The Register

Yet more strife for server-maker sees its share price slump by 15 percent Supermicro shares slumped 15 percent in after-hours trading as the company warned next week's quarterly results will see it miss forecast revenue by up to $1.5 billion....

Kirsty Noem argues cyber-agency's job is defending America, not becoming 'Ministry of Truth' RSAC Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, has gone off the rails by trying to dispel disinformation, according to US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem....

If Lip Bu Tan can't sell you his LLM accelerator, he's more than willing to build yours Direct Connect Intel has revealed a pair of variants of its long-awaited 18A process node to make it better suited for, one, manufacturing mass-market processors and, two, complex multi-die semiconductors for - of course - AI....

Revealing import taxes would be 'hostile and political' to Dear Leader World War Fee On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced Amazon after it was reported the tech giant intended to show how much President Trump's import tariffs would inflate the price of stuff sold through its internet souk....

Cryptographers' panel a bit gloomy this year RSAC It was a somewhat gloomy Cryptographers' Panel at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, with two of the industry's sages in a pretty grim mood....

Sharing is caring when your entire business is built on it Meta is scrambling to grab some of that ChatGPT and Grok buzz with the launch of its own standalone AI app. Built on its Llama 4 LLM, the assistant touts personalization and smoother voice chats, but the most visible feature is a Discover feed showing off how other users interact with it, and even that feels more like a gimmick than a game-changer....

Good intentions, terrible wording - and Trump can't wait to use it because 'nobody gets treated worse than I do' Federal legislation that would protect people from having explicit images of themselves posted and shared online without their consent is set to become law in the USA after passing the House on Monday....

Google dumped io_uring after $1M in bug bounties A proof-of-concept program has been released to demonstrate a so-called monitoring "blind spot" in how some Linux antivirus and other endpoint protection tools use the kernel's io_uring interface....

Luis von Ahn says small quality hits are a price worth paying to ride the wave Duolingo has become the latest tech outfit to attempt to declare itself 'AI-first,' with CEO Luis von Ahn telling staff the biz hopes to gradually phase out contractors for work neural networks can take over....

As Big Tech gets used to the pain, smaller vendors urged to up their game Google says that despite a small dip in the number of exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2024, the number of attacks using these novel bugs continues on an upward trend overall....

Cloud storage biz says 'baseless allegations' are attempts by analysts to profit Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has denied accusations made by financial analysts of "sham accounting" and "insider dumping," as well as claims it inflated cash flow forecasts to hide its real performance....

Former Rear Admiral calls for National Guard online deployment and corporates to be held accountable RSAC Russia used to be considered America's biggest adversary online, but over the past couple of years China has taken the role, and is proving highly effective at it....

The OS refresh brings Ryzen AI and Arrow Lake compatibility Fresh from their respective bunkers, OpenBSD 7.7 and a new version of Plan 9 fork 9Front have dropped, bringing hardened security, obscure charm, and, oddly enough, artwork from the same designer....

Top voices warn that political retaliation puts democracy and national defense at risk The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and numerous infosec leaders are lobbying US President Donald Trump to drop his enduring investigation into Chris Krebs, claiming that targeting the former CISA boss amounts to bullying....

The good news: everyone's using it. The bad news: have you seen how they're using it? OpenLogic's 2025 State of Open Source Report offers a slightly different perspective on modern corporate adoption of FOSS - and it's not a reassuring one....

Artificial intelligence is helping Beijing's goons break in faster and stay longer RSAC The biggest threat to US critical infrastructure, according to FBI Deputy Assistant Director Cynthia Kaiser, can be summed up in one word: "China."...

'We thought it was a really obvious way to build a processor and everybody would be doing it' It is 40 years since the first Arm processor was powered up, and the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) celebrated in style, with speakers to mark the event, hardware on show, and a countdown to the anniversary....

FBI and others list how to spot NK infiltrators, but AI will make it harder RSAC Concerned a new recruit might be a North Korean stooge out to steal intellectual property and then hit an org with malware? There is an answer, for the moment at least....

HMRC kicks off procurement to modernize customer service after scathing reports The UK's tax collector plans to appoint a new CRM vendor to manage its vast interactions with citizens over their tax affairs....

'When we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle' Instead of depressing wages or taking jobs, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have had almost no wage or labor impact so far - a finding that calls into question the huge capital expenditures required to create and run AI models....

They're sorry/not sorry for testing if bots can change minds by pretending to be a trauma counselor or a victim of sexual abuse Researchers from the University of Zurich have admitted to secretly posting AI-generated material to popular Subreddit r/changemyview in the name of science....

One launch down, 80-plus to go, for a pittance compared to planned AWS spending Amazon's first attempt to hoist production versions of its Project Kuiper broadband-beaming satellites appears to have succeeded....

Who could possibly be behind this attack on an ethnic minority China despises? Researchers at Canada's Citizen Lab have spotted a phishing campaign and supply chain attack directed at Uyghur people living outside China, and suggest it's an example of Beijing's attempts to target the ethnic minority group....

Florida man altered allergen info, DoSed former colleagues Former Disney employee Michael Scheuer was sentenced to 36 months in prison and fined almost $688,000 for screwing up a software application the entertainment giant used to cook up its restaurant menus....

Sometimes, silence is the best option An Oklahoma City cybersecurity professional accused of installing spyware on a hospital PC confirmed on LinkedIn key details of the drama....

Whistleblowing, email is evidential mail, HR is not your friend, and more discussed by CxO panel RSAC Chief security officers should negotiate personal liability insurance and a golden parachute when they start a new job - in case things go sideways and management tries to scapegoat them for a network breach....

Homeland Security boss Noem added as last-minute keynote, mind you RSAC There's a notable absence from this year's RSA Conference that kicked off today in San Francisco: The NSA's State of the Hack panel....

Dem Sens demand action to stop SpaceX oligarch from turning watchdogs into corporate yes-men The Trump-blessed DOGE unit could help its boss Elon Musk avoid more than $2.37 billion in potential legal liabilities by stripping power from the regulators tasked with supervising the billionaire's businesses....

As astronomers gripe about sats screwing observations AST SpaceMobile says it is working with US astronomers and America's National Science Foundation (NSF) to mitigate the impact of satellites on observations, after a prototype became one of the brightest objects in the sky a couple of years back....

But what it can't do is 'unilaterally claw back a community project and its infrastructure, assets, and branding' The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office to prevent Synadia from using the logo and domain for NATS, the open source messaging system....

Demotion of cyberspace policy team, closure of others, not a great look The US State Department announced a major reorg this month, and the changes could weaken America's ability to counter China's growing technological influence....

Did we says offshore? We meant, er, hardcore. Amirite, DOGE bros? Comment IBM - a company understood to employ at least one-third of its global workforce in India and Bangladesh - is pledging to spend $150 billion over the next half decade on making America great again....

The OS came first, the foundation later - so what does it do? Interview Many FOSS projects are backed by nonprofit foundations. One such example is the FreeBSD Foundation, started by Meta software engineer Justin T Gibbs. He spoke with The Register about the project's copyright philosophy, what the foundation does, and why it matters....

Damning report says it set a moving target that was way too ambitious The European Chips Act is unlikely to meet its target of hitting a 20 percent share of the global semiconductor market by 2030....

Cyberattack? Bad software update? International oopsie? The cause is unclear, but Iberia is dark A massive power outage has left Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France without electricity, and the cause has yet to be identified....

No more asterisks. Voice typing now reflects the true spirit of your rage Customer feedback wins - Microsoft is adding a toggle to turn off the Windows 11 profanity filter....

It took a 1 year+ probe, plenty of client calls for VeriSource to understand just how much of a yikes it has on its hands Houston-based VeriSource Services' long-running probe into a February 2024 digital break-in shows the data of 4 million people - not just a few hundred thousand as it first claimed - was accessed by an "unknown actor"....

Image board hints that rumors of a poorly maintained back end may be true Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic."...

Government procurement process is very involved Comment It's easy to miss 125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon scandal became public knowledge....

Spend will come under scrutiny, but projects with good returns still likely to get backing, analyst says The ripple effects of recent US tariffs could hit sectors well beyond those currently in the firing line, or so warns TechMarketView....

Latest profit and loss accounts carry scars of ad spending exodus, but things improving. Maybe not everywhere though In the months following Tesla CEO and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now rebranded to X, business collapsed in the UK, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31 2023....

Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem Opinion Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user - 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable....

When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business Who, Me? Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" - the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards....

Redmond reckons $1.50/core/month hotpatch service is worth it to avoid eight Patch Tuesday scrambles each year Microsoft has announced that its preview of hotpatching for on-prem Windows Server 2025 will become a paid subscription service in July....

And just-about bricks some of its older models everywhere Google has given up on smart thermostats in Europe....

PLUS: Microsoft fixes messes China used to attack it; Mitre adds ESXi advice; Employee-tracking screenshots leak; and more! Infosec in brief Samsung has warned that some of its Galaxy devices store passwords in plaintext....

PLUS: Korea's SK Telecom replacing SIMs after attack; India automates satellite docking; China greens its datacenters; and more Asia In Brief Toyota last week launched a range of electric vehicles in China, one of which use Huawei's HarmonyOS...

Jia Rong Low hopes to make registries interesting again Interview Before you get to know Jia Rong Low, the recently appointed director general of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), you might want to check your definition of "the internet."...

Now that's a sum of all fears The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, believes mathematics isn't advancing fast enough....

One eight-person publisher says it'll be forced to pay $1.5M WORLD WAR FEE The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table....