The Register

It's not rocket science, it's budgeting NASA's people analytics group has swapped its Neo4j graph database for Memgraph due to costs....

Lead dev likens flood to 'effectively being DDoSed' Curl project founder Daniel Stenberg is fed up with of the deluge of AI-generated "slop" bug reports and recently introduced a checkbox to screen low-effort submissions that are draining maintainers' time....

Windows 11's hardware requirements: Sales ploy or security play? Comment Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has weighed in on the increasingly heated discussion regarding the impending end of Windows 10. Are Windows 11's hardware requirements all about security or just a sales ploy in disguise?...

Get in the bin: For the first time since 2012, some older CPU generations are being chopped Kernel 6.15 is taking shape and it looks like it will eliminate support for Intel's 486 chip and its contemporaries....

Leave it to the Borg? Scribe David D. Levine slams 'use of planet-destroying plagiarism machines' Fans and writers of science fiction are not necessarily enthusiastic about artificial intelligence - especially when it's used to vet panelists for a major sci-fi conference....

Seeing as the company's CEO is big at DOGE, this is delicious World War Fee Citrix has found a new use for virtualization: Avoiding tariffs....

Prime Minister bemoans bullying, addiction, and inappropriate content - but isn't planning a rapid vote New Zealand's government has signaled its support for a bill to ban social media for children under 16, but without explicitly making it a government initiative....

But a multi-billion dollar contract with Oracle for a pile of Instincts and Epycs should take the edge off AMD expects the Trump administration's newly implemented export controls on GPUs and AI accelerator sales to China to take a $1.5 billion byte out its 2025 revenues, executives revealed on a Tuesday earnings call with Wall Street....

We'd be shocked, just shocked, if Big Tech's renewable energy ambitions aren't known in the White House The Attorneys General of 17 states and Washington, DC have sued the Trump administration over an executive order halting all federal approvals for wind energy projects....

Don't f&#k with Zuck A California jury has awarded Meta more than $167 million in damages from Israeli surveillanceware slinger NSO Group, after the latter exploited a flaw in WhatsApp to allow its government customers to spy on supposedly secure communications....

Just days after judge held Cupertino in contempt over Epic antitrust injunction A developer of mobile sports apps has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Apple, seeking to recover commissions iBiz allegedly collected in violation of a federal injunction intended to allow developers to use alternative payment systems....

Zog brain hurt. Zog want Google help make read easier Exasperated by the prolix verbiage and gratuitously convoluted phraseology that so often permeates technical treatises, philosophical discourses, or the meandering expositions of journalists afflicted by a lack of rhetorical economy? Then Google has a new AI feature for you - provided you use iOS, that is....

What was the plan, showing her his big iron? A now-former manager at Computacenter claims he was unfairly fired after alerting management that a colleague was repeatedly giving his girlfriend unauthorized access to Deutsche Bank's server rooms....

Just 1 in 4 bets paying off so far Only a quarter of AI initiatives have delivered the expected return on investment, according to an IBM survey of 2,000 CEOs....

Schemes like this are just a license to pollute for tech giants, or so critics say Microsoft has expanded its deal with Stockholm Exergi to buy 500,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal annually over ten years. Critics argue such deals give polluters cover rather than drive real climate action....

(If only that would keep folks off unsanctioned chat app side quests) The US Department of Defense (DoD) is overhauling its "outdated" software procurement systems, and insists it's putting security at the forefront of decision-making processes....

Easyjson library's presence in numerous open source projects alarms security biz Easyjson, a software library for serializing data in Golang applications, is maintained by developers affiliated with Russia's VK Group....

Brussels rolls out 500M plan to lure boffins with grants and actual respect for research The European Commission (EC) is looking to make Europe the home of science by tempting researchers and scientists to relocate to the continent amid a more hostile stance toward academic freedom in the US....

Data giant backs federal austerity push, saying it's 'the right thing' for US Palantir, the controversial US surveillance and analytics firm, says it welcomes scrutiny of government spending by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the controversial cost-cutting agency led by Elon Musk....

Feldman calls US's AI Diffusion rules bad policy' Cerebras Systems' dinner-plate-sized chips currently power the latest AI inference offerings from Meta and, soon, those of IBM, but US trade policy weighs heavy on its prospects worldwide....

Azure Virtual Desktop App attach users might want to sit this one out for a bit longer Microsoft is celebrating the milestone of Windows 11 24H2 reaching broad availability with... yet another "known issue." This time, it is related to Azure Virtual Desktop applications....

From ubiquitous go-to system for early Noughties startups to a legacy like no other Before Donald Trump became US president and the UK left the EU - both arguably the result of a new kind of online politics - a rather nervous-looking Mark Zuckerberg shuffled out onto a Harvard University lecture hall floor to offer some insight into the inner workings of a website he had created less than two years earlier....

Too much hot air brings down Manchester Uni based neural network project Exclusive The brain-inspired SpiNNaker machine at Manchester University suffered an overheating incident over the Easter weekend that will send a chill down the spines of datacenter administrators....

'Trust us, we're from Trumpland' may not help Microsoft as much as it hopes Opinion It is a nation's first duty to protect its citizens from harm. A fine maxim, and one we can all agree on, even in these disagreeable times. Sadly, that's as far as it goes. What the harm is and how to protect against it is where light turns to heat....

One distro has to be the most extra - and here it is A Commodore-themed talking Linux desktop, complete with hundreds of games, makes for the biggest distro we've seen yet....

Can we turn to govt, academic models instead? RSAC Corporate AI models are already skewed to serve their makers' interests, and unless governments and academia step up to build transparent alternatives, the tech risks becoming just another tool for commercial manipulation....

A few million here, a few million there, pretty soon you're talking real money Microsoft partners can now tailor private offers that allow buyers to vary the amount and timing of payments for some SaaS products and services....

And declares hypervisor independence after being tied to vSphere Omnissa, the company that acquired VMware's end-user compute portfolio, is moving beyond its traditional territory of managing endpoint devices and into server management....

State-backed chip slinger inches closer to cloud-scale relevance Chinese chip designer Loongson claims more than 100 products now run on its homegrown LoongArch architecture, including an OpenStack-based cloud stack from domestic hyperscale heavyweight Inspur....

Because who needs cybersecurity when there's culture wars to win President Trump's dream 2026 budget would gut the US govt's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, by $491 million - about 17 percent - and accuses the organization of abandoning its core mission in favor of policing online speech....

Tech gigs slide, or so this analysis of US jobs data claims The US jobs market grew faster than expected in April, but most IT pros aren't among the beneficiaries....

No, really? That's a shocking surprise An unidentified miscreant is said to have obtained US government communications from TeleMessage, a messaging and archiving app based on the open-source Signal app and used by ousted national security advisor Michael Waltz....

Funny what a public scolding from AI luminaries and a word from state AGs can do OpenAI's contentious plan to overhaul its corporate structure in favor of a conventional for-profit model has been reworked, with the AI giant bowing to pressure to keep its nonprofit in control, even as it presses ahead with parts of the restructuring....

Fake it till you make it doesn't cut it for mission-critical workloads Who, Me? One of the joys of Monday mornings is arriving at work to find messes made over the weekend. The other is reading a new edition of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of somehow recovering from failure....

Hails DOGE operatives for computer skills during interview in which he also flubbed some tech investment figures US President Donald Trump has said TikTok will be very strongly protected" as the made-in-China social network has a warm spot in my heart"....

PLUS: China spring cleans its AIs; South Korea fines Meta, probes Broadcom; and more! Asia in brief India's ambition to become a global semiconductor manufacturing player went backwards last week after two big players changed their plans....

PLUS: AirPlay exploits; Six-year old backdoor opens; Raytheon settles federal charges; and more! Infosec In Brief Microsoft has decided to push its consumer customers to dump password in favor of passkeys....

With North Korean IT workers storming the gates, too RSAC Another RSA Conference has come and gone, with almost 44,000 attendees this year spread across San Francisco's Moscone Center and the surrounding facilities, according to event organizers....

El Reg checks out shop in SF On Thursday, six stores across America opened their doors with a curious proposition: Come on in, let a metal orb scan your irises, and walk out with a new online profile that promises you're an individual human - and a few bucks in crypto for your troubles....

Not, it's not the plot of a sci-fi disaster movie A Soviet probe launched more than half a century ago is due to return to Earth in the next week or two, and there's every chance that the vehicle will make it all the way to our planet's surface....

A look back at two decades of ODF, from open source hopes to patchy real-world adoption It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats - and the beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop....

Proposed cuts would mean: No Lunar Gateway, Artemis hardware to retire, ISS toast in 2030 The White House has proposed slashing NASA's budget by 24 percent, dropping it from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. If approved, it would mark one of the agency's deepest single-year cuts in federal support, and crash its inflation-adjusted funding to levels not seen in decades....

Capex could jump by $7B to $72B, Zuckercorp says World War Fee Meta's AI ambitions are going to cost more than expected thanks to increased competition and - who could have seen this coming? - the Trump administration's obsession with tariffs, which is driving up the price tag of key components....

Shakeup in US higher education funding means FOSS incubator is short a quarter of a million bucks Higher education across the USA is facing federal funding cutbacks - and now the Oregon State University (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL) is in trouble....

Trademark, domain name, GitHub repos stay under control of open source foundation - no word on any forking off for now The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has reached an agreement with Synadia, the company behind open source messaging system NATS, which will see it control the trademark, domain name, and GitHub repositories....

Grab more headroom with the 4 and 8 GB variants Raspberry Pi has bucked tech industry trends and cut prices for the 4 GB and 8 GB variants of its Compute Module 4....

25-year-old fella pleads guilty to stealing, dumping 1.1TB of data from the House of Mouse When someone stole more than a terabyte of data from Disney last year, it was believed to be the work of Russian hacktivists protesting for artist rights. We now know it was actually a 25-year-old California resident....

Real-time video deepfakes? Not convincing yet RSAC Spam messages predate the web itself, and generative AI has given it a fluency upgrade, churning out slick, localized scams and letting crooks hit regions and dialects they used to ignore....

Can't run Windows 11? Microsoft suggests renting it instead Microsoft has announced a price cut for Windows 365 alongside a not-so-subtle suggestion that Windows 10 users might consider taking advantage of the offer to keep security updates flowing....

UK starts prosecution days after FBI vowed to clamp down on the crime Three young Brits are accused of stateside swatting offences and will appear in a UK court today to face their charges after a joint investigation by the FBI and Merseyside cops....