recommendations made by the Alan Turing Institute after it claimed the UK was ill-equipped to tackle AI-enabled crime....

Techie demoed the effect in about 3 seconds, as On Call again tries to break tech-support world records On Call The working week sometimes speeds by, sometimes crawls, and often ends with a crash. Each Friday, we try to avert the latter by delivering a new edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed tales of handling ridiculous, ribald, and remarkable tech support requests....

We're not Putin up with this alleged industrial espionage, say the Dutch A Russian national appeared in a Netherlands court on Thursday accused of industrial espionage against ASML, the world's leading manufacturer of chip factory equipment and a key supplier that helps the likes of TSMC pump out top-drawer processors....

Australians checking their pensions are melting down call centres and websites Australian retirement fund operators are scrambling after reports emerged of unauthorized access to customer accounts leading to theft of cash....

Probably still behind western rivals, but improved GPU and higher core count can't hurt Chinese chip designer Loongson, whose products have been promoted by China's government, has teased two new designs that will make it more of a contender for mobile and industrial applications. It may also have a new server up its sleeve....

Classification compliance? Records retention requirements? How quaint A US Department of Defense watchdog has opened an investigation into its own Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, over his use of instant-messaging app Signal to discuss government business....

Shape shifting technique described as menace to national security The US govt's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency, aka CISA, on Thursday urged organizations, internet service providers, and security firms to strengthen defenses against so-called fast flux attacks....

And it can be yours for a rather steep $349 Microsoft's Windows 365 Link has reached general availability, although some may question its value....

Simple denial-of-service blunder turned out to be remote unauth code exec disaster Suspected Chinese government spies have been exploiting a newly disclosed critical bug in Ivanti VPN appliances since mid-March. This is now at least the third time in three years these snoops have been pwning these products....

Jeff Bezos' other space business finally shows signs of life with launch scheduled for next week The first batch of Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites is due to be lofted into orbit next week....

It's going to happen to you one day, so get your ducks in a row As Benjamin Franklin famously said: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," and that's especially true when it comes to disaster recovery....

Arm-based silicon to help Google hardware muscle in on territory of Microsoft's own Arm-based PCs MediaTek is bringing out a new chip for Chromebooks that blurs the boundary with Copilot+ PCs, sporting an 8-core CPU cluster and a neural processing unit (NPU) rated at 50 TOPS....

Founder shares 4K Altair BASIC source ahead of 50th anniversary Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has shared the 1975 source code for Altair BASIC....

Espionage? Botnets? Trying to exploit a zero-day? Someone or something is probing devices made by Juniper Networks and Palo Alto Networks, and researchers think it could be evidence of espionage attempts, attempts to build a botnet, or an effort to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities....

To be fair, it sounds like the team has ironed out the more controversial features Comment The latest version of Zorin OS, a popular Windows-macOS-like Ubuntu Linux remix, looks good, but there's one change that causes this vulture some concern....

ProtectEU plan wants to have its cake and eat it too The EU has issued its plans to keep the continent's denizens secure and among the pages of bureaucratese are a few worrying sections that indicate the political union wants to backdoor encryption by 2026, or even sooner....

Tariff moves threaten supply chain stability The cost of buying servers for business will inevitably rise as a result of US President Donald Trump's trade policies, at least in the short term, as uncertainty grips the supply chain....

Recovery's never been harder in today's tangled, outsourced infrastructure Comment Disaster recovery is getting tougher as IT estates sprawl across on-prem gear, public cloud, SaaS, and third-party ITaaS providers. And it's not floods or fires causing most outages anymore - ransomware now leads the pack, taking down systems faster than any natural disaster....

Former official also points to processes driving up the cost of IT investment The UK government does not have a clear picture of what it is spending on digital technology, and its approach to buying associated services and products drives up the cost of investment, MPs have heard....

Think tank report backs data mining for machine learning, leaving artists and rights holders behind Opinion Former UK prime minister Tony Blair became famous for standing shoulder to shoulder with allies, even though the fallout from the Iraq war forever sullied his reputation. Nonetheless, the institute that bears his name makes it clear who it stands with when it comes to using copyrighted material to fuel the expansion of machine learning into every human domain....

Stamp it out: Infostealer malware at German outfit may be culprit Britain's Royal Mail is investigating after a crew calling itself GHNA claimed it has put 144GB of the delivery giant's data up for sale, perhaps after acquiring it with the same stolen credentials it used to crack Samsung Germany....

The BBC and Blizzard Entertainment have chipped in with contributions The Open InfraFoundation has delivered a new version of OpenStack named Epoxy" and thinks it's an even better option for those seeking a VMware alternative....

GPT-4o likely trained on O'Reilly books without permission, figures appear to show Tech textbook tycoon Tim O'Reilly claims OpenAI mined his publishing house's copyright-protected tomes for training data and fed it all into its top-tier GPT-4o model without permission....

Crawlers snarfing long-tail content for training and whatnot cost us a fortune Web-scraping bots have become an unsupportable burden for the Wikimedia community due to their insatiable appetite for online content to train AI models....

Tech slugged with higher duties, broad base 10% hike, semiconductors avoid retaliatory levies for now US President Donald Trump has imposed a base ten percent tariff on all imports into America, and higher levies on goods from major producers of digital tech, such as China, South Korea, and Taiwan....

Double-oh-sh... The name's not Bond. It's O'Brien - Keith O'Brien, now-former global payroll compliance manager at the Dublin, Ireland office of HR software-as-a-service maker Rippling....

Seven gas turbines planned to juice datacenter demand by 2027 Developers on Wednesday announced plans to bring up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power online by 2027 at the site of what was once Pennsylvania's largest coal plant, as part of a proposed datacenter campus running AI and high-performance computing workloads....

Bosses say theft now the name of the game with a shift in tactics, apparent branding Big-game ransomware crew Hunters International says its criminal undertaking has become "unpromising, low-converting, and extremely risky," and it is mulling shifting tactics amid an apparent rebrand....

CEO hails 'transformative year' as IPO puts 'puter maker on the big board Updated Raspberry Pi hasn't felt the sting of US tariffs yet, and having its boards built outside China might give it an edge over rivals, analysts reckon....

Fallout shows how what you say must be central to disaster planning Opinion Oracle is being accused of poor incident comms as it reels from two reported data security mishaps over the past fortnight, amid a reluctance to publicly acknowledge all of the events as well as allegedly deleting evidence from the web....

Hike is no joke and users are not laughing Microsoft's Power BI price rises have arrived, with some tiers increasing by up to 40 percent....

Has until month end to make an offer for semiconductor design and licensing shop Qualcomm has confirmed its interest in buying high-speed connectivity module designer Alphawave Semi, a move that could see yet another major British tech operation swallowed up by a foreign business....