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Polling was supposed to start on Monday. Organizers warn situation is fluid A court in Mauritius has postponed the long-awaited election at the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC)....

DoD says deal covers 'warfighting'. OpenAI merely mentions healthcare and 'supporting proactive cyber defense' The US Department of Defense has contracted OpenAI to run a pilot program that will create "frontier AI," but it's not clear what they're building together....

A moment of panic as some customers thought the free tiers were going away On Monday, Railway, a provider of cloud infrastructure services, decided to throttle software builds by customers in its lowest paying tiers to accommodate unexpected demand for service following the Google Cloud Platform outage last week....

Google threat analysts warn the team behind the Marks & Spencer break-in has moved on Cyber-crime crew Scattered Spider has infected US insurance companies following a series of ransomware attacks against American and British retailers, according to Google, which urged this sector to be on "high alert."...

No need to plagiarize if you can have AI do it for you A series of Freedom of Information requests shows that students in British universities are increasingly getting busted for using AI to cheat....

MAGA MVNO and the gold-plated telephone of destiny The Trump family is getting into the wireless business - and what better way to do it than with a gold-colored Android smartphone that could someday be designed and manufactured in the USA?...

Clock speed of 25 kHz means 2D CMOS system won't run Doom quite yet Gaze into the temporal distance and you might spot the end of the age of silicon looming somewhere out there, as a research team at Penn State University claims to have built the first working CMOS computer entirely from two-dimensional materials....

The group has previously threatened to SWAT cancer patients and leaked pre-op plastic surgery photos An extortion gang claims to have breached Freedman HealthCare, a data and analytics firm whose customers include state agencies, health providers, and insurance companies, and is threatening to dump tens of thousands of sensitive files early Tuesday morning....

For researchers yearning to earn some yen and escape Trump 2.0 Japan is the latest nation hoping to tempt disgruntled US researchers alarmed by the Trump administration's hostile attitude to academia to relocate to the Land of the Rising Sun....

Flights still flying - just don't count on the app or website working smoothly Canadian airline WestJet is warning of "intermittent interruptions or errors" on its app and website as it investigates a cybersecurity incident....

Next version to drop Windows 7 through 8.1, and 32-bit Windows support is on the way out, too The LibreOffice project is preparing to cut some Windows support - and encourages users to switch to Linux....

Evaluation of latest repairs to Russian segment ongoing NASA has pushed back the launch of Axiom Mission 4 to the International Space Station (ISS), citing concerns over persistent leaks aboard the aging orbital outpost. A new No Earlier Than (NET) date is set for June 19....

Marketplace as big as Silk Road had more than 600k users and turnover of 'at least' 250M Operation Deep Sentinel is the latest international law enforcement collaboration against cybercrime, shutting down Archetyp - one of the largest dark web drug marketplaces....

6-in-10 success rate for single-step tasks A new benchmark developed by academics shows that LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality....

But lose your code and it's gone for good Updated Windows 11 users in the European Economic Area will shortly receive a new Recall Export feature, allowing Recall snapshots to be shared with third-party apps and websites....

As others roll back use of tech due to quality, customers preferring to talk to humans Not content with a corporate blueprint to cut up to 55,000 employees by 2030, UK telecoms giant BT now says even more staff could be replaced with AI, despite the experience of some orgs that have already tried this....

Student 'believed he could finish' software dev 'project alone and therefore that the rules did not apply to him' A former GCHQ intern was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for stealing top-secret files during a year-long placement at the British intelligence agency....

Scandal-hit IT giant said it wouldn't take on new UK.gov contracts or continue bidding on existing ones unless asked Exclusive The Northern Ireland government did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for a 125 million ($167 million) contract, yet the Japanese tech giant to continued to do so, despite promising to quit competing for UK government work during the fallout from the Horizon scandal....

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Not a problem with AI hype Opinion Among the forever wars in geekdom, defining the difference between science fiction and fantasy is a hot potato destined to outlive the heat death of the universe....

Custom text fields can be a powerful form of protest Who, Me? The only certainties in life are death, taxes ... and tech causing trouble, a topic that The Register covers each week in this reader-contributed column we call Who, Me?" that celebrates the moments you made trouble at work and somehow escaped....

Promises operational change - and improvements to customer comms when it crashes Google Cloud has explained the massive outage it created last week and, as has happened many times previously, admitted that it broke itself....

German giant wants case heard in Germany, not the USA German giant Siemens AG has tried to convince a US court to throw out the case in which VMware alleged it used unlicensed software....

PLUS: APNIC completes re-org; India cuts costs for chipmakers; Infosys tax probe ends; and more Asia In Brief Australia's Federal Police (AFP) last week announced charges against four suspects for alleged participation in a money-laundering scheme that involved a security company's armored cash transport unit....

PLUS: Discord invite links may not be safe; Miscreants find new way to hide malicious JavaScript; and more! Infosec In Brief A pair of Congressional Democrats have demanded a review of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program amid uncertainties about continued US government funding for the scheme....

Academics mull the need for the digital equivalent of low-background steel Feature For artificial intelligence researchers, the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, changed the world in a way similar to the detonation of the first atomic bomb....

Microsoft veteran on breaking down numbers at the computer store Windows 95 will soon turn 30. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen recalled that when testing Microsoft's reimagining of Windows, an overflow was discovered that had nothing to do with the operating system itself....

Combining quantum entanglement with hash chains promises randomness which can be relied on Scientists in the US have built a system for creating truly random numbers which cannot be tampered with by a third party....

We take a quick look at the headline features - and the growing differences Rocky Linux 10 has caught up to the other high-profile RHELatives, but gaps between them are widening, both in tech and other ways....

Execs from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI join Detachment 201 Several of Silicon Valley's top techies are joining the Army Reserve as part of a newly created unit that will be trying to accelerate the use of AI in military planning and operations....

With Tehran's military weakened, digital retaliation likely, experts tell The Reg The current Israel-Iran military conflict is taking place in the era of hybrid war, where cyberattacks amplify and assist missiles and troops, and is being waged between two countries with very capable destructive cyber weapons....

But the five-satellite upstart has a short time window A messy legal fight between Ligado and Inmarsat over direct-to-cellular (D2C) spectrum has been settled, giving upstart AST a chance to gain ground on Starlink....

Some trace back to an outfit under US export controls for alleged PLA links Both Apple's and Google's online stores offer free virtual private network (VPN) apps owned by Chinese companies, according to researchers at the Tech Transparency Project, and they don't make this fact readily known to people downloading the apps....

Oracle's 80-year-old co-founder pulls off a $25 billion cloud day to leapfrog Zuck and Bezos into the No. 2 spot Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has reclaimed the No. 2 spot on Forbes's real-time billionaire list, trailing only Elon Musk after leapfrogging Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos....

Please insert another million dollars to continue Broader AI adoption by enterprise customers is being hindered by the complexity of trying to forecast inferencing costs amid a fear being saddled with excessive bills for cloud services....

Mark Zuckerberg reached out to our source directly Exclusive Meta has made lavish and lucrative offers to a select set of AI researchers in an effort to develop superintelligent AI....

Work on next gen already underway, while bandwidth needs for datacenters just keep rising The PCI Special Interest Group (PIC-SIG) just released official specs for PCIe 7.0, doubling the bandwidth again for high-performance kit such as network cards, while hinting that PCIe 8.0 may not achieve the same....

Zero-day potentially tied to around 100 suspected infections in 2025 and a spyware scandal on the continent Apple has updated its iOS/iPadOS 18.3.1 documentation, confirming it introduced fixes for the zero-click vulnerability used to infect journalists with Paragon's Graphite spyware....

Sales of HDDs to non-hyperscale outfits increasingly rare, say analysts Feature In early May, independent digital storage analyst Thomas Coughlin shared news of falling sales and revenue in the first quarter of 2025, continuing a trend that started in around 2010. Coughlin cites data from that year showing around 600 million annual hard disk shipments....

Infosec employers demanding too much from early-career recruits, says ISC2 Cybersecurity hiring managers need a reality check when it comes to hiring junior staff, with job adverts littered with unfair expectations that are hampering recruitment efforts, says industry training and cert issuer ISC2....

Superstitions stoked by blackout of iPortal centralized platform when no maintenance was scheduled Barclays Bank is wrestling with some digital gremlins affecting its corporate banking services this Friday the 13th of June - the final day of the working week for many of us, but perhaps not the poor techies beavering away to restore normal play....

Jutes revolt against Redmond: Minister for Digital Affairs aims the longboats away from Vinland Comment The boss of Denmark's Ministry for Digitalization says her department will move away from Microsoft - starting with LibreOffice....

Deal includes 'waiver of historic fees' UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023."...

More like FlAIme Of The Week Flame Of The Week It's been a while since our last Flame Of The Week, but it appears that AI is generating some strong feelings among our beloved readership....

It was one of the offenders' final warning Four staffers at the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) were let off with warnings over separate cases involving the transmission of regulator data to their personal email accounts....

Abusive manager had to be told there's no such thing as an atomic laptop On Call By Friday morning, Reg readers' batteries can sometimes be a little low, which is why we always use the day to offer a jolt of amusement in the form of On Call - the reader contributed column in which we celebrate the lows and lows of tech support....

STEP sucked up 220 million in 2022, and it's still not apparent what that accomplished The UK government has just allocated another 2.5 billion to an ambitious fusion energy project without any indication it's progressed much beyond the planning stages....

Alleges dirty PR campaign to slur its tech China's Yangtze Memory Technologies has accused rival chipmaker Micron of defamation through a campaign to publish nasty stories and reports about it....

Mattel-OpenAI deal paves the way for an AI beach-off Toy giant Mattel has signed a deal with OpenAI to bring the tech industry's buzziest technology to the very youngest generation....

Good news: The vendor patched the flaw in January. Bad news: Not everyone got the memo Ransomware criminals infected a utility billing software providers' customers, and in some cases disrupted services, after exploiting unpatched versions of SimpleHelp's remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool, according to a Thursday CISA alert....

Only while parked Apple is enabling video playback on its CarPlay automotive operating system and has integrated it into iOS 26, as long as you're parked....