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Funding fights and Starship stumbles could still bring it back down to Earth NASA has begun assembling the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will send humans on a lunar landing mission in 2027....

Plan includes chatbots 'with full user context and data access' - what could go wrong? US government buyers have been busy getting AI into the hands of federal agencies, and now they're taking a moment to ask the industry how some of that AI magic could work for them....

Toronto company says weekend cyber raid hit internal IT, not punters' wallets Canadian casino software slinger Bragg Gaming Group has disclosed a "cybersecurity incident," though it's adamant the intruders never got their hands on customer data....

Unexpected news from Pine64, but there are other goodies to compensate Pine64 is moving from Arm kit to RISC-V. As a result, its higher-end open smartphones is for the chop - but not the lower-end model....

Dame Rachel de Souza says under-18s are laughing off the Online Safety Act's age blocks England's children's commissioner has urged the government to shut down one of the most obvious loopholes in its new age-blocking regime: kids firing up a VPN....

Report recommends that the UK become a leader in chip design The British government's advisory body on science and technology thinks the country could be a world leader in designing AI chips, if it could just get the right investment and skills in place....

Want to pass on that old PC? Perhaps wait until out-of-band patch arrives Microsoft has broken the Windows reset and recovery functionality so badly, it must push an out-of-band update....

500, 600, 1200, 2000... what's your number? Hands on The Commodore Amiga turned 40 this year, and the event has been marked by The National Museum Of Computing in the UK with a hands-on exhibition of models from the archives....

Tulsi Gabbard boasts Washington forced Blighty to drop iPhone encryption fight The UK government has reportedly abandoned its attempt to strong-arm Apple into weakening iPhone encryption after the White House forced Blighty into a quiet climb-down....

Developer demand for sovereign cloud from tech giant is on the rise, says exec Interview Google's President of Customer Experience, Hayete Gallot, offered some words of comfort to developers who are looking nervously at the rise of AI assistants while also laying out her vision for cloud sovereignty....

Takes two percent stake as rumours swirl Uncle Sam could do something similar Japanese tech investment concern SoftBank has made a $2 billion investment in Intel....

CEO says if you buy all your infosec stuff from him, life under assault from bots will be less painful Brace for a new round of browser wars, according to Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora....

Single spacesuit now worn 20 times Taikonauts aboard China's Tiangong space station used an AI model to prepare for a spacewalk....

More than 60 years after first demos of this tech, Kairos will bring it back to Oak Ridge Oak Ridge, Tennessee, could be home to a molten salt reactor once again if Google-backed Kairos Power has its way....

High accuracy scores come from conditions that don't reflect real-world usage Facial recognition technology has been deployed publicly on the basis of benchmark tests that reflect performance in laboratory settings, but some academics are saying that real-world performance doesn't match up....

Meet the new COPILOT function Microsoft, in its ongoing effort to AI-ify every product it has, is now adding it right into the cells of Excel. Available on Monday to beta users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new COPILOT function allows you to task Redmond's AI with performing generative tasks right in, for example, C2 or B23....

Got a particle accelerator? Here's your tritium startup idea Tritium is ridiculously rare, incredibly expensive, and central to most fusion energy reactor designs. If research out of Los Alamos National Lab proves to hold true, it might soon become easier to obtain....

Spy vs spy in the chips Comment Chinese state media called the US an aspiring "surveillance empire" over its proposed use of asset tracking tags to crack down on black-market GPU shipments to the Middle Kingdom....

MIT NANDA study finds only 5 percent of organizations using AI tools in production at scale US companies have invested between $35 and $40 billion in Generative AI initiatives and, so far, have almost nothing to show for it....

A plan to standardize IT record keeping is incomplete after 8 years, and the GAO wants someone to act The US federal government first planned to standardize its categorization of IT costs, resources, and solutions back in 2017. Eight years later, the project has mostly stalled, say auditors, and now they're demanding that it either get priority or get the axe....

Surprise - updated plans way more expensive than initially suggested AWS has introduced new pricing for Kiro, its AI-driven coding tool, but unlike the pricing originally announced, the latest plans are "a wallet-wrecking tragedy," according to many of its users....

Supply chain breach has been a major target of legal action Microsoft-owned talk-to-text outfit Nuance has agreed to cough up $8.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the sprawling MOVEit Transfer mega-breach - although it admits no liability....

P2P power networks beat stingy feed-in tariffs for Aussie households, study finds Boffins looking into the Australian solar energy ecosystem say that sharing really is caring - and potentially profitable when homes with solar panels can sell their excess energy to neighbors at a preferential rate....

HR SaaS giant insists core systems untouched Workday has admitted that attackers gained access to one of its third-party CRM platforms, but insists its core systems and customer tenants are untouched....

If at first you succeed, keep trying until you don't SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch, blaming a previous failure on structural issues and fuel pressurization problems....

Virtual agents to guide citizens through red tape - but not remove any of it The UK government has leapt into the AI hype with a raft of "Exemplar" programs it claims will deliver billions in value - including a Clippy-style assistant to help citizens navigate complex forms and legal jargon, rather than simply making them clearer in the first place....

Agency swears breaches are rare, just not rare enough to stop 186 being binned for sticky fingers The UK tax authority has been forced to clean house after dozens of staff were caught helping themselves to taxpayer records....

Sni5Gect research crew targets sweet spot during device / network handshake pause Security boffins have released an open source tool for poking holes in 5G mobile networks, claiming it can do up- and downlink sniffing and a novel connection downgrade attack - plus "other serious exploits" they're keeping under wraps, for now....

When you're asking AI chatbots for answers, they're data-mining you Opinion Recently, OpenAI ChatGPT users were shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to discover that their searches were appearing in Google search. You morons! What do you think AI chatbots are doing? Doing all your homework for free or a mere $20 a month? I think not!...

The official GNU microkernel is still breathing - and now it's 64-bit Before Linux, GNU was working on its own Mach-based Unix compatible OS. Now, in the footsteps of Debian 13, there is a new release....

Visions of immortality are uniformly dull. But this is gonna get ugly Opinion Real versus virtual. Stolen versus synthesized. Generative AI is blurring the lines we used to think we could read between. Now, it's getting its teeth into life versus death....

The real lesson here is how little some companies care about training Who, Me? Welcome to Monday and another instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes and reveal if they derailed your career....

If you wanted to hurt Putin's ransomware racketeers, these info-stealing npm packages are one way to do it Researchers at software supply chain security outfit Safety think they've found malware that targets Russian cryptocurrency developers, and perhaps therefore Russia's state-linked ransomware crews...

Vidchat hosts probably know Otter.ai records everything and feeds it into AI. Their guests may not Voice transcription service Otter.ai has found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit that claims it trains its speech recognition tech without securing permission to do so....

Prime Minister promises first local silicon will appear this year, decades after Fairchild Semi's Robert Noyce made polite inquiries Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has celebrated the nation's independence day by pointing out that the nation is finally becoming a global chipmaking contender - 60 years after blowing the chance to be a global leader....

PLUS: Philippines bans gambling payments; Indonesia warns Roblox; China lures young scientists; And more! Asia In Brief Google on Monday admitted to anticompetitive conduct in its dealings with Australian telcos....

PLUS: Kryptos solution up for auction; Canadian parliament springs a leak; Fake crypto lawyers; And more Infosec In Brief New York State is suing bank-owned peer-to-peer payment app Zelle, claiming that the banks behind it knew fraud was rampant on the platform but allowed scammers to conduct business with impunity....

The non-profit has a new look but still stands up for the open web interview The Mozilla Foundation has changed its look, but its goals remain the same - supporting an internet that's open and inclusive, and that prioritizes the interests of people over corporations....

Handy tool for when only a dedicated device will do hands on Timekettle's lightweight T1 interpreter has received the AI treatment and will now perform offline translations. But unless you have deep enough pockets, both figuratively and literally, for another device and a frequent need for translation, it's not for you....

'Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,' one tells The Reg Feature Bill Gates, an Arizona election official and former Maricopa County supervisor, says that the death threats started shortly after the 2020 presidential election....

These ten features would make users more productive OPINION From desktop alerts begging you to sign up for Xbox Game Pass to a second-chance out-of-the-box experience that insists you need Microsoft 365, Windows has a hard time taking "no" for an answer. The operating system's corporate parent isn't a good listener either, festooning the OS with useless features no one asked for....

Precogs replaced by profiling and postcode data... and 'AI'. What could wrong? Lots, say privacy campaigners The UK government has unveiled a scheme to use AI to "help police catch criminals before they strike."...

Nowhere to hide Codeberg, a Berlin-based code hosting community, is struggling to cope with a deluge of AI bots that can now bypass previously effective defenses....

AI will take your salary in capex before it can take your job Oracle issued layoff notices for more than 300 people in Washington State and California this week, according to state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings in those states....

Is that a JuicyPotato on your network? A suspected Chinese-government-backed cyber crew recently broke into a Taiwanese web hosting provider to steal credentials and plant backdoors for long-term access, using a mix of open-source and custom software tools, Cisco Talos reports....

Could tinkering with a site's code to hide ads count as infringement? A recent ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has reopened the possibility that using ad blocking software could violate copyright law in Germany....

When one GPU translates into three to five of the fastest switch ports money can buy, can you blame them? Nvidia is expected to ship somewhere north of 5 million Blackwell GPUs in 2025. But before those GPUs can train the next GPT, Gemini, or Llama, they need to be networked - and that's quickly becoming big business for Ethernet switch vendors like Cisco, Arista, HPE ... and Nvidia itself....

A large and unfortunate mistake in the kernel development management process is underway comment The first release candidate of Linux 6.17 is out, without any bcachefs changes... but not for any technical reasons. This is bad....

Switchzilla's summer of perfect 10s Cisco has issued a patch for a maximum-severity bug in its Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to inject arbitrary shell commands on vulnerable systems....

You have until Thursday August 21 to respond if you do NASA's plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon have moved on - the agency has now put out a Request For Information (RFI) to gauge industry interest in the project....