The Register

Tackle longstanding issues around productivity, cyber resilience and public sector culture, advises spending watchdog The UK's government spending watchdog has called on the current administration to make better use of technology to kickstart the misfiring economy and ensure better delivery public services amid tightened budgets....

Also, Netgear fixes critical router, access point vulnerabilities Google has released its February Android security updates, including a fix for a high-severity kernel-level vulnerability, which is suspected to be in use by targeted exploits....

GPU giant could just wait eight minutes for Donald to change his mind US President Donald Trump loves his tariffs and it seems that not even a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang could persuade him to change course....

Who better to trust trillions of dollars, SSNs and other sensitive info with than Elon The chaos in Washington DC continued over the weekend and into Monday with government workers locked out of their offices and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) getting unfettered access to classified materials and a top government payment system....

As UK proposes laws against neural-nets-for-pedophiles Americans may have to think twice about downloading a Chinese AI model or investing in a company behind such a neural network in future. A law proposed last month by Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), if successfully passed by Congress, would impose penalties of up to 20 years in prison or $1 million in fines for violating its restrictions on AI-related trade and collaboration....

Senators ask, Homeland Security watchdog answers: Is it worth the money? The Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General has launched an audit of the Transportation Security Administration's use of facial recognition technology at US airports, following criticism from lawmakers and privacy advocates....

Meanwhile, the Internet Archive races to save what it can - again Vast numbers of webpages have disappeared from federal sites in an effort to meet the deadline to implement the Trump administration's executive orders targeting diversity initiatives and gender....

Canadian province 'won't do business with people hellbent on destroying our economy' Updated The provincial government in Ontario, Canada is hitting back at President Trump's 25 percent tariffs on the US' northern neighbor by scrapping a deal with Elon Musk's Starlink....

Throw Copilot down the same well, too, maybe? No? OK If you were relying on Microsoft's Defender VPN, it's time to find an alternative - Redmond is shutting it down at the end of the month....

A glimmer of light in an otherwise gloomy year for troubled chipmaker Beleaguered chip giant Intel has at least one thing to smile about after receiving a payout of 515.55 million ($536 million) from the EU in relation to an old antitrust case that it challenged....

Peter Tripp Akemann avoids jail, will pay 'Super Scooper' repair costs and is ordered to help with LA's wildfire recovery A Culver City, California resident has admitted to crashing his drone into a 'Super Scooper' firefighting aircraft battling the Los Angeles wildfires. His guilty plea spares him up to a year in prison, according to the Department of Justice....

Takes a bit more time to spout a bit less nonsense OpenAI today launched deep research in ChatGPT, a new agent that takes a little longer to perform a deeper dive into the web to come up with a response to a query....

Sci-fi interstellar travel gets another tiny push Centuries after Western explorers used sail power to discover a world hitherto unknown to them - although well known to people who already lived there - science fiction writers and engineers have wondered if space exploration might be similarly powered by lightsails....

Short-term result likely to be increased energy prices across the board Trump's tariffs are raising a new question mark over US datacenters and their expanding energy consumption, with price hikes possible as Canada threatens to withhold energy supplies in response....

You can't make monopoly money without a monopoly, but you sure can lose it Opinion It would take a heart of stone not to explode with joy at the massive infusion of schadenfreude provided in recent days by the DeepSeek AIpocalypse....

Fun with a FOSS-focused Phosh fondleslab FuriLabs offers a decent-spec smartphone that is based on Debian and can run GNOME apps in your pocket....

Investigating compensation to police whose sensitive info was leaked in 2023 The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has bailed two officers after they were arrested as part of a fraud investigation related to the payments to cops whose sensitive data was mistakenly published in 2023....

Profiteering from emergency services comms network in Britain? Not anymore, says CMA Motorola will not be allowed to again appeal a decision by the UK competition regulator to impose a price cap on the communications network it operates for Britain's emergency services....

Third-party software sticking plaster expected six months late Further delays have hit Birmingham City Council's disastrous attempt to implement a functioning finance system after it emerged that off-the-shelf software to solve "one of the fundamental problems" with the beleaguered Oracle implementation has been put back....

Auditor offers qualified opinion as financial fallout from historic miscarriage of justice remains unclear Updated The UK's spending watchdog has offered a "qualified opinion" on the Department for Business and Trade's accounts, largely down to uncertainties around a scheme designed to mitigate the historic injustice surrounding the Post Office Horizon IT scandal....

Hey! Teacher! Leave our network alone! Who, Me? At the start of working week, it can sometimes feel like you're just another brick in the wall and the next five days will require you to carry weight for others. To ease you into the mucky business of exchanging your labor for currency, The Register therefore uses each Monday to offer a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the column in which you admit to escaping your errors and emerging unscathed....

Australian government staff mixed medical info for folk who share names and birthdays Australia's privacy commissioner has found that government agencies down under didn't make enough of an effort to protect data describing digital doppelgangers" - people who share a name and date of birth and whose government records sometimes contain data describing other people....

Tech lobby isn't at the negotiating table, fears unintended consequences United States President Donald Trump has delivered on his campaign promise to introduce tariffs, by slapping a 25 percent duty on imports from Canada and Mexico, and a ten percent impost on goods from China. Industry groups quickly responded by saying this is not a great idea....

PLUS: MGM settles breach suits; AWS doesn't trust you with security defaults; A new .NET backdoor; and more Infosec in brief The United States Food and Drug Administration has told medical facilities and caregivers that monitor patients using Contec equipment to disconnect the devices from the internet ASAP....

PLUS: Chinese bus lanes put Tesla in a tangle; India drops electronics tariffs; Samsung worries about soft demand Asia In Brief Nvidia's quarterly results occasionally raise eyebrows because they report that Singapore is a disproportionately large market for its wares. In a Q3 2025 filing [PDF], for example, the accelerator colossus revealed that Singapore is its second-largest market and accounted for 22 percent of revenue....

Amid wildfire death and destruction, there are solutions, workable smart solutions, but who wants to talk about that? Special report We humans have gorged ourselves on fossil fuels for well over a century, and the bill for that delicious, civilization-enhancing meal has finally come due....

As if secure design is the only bullet point in a list of software engineering best practices Systems Approach As my Systems Approach co-author Bruce Davie and I think through what it means to apply the systems lens to security, I find that I keep asking myself what it is, exactly, that's unique about security as a system requirement?...

Nulled and Cracked had a Lorelai-cal rise - until Operation Talent stepped in Law enforcement officers across Europe assembled again to collectively disrupt major facilitators of cybercrime, with at least one of those cuffed apparently a fan of the dramedy series The Gilmore Girls....

Raymond Chen reflects on the never-ending cycle of updates and restarts Comment Remember when things didn't need constant updating and reboots to work? Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen notes that the affliction has even spread as far as the humble electric toothbrush....

But it still has a chance at the network edge and the PC Comment Any hope Intel may have had of challenging rivals Nvidia and AMD for a slice of the AI accelerator market dissolved on Thursday as yet another GPU architecture was scrapped....

If this keeps Silicon Valley on its toes and honest, who are we to complain? Kettle There's really only one topic for the Kettle this week. DeepSeek....

Microsoft's latest OS claws back market share from Windows 10, but the finish line is a long way off Microsoft appears to be starting the year with a rebound in Windows 11 adoption as the latest figures show the operating system reversing its recent months' long declines....

That email chain could have been a 30-second chit-chat, says IT giant Dell Technologies intends to end its hybrid work arrangement in March, requiring those previously allowed to toil from home part-time to spend their entire five-day work week within corporate walls....

'Magical free' upgrade coincidentally follows M365 price hike Microsoft has made Think Deeper, OpenAI's GPT-o1 reasoning model, "free and available for all users of Copilot."...

Forrester's take on President's economic agenda offers little optimism for the industry It's been less than two weeks since Donald Trump returned to the White House, and the effect the administration may have on the global tech industry is still far from clear....

Self-deprecation much less fun if you're not joking... or if nobody knows what the heck you mean Microsoft has explained what it means by "deprecation" - it doesn't mean "the end", it means "save the date."...

But Chinese startup shakeup doesn't herald 'drastic drop' in need for infrastructure buildout, say analysts Analysis The shockwave following the release of competitive AI models from Chinese startup DeepSeek has led many to question the assumption that throwing ever more money at costly large-scale GPU-based infrastructure delivers the best results....

Sunita Williams lays claim to lead for female EVAs NASA 'naut Sunita Williams has broken Peggy Whitson's record for total spacewalking time for a female astronaut with a trip outside the International Space Station (ISS) to collect samples from the outpost's exterior....

Reckons completion of Hashicorp buy is around the corner, plans to use some of $7B free cash for more M&A IBM is hopeful of completing the $6.4 billion purchase of Hashicorp relatively smoothly given what Big Blue perceives to be a "more rational" and "pro-competition" regulatory environment....

Court said her approach to child access dispute with partner's ex really stinks Wales has given the world many things - Tom Jones, laverbread, and the equals sign. But one woman from Caernarfon has added weaponized flatulence to the list. Her unorthodox approach to WhatsApp landed her with a community order and fines....

Only 35% of those premises actually hooked up though, plus company reports 'higher competitor losses' BT Group claims to have pulled off a record build rate of more than a million premises in the final three months of 2024 amid efforts to install fiber connectivity across the UK and fierce competition from altnets....

ESA and the Argonauts The European Space Agency (ESA) has inked a deal worth 862 million with Thales Alenia Space to develop a lunar lander....

And it doesn't take a crystal ball to predict the future If the nonstop flood of ransomware attacks doesn't already make every day feel like Groundhog Day, then a look back at 2024 - and predictions for 2025 - definitely will....

'Ancient mariner' who came to make the fix in historical costume was such a shock nobody made a pirate joke On Call Tech support people play many roles, and The Register celebrates them all in On Call, our reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your tales of adventure....

That's one way to focus the Platforms & Devices team Google's latest round of layoffs is looking a bit different than usual, with the Chocolate Factory offering a buyout to employees in the recently created Platforms & Devices division....

Is this NEO the one? Yup, as in, a 1% chance of hitting us ... sadly Video Astronomers reckon a 220-million-kilogram asteroid is going to swing by Earth in 2032 with a 1-in-100 chance of hitting us....

Imagine burning through $72B in one year. Did it make Sam Altman the CEO already? Intel capped off a tumultuous year with a reality check for its product roadmaps....

And you, China, Russia, North Korea ... Guardrails block malware generation Google says it's spotted Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean government agents using its Gemini AI for nefarious purposes, with Tehran by far the most frequent naughty user out of the four....

Makes you wonder, how bad could Windows-on-Arm really be? Businesses looking to pick up a Surface Pro tablet or laptop powered by Intel's latest generation of Core Ultra processors can expect to pay at least $400 more compared to Microsoft's existing Arm-based offerings....

Consider patching soon because cybercrooks love to hit vulnerable tools from Broadcom's virtualization giant Broadcom has fixed five flaws, collectively deemed "high severity," in VMware's IT operations and log management tools within Cloud Foundation, including two information disclosure bugs that could lead to credential leakage under certain conditions....