The Register

UK holds onto oversight by a whisker, but it's utterly barefaced on the other side of the pond Opinion The UK government's attempts to worm into Apple's core end-to-end encryption were set back last week when the country's Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds....

Brit retailer says troubled breakup with tech platform of former US owner nearing conclusion Two of the top team behind Asda's 1 billion ($1.31 billion) tech divorce from US retail giant Walmart - which has seen a number of setbacks - are departing the company....

If this techie had been older and slower, this never would have happened Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday often imparts a rude shock, which is why The Register opens the week with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your worst moments at work and explain how you survived them....

Home labs and bare bones test rigs matter so Broadcom's back in the game VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor....

PLUS: Chinese robodogs include backdoor; OpenAI helps spammer; A Dutch data disaster; And more! Infosec In Brief Fortinet last week admitted that attackers have found new ways to exploit three flaws it thought it had fixed last year....

PLUS: India's new electronics subsidies; Philippines unplugs a mobile carrier; Alibaba Cloud expands Asia In Brief Chinese officials admitted to directing cyberattacks on US infrastructure at a meeting with their American counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal....

Beijing tries to find an off-ramp but also fights back with export bans World War Fee The Trump administration's strategy to use tariffs on imports as an incentive for businesses to move their manufacturing plants to the USA took a new turn over the weekend after it announced exemptions for some goods, denied that the exemptions were new, then said it plans further tariffs on high-tech goods....

Military units, government nerds appear to join the fray, with physical infra in sights Feature From triggering a water tank overflow in Texas to shutting down Russian state news services on Vladimir Putin's birthday, self-styled hacktivists have been making headlines....

Multi-protocol chat client is approaching version 3 In the 2020s you might be forgiven for having forgotten that such a thing as a native chat client exists, but a handful still do and they're still useful. One of these is Pidgin, the artist formerly known as GAIM....

Carbon capture, SMRs, fusion power - tech titans' climate strategies are packed with moon shots Comment AI's appetite for power is exploding. Hyperscalers have only just begun to adopt Nvidia's 120 kW-per-rack systems, and the GPU giant is already charting a course toward 600 kW designs....

No worries, just use neural networks to optimize systems powering neural networks Analysis Global datacenter electricity use is set to more than double by 2030 - slightly surpassing Japan's total consumption - with AI named as the biggest driver....

Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting' The rise of LLM-powered code generation tools is reshaping how developers write software - and introducing new risks to the software supply chain in the process....

A thing of beauty for map fans and those with kids Have you ever wanted to explore a blocky low-resolution version of the UK? Well, you're in luck, because the Ordnance Survey has created a Minecraft representation of it, claimed to be as realistic as anything ever can be in the game....

Redmond hopes you've forgotten or got over why everyone hated it the first time After temporarily shelving its controversial Windows Recall feature amid a wave of backlash, Microsoft is back at it - now quietly slipping the screenshotting app into the Windows 11 Release Preview channel for Copilot+ PCs, signaling its near-readiness for general availability....

$5.1B cancellations pitched as efficiency move, though costly Trump birthday parade mulled The US Department of Defense (DOD) has canceled contracts for "consulting and other non-essential services" in the latest round of cuts conceived by Elon Musk's DOGE unit....

Middle Kingdom retaliates against White House's 'instrument and weapon to bully and coerce' World War Fee China is upping tariffs on US imports to 125 percent, branding the Trump administration's tax policies a "joke."...

Consumer campaign group says 'we need lifetime transparency for tech Those well-meaning agitators at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) are back, this time with an interactive "Electronic Waste Graveyard" cataloging a range of devices tossed aside after software support expires or cloud connections flatline....

Activist investor finds payments groups lobbying against climate action An activist investor has called on IBM to report on its lobbying practices, which he alleges include spending dark money" with organizations that campaign against climate change reporting and legislation....

Plus a fresh version ... nine years after its last After five years, the extremely experimental GoboLinux project is springing back to life with a new maintainer and a new release....

Exec pay outlined in Proxy Statement, and things did not go well for either workforce or calls for climate transparency reports Amazon exec chairman Jeff Bezos may not have a daily operational role at the cloud and e-commerce megacorp he founded, but he still got a bigger compensation package than the person currently pulling the strings from the chief executive's office....

Will future techies feel the same way about Copilot? The results are in, and it appears that -at least as far as The Register's most loquacious commenters are concerned - Windows Server 2000 was Microsoft's peak....

Models get bulkier, burnier, and bank-breakier AI continues to improve - at least according to benchmarks. But the promised benefits have largely yet to materialize while models are increasing in size and becoming more computationally demanding, and greenhouse gas emissions from AI training continue to rise....

Hang on, wasn't Capita already handling things like billing, etc? Ah, AgentSuite comes to the rescue Scandal struck UK utility company Southern Water is extending a long-running managed services contract with Capita, everyone's favorite outsourcing badass, for up to five years at an estimated cost of 92.4 million ($121 million)....

Issues at the very top continue to worsen The UK government's latest annual data breach survey shows the number of ransomware attacks on the isles is on the increase -and many techies are forced to constantly informally request company directors for defense spending because there's no security people on the board....

Sysadmin sent on road trip that required a lot of time doing nothing On Call Some working weeks are full of achievements, and others miserably unproductive. Here at The Register, we always make sure that if nothing else we produce a fresh instalment of On Call, the column that recounts readers' tales of delivering top-notch tech support....

A new alternative for those pondering what to do when vSphere 7.x goes end of life in October VMware has revealed another big upgrade is on the way, this time for its vSphere Foundation suite....

Along with Celine Dion and Elton John - plus some good music too The Brian-Eno-composed sound played by Windows 95 when booted has been added to the US Library of Congress's list of nationally significant recordings....

Under-audit political squad also said to be drafting invoices for Uncle Sam In February, Elon's Musketeers at President Trump's cost-trimming DOGE operation turned up at the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates the kinds of self-driving cars the billionaire wants to build....

Former policy boss claims Facebook cared little about national security as it chased the mighty Yuan Facebook's former director of global public policy told a Senate committee that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was willing to do almost anything to get the social network into China - including, she alleged, offering up Americans' data....

Big G reckons this agentic IDE speeds up or simplifies coding. Developers who've used it aren't so sure Cloud Next Google on Wednesday announced Firebase Studio, a product pitched as "a cloud-based agentic development environment" - in other words, a browser-based coding workspace that includes AI to help developers to prototype and build apps without writing every line of code themselves....

LLM query caching also lands soon The return of Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo has borne fruit in the form of a new data type - vector sets - for the widely used cache-turned-multi-model database....

Billionaire 'tried every tool to harm us', says super lab, and it wants judge to end 'harassment' OpenAI has countersued co-founder Elon Musk, accusing him of unlawful and unfair tactics to derail its restructuring plans and demanding a judge hold him liable for damage allegedly inflicted on the AI super-lab....

Props for the transparency though US sensor maker Sensata has told regulators that a ransomware attack caused an operational disruption, and that it's still working to fully restore affected systems....

Operators mulling whether to price tech into subs, says report, which notes Musk's Starlink satellite dominance This year will be Ground Zero for the commercialization of satellite smartphone services, but a key question is whether operators will charge extra for this capability or include it as part of customer subscriptions....

Apparently it's time to assume you will work with AI and must 'move from doing the thing to being the architect of the thing' Atlassian has decided to make its Rovo AI suite free but will in future introduce fees for use beyond a yet-to-be-determined threshold....

Hyperion ships another patch, which is nice Belgian software house Hyperion Entertainment has released Update 3 for AmigaOS 3.2, the version of the classic operating system it launched in 2021. The update targets Amigas with 680x0 processors, including systems enhanced with PiStorm accelerator boards....

The foundation model supports real-time bi-directional speech Amazon has introduced a foundation model that claims to grasp not just what you're saying, but how you're saying it - tone, hesitation, and more....

License to freak out? El Reg reader recommends reverting to pen, paper, pub Final update Readers have flooded our mailboxes with reports that Microsoft 365 Family licensing has fallen over this morning, so those of you who provide tech support to relatives or those using the office suite for a small business, consider yourself warned....

'There are challenges' but staff recruitment and retention isn't one of them Interview Civo shifted its workforce to a four-day working week and while it hasn't changed productivity much at the cloud biz, it has helped attract "new talent" and retain existing staff, CEO Mark Boost says....

Scammers are already cashing in with fake invoices for import costs World War Fee As the trade war between America and China escalates, some infosec and policy experts fear Beijing will strike back in cyberspace....

Practical matters like being 1 of most expensive energy regions in Europe focuses minds at AI Energy Council meeting The UK government's AI Energy Council held its first meeting this week, in an attempt to square the circle of its AI ambitions with the state of the country's power infrastructure and having the most expensive energy in Europe....

Government plans to boost efficiency with IT need to get people onside UK health professionals remain "skeptical" about electronic patient records, despite the NHS in England achieving more than 90 percent coverage....

Officials teased more details to come later this year Following the 2024 takedown of several major malware operations under Operation Endgame, law enforcement has continued its crackdown into 2025, detaining five individuals linked to the Smokeloader botnet....

Llama 4 Scout is just the right size to ingest a lifetime of Facebook and Insta posts In the last twelve months generative AI has transformed from a helpful and cheeky tool into something more worrying....

TL;DR: Move along, still nothing to see here - an idea that leaves infosec pros aghast Oracle's letter to customers about an intrusion into part of its public cloud empire - while insisting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was untouched - has sparked a mix of ridicule and outrage in the infosec community....

Expected sales surge sparked by Windows 10 support ending could yet be trumped, analysts suggest World War Fee The first quarter of 2025 saw shipments of new PCs surge, as vendors and buyers tried to move machines before tariffs made them more expensive....

Customers aren't sure, economy isn't great, tech looks cute, though Cloud Next This week Google joined a throng of tech vendors pushing the concept of "agentic AI" on an unsuspecting and perhaps unreceptive collection of enterprise users. Questions remain about how effective this tranche of tools will be at solving business problems and how much it might all cost....

Sure, we're doing FP8 versus a supercomputer's FP64. What of it? Cloud Next Google's seventh-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPU), announced Wednesday, will soon be available to cloud customers to rent in pods of 256 or 9,216 chips....

Alleges cybersecurity agency was weaponized' to suppress debunked theories Updated The Trump administration on Wednesday ordered a criminal investigation into alleged censorship conducted by the USA's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, plus revocation of any security clearances held by the agency's ex-head Chris Krebs and anyone else at SentinelOne, the cybersecurity company where he now works....

Whistleblower Ashley Gjovik hails iWatershed iMoment for iStaff iRights Apple has agreed to settle charges of labor rights violations filed with America's employment watchdog by whistleblower Ashley Gjovik....