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Update boosts Microsoft file imports, adds new spreadsheet functions, and drops older Windows LibreOffice 25.8 arrives with a tagline of "smarter, faster and more reliable." That all sounds good. So what's new?...

US pulls back from Trump's threatened 100% levy but not everyone pleased at Europe's concessions World War Fee The US and European Union have fleshed out details on their sweeping trade deal, promising billions in AI chip sales, a 15 percent tariff cap on key sectors including autos and semiconductors, and a framework for digital rule-making that could reshape the transatlantic tech industry....

But the free AI Mode itself can now take your history into account The all-AI search mode Google introduced earlier this year has sprouted a one-trick AI agent - but only those willing to pay top dollar for the privilege....

Latest Windows Insider Build puts time and language options in Settings Microsoft has continued its efforts to nudge users toward the Windows Settings app from the venerable Control Panel, with language and time settings making the jump....

What testing is happening before changes hit production? Microsoft had a midweek meltdown on Wednesday as a chunk of its productivity suite fell out of the cloud....

Everything a criminal needs for targeted attacks exposed, but telco insists 'no critical data compromised' A significant data theft at Orange Belgium has opened hundreds of thousands of its customers to serious cybersecurity risks....

Feds say Mirai-spawned botnet blasted 370K attacks before AWS and pals helped yank its servers RapperBot, a botnet-for-hire blamed for hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks, has been yanked offline by the Feds, who also hauled in its alleged Oregon-based mastermind....

Another 'extremely sophisticated' exploit chewing at Cupertino's walled garden Apple has shipped emergency updates to fix an actively exploited zero-day in its ImageIO framework, warning that the flaw has already been abused in targeted attacks....

Worried about your data? No probs, says firm, we'll check the dark web crims' list for you! Yes really A week after its services were disrupted by a cyberattack, UK telco Colt Technology Services has gone back on its initial statement to confirm that data has indeed been stolen....

Researcher claims extension didn't start out by exfiltrating info... while dev says its actions are 'compliant' Security boffins at Koi Security have warned of a shift in behavior of a popular Chrome VPN extension, FreeVPN.One, which recently appears to have begun snaffling screenshots of users' page activity and transmitting them to a remote server without their knowledge - and Google has yet to take it down....

One fetcher bot seen smacking a website with 39,000 requests per minute Cloud services giant Fastly has released a report claiming AI crawlers are putting a heavy load on the open web, slurping up sites at a rate that accounts for 80 percent of all AI bot traffic, with the remaining 20 percent used by AI fetchers. Bots and fetchers can hit websites hard, demanding data from a single site in thousands of requests per minute....

Compositional risk from multiple MCP Servers highlighted by report Microsoft has declared general availability for MCP (model context protocol) servers in Visual Studio, likely to be the second most popular IDE after Visual Studio Code and with wide enterprise use....

Fork runs Android apps and keeps old PCs ticking over ... all without signing into an account with the mothership FydeOS is an alternative to ChromeOS Flex, but with a few significant differences - including Google-account-free operation....

US policymakers should take heed, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation opinion Implementation of the UK's Online Safety Act is giving internet users around the globe - including those in US states moving to enact their own age verification laws - real-time proof that such laws impinge on everyone's rights to speak, read, and view freely....

They're cheap and grew up with AI ... so you're firing them why? Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is "the dumbest thing I've ever heard."...

Web giant reworks AI infra to improve utilization, with mix of chips from home and away Chinese web giant Baidu's robot taxi operations in China are breaking even when measured as a standalone business - and is confident they will be profitable once the company rolls into global markets....

Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark China cut itself off from much of the global internet for just over an hour on Wednesday....

Redmond doesn't bother informing customers about some security fixes UPDATED Microsoft has chosen not to tell customers about a recently patched vulnerability in M365 Copilot....

Digitally enabled omniscience is neat, if you can bear the cost of being constantly monitored by an AI agent The headline-making Harvard duo who turned a pair of Meta smart glasses into a privacy violation machine last year now have their own pair of smart specs to sell, which they tell The Register will make people "super intelligent" by listening in on their conversations 24/7 and offering unsolicited feedback....

At 3% US market share, we don't think Cook & Co are sweating Video In a celebrity-studded launch event on Wednesday, Google showed off its Pixel 10 hardware, including four smartphones, an updated smartwatch, and earbuds. Unsurprisingly, every gadget comes with a heavy dose of AI....

Move along, nothing to see here Amazon has quietly fixed a couple of security issues in its coding agent: Amazon Q Developer VS Code extension. Attackers could use these vulns to leak secrets, including API keys from a developer's machine, and run arbitrary code....

Have a complaint? Need a benefit? Agentforce now has a bot for that American citizens seeking help from the federal government may soon find themselves being assisted by an AI agent, if Salesforce's new public sector offering is a success....

Dragging DNS into the modern age. And if that means fewer people need to buy IPv4, so much the better A pair of networking researchers have proposed that the Internet Engineering Task Force define support for IPv6 as a best practice for operators of DNS resolvers - the servers that translate URLs into IP addresses - and one of them hopes adoption of the idea will accelerate the demise of IPv4....

Rival Brave flags prompt injection vulnerability, now patched updated To the surprise of no one in the security industry, processing untrusted, unvalidated input is a bad idea....

Performance-tuned and optimized spin seems to be winning fans CachyOS bills itself as a Blazingly Fast & Customizable Linux distribution and that seems to be winning it friends. In the last month, it's the number one distro on the popularity chart on the widely-used DistroWatch comparison site....

Snarfing up config files for 'thousands' of devices...just for giggles, we're sure The FBI and security researchers today warned that Russian government spies exploited a seven-year-old bug in end-of-life Cisco networking devices to snoop around in American critical infrastructure networks and collect information on industrial systems....

GSA AI chief says market can do better but the feds needed a kickstart The Trump administration just launched a detailed, AI-pushing platform for federal agencies last week, but a government leader is already promising to kill it....

Plessey sold to Haylo Labs, financed by $100M Goertek loan The UK's Plessey Semiconductors has been acquired by Haylo Labs, using funding supplied by a Chinese company, Goertek Inc. The move was cleared by the British government....

Researchers disclosing their findings said 'it's as bad as it sounds' Researchers at watchTowr just published working proof-of-concept exploits for two unauthenticated remote code execution bug chains in backup giant Commvault....

iiNet breach blamed on single stolen login, with emails, phone numbers, and addresses exposed Aussie telco giant TPG Telecom has opened an investigation after confirming a cyberattack at subsidiary iiNet....

No word yet on when any homegrown hardware production begins Texas fabless chip firm Cirrus Logic has announced a new partnership with GlobalFoundries on next-generation bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) and gallium nitride (GaN) parts....

Epic boss brands the changes 'malicious compliance' Google has announced changes to its Play Store rules in an effort to appease the European Commission and dodge Digital Markets Act (DMA) fines....

Government says move will cut red tape, but startups fear sector could be sidelined The UK Space Agency (UKSA) is set to join the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in an effort to "cut red tape" and, presumably, save some cash....

Hmmm, state ownership of private corps... what does that remind us of? The US government is considering taking a stake in Intel and other semiconductor companies that benefit from CHIPS Act funding, according to officials from the Trump administration. The move follows SoftBank's $2 billion investment in the faltering chip giant....

LLMs flop at selling Fair Trade - unless you're a true believer Interview Large language models stumble when trying to sway buyers with moral arguments, according to research from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and Sakarya Business School....

Good start, but you have to keep it up, say key players Feature It's not easy to grow a national chip industry. Semiconductor startups are a risky investment. They chew through early-stage capital, often with little to show for it, making them a long-term proposition. Those that pay off can deliver big, but success is far from guaranteed....

Redmond scrambles to undo damage after tools borked by August patch Microsoft has moved swiftly to remove the bullet it fired into its own foot with the August 2025 Security Update reset and recovery bug....

Rotten is as Rotten does Opinion It's 1976, and in the country of the Beatles, another guitar band is giving it some. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols isn't so keen on love and blackbirds. Instead, he sings lustily that he wants to be an anarchist, destroying passers-by and in general promoting anarchy in the UK....

Chipzilla quietly fixed the problems without responding to the person who found them Security boffin Eaton Zveare has highlighted some serious holes in the online infrastructure of chip giant Intel - walking through services with coding flaws to gain access to supposedly internal documentation, from non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to the personal details of more than 270,000 Intel staffers....

Burger slinger gets a McRibbing, reacts by firing staffer who helped A white-hat hacker has discovered a series of critical flaws in McDonald's staff and partner portals that allowed anyone to order free food online, get admin rights to the burger slinger's marketing materials, and could allow an attacker to get a corporate email account with which to conduct a little filet-o-phishing....

Researchers use LLM in 'AI Space Cortex' to automate robotic extraterrestrial exploration Businesses may be struggling to find meaningful ways to use artificial intelligence software, but space scientists at least have a few ideas about how to deploy AI models....

Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks - without job losses The Australian arm of consultancy firm KPMG wrote a 100-page prompt to create an agentic system that prepares tax advice far faster than humans....

Memory bandwidth boost appears to be the secret sauce in chips used for new memory optimized instance types Amazon Web Services has revealed it's started running some custom cuts of Intel's Xeon 6 processors....

Rami Sinno led Trainium and Inferentia development at Amazon British chip designer Arm Holdings has reportedly recruited one of Amazon Web Services' top chip engineers....

Reconfigure local app settings via a 'simple' POST request A now-patched flaw in popular AI model runner Ollama allows drive-by attacks in which a miscreant uses a malicious website to remotely target people's personal computers, spy on their local chats, and even control the models the victim's app talks to, in extreme cases by serving poisoned models....

Intruders hoped no one would notice their presence Criminals exploiting a critical vulnerability in open source Apache ActiveMQ middleware are fixing the flaw that allowed them access, after establishing persistence on Linux servers....

When is a duck not also a rabbit? When it's a canard Vision language models exhibit a form of self-delusion that echoes human psychology - they see patterns that aren't there....

Don't be afraid of the dark HANDS ON Even when you have dark mode enabled in Windows 11, some important dialog boxes stay white. But that could be changing, if a new, hidden beta feature becomes widely available....

It's that or a replacement for its aging H200 NVL PCIe cards Nvidia is reportedly prepping a new Blackwell-based GPU for the Chinese market that'll outperform its controversial H20 accelerators....

$1 trillion of new deployment needed by 2030 Colocation capacity in North American datacenters has dropped to a record low, with much of the construction pipeline already pre-leased, making this a key brake on growth. Keeping up with demand could take as much as $1 trillion in fresh datacenter builds before the decade is out....