The Register

Space is hard, especially for racks of fragile computer equipment opinion William Gibson's Neuromancer holds up well after 40 years. One of the cyberpunk novel's concepts was an AI housed in an orbital datacenter (ODC) above the Earth. Today, startup companies and venture capital firms are hoping to turn orbital datacenters into reality to enable AI, believing that free power from the sun and cooling using the emptiness of space will unlock the technology from its terrestrial-based shackles of electric bills and cooling water....

If you've ever logged into a network on your laptop or phone, the password is still there hands-on You're at a place you've been before and your Windows laptop immediately remembers the SSID and password for the Wi-Fi network, logging you on automatically. But your phone, tablet, and your coworker's laptop have never been here before, so they can't connect. If only you remembered the password or had it written down somewhere....

Too much of anything is bad for you, including faux-magical statistical models There are numerous recent reports of people becoming too engaged with AI, sometimes to the detriment of their mental health....

Private sector invited to colocate at legacy nuclear facilities The US Department of Energy (DoE) has identified four sites where private sector firms will be invited to colocate datacenters and energy generation projects, in line with the Trump administration's goal to boost AI development in America....

The FreeBSD Laptop project continues - and plans to offer a very visible change FreeBSD 15 is coming, maybe at the end of this year - and along with other improvements, it may finally offer the option of installing with a graphical desktop....

Zuckercorp blames legal uncertainty under upcoming TTPA law Meta has followed in Google's footsteps in deciding that pending EU political advertising regulations are so onerous to comply with that they're not even going to bother....

Malicious code lurking in over 5,000 downloads, says Socket researcher Developer freelancing platform Toptal has been inadvertently spreading malicious code after attackers broke into its systems and began distributing malware through developer accounts....

We say everything... just not the oldest hardware. Unix Epochalypse less than 13 years away Venerable Linux distribution Debian is side-stepping the Y2K38 bug - also known as the Unix Epochalypse - by switching to 64-bit time for everything but the oldest of supported hardware, starting with the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" release....

Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled - however unlikely - to pass local customer info to US admin Microsoft says it "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France - and by implication the wider European Union - should the Trump administration demand access to customer information held on its servers....

No, it will not turn you into a 10X programmer. In fact, it won't even transform you into a noob developer Opinion Everyone loves the idea of magic. All you have to do is wave your hands, say a few words, and something new is born to the world. That works for Harry Potter, but it won't work for you. Vibe coding, the notion that you can build programs by telling an AI what you want the software to do, is pure fantasy....

CFO claims money being reinvested in sales and engineering staff ServiceNow claims it is on course to realize $100 million in savings on its global headcount this year due to the internal implementation of AI....

CEO Lip-Bu Tan says strategy shift will focus on customer needs, efficiency, and cutting costs Ailing chip giant Intel is ditching its manufacturing sites in Germany and Poland and signaling further job cuts ahead as its new leader tries to stem the losses and turn the Silicon Valley pioneer's fortunes around....

Policy management not affected, but some personal data may have been snaffled Updated Business insurance and employment status specialist Qdos has confirmed that an intruder has stolen some customers personal data, according to a communication to tech contractors that was seen by The Register....

Mock-ups feature m365.com, which could be yours for a few bucks Microsoft this week trumpeted the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot Search with lofty promises and slick mock-ups, but the domain plastered all over them didn't belong to the corporation....

Evidence of copious sugar hits hinted at unauthorized usage On Call By Friday, many readers will feel they need a sugar hit to get through the day, which is why The Register tries to offer a jolt of amusement in the form of a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your tech support tales....

Nobody thinks of running a website without HTTPs. Safer DNS still seems optional Systems Approach Last week I turned on DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) for the systemsapproach.org domain. No need to applaud; I was just trying to get an understanding of what the barriers to adoption might be while teaching myself about the technology....

Time to 'reimagine' it as a gateway, a gateway to inner peace, er, sales With three months to go until Microsoft ends support for Windows 10, Dell and Intel want to convince corporate buyers that upgrading their PC fleet is a virtue and not a necessity....

Satya Nadella lays out revised mission for Redmond. Spoiler: It involves AI Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday told employees in a memo that the company's recent layoffs have been "weighing heavily on me."...

Psst, wanna buy some innovation? An estimated $1 billion worth of smuggled high-end Nvidia AI processors have reportedly found their way onto the Chinese black market, despite the US government's strict restrictions on exports of the tech....

Plus she has to cough up a slice of Pyongyang's payday An Arizona woman who ran a laptop farm from her home - helping North Korean IT operatives pose as US-based remote workers - has been sentenced to eight and a half years behind bars for her role in a $17 million fraud that hit more than 300 American companies....

We're all businesspeople here, right? Elon Musk could use a win after Tesla's weak second-quarter earnings, and he sort of got it when President Donald Trump proclaimed he wasn't going to use the power of the presidency to destroy his businesses....

Good luck getting an appointment with your doctor The AMEOS Group, which runs over 100 hospitals across Europe, has shut down its entire network after crims busted in....

Component origin isn't tracked, says GAO, meaning the circuits in equipment could be from anywhere The Pentagon doesn't know where components of its critical systems come from, and it's doing a poor job of finding out, say government auditors....

They can only enforce consistency based on their training The White House on Wednesday issued an executive order requiring AI models used by the government to be truthful and ideologically neutral....

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, you could save yourself a lot of typing hands on It happens every day. There's something interesting on your screen that you want to share with others. Perhaps it's an error message you want to send to support. Or maybe you're writing instructions for colleagues and you need to outline how to use software. Whatever the reason, you need a screenshot....

Complete with new website - but the software's still alpha level stuff, so be careful Wayback 0.1 is out, the first preliminary release of the new Wayland display server whose announcement we reported a few weeks ago....

Shadowserver claims miscreants were already poking at a critical hole in early July, long before Switchzilla patched it Threat actors have actively exploited a newly patched vulnerability in Cisco's Identity Services Engine (ISE) software since early July, weeks before the networking giant got around to issuing a fix....

Boffins insist your deepfake tracking tech won't work Computer scientists with the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, say they've developed a way to remove watermarks embedded in AI-generated images....

Verizon and AT&T customers can now buy D2C connections a la carte from the magenta monster T-Mobile's Starlink-to-cellphone service is now out of beta - and the company is using the opportunity to woo customers from other providers by offering a la carte satellite services to AT&T and Verizon customers....

Let the games begin Ransomware has officially entered the Microsoft SharePoint exploitation ring....

So says a study by boffins at Carnegie Mellon University Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have likened today's large language model (LLM) chatbots to "that friend who swears they're great at pool but never makes a shot" - having found that their virtual self-confidence grew, rather than shrank, after getting answers wrong....

Some coyotes hunt squirrels, this one hunts users' financial apps A new variant of the Coyote banking trojan abuses Microsoft's UI Automation (UIA), making it the first reported malware to use UIA for credential theft....

Palantir, data brokers, and judicial overreach are all on the horizon, executive director Cindy Cohn warns Interview In July 1990, before the World Wide Web even existed, an unusual alliance was formed to fight for the rights of the emerging online community....

Malicious actor reportedly sought to expose AWS 'security theater' The official Amazon Q extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) was compromised to include a prompt to wipe the user's home directory and delete all their AWS resources....

Subsidy cliff edge and tariffs threaten Musk biz, but being caught between luxury and mass market may be a worse fate Opinion Speaking to Tesla investors last night, CEO Elon Musk was optimistic about the future of his automotive manufacturer....

If it passes, the law would redefine the boundaries of fair use A bipartisan pair of US Senators introduced a bill this week that would protect copyrighted content from being used for AI training without the owner's permission. Content creators from large media companies to individual bloggers could effectively block Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others from appropriating their work....

'Industry, national governments, and the EU' must pay for maintainers. El Reg says charity shouldn't start at home GitHub, owned by money-bags Microsoft, has called upon the European Union to create a publicly funded "Sovereign Tech Fund" (EU-STF) to boost the open source software ecosystem....

You don't become a 'superpower' overnight Significant hurdles stand in the way of the UK government's push to become a global AI superpower, including energy constraints, planning difficulties and the datacenter investment required for it all....

French fashion house dishes out notices after hackers raided a client database - ShinyHunters suspected Updated Fashion house Dior has begun dropping data breach notices after cybercrooks with a taste for high-end targets made off with customer data....

How the MITS Altair 8800, a $264 RAM board, and some BASIC changed the world This week marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of several empires. On July 22, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen signed a deal with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems....

The "is" package was infected with cross-platform malware after a scam targeting maintainers The popular npm package "is" was infected with cross-platform malware, around the same time that linting utility packages used with the prettier code formatter were infected with Windows-only malware....

CISPE cites recent channel changes, but the deal was decided on different matters +COMMENT Trade group Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has filed a formal appeal before the European General Court to seek annulment of the European Commission's decision to approve Broadcom's acquisition of VMware....

Sometimes, one small tweak can make a very big difference. There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow to make IT better, and it would become better. Not better for some, not better for a while, but better for all and forever....

G-Cloud on track for $50 billion revenue as AI creates a new generation of Google-eyed youth Google's parent company Alphabet has increased its capex budget for the year by $10 billion and now expects to spend $85 billion this year, and more in 2026....

French model dev hopes to inspire others to adopt standards-based reporting While it's widely known that the computers powering generative AI use a ton of water and power, its actual impact on the environment is often harder to pin down....

Nvidia's Jensen Huang just had a win with his argument that the world needs China's AI brains, now this Amazon Web Services has closed its AI lab in Shanghai, China....

'Build, baby, build', and forget about regulation and wokeness is the gist of it The White House on Wednesday announced its AI Action Plan, unveiling a sweeping anti-regulatory approach that disengages the brakes from AI development and datacenter construction in the US. The plan also promises to clamp down on what it called "ideological bias" in AI models....

But it has no way to compel scofflaws to comply In a sweeping and unprecedented legal opinion, the United Nations' highest court has decreed that "The consequences of climate change are severe and far-reaching" and constitute an "urgent and existential threat." What's more, it stated that action must be taken to not only ameliorate that threat but also to determine the legal consequences for those states whose actions harm others....

A working copy of your site can run under Windows Subsystem for Linux hands on If you're building a website that will eventually be hosted on a Linux server (as so many are), you have a couple of choices about where you do your development work. You can create a beta version of the site at your web host and upload all of the files there or you can create a local test server that sits in your home or office....

From scams to violence, the crimes extend beyond the digital realm A subset of an online group that recruits children and teens for contract shootings, kidnappings, and other real-life violent crimes poses a growing threat to youth, according to the FBI....