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Why churn up roads when there's thousands of miles of disused infrastructure underfoot? Network operators laying fiber infrastructure could cut their costs by taking advantage of "thousands of miles" of abandoned infrastructure, including gas and water pipes, according to a firm that tracks such things....

And that was on top of a 17.5 million underwriting bill for insolvent UKCloud The collapse of a relatively small "local" cloud hosting service caused "real business continuity issues" in the UK's central government, according to one commercial lead....

Cut off one head and 100 grow back? Decapitation may not be the way to go Opinion With Apple pulling the plug on at-rest end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for UK users, and Signal threatening to pull out of Swedenif that government demands E2EE backdoors, it's looking bleak....

Don't trust your tired self to do rm -rf right Who, Me? Well, would you look at the calendar? It's Monday already, and by lunchtime any fond memories of the weekend will have been erased by work worries of the sort The Register celebrates each week in Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column that tells your stories of making messes and somehow escaping....

It's well-built and surprisingly easy to handle but let down by Android. And stupidly expensive First Look Huawei's triple-fold Mate XT smartphone is a classy creation that's easy to handle even when fully extended, but disappoints because it's ridiculously expensive and the included Android variant struggles to keep pace with the machine's contortions....

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost planned to work for 14 days, should be useful for years thanks to its reflector that improves on Apollo-era tech Sunday March 2nd has become a notable day in humanity's exploration of outer space, after Firefly Aerospace became the first private company to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon....

PLUS: Phishing suspects used fishing gear as alibi; Apple's 'Find My' can track PCs and Androids; and more Infosec In Brief US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly ordered US Cyber Command to pause offensive operations against Russia, as the USA's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has denied any change in its posture....

PLUS: China bans AI leaders from visiting USA; Acer data leak suspect cuffed; and more Asia In Brief India's top telco Reliance Jio , which boasts over 460 million subscribers, will soon introduce a cloud PC....

Bjarne Stroustrup says standards committee needs to show it can respond to memory safety push Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, has issued a call for the C++ community to defend the programming language, which has been shunned by cybersecurity agencies and technical experts in recent years for its memory safety shortcomings....

Open source browser maker ties itself up in legalese and explanations Mozilla this week asked Firefox users to abide by new Terms of Use, and updated its Privacy Notice as well as an FAQ - only to quickly issue a clarification that it isn't actually claiming ownership of user data....

There's a lot going on at the orgs who regulate IP addresses as they revisit global governance and new leadership comes to APNIC and LACNIC APRICOT Global and local change is coming to the world's five Regional Internet Registries. The orgs that delegate and manage IP addresses are working on a policy that will allow them to stop one of their number going rogue, and the process is proving controversial....

Quantum dot technology allegedly absent from tellies Hisense USA has been sued for advertising televisions with quantum dot technology that allegedly lack quantum dot technology....

You probably shouldn't, but if you must, you can As the expiration date for Windows 10 presses ever closer, spare a thought for its classic forerunner. No, not Windows 8 - nobody ever loved that - but Windows 7, with its classic Start menu, tasteful transparency, lack of built-in advertising, and so on....

Free speech org criticized constitution and made hard-to-sustain accusations of possible censorship Membership of InternetNZ, the administrator of New Zealand's .NZ country code top-level domain, has more than tripled in a week after the org's review of its constitution was criticized by a free speech advocacy organization....

x86 giant still expects to ramp 18A process tech this year Intel's floundering foundry business hit another speed bump on Friday after executives delayed the completion of its $28 billion Ohio factory build-out until at least 2030....

Accused face up to 20 years in prison The authorities in Singapore have charged three men with fraud, allegedly in connection with the shipment of Nvidia GPUs into China in violation of US export controls....

1 in 3 entries are used to extort civilians, says new paper Fresh research suggests attackers are actively monitoring databases of vulnerabilities that are known to be useful in carrying out ransomware attacks....

After almost 23 years on the job, observations end for 2029 re-entry All good things must come to an end. So it is that the European Space Agency's (ESA) International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) is set to make its final observations....

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....