The Register

How to pick the news sources you want to see more (and less) hands on Even if you have your favorite sites bookmarked or type their URLs in through muscle memory, you probably still spend a lot of time looking for info on Google. Now, you can exert some control over which publishers appear in your results for news stories....

Users want their customizations and their old models back There has been more furious backpedalling from OpenAI following the company's ill-judged launch of GPT-5 and the removal of previous model selection....

CVE-2017-11882 in discontinued Equation Editor still attracting keylogger campaigns despite software being killed off in 2018 Very few people are immune to the siren song of nostalgia, a yearning for a "better time" when this was all fields and kids respected their elders - and it looks like cyber criminals are no exception....

Reliant on two mega customers? Who says GPU-for-rent kingpin is a not a sustainable biz model? Rent-a-GPU biz CoreWeave is still racking up eyewatering debts amid mounting net losses as it continues to burn cash on expanding datacenter capacity....

Hit the button and then go on your own voyage of printer discovery Microsoft has made the "Pull Print" feature of Universal Print generally available, which means confidential print jobs should no longer appear in unintended locations....

But despite the differences, all models excel at making errors and shouldn't be trusted Generative AI coding models have common strengths and weaknesses, but express those characteristics differently due to variations in coding style....

The vendor hops aboard GSA's OneGov train, offering models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more Not to be left behind in the flurry of government-wide AI purchasing deals, Box has signed a deal with the feds that'll inject some agentic AI into federal government systems....

Windows 365 Reserve offers 10-day cloud PCs when your machine goes kaput - but you'll still need another device to access them Microsoft is so confident in the reliability and security of its Windows 11 OS that it's now offering businesses the ability to quickly dump users onto temporary VMs in its cloud when, not if, their desktops and laptops break....

Seven additional regions across England will now have access to the controversial tech A fresh expansion of UK crimefighters' access to live facial recognition (LFR) technology is being described by officials as "an excellent opportunity for policing." Privacy campaigners disagree....

Shock news: billionaire techpreneur is not a fan Geek-turned-venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen has weighed in on the arguments surrounding the UK's Online Safety Act, accusing the UK government of leaking his input....

For now at least, even though government buying can improve, open source is not all it's cracked up to be Debate Not for the first time, Microsoft is in the spotlight for the UK government's money it voraciously consumes - apparently 1.9 billion a year in software licensing, and roughly 9 billion over five years. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of voices challenging whether this is good use of public money. After all, aren't there plenty of open source alternatives?...

Foundation warns federated servers face biggest risk, but single-instance users can take their time Updated The maintainers of the federated secure chat protocol Matrix are warning users of a pair of "high severity protocol vulnerabilities," addressed in the latest version, saying patching them requires a breaking change in servers and clients....

You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you....

An encounter with the healthcare system reveals sickening decisions about data Column We already live in a world where pretty much every public act - online or in the real world - leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I'd seriously imagined....

Agency asks for ideas from US industry as orbit decays NASA is seeking solutions for a way to raise the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory despite the spacecraft being marked for termination after FY2026 under the agency's budget proposal....

Minnesota's capital is the latest to feature on Interlock's leak blog after late-July cyberattack The Interlock ransomware gang has flaunted a 43GB haul of files allegedly stolen from the city of Saint Paul, following a late-July cyberattack that forced the Minnesota capital to declare a state of national emergency....

First came the fireball, then a hole in the roof and a dent in the floor In late June media speculated that a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere caused widespread sightings of a celestial fireball during daylight hours across the southeast USA. Scientists have now confirmed space rocks caused the phenomenon, citing as evidence a meteorite they found in a resident's living room....

Federal Court finds Big Tech players abused their market power Australia's Federal Court has given Epic Games another win in its global fight against the way Apple and Google run their app stores....

Tells court 'What I did was wrong and I want to apologize for my conduct' Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon has pled guilty to committing fraud when promoting the so-called "stablecoin" Terra USD and now faces time in jail....

None under active exploit...yet Microsoft's August Patch Tuesday flaw-fixing festival addresses 111 problems in its products, a dozen of which are deemed critical, and one moderate-severity flaw that is listed as being publicly known....

Could the most popular browser change hands? AI search biz Perplexity has offered to pay about twice as much as it is worth to acquire Chrome from Google....

And yes, there's the usual credit monitoring Global staffing firm Manpower confirmed ransomware criminals broke into its Lansing, Michigan franchise's network and stole personal information belonging to 144,189 people, months after the extortionists claimed that they pilfered "all of [the company's] confidential data."...

Keep calm and clear out that inbox. Also maybe lay off the GenAI With many parts of England grappling with a water shortage, the UK's National Drought Group (NDG), which includes both government and non-government agencies, has suggested citizens can help by... clearing out their inboxes....

Don't need to give Uncle Sam any more reason to think kill switches are a good idea Nvidia may have the Trump administration's blessing to resume shipments of its H20 AI accelerators to China, but in Beijing, government officials are now pressuring companies to use what they describe as less-advanced semiconductors....

Last year's attempt failed, but increased concern over the state of the BIS might make the second time the charm The US government agency in charge of keeping advanced technology out of the hands of America's enemies desperately needs an IT modernization to accomplish its mission. So a group of elected officials is trying (again) to get the funds it needs to do so....

Deal could give legislative and judicial agencies access to AI that hallucinated legal citations in a court filing Anthropic has become the latest company to benefit from the US government's frenetic AI adoption pace, inking a deal to get its software into the hands of federal agencies at a deep discount....

Enter a prompt and get back a copyright infringement More and more US companies are using generative AI as a way to save money they might otherwise pay creative professionals. But they're not thinking about the legal bills....

Website, emails, and phones are down for a second day The Pennsylvania's Office of Attorney General (OAG) is blaming a digital blackout of its services on a "cyber incident."...

Efforts to build easier off-ramps are ... err ... ramping up Private cloud platform vendor Platform9 has a new lure for disaffected VMware users: A tool that allows migrations without requiring extra hardware....

'Hung' is out and 'Unresponsive' is in, according to the Academy Software Foundation and the Alliance for OpenUSD A Linux Foundation project has published an Inclusive Language Guide to recommend replacements for common tech terms deemed potentially offensive to some users....

US cops yank servers, domains, and crypto from the Russia-linked gang - but the crooks remain at large In a display of bureaucratic bravado, US law enforcement agencies say they've disrupted" the BlackSuit ransomware gang (also known as Royal), freeing millions of dollars in virtual currency from its clutches....

Long-term support release candidate arrives, general availability comes next month Java 25, an LTS (long-term support) version, is now at release candidate (RC) stage with general availability scheduled for September 16....

Designs scheduled for launch in 2026, developer kit for programmers out today Chip designer Arm is bringing dedicated neural accelerator hardware to its GPU blueprints used in phones. It expects this to deliver higher quality visuals while boosting AI performance....

Aside from glam, includes cool features like standalone GNOME Flashback session with no GNOME shell Debian 13 has arrived, now with RISC-V and preconfigured "blends" right in the main installer....

Chip giant praises 'president's strong leadership,' promises to 'restore this great American company' US President Donald Trump has now reversed his opinion of Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan following their meeting at the White House yesterday, hinting that the two will work more closely together....

Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ spent the weekend bragging to each other on a Telegram channel Prolific cybercrime collectives Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ appear to be working together to break into businesses' networks, steal their data, and force an extortion payment....

Automaker's answer to spate of car thefts is to charge customers for extra Hyundai is charging UK customers 49 ($66) for a security upgrade to prevent thieves from bypassing its car locks....

UK online reseller bought out of administration in -pre-pack agreement, say sources London Stock Exchange-listed Fraser Group is understood to have bought struggling UK online tech bazaar Ebuyer from administrators in a pre-pack agreement, sources have told The Register....

Microsoft's AI-centric code editor and IDE adds the ability to rollback misguided AI prompts The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) team has rolled out version 1.103 with new features including GitHub Copilot chat checkpoints....

Joburg and Warsaw among the hotspots for sprawling server farm construction Lagos, Warsaw and Dubai are among the fastest growing cities for colocation services - with metro areas in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions expanding more rapidly than traditional datacenter hotspots....

Legacy tech for nation's farmers must migrate ... contract swells to 245M The UK's government department for agriculture and the countryside has upped the potential contract value on offer for cloud and datacenter hosting by more than 100 million....

Home Office officials reportedly concede Brit government on back foot as Trump moves to protect US Big Tech players Analysis The Home Office's war on encryption - its most technically complex and controversial aspect of modern policymaking yet - is starting to look like battlefield failure after more than ten years of skirmishes....

Taskforce delivers damning interim report on next generation of energy generation An independent taskforce commissioned by the UK government has warned of the nation's "unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly" approach to nuclear power (and weaponry)....

Sysadmins, your job is safe Automating IT operations using AI may not be the best idea at the moment....

Don't laugh, a French nuclear power plant just shut down for a while after invertebrates overwhelmed its intakes Proponents of increased use of nuclear energy to power datacenters have a new foe: Jellyfish....

Outages, degraded service, and login troubles hit 10 regions and 27 services IBM Cloud experienced a Severity One outage on Monday that left customers unable to access resources....

70W TDP means the new RTX Pro 4000 SFF and RTX Pro 2000 won't blow power budgets Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs are a pair of itty-bitty workstation cards that aim to deliver the highest performance possible for professional visualization and local AI workloads within a 70-watt energy diet....

Biden-era program has reduced FedRAMP processing times to just five weeks from previous year or more The US Government's process for certifying cloud services safe for official use has long been slow, but that's no longer the case. Approvals so far this fiscal year are more than double the total for all of FY 2024....

And shave 15% of the top no doubt. Nerfed versions of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs could soon join its H20 on the list of AI accelerators approved for sale in China....

A few weeks earlier 'zeroplayer' advertised an $80K WinRAR 0-day exploit Russia-linked attackers found and exploited a high-severity WinRAR vulnerability before the maintainers of the Windows file archiver issued a fix....