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Judges say cops face-slurping not a problem under current human rights laws London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has survived a legal challenge that attempted to curb its rollout of live facial recognition (LFR) technology across the capital....

Legal action claims tech giant charges more for Windows Server when it's not on Azure A UK Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) has dismissed Microsoft's objections to a collective action lawsuit brought by UK-based cloud licensees, clearing the way for trial....

Text-to-SQL might be useful for analysts and DBAs, but be cautious with general user adoption Over the past few years, database and analytics vendors have hopped on a bandwagon that may take us all to a destination where common data queries are free from the constraints of the specialist query language SQL....

Brit firms look to run tech overseas as govt tries to support 'sovereign' creators One in five UK firms have already moved AI workloads abroad due to high energy costs, in findings likely to alarm a government counting on AI to drive economic growth....

Gartner sees accelerating growth in IT spending, powered by cloud and AI infrastructure investment A day after the International Energy Agency (IEA) said the US/Israel/Iran war was creating the worst energy crisis ever faced by the world, Gartner increased its growth forecasts for global IT spending by nearly three percentage points....

Mozilla CTO says AI means developers finally have a chance to get on top of security The Mozilla Foundation has revealed it tested Anthropic's bug-finding Mythos" AI model and feels the results it experienced represent a watershed moment for software defenders....

Zuck reportedly needs to capture workers' keystrokes to build AI Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads, is reportedly now installing surveillance software on employees' work computers....

Unannounced change apparently aimed at two percent of users but hit documentation for everyone Anthropic has removed Claude Code from its Pro subscription plan, according to some of its public-facing web pages, but the company says it's only a test for a small number of users....

John Ternus can remake Apple the way it should have been OPINION Apple's pending leadership transition affords the company a rare opportunity to return to its roots and once again serve as a source of inspiration instead of frustration....

NCSC boss says China's whole-of-state cyber machine has become Britain's peer competitor in cyberspace State-sponsored cyberattacks from Chinese intelligence and military agencies display "an eye-watering level of sophistication," UK National Cyber Security Centre CEO Richard Horne is expected to say in a less-than-cheery opening speech to kick off its annual conference....

Plus news from its Dublin neighbors, Linux Mint The latest point release of Zorin OS is here, as an interesting alternative to Linux Mint for those still searching for a replacement for Windows 10 as the dust settles over the ruins....

Lawmakers decry CISA cuts: 'We are shooting ourselves in the foot' If a cyberattack leads to a death, that's murder. A former FBI cyber division chief urged the US Justice Department to consider felony homicide charges against ransomware actors when attacks on hospitals lead to patient deaths....

CISA gives federal agencies 4 days to patch America's lead cyber-defense agency has warned that three Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager bugs are under attack, and given federal agencies just four days to patch the security holes....

Still only a tiny slice of mobile activity overall The US and Starlink lead the way in the still-young direct-to-device (D2D) satellite market, where the number of connections recorded by Ookla rose nearly 25 percent between July 2025 and March 2026....

Data from browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, 200+ extensions hoovered up A ClickFix campaign targeting macOS users delivers an AppleScript-based infostealer that collects credentials and live session cookies from 14 browsers, 16 cryptocurrency wallets, and more than 200 extensions....

Bun is fast as a toolkit but can leak memory in production, causing slowdowns and crashes A new version of the Bun JavaScript runtime and toolkit is out with enhanced testing support and improved memory management. The latter is a critical issue to devs and follows complaints of memory leaks causing problems in production....

Change is glacial, but the direction is clear It might look like a map of the London Underground designed by a madman, but Gartner's newly-completed DBMS Market Share Ranks: 2011-2025 has an important message. The change may be glacial, but (most of the) dominant database vendors are slowly losing their grip on the market....

Plus: Court papers reveal nonprofit paid a ransom worth nearly $26.8 million The third of three former ransomware negotiators accused of assisting the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang in extorting US businesses has pleaded guilty, months after his two co-workers did the same....

One of two second stage engines misbehaved, administration must sign off report before flights resume Blue Origin's New Glenn loss of a satellite has been classed as a "mishap" by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), triggering a mandatory investigation....

An $899 CPU? In this economy? Review Ever since AMD's cache-stacked Ryzen 7 5800X3D closed the gap with Intel in gaming, folks have wondered: if one V-Cache chiplet is good, surely two must be better. With the launch of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition (DE), we finally have our answer....

CEO suspects silicon sidekick behind 'surprising velocity' breach - cyber crims shop stolen data for $2M Vercel's CEO reckons the crooks behind its recent breach likely had a helping hand from AI, saying the attackers moved with "surprising velocity" and a deep understanding of the company's infrastructure....

Mexican IT services firm admits it was hacked, but says client operations weren't affected A Mexican IT infrastructure and digital transformation biz is on clean-up duty after a criminal posted screenshots of what they claimed was company video surveillance footage to a cybercrime forum....

No facial recognition privacy intrusions either! Well, maybe a little London's Metropolitan Police is trialing new retail technology to help curtail the city's pervasive shoplifting problem... and it doesn't rely on live facial recognition (LFR)....

90% of schools already compliant, but at least now there's paperwork Ministers are moving to turn England's patchwork of school phone bans into law, after peers backed fresh changes to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill in a Monday vote....

Spoiler: There's no magic value. Just a timer, some kernel calls, and too much coffee Windows has always had a built-in portal to the very recent past: Task Manager's CPU usage meter....

Fake emails already doing the rounds as ransomware crew boasts about what it allegedly stole UK enterprise software consultancy The Adaptavist Group is investigating a security breach after an intruder logged in with stolen credentials, while a ransomware crew claims it grabbed far more than the company is currently admitting....

Admins are tired of taking photos, so this enables secure on-site unattended enrolment Japanese industrial giant Panasonic has created a new form of QR code it says will only work on designated devices and environments....

And China is loving it Iranian media is claiming that the US used backdoors and/or botnets to disable networking equipment during the current war, and Chinese state media is dining out on the allegations....

Dud contracts, proprietary designs, and zero-experience supplier make for quite the mess The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency's auditor, fears that work on next-generation spacesuits won't finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028....

Remember what we promised when you subscribed for a year? Well, we've got a new deal that's better for us. Microsoft's GitHub has stopped accepting new Copilot individual subscriptions while the code hosting biz figures out how it can meet its service commitments without breaking the bank....

A lesson in how not to respond to vulnerability reports UPDATED Vibe-coding platform Lovable is pooh-poohing a researcher's finding that anyone could open a free account on the service and read other users' sensitive info, including credentials, chat history, and source code. However, the company's story keeps changing: First it attributed the publicly exposed info to "intentional behavior" and "unclear documentation," then threw bug-bounty service HackerOne under the bus....

The struggles continue for Fermi America's 17 GW bit barn ambitions It's been a weekend filled with dizzying changes in the boardroom at datacenter wannabe Fermi America as it hopes eventually to expand its West Texas campus to about 17 gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation capacity....

Tim Cook is handing the reins to John Ternus at Apple Have you heard? Apple's Tim Cook is stepping down after 15 years leading the iMaker's business. He'll become executive chairman and hand the reins over to John Ternus, a senior VP of hardware engineering, effective September 1....

Official involved in deal tells El Reg number doesn't paint entire picture of datacenter's economic benefit When Rockland County, New York, approved nearly $77 million in tax breaks for JPMorgan Chase's datacenter expansion in 2024, no one showed up to object. Two years and a whole lot of bit barns in the news cycle later, government watchdogs are calling foul over the project's lone permanent job....

Installation and pre-approval without consent looks dubious under EU law One app should not modify another app without asking for and receiving your explicit consent. Yet Anthropic's Claude Desktop for macOS installs files that affect other vendors' applications without disclosure, even before those applications have been installed, and authorizes browser extensions without consent....

Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver....

Tyler Buchanan admits role in scheme that stole at least $8 million in virtual currency A Scottish man linked to the Scattered Spider cybercrime crew has pleaded guilty in the US to a phishing and SIM-swap scheme that stole at least $8 million in cryptocurrency....

It won't provide much juice, but its creator calls it a 'nanowatt nuclear power plant' It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard. But a DIY tritium nuclear battery is far less dramatic - just don't expect any appreciable amount of energy from it....

Excessive friendliness may cause users to forget they're talking to a very confident autocomplete A study into how humans interact with chatbots suggests the fastest way to make an LLM feel human isn't making it smarter - it's making it seem nicer....

US-based cloud providers could have to disclose certain data under American legal orders The European Commission has awarded four contracts designed to advance cloud sovereignty in the EU, but one uses services from S3NS, a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud, raising questions about its real independence....

Google previews Android CLI as agentic development continues to snowball Google has introduced a new Android command-line interface built specifically for AI agents, claiming a 70 percent cut in token usage and three times reduction in task completion time....

Out-of-band or out of control? Microsoft has pushed out an out-of-band update to address the restart loop that hit some Windows Server devices after its April update....

Bit barns need to worry more about space, access to grid - overstuffed center no longer a must, say experts UK AI datacenter capacity could migrate away from London as power shortages, planning constraints and reduced reliance on low-latency connections to financial firms make other locations more attractive....

Companies get to keep IP developed for government projects The UK government is opening 80 million in AI procurement talks with tech firms, drawing on its 500 million sovereign capability fund....

Workstations that made distant desktops feel local is headed for a slow shutdown HP is quietly pulling the plug on its Teradici-derived remote desktop business, shelving HP Anyware and its zero client hardware barely a few years after betting big on the tech as the backbone of its hybrid work push....

Wouldn't be the first time a Jeff Bezos company left a package in the wrong place Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket nailed the landing this weekend, but failed at the crucial part of delivering a satellite to a usable orbit....

330M deal leaves service with no ownership of software built to connect trusts to the platform The UK government is considering ending Palantir's involvement in a central NHS data platform after coming under fire from MPs, unions, and campaigners....

Committee launches inquiry into emerging chip designs to curb datacenter energy use MPs are probing whether radically different, low-energy chip designs can stop AI from turning the UK's power grid into a bottleneck....

We've been here before. This time, we may not get out Opinion Fans of the creative arts often find out where creators gather to talk among themselves, then sneak in to eavesdrop on what those masters of the art talk about. Golden insights, daring concepts, cutting-edge thinking? Not a bit. Gossip, if you're lucky. Travel miseries, if you're not. Mostly, they talk about money....

Blames outfit called Context.ai, which reckons an agentic OAuth tangle caused the incident Vercel, the company that created the open source Next.js web development framework, has a data leak that led to compromise of some customer credentials, and blamed an outfit called Context.ai for the mess....