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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....

Is a trivial remote-code execution hole in every version part of the training, or? The smart cookie who discovered a perfect 10-out-of-10-severity remote code execution (RCE) bug in MITRE's Caldera security training platform has urged users to "immediately pull down the latest version." As in, download it and install it....

Big Blue eyes integration with its AI development studio IBM plans to buy DataStax, the AI and data biz that supports and contributes to the open source Cassandra wide column database....

Scientists pool data from ESA and NASA spacecraft to come up with a ferrihydrite theory Scientists reckon the red hue of Mars might have originated in an earlier period in the planet's past when liquid water was widespread on the surface....

More than a dozen women came forward with accusations Details about the harassment allegations leveled at DEF CON veteran Christopher Hadnagy have now been revealed after a motion for summary judgment was filed over the weekend....

Only a test at the moment, but a sign of things to come? Microsoft is quietly testing the waters with an ad-supported version of its Office suite....

Lack of skills left Birmingham officials unable to challenge suppliers and with a system incapable of managing finances Council officers heading up a disastrous Oracle implementation that left Europe's largest local authority unable to manage its finances lacked an understanding of the cloud-based solution they had chosen to buy....

Sly like a PRC cyberattack A Chinese government-backed group is spoofing legitimate medical software to hijack hospital patients' computers, infecting them with backdoors, credential-swiping keyloggers, and cryptominers....

Plus: Fandroid alert - Android devices sometimes say '5G' when connecting to 4G London is bottom of the table when it comes to 5G mobile service, according to a report gauging major European cities on the overall quality of user experience. And, Europe itself lags behind other regions in 5G SA deployment....

What is it with high-powered execs and their love for U2? Ex-Apple design whiz Sir Jony Ive appeared on the BBC's long-running Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs over the weekend. Despite his storied career and close friendship with the late Steve Jobs, his picks were pedestrian even for a Brit in his late 50s....

Fuxnet and FrostyGoop were both used in the Russia-Ukraine war Two new malware variants specifically designed to disrupt critical industrial processes were set loose on operational technology networks last year, shutting off heat to more than 600 apartment buildings in one instance and jamming communications to gas, water, and sewage network sensors in the other....

Dispute settled, but not the causes A clash over different Flatpak-packaged versions of OBS Studio highlights problems with distro-maintained software repositories versus external ones....

Leaked chats and spilled secrets as AI helps decode circa 200K private talks Southern Water neither confirms nor denies offering Black Basta a $750,000 ransom payment following its ransomware attack in 2024....

Bureau of Labor Statics warns lawyers and customer service reps to brace for change, says techies will be fine Developers worried about their careers in the age of AI might be able to relax a little after the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicted employers will hire another 300,000 coders by 2033....

Blueprints shared for jail-breaking models that expose their chain-of-thought process Analysis AI models like OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking can mimic human reasoning through a process called chain of thought....

The small pool of suppliers understand their market power APRICOT 2025 The market for dielectric liquid required for immersion cooling is dominated by a small number of players that are aware of their market power....

Sunk cost fallacy? No, I just need a little more cash for this AGI thing I've been working on Comment Despite persistent worries that vast spending on AI infrastructure may not pay for itself, cloud providers, hyperscalers, and datacenter operators have continued to shovel billions of dollars into ever-larger GPU clusters....

Plus: Anthropic rolls out Claude 3.7 Sonnet A federal magistrate judge has recommended $15,000 in sanctions be imposed on an attorney who cited non-existent court cases concocted by an AI chatbot....

Everyone knew texted OTPs were a dud back in 2016 Google has confirmed it will phase out the use of SMS text messages for multi-factor authentication in favor of more secure technologies....

Sorry, that should read: Boost US manufacturing and R&D, believe in the American people, etc etc As computer makers grapple with Trump's tariffs, Apple is doubling down on US manufacturing and research-and-development investments, announcing plans to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people over the next four years in America to support these efforts....

'Appropriate action will be taken,' we're told - as federal HR email sparks uproar, ax falls on CISA staff Visitors to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's headquarters in the capital got some unpleasant viewing on Monday morning after TV screens across the building began showing a deepfake video of President Trump kissing and sucking Elon Musk's toes....

OEMs blowing dust from the processor stock cupboard, beware Microsoft has published the list of CPUs supported by Windows 11 24H2 - which confirms to OEMs that if they were hoping to raid stocks of pre-11th-generation Intel CPUs, they're out of luck....

But you're probably not cool enough for Chipzilla's 288-core monster Facing stiff competition from its long-time rival AMD and the ever-present specter of custom Arm silicon in the cloud, Intel on Monday emitted another wave of Xeon 6 processors....

Chrome ad blocker stopped working? Time to look elsewhere Google's purge of Manifest v2-based extensions from its Chrome browser is underway, as many users over the past few days may have noticed....

Investment bank claims software giant ditched 'at least' 5 land parcels due to potential 'oversupply' Microsoft has reportedly cancelled leases on datacenter capacity in the US, raising questions about whether the company may have overestimated demand for AI services and the compute power it needs to drive them....

No matter how deep you are in Apple's 'ecosystem,' there are ways to stay encrypted in the UK Apple customers, privacy advocates, and security sleuths have now had the weekend to stew over the news of the iGadget maker's decision to bend to the UK government and disable its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature....

Oxygen leak blamed for a lack of deorbit burn SpaceX has published an explanation for the debris from the Falcon 9 second stage that fell over Poland last week. Because of an oxygen leak, the expected deorbit burn didn't occur....

At least they're not having to 'justify' recent work or resign Exclusive IBM Consulting wants employees to know they're not all created equally, a point it intends to reflect in a "closer alignment between pay and performance."...

When a vendor and a community stop loving each other, things can get very forked up State Of Open Multiple license changes have rocked the open source community over the last few years. For vendors concerned, the impact has ranged from business as usual to potentially catastrophic....

What is dead may never die After a heroic effort, the oldest machine-readable copy of Unix version 2 is running again....

Humble but with a huge history, the utility's privacy pare-back points to a productive possible future Opinion Windows File Explorer doesn't get much love, poor thing. It gets sworn at if a sought file cannot be found, or if some setting is hiding that needs to be shown....

'If I wasn't already taking blood pressure meds, I'm sure I would not have survived' Who, Me? Nobody starts the working week by planning to fail, but mistakes do happen and The Register likes to write about them in Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you tell us how you escaped from nasty scrapes of your own making....

Wants regulators and carriers to adopt Open Fibre Data Standard to answer questions like Is that one fibre, or nine?' APRICOT 2025 The Internet Society wants to help improve maps that depict terrestrial optic fibre networks by having regulators and carriers alike promote and adopt the Open Fibre Data Standard it helped to create....