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We can remember it for you wholesale, and sell it back to you for big bucks Web scraping bots are increasing the pressure on the tech supply chain by scouring sites for DRAM, so their minders can snap up increasingly scarce inventory and resell it for a quick profit....

Vulnerable citizens targeted by criminals purporting to represent fake police crisis department Scammers targeted Dubai citizens mere hours after missiles struck the city, attempting to gain access to their bank accounts, police have warned....

More than a fifth of servers still on Windows Server 2016 Windows 11 has leapt ahead of Windows 10 in market share, according to the latest Statcounter figures....

A handy feature you can already try in recent versions The new beta of the next version of Firefox lets you view two web pages side by side, with a split you can drag with your mouse....

Official monitoring shows connectivity collapsing to near-zero Iran's internet has plunged into a near-total blackout, with traffic down to around 1 percent of normal levels and connectivity described as "close to zero" as authorities curb access amid widening regional conflict....

Soon turned out, we had a heart of glass Opinion There is more joy in heaven over a single report of genuinely new technology than in a thousand desperate AI marketing pitches. What the angels will make of Microsoft's Project Silica, a mixture of the two, is less clear....

Browser-based version back on the menu, reopening questions about TDF's relationship with Collabora The Document Foundation (TDF) has pulled LibreOffice Online out of its "attic" - its term for retired projects - and is resuming development....

Oh, the contortions required to debug strange errors! Who, Me? A weekend of unwinding is behind us, so The Register returns to work on Monday with a fresh installment of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column that reveals how you got in a tangle, and then extricated yourself....

Signs a deal with Washington anyway, says he's kept control of killer robots by allowing only cloudy AI, with guardrails OpenAI has signed a deal with the United States Department of War (DoW) that allows use of its advanced AI systems in classified environments, and urged the Pentagon to make the same terms available to its rivals....

PLUS: Firefox adds XSS protection; Leadership turnover at CISA; FTC exempts some data collection Infosec In Brief DNS vulnerabilities are being addressed 84 percent faster in the UK public sector thanks to an automated vulnerability scanning system established as part of a program kicked off early last year....

Went from triumph at having busted tax dodgers to embarrassment at losing the proceeds South Korea's National Tax Service has apologized after it leaked passwords to a stash of stolen crypto, which parties unknown used to make off with the digi-cash....

New ThinkPads also come in blue, get perfect fixability score If you own a desktop computer, you're used to swapping parts and peripherals around, but most laptops are closed boxes with few ways to modify them. Lenovo's new ThinkBook Modular AI PC concept shows what happens when you can remove a screen, a keyboard, and even blocks of ports from a mobile PC....

PLUS: AI claims 2,000 jobs at Australia's WiseTech; Samsung wants humanoid robots for autonomous factories; Micron opens India plant; And more! Asia In brief One of Amazon Web Services' availability zones in the United Arab Emirates is offline after the facility was hit by unknown objects....

A smaller, security-conscious take on the viral AI agent platform Interview Ideally, you shouldn't have to defend yourself against your own AI agent. But we don't live in an ideal world and an unrestrained agent can cause a ton of damage....

Lost among the investor froth, someone has to do all the boring stuff. And they'll probably be around for the next spin of the hype cycle Opinion Say goodbye to the SaaS-pocalypse theory, which posits that advances in AI will bring the software-as-a-service market to its knees. Say hello to "a feedback loop with no natural brake." Or doomster porn, as others would have it....

Jake Braun thinks hackers need to create a 'Digital arsenal of democracy' to defend us all Interview Hackers - especially Jake Braun - are "fed up with government."...

Careless big-time users are treating FOSS repos like content delivery networks Opinion I'm at the Linux Foundation Members Summit, and Sonatype's CTO Brian Fox introduced me to a new open source problem. I wouldn't have thought that was possible, but here I am....

Credential and cryptocurrency theft, live surveillance, ransomware - an attacker's Swiss Army knife A new remote access trojan (RAT) being sold on cybercrime networks enables double extortion attacks on Windows machines by bundling ransomware and data theft, along with credential and cryptocurrency stealers, live surveillance, and a whole host of other illicit capabilities, all controllable from a centralized dashboard....

Without a single 'You're Fired' joke updated President Trump has escalated Anthropic's dispute with the Defense Department with a social media post ordering the entire federal government purge the company's software from its systems....

'This is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry has faced since its inception' The next wave of smartphones and PCs will have less memory and fewer capabilities, yet are likely to cost consumers 14 percent more as AI ambitions eat all available memory supplies, according to researchers at IDC....

ChatGPT maker announces $110B in new investment amid flurry of self-serving deals The headlines say OpenAI on Friday announced $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, though terms and conditions apply....

Who is knocking at the Dohdoor? Digital intruders with possible links to North Korea have been infecting US education and healthcare sectors with a never-before-seen backdoor since at least December, according to security researchers....

Lab aims to link power, cooling, and workload management to ease strain on the US grid Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is hoping to turn its technical expertise to the problem of growing electricity demand from AI datacenters....

Let's hope air cargo checks don't trigger the same headaches The US Army's attempt to turn Microsoft HoloLens headsets into battlefield kit may have failed, but the AR goggles aren't going into the garbage. Instead, they're being repurposed for remote cargo inspection support....

Are they shoe-ins for an award? Hard to say It is a sound evocative of high school: the characteristic squeak of sneakers on a basketball court. UK readers may, however, be familiar with the same sound from their trainers while playing badminton....

Who's to blame - the vibey platforms or the humans who ignore security warnings? Vibe-coding platform Lovable has been accused of hosting apps riddled with vulnerabilities after saying users are responsible for addressing security issues flagged before publishing....

Smaller crews piled in as old names splintered and rebranded Ransomware payments cratered in 2025, but it seems like the cybercrooks launching the attacks didn't get the memo....

Crooks claim they helped themselves to over 37M accounts during January hit on subcontractor French online marketplace ManoMano is warning customers their personal data was siphoned off after a cyberattack hit one of its customer support subcontractors - and criminals are already claiming the haul is far larger than the company's carefully worded notice suggests....

Government and 32 private-sector backers fund push to take on TSMC and Samsung at leading-edge nodes Japan's fledgling foundry biz Rapidus has secured funding of $1.7 billion to help it progress to mass production of 2nm semiconductors by 2027, making it a potential rival for Taiwan's TSMC....

Company refuses to pay ransom as attackers threaten larger daily dumps The Netherlands' national police is backing Odido's refusal to pay a ransom after ShinyHunters leaked a second round of records belonging to the telco....

To put that into perspective, 45 GW was peak electricity use for Britain so far this year About 140 datacenters are in the queue to be connected to Britain's power grid, and their combined energy requirements are estimated to be more than the current peak electricity use for the entire country....

Most DSAG members willing to pay a premium to stay on legacy platform until 2030 About half of German-speaking SAP users on its legacy ECC ERP system are set to ignore the 2027 support deadline, according to a survey of users in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria....

French firm claims DWP failed to identify rival's bid was 'abnormally low' and alleges govt breached procurement rules Sopra Steria is suing the UK government, alleging it accepted a bid from rival Capita for an outsourcing contract worth up to 958.7 million that it failed to recognize as too low to comply with procurement rules....

Snack giant opts for vendor-neutral process mining as it shifts from ECC to S/4HANA In the middle of a mammoth migration off SAP's legacy ERP systems, global snack giant Mondelz has found an alternative to the German vendor's tech as the main platform for understanding its complex, fragmented business processes....

Typing 8x more than your peers? You better have the work to show for it Avon and Somerset Police this week confirmed a former officer was dismissed after she was found weighing her laptop keyboard down with photo frames to simulate activity....

'I was no longer field support. I was collateral' On Call Friday has arrived, bringing a promise of fleeting freedom - and a new instalment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that retells your tales of tech support incidents that became memorable for all the wrong reasons....

Dell also joins the alternative to Windows 365 Link fun Microsoft has found some friends to make desktop devices that boot into its Windows 365 cloud PCs....

Apparently Uncle Sam busted Binance to shore up the dollar, balance the budget, and achieve world domination The Chinese agency that has accused the USA of cyberattacks on its own infrastructure to make Beijing look bad is back with another theory: Washington's actions against cryptocurrency crooks are just attempts to dominate the global financial system....

AI upstart won't remove Claude's guardrails to stay onside with Dept. of War Anthropic has fired back at the US Department of War, arguing that it can't agree to Uncle Sam's contract demand to remove guardrails on its AI in part because the tech can't be trusted not to harm American civilians and warfighters....

One massive round of firings is apparently better for morale than a drip-drip-drip of death Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff - around 4,000 people - because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing can do more and do it better."...

Grants for critical, unappreciated projects Open source projects, ever short of funding, have a potential new source of revenue in the form of the Open Source Endowment (OSE)....

Processor is one of roughly half a dozen designs based on Broadcom's XDSiP platform Fujitsu's 144-core Monaka CPU will be built using 3D-chip stacking tech from Broadcom, the merchant silicon slinger revealed on Thursday....

When it gets stuck, the bot will escalate rather than hallucinate ServiceNow claims it has created an AI agent that is currently solving 90 percent of the inbound IT tickets to the company's own employee help desk....

Because nothing says hospitality like a bot counting your pleases The bot's nagging will continue until morale improves. Burger King is rolling out a new employee-facing AI that, among other things, will listen to employees' customer interactions to ensure they're being friendly enough - as if working in fast food weren't hard enough already....

Just less than before, according to the ORCA test exclusive Current-day LLMs are prediction engines and, as such, they can only find the most likely solution to problems, which is not necessarily the correct one. Though popular models have mostly become better at math, even top performer Gemini 3 Flash would receive a C if assessed with a letter grade....

Pretending the software is sentient makes it sound more powerful As with any piece of obsolete software, you might expect an outdated AI model to just be switched off. Anthropic, however, argues that simply pulling the plug has downsides. After retirement" interviews, Claude Opus 3 said it wanted to keep sharing its musings," so Anthropic suggested a blog....

Report claims more vulnerabilities created than fixed as remediation gap widens Veracode has posted its annual State of Software Security report, based on data from 1.6 million applications tested on its cloud platform, finding that more vulnerabilities are being created than are being fixed, and that high-velocity development with AI is making comprehensive security unattainable....

TrendForce says eight hyperscalers are set to pour $710B into servers and infrastructure The big cloud operators are ramping up investment in AI servers and infrastructure to meet demand for AI development and deployment, exacerbating the memory shortage caused by their insatiable growth....

Whac-A-Mole season continues as Redmond finds yet another corner to stuff its 21st century Clippy Microsoft has announced that its Edge browser will automatically open the Copilot side pane when users open links from Outlook....

Telegram posts promise up to $1,000 per call as gang refines IT helpdesk ruse Prolific cybercrime crew Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) is reportedly recruiting women in the hope of improving its social engineering success....