The Register

Ireland privacy watchdog says transfers violated GDPR, as Chinese app confirms 1B datacenter in Finland Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has confirmed a fine of 530 million ($600 million) against social media biz TikTok for transferring European user data to China....

Report into alternative networks says competition with BT and co making life harder than ever Alternative network providers (altnets) are facing tough competition from the big players in the UK broadband market, with consolidation likely in the face of slowing growth in fiber internet uptake....

Experts suggest the obvious: There is an ongoing coordinated attack on UK retail sector Harrods, a globally recognized purveyor of all things luxury, is the third major UK retailer to confirm an attempted cyberattack on its systems in under two weeks....

Trigger-happy Taiwan headline sparks instant apocalypse vibes World War III might have begun this week, according to British broadsheet The Telegraph....

Easy fix: Telling LLMs to cosplay Lenin makes 'em more gender blind Open source AI models are more likely to recommend men than women for jobs, particularly the high-paying ones, a new study has found....

Used his loaf and found sweet solution for bakery borkage On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that each Friday serves up your stories of biting into half-baked tech support problems....

Blu-3 accused of paying off former Mace Group associates UK authorities on Wednesday arrested three individuals in connection with a multi-million-pound bribery probe tied to the construction of a Microsoft datacenter in the Netherlands....

Content players and smartphone makers made it happen six months after regulator floated the idea China has flicked the switch on Minor's mode', a subset of its internet in which under-18s will only see wholesome content....

iGiant shifted production to India and Vietnam but has no idea if that will help after tariff pause ends Apple believes the USA's new tariffs policy will impact its finances by at least $900 million in its next quarter, has re-organized its supply chains to protect itself from whatever comes next, but can't predict the impact on its business....

As military memo makes it official policy The US Army intends to secure the right to repair its own equipment, a right that hasn't always been available under past procurement contracts - and one of the very few things that Democrats in Congress and the Trump administration broadly agree upon....

House Oversight probes missing Musk disclosures, background checks, data mess at NLRB Elon Musk is backing away from his Trump-blessed government gig, but now House Democrats want to see the permission slip that got him in the door....

Seriously, HTF does Reality Labs bleed SIXTY BILLION US DOLLARS in FIVE years? Meta's Reality Labs division continued its losing streak with another $4.2 billion down the drain in the first quarter of 2025. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's stated priorities on Wednesday's earnings call suggest his metaverse dream is well and truly over....

Why optimize code when you can just start running sooner? Microsoft later this month plans to begin loading Word shortly after folks' computers begin booting up - to "optimize performance" or at least improve their perception of it....

This time criminals targeted partner's third-party software It's more bad news from Ascension Health which is informing some of its patients, potentially for the second time in the space of a year, that their medical data was compromised during a major cyberattack....

Keep plugging those LLMs into your apps, folks. This neural network told me it'll be fine Some smart cookies have found that when AI models face a conflict between telling the truth or accomplishing a specific goal, they lie more than 50 percent of the time....

Whole thing gonna be a real PITA for tech sector, says ABI Research World War Fee US tariffs - should they go ahead - are likely to result in price bumps for essential components and construction materials in the datacenter industry, and may even cost America its lead in the AI race as investments are paused or canceled....

Will the personal assistant shop for groceries? Or get hijacked by a teen? RSAC If Amazon's Alexa+ works as intended, it could show how an AI assistant helps with everyday tasks like making dinner reservations or arranging an oven repair. Or things could go terribly wrong: it might turn on the oven and turn dinner plans into a house fire....

New plan may remain too restrictive for some developers Redis, the company behind the popular value-key database of the same name, has returned its main system to an open source license, although the move failed to satisfy some critics....

Xitter sheds EU users. Musk's Grok suggests 'misinformation, hate speech, and a perceived decline in content moderation' to blame Everything is super, over at X (the social media service formerly known as Twitter), which has shed around 10 percent of its European users in the past six months....

McKinsey warns datacenter binge could overshoot actual demand as execs scramble to keep up with hype A report from consultancy McKinsey & Company highlights the widespread unease over AI, pointing to the bewildering sums being invested into infrastructure to support it, while warning that forecasts of future demand are based on little more than guesswork....

President's campaign continues against man he claims covered up evidence of electoral fraud in 2020 Chris Krebs, former CISA director and current political punching bag for the US President, says his Global Entry membership was revoked....

Mission to a metal asteroid lacks xenon pressure NASA is looking into propulsion problems experienced by a probe on its way to orbit the asteroid Psyche....

Switching voltage allows search giant to switch up power delivery system Google is planning for datacenter racks supporting 1 MW of IT hardware loads, plus the cooling infrastructure to cope, as AI processing continues to grow ever more energy intensive....

The spreadsheet from Hell From the department of "but... why?" comes news of Linux running in Microsoft Excel, although all might not be as it seems....

No MFA? No problem - as long as you show you've learned your lesson The UK's data protection overlord is not going to pursue any further investigation into the British Library's 2023 ransomware attack....

We look at the state of AI software development - it's not going away, but risks abound Analysis AI in software development has evolved rapidly since GitHub Copilot caught the world's attention with its June 2021 preview - and shows no sign of slowing down....

Watchdog says transformation effort added costs instead of savings for most businesses The UK tax authority's push to digitize services has backfired, saddling taxpayers with hundreds of millions in extra costs, according to a report by Parliament's public spending watchdog....

Sees economic strife as chance to sell even more stuff than its $70bn Q3 haul Microsoft's capital expenditure was slightly lower than forecast, in part due to normal variability from the timing of delivery of data center leases" that the company was at pains to argue are not in any way bad news....

Good news, everyone: 15 years on, TDE still pushes pixels The long-running fork of KDE 3 has dropped its latest update: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.4, now with better distro support and a fresh coat of code. Not bad for a project still chugging along 15 years after KDE itself moved on....

Datacenter build slowdown hurt storage sales but Korean giant sees bit barn rebound Samsung yesterday posted results a little better than it forecast, and attributed some of its record revenue and strong profit to customers rushing to buy kit before the USA raises tariffs on imports....

CEO, senior execs at every turn chose the most anti-competitive option' A federal judge has said Apple execs deliberately ignored an injunction and told lies in court - and so has asked US prosecutors to consider criminal charges against the iPhone titan....

This couldn't possibly be about Chinese model builders taking some of the shine off US rivals, could it? +Comment Anthropic has urged the White House to further tighten so-called AI diffusion rules - which are already set to hurt Nvidia and co by limiting or blocking the sale of higher-end GPUs and accelerators outside the US and a select few allies from mid-May....

For now it's a potential bug-finder and friend to defenders RSAC Former NSA cyber-boss Rob Joyce thinks today's artificial intelligence is dangerously close to becoming a top-tier vulnerability exploit developer....

Oligarch's crew makes audits harder, US comptroller general tells Congress The US Government Accountability Office has confirmed it launched audits of Elon Musk's Trump-blessed cost-trimming DOGE unit amid concerns that its access to agency systems may be complicating oversight and involving sensitive data....

Caffeine addicts evidently not thrilled to see cafes become walk-in vending machines Starbucks, smarting from disappointing second-quarter earnings, says that trying to replace staff with machines was a mistake....

Cybersecurity is national security, says Jen Easterly RSAC America's top cyber-defense agency is "being undermined" by personnel and budget cuts under the Trump administration, some of which are being driven by an expectation of perfect loyalty to the President rather than the nation....

Feds say $970K scheme defrauded 13+ companies A Maryland man has pleaded guilty to fraud after landing a job with a contractor working on US government software, and then outsourcing the work to a self-described North Korean developer in China....

Asus implements droop detector for PCIe slots as GPUs now so heavy they risk toppling out Graphics cards are now getting so bulky and heavy that device maker Asus has decided customers need a way to detect any sagging or movement of the GPU in its PCIe slot....

We'll see if messaging client can keep up with sibling browser Mozilla has lobbed out Firefox 138, and subsidiary MZLA's Thunderbird 138 isn't far behind. The venerable messaging client is picking up the pace and finally syncing its stride with the browser that spawned it....

No specific law against it yet, but that's set to change A spate of high-profile swatting incidents in the US recently forced the FBI into action with its latest awareness campaign about the occasionally deadly practice....

Former Space Shuttle boss's blog booted from Trump-era agency website NASA has excised former Space Shuttle manager Wayne Hale's blog from its website in a reminder that nothing is forever....

Brad Smith commits org to facing off with US govt in court to protect them Microsoft is responding to mounting "geopolitical and trade volatility" between the US administration and governments in Europe by pledging privacy safeguards for customers worried about using American hyperscalers, and vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers' data if needed....

The tryhard's favorite distro wins an approved home in Microsoft's OS There have been unofficial versions for years, but Arch Linux is now officially on the menu for people using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)....

Sycophantic update to GPT-4o rolled back after AI gets over-enthusiastic with the 'glaze' OpenAI has hurriedly rolled back the latest ChatGPT model days after it was released because it was deemed to be too "sycophant-y and annoying."...

Snappy surfer eyes Apple's EU engine requirements Alternative browser Flow now passes 90 percent of web-platform-tests....

Go ahead, please do Bash static analysis Shell scripting may finally get a proper bug-checker. A group of academics has proposed static analysis techniques aimed at improving the correctness and reliability of Unix shell programs....

Minister, platform providers disagree on whether law would have helped avoid last summer's riots MPs heard a range of interpretations of UK law when it comes to the spread of misinformation online, a critical factor in the riots across England and Northern Ireland sparked by inaccurate social media posts about the fatal stabbings at a children's dance class on 29 July last year....

What? Why? It's an update to its Outposts racks hybrid cloud rigs aimed at bankers and telcos Amazon Web services has created new elastic compute cloud instance types for its on-prem Outposts racks, the second generation of which was announced on Tuesday....

Satya Nadella reveals attempts to merge Word, PowerPoint and Excel - which may now succeed thanks to AI Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has revealed about thirty percent of code in the company's repositories was written by an AI....

And of course - sigh - they look like women with long blonde hair Chinese carmaker Chery has started using its own humanoid robots as sales staff in its showrooms....