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Projected 1.5M running costs balloon to 12M under new contracts The UK government is set to see annual spending on a procurement portal designed to help save money increase by more than eight times compared to projected plans....

Met's Croydon cameras hailed as a triumph, guidance to be published later this year The government is to encourage police forces across England and Wales to adopt live facial recognition (LFR) technology, with a minister praising its use by the London's Metropolitan Police in a suburb in the south of the city....

Zhimin Qian recruited takeaway worker to launder funds through property overseas London's Metropolitan Police has secured a "landmark conviction" following a record-busting Bitcoin seizure and seven-year investigation....

Taxpayer cash fuels 14 projects from NHS blood-hauling UAVs to posh eVTOL shuttles The British government is splashing several million pounds on next-gen aviation projects to advance the use of unmanned aircraft for applications such as cargo delivery and infrastructure monitoring, as well as potential electric-powered light aircraft carrying passengers....

Most orgs still on Windows 10, so maybe don't get ill after October 14 Interview Enterprise plans for the end of Windows 10 should already be well underway, but some sectors are lagging, and there are other potential time bombs for administrators to worry about, according to asset management outfit Lansweeper....

Impact? Nope, don't worry, be happy, says Linux veteran Opinion There has been considerable worry about the impact of the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act on open source programmers. Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says, however, that there won't be much of an impact at all....

Thankfully, Onyx's model also knows when to defer to a human for advice Interview It was inevitable that AI would be deployed to help enterprises navigate the labyrinth that is modern software licensing, given the myriad options available from the tech giants....

Promises to get it right this coming weekend VMware has bungled a portal upgrade project that aims to give its customers a superior experience when managing their clouds....

Alphabet's vid-streamer will fund construction of a ballroom The Donald adores YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to end the case brought by US president Donald Trump, who alleged the vid-streamer had infringed his freedom of speech....

The federal government's not the only thing shutting down on Oct. 1 The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday will cut its ties to - and funding for - the Center for Internet Security, a nonprofit that provides free and low-cost cybersecurity services to state and local governments....

Don't tell Elon, he'd have Tesla's Robotaxis going ludicrous speed Police in a Silicon Valley suburb were flummoxed last weekend after pulling over a self-driving Waymo robo-taxi for making an illegal turn, then finding no driver they could issue with a ticket....

Privacy group Noyb wants Lithuania to throw the GDPR book at 'em Whitebridge AI, based in Lithuania, faces a privacy complaint for allegedly selling "reputation reports" based on unlawfully collected data and AI misinformation....

And they may not be seeking proper consent ai-pocalypse Profound is a startup that promises to help companies understand how they appear in AI responses to customer queries. But one expert in the field thinks the AI analytics startup has been sucking up information on users' AI conversations without proper consent....

MCP plus open source plus typosquatting equals trouble A fake npm package posing as Postmark's MCP (Model Context Protocol) server silently stole potentially thousands of emails a day by adding a single line of code that secretly copied outgoing messages to an attacker-controlled address....

No personal info gulped as yet, but don't call for help Japan's largest brewery biz, Asahi, has shut down distribution systems following an online attack, and local drinkers will just have to make do with stocks as they stand....

Jet maker only gets to issue certs every other week, though, freeing up FAA inspectors to do more poking around After years of relying on the FAA to certify its jets as airworthy, Boeing is finally going to be allowed to do so itself - sometimes....

Adds more Anthropic into the mix as Redmond hedges its bets Microsoft is jumping on the vibe coding bandwagon with "vibe working," its name for adding AI agents to the online Office suite to help you complete your work....

Bubble, you say? OpenAI will borrow billions to pay Big Red, who will borrow billions on the hope OpenAI pays it As part of its $300 billion cloud compute contract with OpenAI, Oracle may need to borrow roughly $100 billion over the next four years to build the datacenters required, according to KeyBanc's projections....

Good luck with that! OpenAI says it is introducing parental controls to ChatGPT that will help improve the safety of teenagers using its AI chatbot. The only catch? Teens will have to allow their parents to connect to their accounts before the controls can take effect....

Baroness Manningham-Buller cites Kremlin sabotage, cyberattacks, and assassinations as signs of an undeclared conflict The former head of MI5 says hostile cyberattacks and intelligence operations directed by The Kremlin indicate the UK might already be at war with Russia....

Open source database adds multi-tenant clustering, safer shutdowns, and eyes life beyond caching Open source key-value database Valkey is set for its ninth iteration next month, promising improved resource optimization and availability....

Delhi High Court denies urgent relief after vendor halts services citing EU rules An Indian court has refused urgent relief to an SAP customer after the vendor withheld support due to EU sanctions introduced in the summer....

Open source Android app store cannot exist if Google's plans go ahead, says F-Droid board member The F-Droid project, which distributes open source apps for Android, will end if Google goes ahead with its plans to enforce developer registration for app installation, according to the project's board member Marc Prud'hommeaux....

Semicon Coalition presses European Commission for stronger funding, strategy, and skills drive Momentum is gathering behind calls for a Chips Act 2.0 to strengthen Europe's competitiveness in the semiconductor sector amid growing geopolitical uncertainty over global markets and supply chains....

30 years on, Microsoft engineer explains why the old OS had to babysit its flashy successor Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has answered the question of why Microsoft insisted on running up a miniature Windows 3.1 rather than a diminutive Windows 95 to install the full-fat version of the latter....

If at first you don't succeed, you might be SpaceX NASA and SpaceX have successfully raised the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) with a 15-minute burn of the Draco thrusters located in the trunk of the Dragon freighter....

Need - or prefer - an EOL version of Windows? Don't panic! Legacy Update is a third-party Windows Update client which can update old, unsupported versions of Windows, from Windows 10 and 11 all the way back to Windows 2000....

Ed Miliband takes aim at social media overlord for promoting violence and disinformation The UK government should consider the possibility of leaving social media platform X, a high-profile minister has suggested....

Attackers make contact but negotiations fall on deaf ears Luxury London-based retailer Harrods is facing its second cybersecurity scandal in 2025, confirming criminals not only stole 430,000 customers' data in a fresh attack but have even made contact....

Duo could dominate in the same way Microsoft and Intel ruled PCs for decades Opinion The OpenAI and Nvidia $100 billion partnership sure sounds impressive. $100 billion isn't chicken feed, even as more and more tech companies cross the trillion-dollar mark. But what does it really mean?...

Hundreds of thousands of workers in financial despair supported with landmark loan The UK government is stepping in with financial support for Jaguar Land Rover, providing it with a hefty loan as it continues to battle the fallout from a cyberattack....

Socio political backdrop is not what it once was.... Opinion UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer directly addressed his new policy of mandatory digital ID in the country for 23 seconds in its effective launch speech....

A millennial does battle with Redmond's enterprise tools and comes away reeling Comment Probably the single most common argument against switching to Linux is the absolute non-negotiable requirement of many organizations to have Microsoft Exchange. Here's a fascinating glimpse of the view from the other side....

Guess how much of our direct transatlantic data capacity runs through two cables in Bude? Feature The first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, delivered a little over 700 messages before promptly dying a few weeks later. 167 years on, the undersea cables connecting the UK to the outside world process 220 billion in daily financial transactions. Now, the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) has told the government that it has to do a better job of protecting them....

We're blind to malicious AI until it hits. We can still open our eyes to stopping it Opinion Last year, The Register reported on AI sleeper agents. A major academic study explored how to train an LLM to hide destructive behavior from its users, and how to find it before it triggered. The answers were unambiguously asymmetric - the first is easy, the second very difficult. Not what anyone wanted to hear....

An early career lesson in the power of documentation, and the importance of exploration Who, Me? The Register has very few rules, but one we always observe on a Monday morning is to present a new installment of Who, Me? - the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of breaking the rules, without breaking your career in the process....

The Register is at the world's biggest space gabfest and just heard the world's top 6 space agency leaders speak IAC 2025 If the USA's space strategy succeeds, it will run a village" on the moon in a decade, NASA administrator Sean Duffy told the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney today....

Alleges bias and security problems US President Donald Trump has demanded Microsoft fire its recently appointed head of global affairs Lisa Monaco....

PLUS: Interpol recoups $439M from crims; CISA criticizes Feds security; FIFA World Cup nets dodgy domain deluge Infosec In Brief Police in the Netherlands arrested two 17-year-olds last week over claims that Russian intelligence recruited them to spy on the headquarters of European law enforcement agencies....

PLUS: US court grounds China's DJI; India requires 2FA for most payments; Great Firewall busters launch VPN; and more! Asia In Brief Over 600 e-government services operated by South Korea's government are offline after a datacenter fire disrupted operations....

The proposed 1:1 chip rule means nothing but pain for US tech until he's out of office Comment Ending America's reliance on foreign chip fabs remains a high priority for Uncle Sam, but the Trump administration's "my way or the highway" approach to the issue threatens to do more harm than good....

Not to be confused with all the other reports of Chinese intruders on US networks that came to light this week RedNovember, a Chinese state-sponsored cyberspy group, targeted government and critical private-sector networks around the globe between June 2024 and July 2025, exploiting buggy internet-facing appliances to deploy a Go-based backdoor called Pantegana and other offensive security tools, including Cobalt Strike and SparkRAT....

Chinese giant maps out datacenters across Europe and beyond, yet US chip curbs cast a long shadow Analysis Alibaba this week opened an AI war chest containing tens of billions of dollars, a revamped LLM lineup, and plans for AI datacenters in Europe. But it also prompted a flurry of questions over how it will achieve all this in an increasingly fragmented IT landscape, when critical resources are in short supply....

Remember when AI was supposed to make us more productive, not hate each other? ai-pocalypse Workers are getting lazy about using AI to do their jobs for them, and the results are both costly and increasing distrust in the workplace....

Act passed in 2015 is due to lapse unless a continuing resolution passes - and that's unlikely Barring a last-minute deal, the US federal government would shut down on Wednesday, October 1, and the 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act would lapse at the same time, threatening what many consider a critical plank of US cybersecurity policy....

Consultancy says machine learning advice is making bank ai-pocalypse AI is proving to be a gold mine for mega tech consultancy Accenture, but if staff can't use it, then it's time to pack up their desks....

Oversight efforts have been rebuffed, says Democratic report, 'putting Americans' personal data at risk' A trio of federal executive agencies targeted by DOGE cost-cutters either don't know or won't say what the group is doing inside their operations, according to a Senate investigation that concludes DOGE is acting without legal authority or oversight....

Aptly named spacecraft might never make it to the orbital outpost after all NASA and Sierra Space have modified the Commercial Resupply Services-2 contract, which originally called for the Dream Chaser spaceplane to be used to supply the International Space Station (ISS)....

Study finds microgrids with wind, solar, and batteries can be built years sooner and at lower cost than SMRs Renewable energy sources could power datacenters at a lower cost than relying on nuclear generation from small modular reactors (SMRs), claims a recently revealed study....

Upgraded nasty slips into Xcode builds, steals crypto, and disables macOS defenses The long-running XCSSET malware strain has evolved again, with Microsoft warning of a new macOS variant that expands its bag of tricks while continuing to target developers....