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More than 60 years after first demos of this tech, Kairos will bring it back to Oak Ridge Oak Ridge, Tennessee, could be home to a molten salt reactor once again if Google-backed Kairos Power has its way....

High accuracy scores come from conditions that don't reflect real-world usage Facial recognition technology has been deployed publicly on the basis of benchmark tests that reflect performance in laboratory settings, but some academics are saying that real-world performance doesn't match up....

Meet the new COPILOT function Microsoft, in its ongoing effort to AI-ify every product it has, is now adding it right into the cells of Excel. Available on Monday to beta users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new COPILOT function allows you to task Redmond's AI with performing generative tasks right in, for example, C2 or B23....

Got a particle accelerator? Here's your tritium startup idea Tritium is ridiculously rare, incredibly expensive, and central to most fusion energy reactor designs. If research out of Los Alamos National Lab proves to hold true, it might soon become easier to obtain....

Spy vs spy in the chips Comment Chinese state media called the US an aspiring "surveillance empire" over its proposed use of asset tracking tags to crack down on black-market GPU shipments to the Middle Kingdom....

MIT NANDA study finds only 5 percent of organizations using AI tools in production at scale US companies have invested between $35 and $40 billion in Generative AI initiatives and, so far, have almost nothing to show for it....

A plan to standardize IT record keeping is incomplete after 8 years, and the GAO wants someone to act The US federal government first planned to standardize its categorization of IT costs, resources, and solutions back in 2017. Eight years later, the project has mostly stalled, say auditors, and now they're demanding that it either get priority or get the axe....

Surprise - updated plans way more expensive than initially suggested AWS has introduced new pricing for Kiro, its AI-driven coding tool, but unlike the pricing originally announced, the latest plans are "a wallet-wrecking tragedy," according to many of its users....

Supply chain breach has been a major target of legal action Microsoft-owned talk-to-text outfit Nuance has agreed to cough up $8.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the sprawling MOVEit Transfer mega-breach - although it admits no liability....

P2P power networks beat stingy feed-in tariffs for Aussie households, study finds Boffins looking into the Australian solar energy ecosystem say that sharing really is caring - and potentially profitable when homes with solar panels can sell their excess energy to neighbors at a preferential rate....

HR SaaS giant insists core systems untouched Workday has admitted that attackers gained access to one of its third-party CRM platforms, but insists its core systems and customer tenants are untouched....

If at first you succeed, keep trying until you don't SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch, blaming a previous failure on structural issues and fuel pressurization problems....

Virtual agents to guide citizens through red tape - but not remove any of it The UK government has leapt into the AI hype with a raft of "Exemplar" programs it claims will deliver billions in value - including a Clippy-style assistant to help citizens navigate complex forms and legal jargon, rather than simply making them clearer in the first place....

Agency swears breaches are rare, just not rare enough to stop 186 being binned for sticky fingers The UK tax authority has been forced to clean house after dozens of staff were caught helping themselves to taxpayer records....

Sni5Gect research crew targets sweet spot during device / network handshake pause Security boffins have released an open source tool for poking holes in 5G mobile networks, claiming it can do up- and downlink sniffing and a novel connection downgrade attack - plus "other serious exploits" they're keeping under wraps, for now....

When you're asking AI chatbots for answers, they're data-mining you Opinion Recently, OpenAI ChatGPT users were shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to discover that their searches were appearing in Google search. You morons! What do you think AI chatbots are doing? Doing all your homework for free or a mere $20 a month? I think not!...

The official GNU microkernel is still breathing - and now it's 64-bit Before Linux, GNU was working on its own Mach-based Unix compatible OS. Now, in the footsteps of Debian 13, there is a new release....

Visions of immortality are uniformly dull. But this is gonna get ugly Opinion Real versus virtual. Stolen versus synthesized. Generative AI is blurring the lines we used to think we could read between. Now, it's getting its teeth into life versus death....

The real lesson here is how little some companies care about training Who, Me? Welcome to Monday and another instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes and reveal if they derailed your career....

If you wanted to hurt Putin's ransomware racketeers, these info-stealing npm packages are one way to do it Researchers at software supply chain security outfit Safety think they've found malware that targets Russian cryptocurrency developers, and perhaps therefore Russia's state-linked ransomware crews...

Vidchat hosts probably know Otter.ai records everything and feeds it into AI. Their guests may not Voice transcription service Otter.ai has found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit that claims it trains its speech recognition tech without securing permission to do so....

Prime Minister promises first local silicon will appear this year, decades after Fairchild Semi's Robert Noyce made polite inquiries Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has celebrated the nation's independence day by pointing out that the nation is finally becoming a global chipmaking contender - 60 years after blowing the chance to be a global leader....

PLUS: Philippines bans gambling payments; Indonesia warns Roblox; China lures young scientists; And more! Asia In Brief Google on Monday admitted to anticompetitive conduct in its dealings with Australian telcos....

PLUS: Kryptos solution up for auction; Canadian parliament springs a leak; Fake crypto lawyers; And more Infosec In Brief New York State is suing bank-owned peer-to-peer payment app Zelle, claiming that the banks behind it knew fraud was rampant on the platform but allowed scammers to conduct business with impunity....

The non-profit has a new look but still stands up for the open web interview The Mozilla Foundation has changed its look, but its goals remain the same - supporting an internet that's open and inclusive, and that prioritizes the interests of people over corporations....

Handy tool for when only a dedicated device will do hands on Timekettle's lightweight T1 interpreter has received the AI treatment and will now perform offline translations. But unless you have deep enough pockets, both figuratively and literally, for another device and a frequent need for translation, it's not for you....

'Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,' one tells The Reg Feature Bill Gates, an Arizona election official and former Maricopa County supervisor, says that the death threats started shortly after the 2020 presidential election....

These ten features would make users more productive OPINION From desktop alerts begging you to sign up for Xbox Game Pass to a second-chance out-of-the-box experience that insists you need Microsoft 365, Windows has a hard time taking "no" for an answer. The operating system's corporate parent isn't a good listener either, festooning the OS with useless features no one asked for....

Precogs replaced by profiling and postcode data... and 'AI'. What could wrong? Lots, say privacy campaigners The UK government has unveiled a scheme to use AI to "help police catch criminals before they strike."...

Nowhere to hide Codeberg, a Berlin-based code hosting community, is struggling to cope with a deluge of AI bots that can now bypass previously effective defenses....

AI will take your salary in capex before it can take your job Oracle issued layoff notices for more than 300 people in Washington State and California this week, according to state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings in those states....

Is that a JuicyPotato on your network? A suspected Chinese-government-backed cyber crew recently broke into a Taiwanese web hosting provider to steal credentials and plant backdoors for long-term access, using a mix of open-source and custom software tools, Cisco Talos reports....

Could tinkering with a site's code to hide ads count as infringement? A recent ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has reopened the possibility that using ad blocking software could violate copyright law in Germany....

When one GPU translates into three to five of the fastest switch ports money can buy, can you blame them? Nvidia is expected to ship somewhere north of 5 million Blackwell GPUs in 2025. But before those GPUs can train the next GPT, Gemini, or Llama, they need to be networked - and that's quickly becoming big business for Ethernet switch vendors like Cisco, Arista, HPE ... and Nvidia itself....

A large and unfortunate mistake in the kernel development management process is underway comment The first release candidate of Linux 6.17 is out, without any bcachefs changes... but not for any technical reasons. This is bad....

Switchzilla's summer of perfect 10s Cisco has issued a patch for a maximum-severity bug in its Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to inject arbitrary shell commands on vulnerable systems....

You have until Thursday August 21 to respond if you do NASA's plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon have moved on - the agency has now put out a Request For Information (RFI) to gauge industry interest in the project....

Sam Altman, busily planning to spend "trillions" more on datacenters, admitted yesterday that AI is a bit inflated Sam Altman admitted we're in the midst of an AI bubble Thursday, but don't let that fool you: He still intends to rule over whatever's left after it bursts....

TeejeeTech takes Trixie, adds considerably more polish, yet comes in lighter Teejeetech turns its attention from Ubuntu to its progenitor. The result is a refined and attractive spin of Debian with Xfce....

Online Services price changes start November 1, aligning with Microsoft.com rates and eliminating programmatic discounts Microsoft is updating its pricing approach for Online Services in Enterprise Agreements in the name of consistency and transparency, but could leave some customers paying more....

A tiny model trained on trillions of tokens, ready for specialized tasks Google has unveiled a pint-sized new addition to its "open" large language model lineup: Gemma 3 270M....

Who knew zero-days could be so useful to highway speedsters? The lingering effects of a cyberattack on the Public Prosecution Service of the Netherlands are preventing it from reactivating speed cameras across the country....

Or, more? Eventually, AI companies will stop selling their services as a loss leader, and then the AI "cost-savings" will disappear like dew on a hot summer morning Bosses throughout the world love the idea of using AI to replace employees. They can talk all they want about how much more efficient everyone will be with AI, but the truth is if they can fire staffers, their bottom line looks better, their stock price goes up, and the CEO makes a ton more money....

London-based multinational takes customer portal and Voice API platform offline as 'protective measure' following breach Updated Multinational telco Colt Technology Services says a "cyber incident" is to blame for its customer portal and other services being down for a number of days....

Government: 'Trust us, it'll be different this time' Feature The UK government has gone all-in on AI. More than 50 years after Harold Wilson gave his famous "White heat of technology" speech, this is the hot new thing. An AI Strategy has been released. Datacenters are planned. Steps to strengthen AI supply chains are being formulated. And of course, the public sector will lead by example in AI usage....

System prompt engineering turns benign AI assistants into 'investigator' and 'detective' roles that bypass privacy guardrails A team of boffins is warning that AI chatbots built on large language models (LLM) can be tuned into malicious agents to autonomously harvest users' personal data, even by attackers with "minimal technical expertise", thanks to "system prompt" customization tools from OpenAI and others....

Somebody built a very sick network in the bowels of a hospital On Call Few make it to Friday without some end-of-week blues, which The Register always treats with a fresh dose of On Call - the reader-contributed column that recounts your stories of tech support contusions....

As 9 billion MoU sparks debate about value for money, it's time to have your say Register debate series It's a lot of money, 9 billion ($12 billion). Especially for a government which finds itself - for whatever reason - in a fiscal dead end....

Next: Modular datacenters ready to host rack-scale systems, to meet endless demand Manufacturer to the stars Foxconn is building so many AI servers that they're now bringing in more cash than consumer electronics - even counting the colossal quantity of iPhones it creates for Apple....

Sees AI costs rising but not certain revenue will match them Chinese web giant Tencent doesn't mind if Washington doesn't let it buy more American GPUs, because it already has all the chips it needs....