The Register

Survey probes interest in AI assistance for locally hosted email setups Microsoft's mission to "Copilot all the things" has reached Exchange Server, with a survey asking if admins want the AI assistant on-prem....

Criminal outfits had been using Musk's broadband beacons to run cyber-slavery scams across Southeast Asia SpaceX says it has shut down thousands of Starlink terminals that were powering Myanmar's notorious scam compounds after its satellite network was found to be keeping human trafficking and cyber-fraud operations online in the country's lawless border zones....

The wheels on Copilot's hockey stick must be giving off smoke by now Microsoft's finance division has a term for an overly optimistic projection that seems to march backward year after year: the hockey stick on wheels....

New version includes multithreaded TCP/IP and Raspberry Pi 5 support The 59th version of the OpenBSD operating system is here, six months after 7.7, with multiple improvements in various areas....

Meanwhile, civil services claims 75,000 days could be saved by the tech each year Ignoring the skeptics and threat of an AI bubble, the UK government is pushing ahead with AI "sandboxing" and backing a raft of projects it claims could benefit from red-tape cutting....

Cupertino wants you on certain channels, and pushes back if you have your own preferences Networking researcher Christoff Visser has found that Apple devices cause Wi-Fi networks to jitter" due to traffic generated by the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) tech that powers the peer-to-peer AirDrop filesharing tool....

We could really have used this a couple of days ago, guys In the same week that a massive outage of its own cloud inconvenienced millions of customers, AWS has delivered an improved interactive incident reporting service to help its customers explain what happened when their cloud-hosted resources strike trouble....

Infra revenue soars and AI helps everything ... except the share price If IBM reveals improved profit margins or a fresh round of redundancies, AI may be the reason, because Big Blue today revealed that its own Project Bob" developer assistance tools have improved productivity among its coders by 45 percent....

'Trust no AI' says one researcher OpenAI's brand new Atlas browser is more than willing to follow commands maliciously embedded in a web page, an attack type known as indirect prompt injection....

Meanwhile Sullivan's legal battle continues interview Two convicted felons walk into a room at the request of a federal judge who wanted one of them - Joe Sullivan, the former Uber chief security officer found guilty of attempting to cover up a 2016 breach at the rideshare company - to help rehabilitate the other, whom the feds accused of hacking into corporate networks as a teen and participating in a "significant" digital heist....

The one chip startup building accelerators for something other than AI boasts performance up 10x that of modern GPUs using a fraction the power Researchers and engineers working in particle physics, materials analysis, or drug discovery haven't exactly been spoiled for choice when it comes to chips capable of the highly precise double-precision calculations that these workloads depend. NextSilicon aims to change that with Maverick-2, a chip aimed not at AI but the high-performance computing (HPC) community....

Social media site continues legal campaign against those who take its content without a license Reddit on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI and three of its alleged data dealers for trafficking in unlawfully scraped information....

Plus spy helping spy: Typhoons teaming up Security researchers now say more Chinese crews - likely including Salt Typhoon - than previously believed exploited a critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability, and used the flaw to target government agencies, telecommunications providers, a university, and a finance company across multiple continents....

Company shares lost value on slow-than-expected sales The global semiconductor market is recovering, albeit at a slower pace than in previous cycles due to macroeconomic dynamics and ongoing uncertainty caused by US trade policy and tariffs, according to Texas Instruments....

Not the default file system, but in the installer if you want it AlmaLinux is to support the Btrfs file system in version 10.1 of its eponymous RHELative operating system....

The end is nigh, now get thee to 365 Microsoft will kill Office Online Server next year, creating a headache for anyone using on-premises Office web applications and the beleaguered holdouts sticking with Skype for Business Server....

AI power demands drive operators to repurpose aircraft parts amid gas turbine shortages AI-driven datacenter energy needs are causing a shortage of gas turbines to power generators, with some operators reportedly turning to old aircraft engines instead....

It's not the size of your accelerator, it's how you use it Gene editing startup Metagenomi has tapped AWS's Inferentia 2 accelerators to speed the discovery of potentially life-saving therapies, and said its efforts cost 56 percent less than it would have incurred using Nvidia GPUs....

Designation hands CMA broad oversight of their app stores and platforms The UK's competition watchdog has officially slapped Apple and Google with "strategic market status," a new legal label that gives the regulator far-reaching powers to rein in how the tech giants run their empires....

Forks of forks of forks, but which ones are patched? A vulnerability in the popular Rust crate async-tar has affected the fast uv Python package manager, which uses a forked version that's now patched - but the most widely downloaded version remains unfixed....

RFC proposes power-button interrupt - and highlights wider problems with sleep states A new Linux kernel patch lets you cancel the process of your machine going into hibernation, but the bigger context of the work may be more important....

480:1 ratio compared to average employee? Must be all that 'leadership' juice Months after saying job cuts at Microsoft weighed on him, bossman Satya Nadella has another problem: how to expend his swelling bank balance following another bumper pay rise....

That's a lot of extended warranties The Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) cyberattack could end up being the costliest such incident in UK history, billed at an estimated 1.9 billion and affecting over 5,000 organizations....

Wheeled wonder leaves European rail in the dust China's CR450 train hit 453 km/h during pre-service trials, surpassing its CR400 predecessor's 420 km/h and outpacing Deutsche Bahn's 405 km/h test record....

Laser-guided weapon reaches full service after successful sea trials Royal Navy helicopters will soon carry drone-busting lightweight Martlet missiles, now declared fully operational following the anti-ship Sea Venom gaining initial operating capability (IOC) earlier this month....

Researchers say 'Proto-X' fine-tunes databases automatically, delivering multifold performance boosts Automated database systems based on vector embedding algorithms could improve the performance of default settings on common PostgreSQL database services by a factor of two to ten, according to a database researcher....

ICO says probe unnecessary after reviewing ministry's handling of leak The UK's data protection regulator declined to launch an investigation into a leak at the Ministry of Defence that risked the lives of thousands of Afghans connected with the British Armed Forces....

YouTube and Gmail already running on both x86 and homebrew Axion silicon, 70,000 more apps in the conversion queue Google has revealed it's ported around 30,000 of its production packages to the Arm architecture and plans to convert them all so it can run workloads on both its own Axion silicon and x86 processors....

Why experience the web for yourself when there's so much privacy to surrender? In a bid to grab even more eyeballs, OpenAI has finally released Atlas, its long-teased, ChatGPT-powered web browser. Surfing the web may never be the same now that a bot is doing it for you - while training itself at the same time....

And got arrested instead of earning a viral TikTok A Maryland woman who allegedly used AI to fake a home invasion was arrested and charged with making false statements after telling police that the ersatz intruder was part of a prank gone wrong....

Rise and grind, robot overlords demand AI services like OpenAI's ChatGPT have been pitched for potential productivity gains, but their effect has been to make people work more while benefiting less from their labor....

The vuln affects the Oat++ MCP implementation A security flaw in the Oat++ implementation of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows attackers to predict or capture session IDs from active AI conversations, hijack MCP sessions, and inject malicious responses via the oatpp-mcp server....

Amazon's hours-long cloud blackout transformed the future of sleep into a sauna and cat care into chaos When Amazon's cloud face-planted on Monday, it didn't just take down some of the world's most popular apps - it took down dignity, comfort, and the occasional cat toilet....

24,500 devs polled, two blog posts, one confusion JetBrains has released its State of the Developer Ecosystem survey, with more than 24,500 responses, revealing AI's impact on developer tools and programming language trends - including the claim that PHP and Ruby are in "long term decline."...

Dev unveils a faster, modernized take on Microsoft's file system for penguin-powered PCs Just under four years after the Linux kernel gained built-in read-write access to Windows drives, an alternative option has appeared....

Pixels of the past 'created just for fun' The pifmgr.dll still lingers in modern Windows installations - a throwback to a simpler and blockier time, according to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen....

Lunar landing reality distortion field slips for Musk's rocketeers NASA's Acting Administrator has admitted that SpaceX is behind in plans to return astronauts to the Moon, has reopened lander contract competition, and pushed the deadline for a lunar landing to the end of the Trump administration in 2029....

MAST Upgrade team claims first suppression of pesky edge instabilities in a spherical tokamak Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) claim they have taken a significant step toward making fusion energy possible by applying a 3D magnetic field to counteract instabilities in a spherical tokamak plasma for the first time....

Japanese retailer halts online orders after attack cripples third-party vendor Japanese retailer Muji is suspending online orders after logistics partner Askul was knocked offline by a ransomware attack....

CISA adds high-severity flaw to KEV list, urges swift updating Uncle Sam's cyber wardens have warned that a high-severity flaw in Microsoft's Windows SMB client is now being actively exploited - months after it was patched....

DevOps guru and ex-Googler say vibes beat reading diffs but there are risks "Accept All. Always. Don't read the diffs anymore."...

Security pros explore whether infection-spoofing code can immunize Windows systems against attack Feature What's better, prevention or cure? For a long time the global cybersecurity industry has operated by reacting to attacks and computer viruses. But given that ransomware has continued to escalate, more proactive action is needed....

Another phone Linux? The Reg attempts to disentangle the options The latest version of Mobian, an edition of Debian aimed at mobile devices, is here, based on Debian 13 "Trixie"....

Calendar cock-up exposed recipients' details Anti-fraud nonprofit Cifas was left red-faced after sending out a calendar invite that exposed the email addresses of dozens of individuals working across the fraud space....

12 more hours of pain followed initial outage Amazon Web Services has revealed that its efforts to recover from the massive mess at its US-EAST-1 region caused other services to fail....

Better scheduling and resource-sharing for inferencing workloads using multiple models, not a training breakthrough Chinese tech giant Alibaba has published a paper detailing scheduling tech it has used to achieve impressive utilization improvements across the GPU fleet it uses to power inferencing workloads - which is nice, but not a breakthrough that will worry AI investors....

Shall I refer thee to all those lawsuits about fair use? Researchers think this result makes them worth revisiting Readers of texts created to use the styles of famous authors prefer works written by AI to human human-written imitations, but only after developers fine-tune AI models to understand an author's output....

It's Typhoon season...year round China's Salt Typhoon gang appears to have successfully attacked a European telecommunications firm, according to security researchers at Darktrace....

The government in the Netherlands has taken control of the company Nexperia, a Dutch chipmaker that's found itself at the center of a geopolitical crisis, has denied claims by its former CEO that its Chinese division is now operating as an independent entity....

Researchers accuse tech firms of profiting from exploitative AI imagery The starving child whose picture broke your heart when you saw it on a charity website may not be real. Global health researchers say that stock image companies like Adobe are profiting from AI-generated "poverty porn" that non-profits are using to drum up donations....