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If you can't bother to keep GitHub running, why should we bother with you? Opinion It's been another shabby week for Microsoft, and a shabbier one for its users. We learnt that Windows 11's epic habit of trying to corral customers into paid-for Microsoft services just got worse with a low-rent trick. Remote Desktop got a bit more secure, which is good, but in a way that suggests not too much user testing took place. As for GitHub... GitHub got two helpings of Chef Redmondo's Special Sauce....

New monsters! New magic items! An Arm port! And compliance with a dead C standard Antiques Code Show Admirers of Roguelike games have a new distraction: Version 5.0 of NetHack dropped last weekend....

Haswell's had its day and Skylake and Cascade Lake are draining away Microsoft will stop offering long-term rentals for 17 Azure instance types - most of them powered by CPUs Intel released in the 2010s - again showing that cloud computing isn't always a seamless and easy choice....

Vendors all use different formats. This tech translates them all so you can smooth your SOC Academics from Singapore and China have found a way to make AI useful for cyber-defenders, by creating a technique that translates rules from diverse Security Information and Event Managements (SIEMs) so they're easier to consume across multiple systems....

The Iran war has been great for business The Iran War has been great for business at Palantir, as the Department of Defense has doubled usage of the company's Maven targeting system in four months....

The tiny desktop is no longer Apple's most affordable computer The Mac Mini is the latest victim of the AI-fueled RAM-pocalypse. Last week, Apple discontinued the 256 GB version of the system, which cost $599. To get in now, you'll need to drop at least $799 on a 512 GB version....

Devs not thrilled that Git extension added the bot as co-author by default Imagine working your butt off on a project, only to have VS Code put an attribution into your commit that says Copilot helped you, even if it did not. Microsoft has reversed a change that added a default AI attribution notice after user complaints that the bot was claiming credit for human-authored code....

46% say age checks are easy to bypass, and nearly a third admit getting around them It's been months since the UK government began requiring stronger age checks under the Online Safety Act, and recent research suggests those measures are falling short of keeping kids away from harmful content. In some cases, even drawing on a mustache has been reported as enough to fool age detection software....

Everything you need to build the PS-85 is available from its designer's website, even if you can't get to space We've all been there: You're doing maintenance on a Weyland-Yutani hauler dragging mineral ore back toward Earth, and there's no terminal handy to tap into the MU/TH/UR AI to check ship systems. Lucky for you, one enterprising maker has created just the machine for the job....

It's not the fork that's the problem, it's the attempt to make it look official, says original Notepad++ dev Don Ho Notepad++ remains a Windows-only app, at least under that name. The beloved developer-focused, open-source text editor recently was ported to macOS by a third party. However, developer Don Ho wants to be perfectly clear that, no matter how convincing the new project might look, it's not official....

The Register gets a look inside AWS' networking lab in Cupertino FEATURE In an unassuming three-story office building in Cupertino, California, engineers from Amazon Web Services are busy trying to make networking inconspicuous....

'If you don't have visibility, you can't understand what to protect' When it comes to securing enterprise supply chains, now heavily infused with AI applications and agents, a software bill of materials (SBOM) no longer provides a complete inventory of all the components in the environment. Enter AI-BOMs....

Serious Linux VMs will enjoy big iron - if you can learn to love lock-in risks and skills challenges VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom's new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti....

Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts....

That box-full-of-old-tech-you-should-probably-have-thrown-out-but-kept-just-in-case got a techie in trouble Who, Me? Monday is upon us once again and The Register hopes that when you arrive at your desk, all is well. We offer that sentiment because we use the first day of the working week to bring you a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column in which you confess to making mistakes, and explain how you survived them....

Like actual butlers, this relic of the first dotcom boom has been a quaint anachronism for decades In the mid-1990s, search engine designers settled on the user interface that dominates to this day: a text box into which users enter text, and a resulting list of websites....

Prioritize resilience over productivity, say CISA, NCSC and their friends from Oz, NZ, Canada Information security agencies from the nations of the Five Eyes security alliance have co-authored guidance on the use of agentic AI that warns the technology will likely misbehave and amplifies organizations' existing frailties, and therefore recommend slow and careful adoption of the tech....

PLUS: Samsung cashes in on RAM prices; Booze from space fetches huge price; China's hyperscalers surge A Chinese court has ruled that it's illegal to replace human workers with AI....

Windows is a mess, GitHub keeps wobbling, Copilot draws flak - what's wrong at Redmond? kettle When it comes to making decisions that piss off your user base, no one knows how to do it like Microsoft....

In a disaggregated AI world, Nvidia can be both a friend and an enemy AI adoption is reaching an inflection point as the focus shifts from training new models to serving them. For the AI startups vying for a slice of Nvidia's pie, it's now or never....

Plan mixes crewed ships, robot escorts, and long-range strike to bolster a stretched fleet The leader of Britain's Royal Navy has outlined a Hybrid Navy" built on a mix of crewed, uncrewed, and autonomous platforms to ensure it can continue to defend the nation and operate overseas....

PAC: Now why can't everybody else in public sector do it like this? Parliament's spending watchdog has held up a successful large-scale public sector tech transformation as a rare example worth emulating, in a striking departure from the usual diet of failure and overspend....

Take those token limits and shove them by vibe coding with a local LLM With model devs pushing more aggressive rate limits, raising prices, or even abandoning subscriptions for usage-based pricing, that vibe-coded hobby project is about to get a whole lot more expensive. Fortunately, you're not without cost-saving options....

Agency insists everything is working fine, even though users spend days failing to load it The DVSA's driving test booking system has spent the week offline, according to frustrated users....

Britain's cyber agency says the bill for years of technical shortcuts is coming due, and it's arriving all at once Britain's cyber agency is warning that AI-fuelled bug hunting is about to flush out years of buried flaws, leaving defenders scrambling to keep up....

CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes touts 'largest ever quarter for competitive displacements' The chase is on. Atlassian reported its largest-ever quarter for taking share from a major IT service management provider, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said on the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings call Thursday, escalating its rivalry with ServiceNow....

Emil Michael says agencies are evaluating the cybersecurity model, not deploying it Pentagon CTO Emil Michael pushed back on reports of a thaw in the department's relationship with Anthropic: The two are not getting back together, even as Mythos draws interest from government agencies....

SpaceX and Blue Origin will absolutely be ready in time. Definitely Amid the sensational NASA budget cut proposals taking place in the US at the moment, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has refined the Artemis III launch date to "late 2027."...

Both Cupertino and Google are imposing ever stricter limits on their phones - but you have alternatives As both Apple and Google introduce unwelcome changes in their phone OSes, here's a quick reminder that you do have alternatives to the Gruesome Twosome....

If software writes software the risk is systematic failure at scale". Someone needs to take charge, argues Forrester Forrester predicts that by decade's end, the rush toward agentic AI will grow so chaotic that CIOs will be forced into a new role as enforcer of order....

Users have less cash to burn and less patience for AI in new models... now where to get the used stock Secondhand phones sales are booming - relatively speaking - and the industry has rising inflation, AI bloat, and consumers' growing apathy toward overpriced new handsets to thank for it....

Exploitation was underway before patches landed, at least one victim reports ransomware demand CISA has added a critical cPanel bug to its known-exploited list, confirming that attackers are already poking holes in one of the internet's most widely used hosting stacks....

Lots of fixes, some performance tweaks. Fingers crossed there's no out-of-band patch to follow Microsoft is following through on its promise to prioritize Windows stability with its April 30 non-security update....

Altman's crew now doing the same gatekeeping it recently mocked OpenAI is lining up a limited release of its new GPT-5.5-Cyber model to a handpicked circle of "cyber defenders," just weeks after taking a swipe at Anthropic for doing almost exactly the same thing....

But unlike most junkers, it'll be traveling faster than the speed of sound, claims astronomy software dev An astronomy software dev claims a Falcon 9 upper stage will hit the Moon in August, traveling at several times the speed of sound....

313 Team tells Canonical: pay up or the packets keep coming Canonical says its web infrastructure is under attack after a pro-Iran hacktivist group instructed its members to target the open source giant....

Covert cameras, live-streaming systems, and in-vehicle recording kit sought to catch out fraudsters The Department for Work and Pensions has gone shopping for covert cameras, live-streaming kit, and vehicle-based recording gear as it lines up a 2 million upgrade to watch fraud suspects in real time....

Things that go bork in the night Bork!Bork!Bork! What frightens you? What, as an IT professional, would make you shriek like a small child? What tech horrors are lurking under your bed?...

Start date pushed back a year, annual cost up a third, and UK's now handing out eight million passports a year The Home Office has increased the annual value and overall duration of its new passport production contract, increasing it to a total of 576 million as it starts a third round of engagement with suppliers....

Medical license applicants still waiting months while agency insists it's 'putting things right' The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) has introduced new techto support driving license applications that require medical checks, after processing times exceeded 14 weeks in February....

For once, Oracle ERP wasn't the problem On Call Fridays can be a drag, but The Register has a formula to inject a little fun by delivering a new instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which we share your tech support stories....

Enters the custom AI silicon business with secret silicon for an un-named hyperscaler Qualcomm has quietly entered the market for custom hyperscale silicon, and datacenter CPUs...

In talks with Japan, the UK, and Australia on defense tech that can contribute to global stability' Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has confirmed the demise of its mainframe business in the year 2035 and hinted it's working on significant defense projects....

$227k gets you a hearing for your dot.vanity project, or strings in one of 27 scripts The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday kicked off a new application process for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), its first since 2012....

Mini Shai-Hulud caught spreading credential-stealing malware The wave of supply chain attacks aimed at security and developer tools has washed up more victims, namely SAP and Intercom npm packages, plus the lightning PyPI package....

Stop the sprawl! With the average Global Fortune 500 enterprise expected to run more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 today, there's plenty of room for chaos. Analyst firm Gartner says that, without proper governance, those agents will multiply and run amok....

Mozilla fears wiring an AI API into Chrome will make the web less open Updated Mozilla has reiterated its opposition to Google's decision to build AI plumbing into its Chrome browser, though rather belatedly now that the technology, known as the Prompt API, is already being tested in Chrome and Microsoft Edge....

KnowBe4 says 86% of phishing it tracked used AI, and inboxes are only the start Give a man a phishing kit and he might get lucky a couple of times; teach an AI to phish and it'll change the landscape, if KnowBe4's latest phishing trends report is accurate....

One alleged cyber contractor was extradited to the US over the weekend China's "hacker-for-hire ecosystem has gotten out of control," according to Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division....

Analyst says handsets now stay in pockets for 4.2 years on average Remember the early days of the smartphone revolution when, even after six months, your phone felt outdated? Not anymore. Smartphone replacement cycles are getting longer as discretionary household budgets come under pressure from inflation, with demand for new devices expected to fall for the rest of this year....