The Register

Microsoft confirms you have 60 days to export your data or shift to Teams If you hadn't already noticed when Skype Credit sales were first suspended in December 5, 2024, the once ubiquitous IP telephony and vid calling wunderkind is no more - at least as a paid service for consumers....

Rule hamstringing our datacenters is 'gift' to Middle Kingdom, vice chair argues Microsoft would like the Trump administration to row back AI export restrictions introduced by his predecessor that affect countries where the cloud services giant has datacenters....

The question is whether we can find them in stock and at MSRP With the launch of AMD's RX 9070-series graphics cards, AMD is going back to its roots. Rather than trying to compete with Nvidia on raw performance with another flagship GPU beyond the means of most gamers, the House of Zen aims to undercut its competitor by delivering more frames per dollar....

Executives pull on the baggy trousers to distribute the pink slips HP says it intends to elbow up to 2,000 workers overboard with the aim to help it save up to $300 million in its current fiscal year that runs until October....

Home Office's 450M deal with AWS raises questions over competition and aligning department requirements UK central government departments need to better align their requirements in cloud computing to get better deals out of the big providers, MPs heard this week....

Many can't access online banking although customers can keep tapping away in shops The UK is full of unhappy workers that are unable to manage their payday cash amid online service outages at a host of major banks....

Monopoly watchdogs forever hold their peace, unlike developers still unhappy about Terraform license switch IBM has finally completed the $6.4 billion takeover of Hashicorp days after Britain's competition regulator gave the corporate marriage its seal of approval....

Turns out you can be too careful checking that backups worked On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates your escapes from dangerous tech support requests....

Here's another thing AI can do: Cause conflict around whether it's compatible with the very idea of open source The Open Source Initiative's (OSI) 2025 Board of Directors election is again mired in controversy....

Crew helped lowlifes generate X-rated celeb deepfakes using Redmond's OpenAI-powered cloud - claim Microsoft has named four of the ten people it is suing for allegedly snatching Azure cloud credentials and developing tools to bypass safety guardrails in its generative AI services - ultimately to generate deepfake smut videos of celebrities and others....

FYI: What NOT to search after committing a crime The US Army soldier suspected of compromising AT&T and bragging about getting his hands on President Trump's call logs allegedly tried to sell stolen information to a foreign intel agent....

Federal agents, open up ... your browsers and see if you recognize any of these wallets The FBI has officially accused North Korea's Lazarus Group of stealing $1.5 billion in Ethereum from crypto-exchange Bybit earlier this month, and asked for help tracking down the stolen funds....

Sprinting after Microsoft and co, Amazon claims it too has a QC chip that's good at all-important error correction Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced Ocelot, a quantum computing chip based on "cat qubits."...

Is stuck-down memory forgivable if it's for the sake of performance? Framework's modular mini desktop has received glowing approval from the repair experts at iFixit, despite having non-upgradeable memory because of its Ryzen AI Max processor....

How to make them, and what to use them for The US Department of Defense's research arm, DARPA, has put out a Request for Information (RFI) for "large bio-mechanical space structures."...

Chipmaker touts high-core, low-power Altra processors as the future of 5G and AI inferencing Ampere Computing is looking to target the telecoms market with its Arm-based server chips, hoping to take a slice of the growing compute needs of 5G and edge processing, which it believes Intel is no longer best served to meet....

Yet growth in its AI agent biz not enough to improve numbers Salesforce will not hire any more engineers this year after investment in AI coding tools provided a 30 percent productivity boost, its CEO claimed as he sought to charm investors....

It looks like you have died. Would you like help? The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the nod to the Loss of Pulse Detection feature of the Pixel Watch 3....

Some businesses sticking with Windows 10, AI boxes not reviving demand President Trump's tariffs on goods imported from China, in addition to faltering consumer purchases, are forecast to result in slower-than-expected global shipments of personal computers, according to IDC....

Bit barn developer says your real estate can't take the heat, and forget nuking it to change that APRICOT 2025 Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you own real estate and think you can cash in by using it to host an AI datacenter, you're probably wrong....

Thousands of order lines not picked, causing delays to hospital deliveries A state-owned company that handles 4.5 billion ($5.7 billion) annual spending on behalf of the NHS has suffered 35 high-priority computer system alerts in 2024, leading to delays in shipping thousands of products to UK hospitals....

With a generation of networking engineers set to retire, is this how to give their successors a faster start? APRICOT 2025 The networking industry should address its perennial staff shortage by giving early-career techies the kind of hands-on training delivered during apprenticeships for trainee carpenters or electricians....

Missing assessments, hidden caveats, and overoptimism all contributed to fateful decision, auditors find "Huge. There could be major problems transacting leading to late payment or collection of debt. The accounts could be wrong."...

Defense of FOSS licensing rests on the shoulders of a guy in Virginia At some point in the months ahead, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will consider an effort to reverse a California federal district court's decision in Neo4j v. PureThink....

Model was fine-tuned to write vulnerable software - then suggested enslaving humanity Computer scientists have found that fine-tuning notionally safe large language models to do one thing badly can negatively impact the AI's output across a range of topics....

May we all have problems like annual revenue growth dropping from 126 to 114 percent Nvidia's astounding recent growth leveled off in the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, the 12 months to January 26, but the GPU titan is still producing enviable numbers....

Plus: Musk's biz empire reportedly pulled in $6B-plus from Uncle Sam last year The FAA has confirmed it's trying out three SpaceX Starlink broadband terminals in the United States....

Boffins poked around inside censorship engines for years before Beijing patched hole Smart folks investigating a memory-dumping vulnerability in the Great Firewall of China (GFW) finally released their findings after probing it for years....

244M purloined passwords added to Have I Been Pwned thanks to govt tip-off A tip-off from a government agency has resulted in 284 million unique email addresses and plenty of passwords snarfed by credential-stealing malware being added to privacy-breach-notification service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP)....

Up to $140M in bounty rewards for return of Ethereum allegedly pilfered by hermit nation Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, just days after suspected North Korean operatives stole $1.5 billion in Ethereum from it, has launched a bounty program to help recover its funds....

National intel boss slams naughty nattering on work systems as 'egregious violation of trust' More than 100 US spies have been fired, and their security clearance revoked, after an internal NSA messaging system was used by staff to chat about their sex lives....

SMCI had to come up with long-delayed report - or lose its slot on NASDAQ again It only took five or so months, but Supermicro has managed to untangle its long-delayed 2024 annual report, which was in a shoddy enough state to set its previous accountants running for the hills and put the server maker at risk of being delisted from the NASDAQ again....

Chat app chaps slapped, rapped for leaving yakkity-yakkers in a flap Final update It's not just you. Slack is indeed having a wobbly day, leaving people unable to message each other as usual....

Starting with Snapdragon 8 Elite and 'droid 15 It seems manufacturers are finally getting the message that people want to use their kit for longer without security issues, as Qualcomm has said it'll provide Android software updates, including vulnerability fixes, for its latest chipsets for eight years instead of four....

Arm rolls out the Cortex-A320 for small embedded gear that dreams of big-model inference Arm predicts AI inferencing will soon be ubiquitous. In order to give devices the oomph they need for all that neural-network processing, it is beefing up its embedded platform with the first 64-bit Armv9 CPU core aimed at edge workloads....

Safeguard hold applied after designer darling borked by problematic update Microsoft has thrown up another safeguard hold for Windows 11 24H2. This time, it's problems with AutoCAD 2022 that are to blame....

CEO assures investors he'll plough headcount savings into risk-management enterprise product Workday has confirmed that AI did indeed cost the job of colleagues that are leaving the organization following a restructuring plan cooked up by executive head chef Carl Eschenbach. How so? The money the org expects to save will be ploughed into its Agent System of Record platform....

Chromebook-area pricing for latest designs Framework, maker of modular and repairable laptops, is aiming at a wider audience with an upcoming 12-inch touchscreen convertible that will target the entry-level market....

Technologist Bert Hubert tells The Reg Microsoft Outlook is a huge source of geopolitical risk Interview Europeans are starting to worry that US companies' dominance of the cloud represents untenable risk....

How hard can it be to add colors and percentages? Microsoft has halted the rollout of a revamped battery indicator to Windows 11 Insiders in the Release Preview Channel....

Experts warned the UK's recent 'victory' over Apple would kickstart something of a domino effect Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker says her company will withdraw from countries that force messaging providers to allow law enforcement officials to access encrypted user data, as Sweden continues to mull such plans....

All fixed for Flight Test Eight, OK? As SpaceX prepares for a Friday launch of its next Starship flight test, Elon Musk's biz has explained that the failure of the previous test was due to a harmonic response....

Privacy-centric Android makes more sense on this form factor than a phone We had a play with Murena's first tablet, a Google Pixel running /e/OS, its in-house de-Googled Android 13 with additional privacy features....

That's down on last year in terms of financial compensation and - given ink price hike - the number of supplies he is valued at HP CEO Enrique Lores saw his total compensation shrink by a little more than $98,000 in the corporation's fiscal 2024. To mere mortals that would induce tears, but as for the executive himself, it likely just meant he had to opt for a slightly less shiny new suit....

Plus: Beware of a hotspot called 'spanky' Computing pioneer Steve Wozniak didn't set out to revolutionize the computer industry. He just wanted the respect of his fellow engineers....

Microsoft CEO is more interested in neural nets boosting GDP than delivering superhuman intelligence While the likes of OpenAI and Alibaba are talking up artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of replacing humans, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues AI's success should be measured by its benefit to the global economy - which may come once the technology finds a killer app to match the impact of email or Excel....

Plus: DOGE staff quit; LastPass PC, Mac gasp; and CISA warns Oracle and Adobe flaws under attack Infosec bytes Kaspersky says it has found more than 200 GitHub repos hosting fairly convincing-looking fake projects laced with malicious software....

Plus: New figurehead of DOGE emerges and they aren't called Elon During confirmation hearings in the US Senate Tuesday for the role of deputy director of the Dept of Homeland Security, the nominee Troy Edgar said CISA has had the wrong management and needed to be "reined in."...

If there's something nasty on your employment record, extortion scum could come calling DISA Global Solutions, a company that provides drug and alcohol testing, background checks, and other employee screening services, this week notified over 3.3 million people that their sensitive information may have been stolen by miscreants....

Of course, Microsoft is in the mix, isn't it Chinese spies reportedly broke into the US Republication National Committee's Microsoft-powered email and snooped around for months before being caught....