The Register

Under the sea, under the sea... bit barnacle's better, down where it's wetter, take it from me China is persevering with underwater datacenters - a deployment off the coast near Shanghai is expected to save on the energy costs of cooling compute infrastructure thanks to ocean currents....

Outsourcing your helpdesk always seems like a good idea - until someone else's breach becomes your problem Discord has confirmed customers' data was stolen - but says the culprit wasn't its own servers, just a compromised support vendor....

No confirmed date but workers expected to return in the coming days Jaguar Land Rover is readying staff to resume manufacturing in the coming days, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Reg....

Big Red rushes out patch for 9.8-rated flaw after crooks exploit it for data theft and extortion Oracle rushed out an emergency fix over the weekend for a zero-day vulnerability in its E-Business Suite (EBS) that criminal crew Clop has already abused for data theft and extortion....

Plus, PAN under attack, IT whistleblowers get a payout, and China kills online scammers Infosec in brief On August 29, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency fired its CISO, CIO, and 22 other staff for incompetence but insisted it wasn't in response to an online attack. New material suggests FEMA's claim may be false....

Microsoft's Copilot is helping workers perfect the ancient art of doing sweet f all Opinion It has been less than three years since ChatGPT lit the fuse of the current explosion of AI everywhere. AI years move even faster than internet years, so there's been time not only for the forcible injection of AI into the workplace courtesy of Microsoft, but the first scientific studies of the effect. Productivity may not have gone up, but anxiety, confusion and annoyance most certainly have....

Consumer group Which? says owners of Apple and Samsung devices overcharged by 480M Qualcomm is facing a UK trial over allegations that it abused its dominant position in the smartphone chipset market to charge inflated license fees, ultimately driving up device prices for Brit consumers....

Big Blue turned the air blue Who, Me? Oh, bother, it's Monday. But rather than curse about another working week rolling around, The Register welcomes it with another instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace whoopsies and reveal how you survived them....

Top AI models keep saying you're right, and that's the problem State-of-the-art AI models tend to flatter users, and that praise makes people more convinced that they're right and less willing to resolve conflicts, recent research suggests....

'Seems like you should at least run that through ChatGPT to reword it' A new hacking contest has caused a social media kerfuffle over allegations of rule copying and plagiarism....

Carmaker confirms screen hijack, says probe underway Conference-room screens at Ford's Dearborn HQ were briefly hijacked on Thursday to display a protest image in an apparent swipe at the carmaker's return-to-office policy....

AI and new wave of offshoring mean graduates can't get gigs Feature Shubh Kumar graduated from IIT Patna, one of India's famed Institutes of Technology - universities that attract millions of applicants but admit only 18,000 undergraduates....

Draft solicitation calls for nearly 30 contractors to mine social media and other open-source data US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking contractors to trawl social media and other open-source data for potential immigration enforcement leads, assuming public posts can yield actionable intelligence....

Aspiring Bond villain believes the best place to train our AI overlords is in orbit Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos says that, within two decades, gigawatt-scale datacenters powered by a continuous stream of photons from the sun will fill Earth's orbit....

One week after the blitz, beer biz is still stymied Ransomware has left Japan's biggest brewer struggling to ship beer, with Asahi warning domestic customers to brace for patchy supplies while its core systems stay offline....

CRM giant insists its platform wasn't breached Despite multiple arrests and talk of retirement, a crew now calling itself Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has reemerged with a data-leak site listing about 40 companies' Salesforce environments, and is demanding $989.45 million to prevent what it claims is about 1 billion stolen records from being published online....

Devs live in terminals - now Jules does too In the beginning was the command line, and despite all the machine-learning froth, developers still live there. That is why Google has shoved its Jules coding agent into a terminal with a new tool it calls Jules Tools....

Better hope that bubble doesn't pop The Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm (aka A16z) crunched startup spending data and found young firms stuffing AI into everything, while bigger businesses remain far more restrained....

Open source giant admits intruders broke into dedicated consulting instance, but insists core products untouched What started as cyber crew bragging has now been confirmed by Red Hat: someone gained access to its consulting GitLab system and walked away with data....

Analysts at Goldman Sachs Global Institute say training is starting to hit its limits, enterprise info troves may be last hope Those spiffy AI systems that tech companies keep promising require mountains of training data, but high-quality sources may have already run out-unless enterprises can unlock the information trapped behind their firewalls, according to Goldman Sachs...

Cupertino yanks ICEBlock citing safety risks for law enforcement Apple has deep-sixed an app that tracks the movements of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents - apparently bowing to government pressure....

Overnight shutdown leaves thousands stuck as Oktoberfest crowds stretch city security Munich Airport was temporarily closed last night following reports of drones buzzing around the area....

Exploding valuations and mountains of debt co-exist with a US government shutdown. How long can we stay on the hype-cycle rollercoaster? Analysis In an employee share sell-off this week, OpenAI achieved a nominal value of $500 billion. In terms of valuation, the posterchild of GenAI - which is yet to make a profit - left in its dust companies like Toyota, the world's largest automaker....

Even spy-tech biz Palantir says 'steady on' as 2.76M Brits demand it be ditched The British government has finally given more details about the proposed digital ID project, directly responding to the 2.76 million naysayers that signed an online petition calling for it to be ditched....

Researchers suggest internet-facing portals are exposing 'thousands' of orgs Oracle has finally broken its silence on those Clop-linked extortion emails, but only to tell customers what they already should have known: patch your damn systems....

Modder crams working hardware into plastic shell and fires up Tetris An enterprising nerd has taken LEGO's new Game Boy creation, performed some suitably geeky magic, and turned it into a real Game Boy....

UK Power Networks trials Thermify's HeatHub boilers, swapping gas flames for clustered compute Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs....

Names, numbers, and reg plates exposed in latest auto industry cyber-shunt Renault UK customers are being warned their personal data may be in criminal hands after one of its supplier was hacked....

UK Treasury called time on troubled integration scheme after 240M sunk Analysis In 2020, the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS), which provides data vital to form public sector policy and allocate resources, launched a plan to integrate government data and provide "high quality analysis that reflects the diversity of economic and social experience in our country."...

Cool kids drank the aggressive micro-management Kool-Aid On Call By Friday morning, techies may need a jolt of energy to get through the final day of the working week, so we deliver it in the form of a new instalment of On-Call, the weekly reader-contributed column that shares your tales of trying to deliver speedy tech support....

No injuries, but the FAA and NTSB are investigating Amazon has grounded its drone fleet in Arizona after two of the airborne delivery vehicles crashed on Wednesday....

Agentforce Vibes is a new AI-assisted IDE for building Salesforce apps and agents Salesforce is bringing "vibe coding" to enterprise customers through a service called Agentforce Vibes - and it may not be as troubling as it sounds....

Beards, body fat, and cyber refreshers now frowned upon Cybersecurity training, beards, and body fat have something in common, according to the Pentagon. They're not helping the US military fight and win wars....

Honor among thieves - extortion is fine, but no juveniles, please A ransomware crew that posted pictures and addresses of preschool children in an effort to get a payday has now deleted the data, apparently under pressure from other criminals....

Pivot will hinge on success of next-gen Maia accelerator Microsoft buys a lot of GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD. But moving forward, Redmond's leaders want to shift the majority of its AI workloads from GPUs to its own homegrown accelerators....

Police say they found the evidence on his phone A Missouri college student has learned the hard way that admitting a vandalism spree to ChatGPT and asking whether he was likely to get caught may not be the best use of AI....

Artificial intelligence works when humans use it wisely Over the past two years, the open source curl project has been flooded with bogus bug reports generated by AI models....

One officer was recorded pressing the 'I' key more than 16,000 times Police in the United Kingdom appear to be taking a cue from Homer Simpson's playbook, with officers in multiple departments accused of "key jamming" to make it look like they were working from home when they likely weren't....

And don't even get him started on AI interview The bodies responsible for securing America from cyberattacks are currently too fragmented to be successful, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, the first person ever to hold that job....

Software maker Kodex said its domain registrar fell for a fraudulent legal order A software platform used by law enforcement agencies and major tech companies to manage subpoenas and data requests went dark this week after attackers socially engineered AWS into freezing its domain....

Smithsonian warns that dismantling orbiter for relocation is history in the wrecking How would you move Space Shuttle Discovery from Virginia to Texas? The White House Office of Management and Budget asked NASA and the Smithsonian Institution and the response was to dismantle it....

Replies are slow and it's prone to gibberish - just like any other AI Never mind Doom running on a potato, or whatever - the next generation of ridiculous computing belongs to Minecraft YouTuber Sammyuri, who built a working chatbot in the perennially popular voxel building sandbox....

Duo pledge memory for Stargate to the tune of 900k DRAM wafer starts a month OpenAI has persuaded two of South Korea's chip titans to fuel its bid to build the biggest AI engine yet....

Apple's bad QA or poor coding by developers? The Electron team has fixed code that caused system-wide slowdowns on the newly released macOS 26 "Tahoe."...

Consulting biz reckons ballooning costs a result of changes in licensing, vendor landscape, and product shifts Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is warning that organizations need to rethink their approach to buying software as the ongoing push of SaaS into the market gathers pace....

Zero repairability rating: iFixit teardown finds earbuds glued, unfixable, and destined for recycling Improvements in repairability might have been made elsewhere in Apple's product range, but the AirPods Pro 3 model continue to make repairs virtually impossible....

Extortion emails name-drop Big Red's E-Business Suite, though Google and Mandiant yet to find proof of any breach Criminals with potential links to the notorious Clop ransomware mob are bombarding Oracle execs with extortion emails, claiming to have stolen sensitive data from Big Red's E-Business Suite, according to researchers....

Rage, rage against the dying of the free security updates With just days remaining until Microsoft discontinues free support, Windows 10 still accounts for 40.5 percent of the Windows desktop market, At the same time, Windows 11 adoption remains at just 48.94 percent....

Experts say Commission is fanning the flames' of the continent's own Watergate An arsenal of angry European Parliament members (MEPs) is demanding answers from senior commissioners about why EU subsidies are ending up in the pockets of spyware companies....

Because 100% would just be silly BT wants to have 5G Standalone (5G SA) mobile service available to 99 percent of the local population by the end of the decade, but it isn't the only telco with lofty ambitions....