The Register

'Three-year' tech support deal still running The UK's third-largest grocery retailer is set to finish its "three-year" tech divorce project from Walmart in the third quarter of 2025, while most project staff have been moved on....

One more time, with feeling ... Garbage in, garbage out, in training and inference Researchers have found that large language models (LLMs) tend to parrot buggy code when tasked with completing flawed snippets....

If this light-activated stuff works, it could make building robots easier - or make lazing about under the Sun quite a workout Bioengineers have pulled together to get artificial muscles pulling in multiple directions, an important step towards using them in medical treatments and robots....

Analyst finds 91 percent revenue growth with white box makers leading the way Here's another thing AI can do: Increase revenue from selling servers by 91 percent year-over year, according to analyst firm IDC....

Apparently boosts battery to 20 km range in 10 seconds, although as ever ... YMMV Chinese electric automaker BYD has announced 1,000-volt supercharging technology it claims can fill a compatible vehicle's battery in the same amount of time needed to pump fuel into a conventional car....

Remaining Republicans don't like the right to repair, non-compete clause ban, or some social media moderation Analysis In a surprise Tuesday move, US President Donald Trump fired the two remaining Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, potentially accelerating a shift in the consumer and competition watchdog's stance towards tech and other businesses....

Now that's what we call dense floating-point compute GTC Nvidia's rack-scale compute architecture is about to get really hot....

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler again told his 'Creativity Machine' can't earn a (C) The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has affirmed a lower court ruling that content created by an AI model without human input cannot be copyrighted....

DOGE efficiency in action The upheaval at the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, took another twist on Tuesday, as it moved to reinstate staffers it had fired over the past few weeks - specifically those still in their probationary period - though they've been benched on paid leave for now....

HPE and Lenovo also have plans to put Jensen's latest hardware to work GTC The age of the 20-petaFLOPS desktop is upon us as Dell announced a machine capable of achieving that massive processing power today at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley....

Or a 96 GB RTX PRO in your desktop or server GTC After a Hopper hiatus, Nvidia's DGX Station returns, now armed with an all-new desktop-tuned Grace-Blackwell Ultra Superchip capable of churning out 20 petaFLOPS of AI performance....

Power sipping bandwidth bottleneck busters - or that's the hope, anyway GTC Nvidia is set to make available Ethernet and InfiniBand switches featuring silicon photonics with co-packaged optics to advance its vision of datacenters with "millions of GPUs," arguing that the equipment can keep power consumption down....

There goes AMD's capacity advantage GTC Nvidia's Blackwell GPU architecture is barely out of the cradle - and the graphics chip giant is already looking to extend its lead over rival AMD with an Ultra-themed refresh of the technology....

Web souk hits back at critical study into union drive at package depot Amazon has used tricks, algorithms, and surveillance to discourage warehouse employees from unionizing, according to a paper published in the journal Socius....

Hiring remains relatively strong as analysts warn of slowdown A pair of reports on tech sector employment trends in the United States suggest out-of-work techies right now have relatively decent prospects, but economic uncertainty and rapid policy changes initiated by the Trump administration mean the future job market looks less rosy....

For when a Pico 2 is just too general purpose The Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller is generally available, meaning the chip can now be picked up from resellers rather than as a Pico 2 or on PCBs from manufacturers like JLC....

Tall order for tiny marketshare techies but 'This is the moment to decide what kind of internet we want,' says CEO A new, speedier browser has arrived in the form of Vivaldi 7.2, giving its CEO the opportunity to protest the power of tech giants....

'Only' a local access bug but important part of N Korea, Russia, and China attack picture An exploitation avenue found by Trend Micro has been used in an eight-year-long spying campaign, but there's no sign of a fix from Microsoft, which apparently considers this a low priority....

The 24 JDK Enhancement Proposals in Java 24 represent a stochastic sign Oracle JDK 24 debuted on Tuesday with 24 JDK Enhancement Proposals, or JEPs as they're known in the Java programming community....

Ad giant just confirmed its cloudy arm will embrace security shop in $30B deal Infoseccers at Google acquisition target Wiz think they've found the root cause of the GitHub supply chain attack that unfolded over the weekend, and they say that a separate attack may have been to blame....

Dispute over app privacy escalates into legal brawl Phyllis Jager, CEO of New York-based creative agency zuMedia, has perhaps, like some of you, privacy concerns about the pictures DoorDash drivers take to prove they've correctly made their deliveries....

There's nothing bog-standard about this bombshell loo-suit Updated Rival HR technology unicorns are at each other's throats in a courtroom brawl over alleged corporate espionage....

Govt yearns to learn mistakes of serially breached record holders so it can, er, liberalize data sharing regs The UK government is inviting experts to provide insights about the data brokerage industry and the potential risks it poses to national security as it moves to push new data-sharing legislation over the line....

Sending Kubernetes and AI into orbit as devices move from 'glorified sensors' to 'decision-making' SUSECON 2025 Edge technology is finally past the tipping point thanks to inferencing and AI, according to SUSE CTO Brent Schroeder....

SourceHut says it's getting DDoSed by LLM bots SourceHut, an open source git-hosting service, says web crawlers for AI companies are slowing down services through their excessive demands for data....

Don't laugh. This kind of warning shows crims are getting desperate Dark web analysts at infosec software vendor Fortra have discovered an extortion crew named Ox Thief that threatened to contact Edward Snowden if a victim didn't pay to protect its data - a warning that may be an indicator of tough times in the ransomware world for some, at least....

Another success for the 'Moonshot factory' and an extra rival for Starlink et al Google's attempt to provide remote area connectivity with balloons has been floated out as an independent company, a rare success for the company's attempt to develop breakthrough technologies....

One PUT request, one poisoned session file, and the server's yours A trivial flaw in Apache Tomcat that allows remote code execution and access to sensitive files is said to be under attack in the wild within a week of its disclosure....

More light shed on what went down with Marko Elez, thanks to NY AG and co's lawsuit A now-former DOGE aide violated US Treasury policy by emailing an unencrypted database containing people's private information to two Trump administration officials, according to a court document filed Friday....

Microsoft says disappearance of Clippy 2.0 is an error it will shortly fix A buggy Windows 11 update from Microsoft has a silver lining for those who aren't keen on the operating system's Copilot assistant. When installed, the software patch will remove the AI app on at least "some" PCs....

Web souk says Echo hardware doesn't have the oomph for next-gen AI anyway Come March 28, those who opted to have their voice commands for Amazon's AI assistant Alexa processed locally on their Echo devices will lose that option, with all spoken requests pushed to the cloud for analysis....

Cupertino's latest skips iPhone repair gains, iFixit says Anyone hoping Apple's latest MacBook Air might inherit the iPhone's recent repair-friendly tweaks is in for disappointment, iFixit's teardown crew has found....

First license plates, now a way to calculate pace in orbit. Speeding tickets next? Scientists at America's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico say they have developed a Spacecraft Speedometer that satellites can use in orbit to ideally avoid orbital collisions....

Nearly 100 orgs plead for homegrown lifeline amid geopolitical tensions A group of technology companies and lobbyists want the European Commission (EC) to take action to reduce the region's reliance on foreign-owned digital services and infrastructure....

Process mining specialist accuses the ERP giant of rigging game with fees, restrictions, and a closed ecosystem German software company Celonis is suing SAP, alleging anti-competitive conduct and claiming its systems lack openness....

Large organizations among those cleaning up the mess It's not such a happy Monday for defenders wiping the sleep from their eyes only to deal with the latest supply chain attack....

Another all-FOSS option - just don't confuse it with all the other Flangs The latest version of the LLVM compiler suite has promoted its Fortran front end. "Flang" is now official....

Technology Services 4 framework expands by 4B, with procurement to begin this week UK government is set to crack open the pork barrel for up to 16 billion in contracts for a range of IT services. The buying framework was delayed by six months and the total pot of spending is now potentially 25 percent bigger than the previous proposal....

Maddening techno bass loop, Zoolander reference, and 14 minutes of time wasted A vulnerability analyst and prominent member of the infosec industry has blasted Microsoft for refusing to look at a bug report unless he submitted a video alongside a written explanation....

Well, maybe not richer, but we're about to find out Opinion The universe ended unexpectedly on a March Monday in 2025. To the relief of many, it came back a few days later much as before, but with one very significant change. One that may herald significant changes for all of us, inside its sphere or not....

What comes after testing in the software development lifecycle? Aaah, never mind ... let's skip to maintenance Who, Me? With the weekend behind us, it's time to once again ask the question "Who, Me?" That's the name of The Register's Monday column in which we share reader-contributed confessions of making a mess with tech....

Yes, we are. And we promise your 'Droid and smart home kit will get a 'new experience' Google has decided to silence its voice Assistant and replace it with the Gemini AI service....

Second time's a charm SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endurance capsule successfully launched on Friday, March 14, and docked with the International Space Station (ISS) just over a day later....

PLUS: Foxconn wants 40 percent AI server market share; Atlassian CEO jets into controversy; Starlink reaches 800 million in India; And more! Asia In Brief Chinese authorities last week announced identification measures" for AI-generated content that will require it to be labelled with human and machine-readable notifications....

PLUS: Alleged Garantex admin arrested in India; Google deletes more North Korean malware Infosec In Brief United States Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr has unveiled plans to form a Council on National Security that will combat foreign threats to American tech and telecommunications infrastructure....

How to tame its hypersensitive hyperparameters and get it running on your PC Hands on How much can reinforcement learning - and a bit of extra verification - improve large language models, aka LLMs? Alibaba's Qwen team aims to find out with its latest release, QwQ....

AT&T engineer, and the Deep Throat of the network age, dies at 79 In 2006, a retired AT&T engineer knocked on the door of the EFF's office in a rundown part of San Francisco's Mission district and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?" With him he carried schematics exposing the largest US government domestic spying operation since Watergate....

Chinese giant says it's 'committed' to obeying the law as arrests made Belgian authorities have raided multiple premises as part of a corruption probe involving Chinese tech giant Huawei, which has also led to the sealing of two EU parliamentary offices in Brussels....

Billions continue to pour into bit barns across the globe Fears that AI may be a bubble about to burst have yet to dent datacenter investment, with a handful of new developments revealed this week....

Trapped gas isn't just a party foul - it's a launch-stopper The hydraulic problem that kept the next International Space Station (ISS) crew on the ground this week was likely due to trapped air in the system....