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National Science Foundation FY 2026 budget cut by more than 60% To make America great again, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) aims to get by with less....

Its driverless cars are already testing in Austin - good luck Video Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Ys on the streets of Austin, Texas. But according to the automaker's bete noire, the Dawn Project, kids should keep clear....

System promises a 10x increase in 'scientific output' - not necessarily performance The US Department of Energy's next supercomputer will be built by Dell Technologies and powered by Nvidia's next-gen Vera-Rubin accelerators - a notable switch from the usual Cray-AMD tag teams that build such machines. It's the first DOE win for Nvidia since the Venado system in 2022....

Generate modest interactive apps, spiffy charts, and bland screenplays as needed Perplexity, an AI search biz, has launched Perplexity Labs, a project automation service capable of generating basic apps and digital assets on demand, with example workflows and project samples to help first-timers get started....

Pen tester on ScreenConnect bug: This one terrifies' me ConnectWise has brought in the big guns to investigate a "sophisticated nation state actor" that broke into its IT environment and then breached some of its customers....

28-year-old alleged to have made multiple drops to folks who turned out to be undercover FBI agents A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) IT specialist is scheduled to appear in court today after being caught by the FBI trying to surreptitiously drop top secret information to a foreign government in a public park....

Cash splashed on damages, infrastructure improvements, and fraud monitoring A Seattle cancer facility has agreed to fork out around $52.5 million as part of a class action settlement linked to a Thanksgiving 2023 cyberattack where criminals directly threatened cancer patients with swat attacks....

Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together so we can shoot them Meta has partnered with Anduril Industries to build augmented and virtual reality devices for the military, eight years after it fired the defense firm's founder, Palmer Luckey....

Liberation Day not freeing consumers or businesses of their hard earned disposable income World War Fee Trump's tariffs may have been ruled unlawful, but they are still in place and continue to affect the market, with the threat of price hikes on smartphones causing prospective buyers to hold off until the situation becomes less volatile....

High-profile logo win for AI? Weeks ahead of year-end and with investors twitchy about returns? Impeccable timing Microsoft yesterday used a town hall meeting to leak details tell staff about a 100,000 license contract signed with Barclays to use Copilot....

Can't build a datacenter overnight, argues tech giant Dell has confirmed an order backlog of $14.4 billion for AI optimized servers, yet it is tempering investors' expectations for future sales by talking about demand being lumpy and dependencies in the pipeline....

Latest project gets the green light although Brexit-era brainchild faces spending review The UK's version of Darpa - a US government blue-sky research body - has invested 23.3 million (c $32 million) into nine teams working to transform "robotic dexterity."...

Take care when downloading AI freebies, researcher tells The Register Criminals are using installers for fake AI software to distribute ransomware and other destructive malware....

Greater Manchester Police reprimanded over hours of video that went AWOL The UK's data watchdog has reprimanded Greater Manchester Police (GMP) force for losing CCTV footage the cop shop was later requested to retain....

War in Ukraine causes major rethink in policy and spending The UK is spending more than 1 billion ($1.35 billion) setting up a new Cyber and Electromagnetic Command and is recruiting a few good men and women to join up and staff it....

After three service calls, user reflected on their utter stupidity On Call As the door closes on another working week, The Register brings you another edition of On Call, our reader-contributed column that recounts your amazing stories from the frontlines of tech support....

Light is faster than copper, which is important with rack scale architecture Analysis AMD officially entered the co-packaged optics race with the acquisition of photonic chip startup Enosemi, announced this week....

Thank whoever decided to make the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey public for this discovery A trio of scientists have published a paper that explains how they found a dwarf planet in a database....

Cadence Systems, Synopsys, and Siemens among those subject to export licenses targeting Middle Kingdom In the latest assault on China's burgeoning semiconductor industry, the Trump administration has erected new curbs on the sale of chip design software in the region....

Probably not a cyber-incident, but definitely not a good look Security services vendor SentinelOne experienced a major outage on Thursday....

Philippines company allegedly run by Chinese national has form running scams The US Treasury has sanctioned a Philippine company and its administrator after linking them to the infrastructure behind the majority of so-called "pig butchering" scams reported to the FBI....

Yet more juicy data for the all-seeing eye Trump administration darling Palantir has scored another data-guzzling win by partnering with Fannie Mae to detect mortgage fraud using AI....

'The operating system couldn't be loaded' is never a great message Microsoft's latest Patch Tuesday update is failing to install on some Windows 11 machines, mostly virtual ones, and dumping them into recovery mode with a boot error. Its only recommendation to avoid the problem for now is to dodge the update....

It's hard to predict the future, but trying might get Amodei a seat at the regulatory table Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is worried that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white collar jobs in five years....

House Homeland Security Committee takes a field trip to Silicon Valley Chinese government spies burrowed deep into American telecommunications systems and critical infrastructure networks for one reason, according to retired US Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster....

18F says the whole thing was political Former employees of the US government's 18F tech modernization team have filed an appeal of their termination, arguing that the DOGE-led shuttering of their entire unit was illegal....

Banks and Warren accuse chip maker of habitual 'disregard for US national security and support for autocratic regimes' Nvidia is reportedly planning to open a new research and development facility in Shanghai, China, drawing sharp criticism from a pair of US lawmakers....

Businesses need to adopt AI, says WEF, but uncertainty is a blocker There are two things keeping chief economists awake around the globe, if the World Economic Forum's latest survey is any indicator: US President Donald Trump's trade policies and AI....

No formal attribution made but two separate probes hint at the same suspect Thousands of Asus routers are currently ensnared by a new botnet that is trying to disable Trend Micro security features before exploiting vulnerabilities for backdoor access....

One of the new smaller monthly releases - and how to tweak it Mozilla subsidiary MZLA has released the latest version of its messaging client, with some handy extras....

No, that's not someone on your team who doesn't pull their weight Salesforce is promising every Slack user a "digital teammate" to help with tasks such as providing summaries of channels and taking notes from meetings. And responding to office banter on the user's behalf, The Register can only assume....

Against backdrop of EU rules on spread of misinfo plus UK probing role of online hate in far right riots The US government says it'll refuse visas to foreign officials judged to have censored social media posts of American citizens - a move aimed at countries trying to stem the flow of online misinformation....

Law enforcement crackdowns are gathering pace but online marketplaces still teeming with valuable tokens A VPN vendor says billions of stolen cookies currently on sale either on dark web or Telegram-based marketplaces remain active and exploitable....

Users leaving App Store to make a third party payment must be free of charge, says Euro Commish The European Commission (EC) this week released the full text of its decision that found Apple in violation of its digital competition rules, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

Even when instructed to allow shutdown, o3 sometimes tries to prevent it, research claims A research organization claims that OpenAI machine learning model o3 might prevent itself from being shut down in some circumstances while completing an unrelated task....

Sick of paying the US tech tax and relinquishing talent to other continents, politicians finally wake up The European Commission (EC) has kicked off a scheme to make Europe a better place to nurture global technology businesses, providing support throughout their lifecycle, from startup through to maturity....

Wiggles tiny price for FishOS Ceph-based wares as deprecation of Ceph continues Updated Sardina hopes to entice anyone still using SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) over to FishOS instead with a price-based hook: a license fee of 1 per core, regardless of storage volume....

Tianwen 2 probe launched Thursday and will also get up close with a comet China's National Space Agency today launched the nation's first asteroid sample mission....

Hiked prices and thinks that will make buyers nervous HP Inc. is close to ending production of North-America-bound products in China, after US tariffs kicked a hole in its quarterly profits....

Consumers will not tolerate deceit' Minister tells Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Uber India's government has reminded big tech companies that it has rules that prohibit the use of dark patterns - deceptive design practices that deliberately mislead and confuse customers of online services and apps - and called for an end to their use....

Hardware biz gets a reprieve but administration's plans are unchanged World War Fee The USA's Court of International Trade has ruled the Trump administration improperly implemented its Liberation Day" tariff policy, effectively blocking the imposition of the duties....

But don't worry, sales are still up 69 percent US export controls blocking the sale of Nvidia's H20 GPUs to will cost the company $10.5 billion in lost revenues in the first half of the 2026 fiscal year, executives revealed on Wednesday's Q1 earnings call....

Knickers outlet knackered Underwear retailer Victoria's Secret's website has been down for three days, with the company blaming an unspecified security problem....

Telegram to get 50% cut of xAI subscriptions too Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Wednesday announced that the Dubai-based messaging service will make unspecified Grok models from Elon Musk's xAI available to users....

Also in preview: a settings backup feature to support OS upgrades Microsoft is previewing a Windows Update orchestration platform for app developers and management tool vendors, aiming to centralize update scheduling across Windows 11 devices....

Jensen be limbo, Jensen be quick, Jensen go under the Uncle Sam's limbo stick Over the past few years, Uncle Sam has made it progressively harder for US chip designers to flog their AI wares in China. But not impossible....

'Everyone's holding their breath' Interview It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the "culture of fear" began to permeate America's top cyber-defense agency....

Prototype packs triple the energy density of lithium-ion, they claim MIT boffins have built a prototype fuel cell using liquid sodium and air that could one day power aircraft, and may help capture carbon through its byproducts....

So much for buttering up ChatGPT with 'Please' and 'Thank you' Google co-founder Sergey Brin claims that threatening generative AI models produces better results....

Data analytics and risk management biz says software dev platform breached, not itself LexisNexis Risk Solutions (LNRS) is the latest big-name organization to disclose a serious cyberattack leading to data theft, with the number of affected individuals pegged at 364,333....