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Grappling with UK trains will send humans into Recovery too sometimes Bork!Bork!Bork! Today we visit the south of England, where Windows has fallen over, briefly granting unrestricted rail travel to one and all....

Distributed Acoustic Sensing tech uses broadband cables to pinpoint plumbing faults Openreach claims its fiber network infrastructure can detect leaks in nearby water supply pipes, which could save millions of liters of the precious fluid... if the water companies can be bothered to fix them....

Have you tried turning it on, never mind off and on again? On Call Arrr! How is it Friday already? The Register can't explain where the week went, but we can deliver a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of tech support SNAFUs....

From Groq-ing about tokenomics to OpenClaw and the silicon that powers it, our predictions for the hottest ticket in town Nvidia has a bit of a problem. Popular generative AI workloads like code assistants and agentic systems generate massive quantities of tokens and need to move them at speed. But the GPU giant's chips currently struggle to deliver....

Didn't say why, but for once AI may not be the reason for a lost job Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has announced he intends to depart the company after 18 years as the prince of PDFs....

Beijing hinted it wasn't happy with Cupertino, which weeks later made a change Apple has cut the fees it charges Chinese developers to sell their apps and other digital goodies....

Going from eight systems to one means fewer people make decisions to unleash Epic Fury As the US continues its strikes on Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury, speakers at Palantir's AIPCON event on Thursday said the company's Maven Smart System product has shortened the time it takes the Department of Defense to select and hit targets on the battlefield during the conflict....

Prompt like a hard-ass boss who won't tolerate failure and bots will find ways to breach policy AI agents work together to bypass security controls and stealthily steal sensitive data from within the enterprise systems in which they operate, according to tests carried out by frontier security lab Irregular....

Everything extends its cloud Computer to enterprises, your computer Perplexity is ready to have enterprises use its AI service even if enterprises may still be wary of delegating tasks to software agents....

Automated checks raised doubts, though key questions remain unanswered American parents of school-aged children may want to pay attention to where their cars are parked and for how long, as license plate reader data is now being cited by at least one school district when challenging whether students live where they say they do....

It's safe and secure, Redmond insists, but don't expect medical advice Microsoft wants to store your healthcare data so that its AI "delivers personalized health insights that you can act on," but without the liability that comes with actual medical advice....

Franchise isn't the only one unhappy about its IP appearing in propaganda Anime mainstay Yu-Gi-Oh has criticized the White House for using a clip from the TV show in videos promoting US military action....

OEM delays have become patient care delays When patient care is delayed in a hospital because something is broken, biomedical technicians would like you to understand that it's not usually their fault....

International cops stuck down 23 servers in 7 countries Cops from eight countries this week disrupted SocksEscort, a residential proxy service used by criminals to compromise hundreds of thousands of routers worldwide and carry out digital fraud, costing businesses and consumers millions....

Pot of money grows to $2.1BN for fiscal '26, as Big Red exec says AI helping smaller engineering teams do more Oracle has increased funding for its restructuring plans for the current financial year by $500 million, with some observers anticipating a spate of job losses....

The idea being that fleets of AI agents could emulate the 'function of entire companies' Elon Musk wheeled out his "Macrohard" dad joke again in the form of a supposed fleet of "Digital Optimus" agents that he claims would be capable of "emulating the function of entire companies."...

Google evolves its pricing for agentic AI tool, pointing devs towards on-demand credits or $250 per month Ultra plan Developers using Google's Antigravity agentic AI coding tool are complaining about higher prices following an announcement yesterday that the company is evolving its AI plans....

Classicist, philosopher, wit, and one of the greatest British computer scientists of all time Obit Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare has died at the age of 92. Known to many computer science students as C. A. R. Hoare, and to his friends as Tony, he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of programming - he also came up with a number of the field's pithiest quotes....

Van Allen spacecraft re-enters over the Pacific with 1 in 4,200 chance of causing injury NASA's Van Allen Probe A has re-entered Earth's atmosphere eight years earlier than expected, with a 1 in 4,200 chance that its components could cause injury....

No rest for project maintainers battered by slew of vulnerability disclosures The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that hackers are exploiting a max-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in workflow automation platform n8n....

Alphabet to remain 'significant minority shareholder' Alphabet is spinning out its US Google Fiber business and combining it with Astound Broadband as part of a joint venture with private equity investor Stonepeak....

US spy-tech biz and platform provider retorts that this would be against the current law and a breach of its contract Medical and legal rights campaigners are warning that the Palantir data platform, designed to be at the heart of England's health system, risks enabling UK immigration and policing departments to access confidential patient information....

Some account holders see names, salaries, and child benefit payments... just not their own Updated Customers of three major UK banks woke on Thursday to find incorrect transactions appearing in their apps, a problem later attributed to a technical glitch....

All aboard the elevator where only Microsoft knows where you're going Bork!Bork!Bork! Smart mirrors are all the rage. However, rather than a list of headlines and tasks to do today, an unhappy Windows installation can make a smart mirror seem very dumb indeed....

DSTL bets 350K the UK can cook up its own exotic materials Britain has taken the first steps towards producing its own ultrahigh temperature materials, regarded as vital for applications including hypersonic vehicles, space, and advanced propulsion systems....

Plan to fast-track bit barn connections leaves housing developers fuming and billpayers on the hook The British government is consulting on reforms to prioritize "strategically important" grid connections - including datacenters - amid reports of delays stretching more than a decade on some projects....

Government offers 100K to support software forecasting how travelers choose departure hubs The UK's Department for Transport is offering up to 100,000 over three years for access to a C++ programmer who can keep a module of its airport usage model up in the air....

Out of the Copilot and into the fire Organizations that rely on consumer-grade PCs or allow staff to bring their own devices to work have something new to worry about: a virtual Xbox lurking inside Windows 11....

Deploying them by the gigawatt but still can't flag obvious AI slop Social networking giant Meta has revealed details of four previously unknown custom chips powering its AI services....

Like deleting data, exposing keys, and loading malicious content - which may be why Beijing has reportedly banned it China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team has warned locals that the OpenClaw agentic AI tool poses significant security risks....

Company is reshaping our skill mix' amid long share price slide and SaaSpocalypse whispers Australian collaborationware company Atlassian has announced it will shed ten percent of staff - around 1,600 people....

Court issues preliminary injunction but delays it to allow an appeal Perplexity's AI browser Comet has been banned from accessing Amazon's website after the e-commerce giant obtained a court-ordered preliminary injunction....

State news published a list of nearly 30 sites that could be targeted Iran has reportedly designated Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir facilities as legitimate targets of retaliatory strikes, according to an Al Jazeera report citing Iran's state-affiliated Tasnim news agency....

Meanwhile, Verifone says 'no evidence' to support the digital intruders' claims A hacking crew with ties to Iran's intelligence agency claimed to be behind a global network outage at med-tech firm Stryker on Wednesday, and said the cyberattack was in response to the US-Israel airstrikes....

I see you're trying to kill children. Would you like some help with that? You might expect a bot to have guardrails that prevent it from helping you plan a crime, but your expectations might be too high. According to a study, eight of ten major commercial chatbots will help you prepare to conduct a school shooting....

150k accounts nuked, 21 suspects arrested Not every scam starts with malware or a compromised account. Sometimes all it takes is a friend request or a link shared via chat....

Inspector general flags Starship risks and gaps in testing The NASA Office of Inspector General has published a report on the agency's management of the lunar Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, highlighting the risks and arguments behind the scenes....

Project claims legal clarity and zero legacy code, but offers binaries only DR-DOS is back, and there is already a test version you can download. But as of yet, it's not finished, not FOSS - and not based on the original code....

Blue-on-blue internal investigation lands force 66k fine The UK's data protection watchdog has fined Police Scotland 66,000 ($88,000) for what it calls a "serious failure" in handling an alleged victim's sensitive data....

This is not satire, but we wish it was The Ig Nobel Prize, which satirizes its more noble namesake, is moving its award ceremony to Europe following concerns about the safety of those attending the US event....

Let them eat cores Intel has a new strategy for shoring up its eroding market share: Offering PC buyers more cores per dollar than arch-rival AMD in a refresh of its Arrow Lake range....

Reference design to stitch more than a thousand accelerators into a single enormous server. Exclusive If you thought Nvidia or AMD's 72-GPU rack systems were enormous, silicon Ayar Labs has something much bigger in the works....

Latest optical engine may not be CPO, but it's still better than pluggables Photonics startup Lightmatter says that its latest optical engine can cut the amount of fiber used by modern datacenters in half, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't rely on co-packaging to do it....

Google also enables auto-approval of AI agents while their documentation warns against it Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is moving to a weekly release cycle, as well as joining Google in encouraging agentic AI development without manual approval with a new Autopilot feature....

Officials suspend Basel-Stadt trial and launch probe A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8....

17-year-old allegedly withdrew large sums of cash from ATMs Dutch police have arrested a 17-year-old boy who detectives suspect was responsible for 16 bank card frauds across the Netherlands....

Subscribers north of the border suffer the most long-running failures per 100 spent Broadband subscribers in Scotland suffer the most outages in the UK, according to Broadband Genie, with customers of BT typically experiencing the fewest....

Microsoft insists rebootless updates are 'the quickest way to get secure' From the department of "what could possibly go wrong?" comes news that Windows Autopatch is enabling hotpatch security updates by default....

Advocate General urges rethink of PSD2 to speed compensation after scams Analysis One of the European Union's top legal advisors is trying to change how banks treat cybercrime victims - meaning they could enjoy greater financial protections sooner than expected....

AI factories demand 800 volts because physics doesn't care about your upgrade budget Feature Hyperscale computing was built on a foundation of certainty. For years, 12V and 48V rack architectures - implemented at a steady 50-54 VDC (Volts of Direct Current) - ruled the datacenter floor, engineered to perfection for power densities of 10-15 kW per rack. These systems were finely tuned machines, optimized around the predictable, steady-state demands of general-purpose CPUs and storage servers. The infrastructure was stable. The math was settled....