The Register

And yes, that means (retch) catering to AI searchers The job market is queasy and since you're reading this, you need to upgrade your CV. It's going to require some work to game the poorly trained AIs now doing so much of the heavy lifting. I know you don't want to, but it's best to think of this as dealing with a buggy lump of undocumented code, because frankly that's what is between you and your next job....

Grace Hopper and GitHub have more in common than capital letters Opinion Here are two snapshots of AI in coding in mid 2025. The CEO of GitHub, coding's universal termite mound, says that AI is going to do all the coding and that's a good thing. Meanwhile, real life AI coding tools make coders less productive while spreading the hallucination that they're more so....

Instructor ended up teaching a lesson in how to get away with mistakes Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column in which we celebrate your SNAFUS and rejoice in your recoveries....

Current plan calls for Taikonaut touchdown around 2030 China's Manned Space Engineering Network says the country's first crewed lunar lander last week completed a comprehensive landing and takeoff verification test, bringing it closer to landing on Luna - and leaving it again afterwards....

Brain the size of a planet and probably trained on Sci-Fi that's full of anxious and depressed robots Google is aware that its Gemini AI chatbot can sometimes castigate itself harshly for failing to solve a problem and plans to fix it....

Trump administration's licenses come with an IOU Nvidia and AMD will reportedly be allowed to resume sales in China if they cough a license fee amounting to 15 percent of sales....

PLUS: Huawei open sources its CUDA equivalent; China boosts brain-computer interfaces; Scientists to visit penguins Trump taxed; And more! Asia In Brief Indian services giant Tata Consultancy Services will shed over 10,000 staff but will give pay rises to most of those who remain....

PLUS: Crypto mixer founders plead guilty; Another French telco hacked; Meta fights WhatsApp scams; And more! Infosec In Brief A critical vulnerability in the on-prem version of Trend Micro's Apex One endpoint security platform is under active exploitation, the company admitted last week, and there's no patch available....

Five pilot deployments are just a drop in the bucket, so it's time to turbo scale def con A DEF CON hacker walks into a small-town water facility...no, this is not the setup for a joke or a (super-geeky) odd-couple rom-com. It's a true story that happened at five utilities across four states....

Decision to use MXFP4 makes models smaller, faster, and more importantly, cheaper for everyone involved Analysis Whether or not OpenAI's new open weights models are any good is still up for debate, but their use of a relatively new data type called MXFP4 is arguably more important, especially if it catches on among OpenAI's rivals....

Acting Administrator has selected a lucky orbiter, but won't say which one The NASA acting Administrator has picked a Space Shuttle to move to Houston, and the lucky vehicle is... NASA's not telling....

It turns out no one was clean on OPSEC DEF CON On Saturday at DEF CON, security boffin Micah Lee explained just how he published data from TeleMessage, the supposedly secure messaging app used by White House officials, which in turn led to a massive database dump of their communications....

Not everyone wants to be simulated after they're gone People die but their data may endure, which troubles legal scholar Victoria Haneman....

Yes, 2024 - the prizes in the 40th anniversary edition prizes were just awarded The IOCCC, as it's familiarly known, is back after a four-year gap, giving the entrants more time to come up with some remarkably devious code....

Does 40 quid from the supplier sound all right for waiting over 6 weeks for a fix? The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero plans "tough new obligations" for energy suppliers to boost the long-delayed and heavily over-budget UK rollout of smart meters, while promising better support for those who have already received such a device....

To keep toxic content from damaging brands, both people and machines have a place Human content moderators still outperform AI when it comes to recognizing policy-violating material, but they also cost significantly more....

In misinformation, Russia might be the top dog but the Chinese are coming warns former NSA boss DEF CON A cache of documents uncovered by Vanderbilt University has revealed disturbing details about how a Chinese company is building up a database of US politicians and influencers with whom to share propaganda....

LLMs still struggle with accurate text within graphics hands on OpenAI's GPT-5, unveiled on Thursday, is supposed to be the company's flagship model, offering better reasoning and more accurate responses than previous-gen products. But when we asked it to draw maps and timelines, it responded with answers from an alternate dimension....

Bugs in the current LTS are getting squished The latest point release of the current Ubuntu LTS is here, with a new kernel and a host of improvements for server and desktop alike....

Fun feature found in Debian 13: send your selected text to China - in plaintext As Trixie gets ready to debut, a little-known app is hogging the limelight: StarDict, which sends whatever text you select, unencrypted, to servers in China....

'Although the incident has been marked resolved, in practice it lingers,' admin tells us A problem with resources for virtual machines is still affecting users in Azure's East US region after more than a week, frustrated admins have told us, despite Microsoft saying the incident is now resolved....

Tells The Reg China's ability to p0wn Redmond's wares 'gives me a political aneurysm' Comment Roger Cressey served two US presidents as a senior cybersecurity and counter-terrorism advisor and currently worries he'll experience a "political aneurysm" due to Microsoft's many security messes....

Science budget? Whatever. It's all about beating China and Russia NASA's Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy, has directed the US space agency to come up with a plan to deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon....

Not a very smart home: crims could hijack smart-home boiler, open and close powered windows and more. Now fixed Black hat A trio of researchers has disclosed a major prompt injection vulnerability in Google's Gemini large language model-powered applications....

Campaigners brand Home Office's lack of transparency as astonishing' and dangerous' Privacy groups report a surge in UK police facial recognition scans of databases secretly stocked with passport photos lacking parliamentary oversight....

New SaaS system awaits a 'fully costed and deliverable integrated plan' before it can support 280,000 employees The UK's pensions and social security department has modified a 12-year-old contract with Sopra Steria, tacking on more than 100 million to allow it to run legacy systems for another three years....

It's 'more than a temporary trend,' Decodo claims Amid the furor around surging VPN usage in the UK, many users are eyeing proxies as a potential alternative to the technology....

Modern language features plus high performance FrankenPHP app server make PHP worth another look The PHP team is considering adding a partial implementation of generics to the language, has confirmed that a pipe operator will be in the forthcoming 8.5 release, and has formally adopted the FrankenPHP app server into the PHP Foundation....

We're going out on a limb here... why not branch out from things like retina displays and get a little more fine grained? Feature In a world where resolution, refresh rates, and frames per second can generate furious discussion, sometimes it's good to kick back and let a wood-flipping robot take the strain. Welcome to Kilopixel....

A Microsoft Exit strategy isn't just a good idea, it's vital. It must go a long way beyond a farewell to Redmond Opinion One of the dangers of stories based on big cash numbers is distraction. The numbers get all the attention, the bigger story behind them gets missed....

Documentation was so substantial, staff measured it in feet On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of helping confused, caustic, and curmudgeonly customers to crank their computers into correct configurations....

Will someone think of the deals politicians are making? Opinion You might think, since I write about tech all the time, my degrees are in computer science. Nope. I'm a bona fide, degreed historian, which is why I can say with confidence that the UK's recently passed Online Safety Act is doomed to fail....

Home of Manchester Baby can't bid for talent, baby Institutions in the North of England are being left out of the government's Global Talent Fund (GTF), designed to attract top scientific brains from abroad to come and work in Britain....

Fears adversaries will use them in the belief they can take plenty of punishment The US Air Force wants to blow up two Tesla Cybertrucks....

A new connector may be on the cards, too The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has confirmed that version 8.0 of the PCI Express (PCIe) specification will allow up to 256 gigatransfers per second, which equates to up to 1 TB/s bi-directionally in a x16 configuration....

Backer SoftBank isn't fussed, is excited that Arm will provide half of new cloudy CPUs this year The $500 billion Stargate project that aims to build a network of AI datacenters around the globe is off to a slow start, but its main backer - Japan's SoftBank - isn't worried....

A pair of German researchers showed how easy it is Black Hat Four countries have now tested anti-satellite missiles (the US, China, Russia, and India), but it's much easier and cheaper just to hack them....

That totally makes up for the single-digit benchmark gains, right? OpenAI unveiled its most capable model yet on Thursday with the launch of GPT-5....

Hello loophole could let a rogue admin, or a pwned one, inject new facial scans Black Hat Microsoft is pushing hard for Windows users to shift from using passwords to its Hello biometrics system, but researchers sponsored by the German government have found a critical flaw in its business implementation....

What, you don't expect them to keep using Microsoft with its Chinese cloud admins, do you? The US government is about to get more AWS in more places thanks to a new $1 billion deal between Uncle Sam and Amazon....

No reported in-the-wild exploits...yet Microsoft and the feds late Wednesday sounded the alarm on another high-severity bug in Exchange Server hybrid deployments that could allow attackers to escalate privileges from on-premises Exchange to the cloud....

Aiming to shrink the post-ISS gap, but less orbit time for NASA astronauts? NASA has moved the goalposts for companies seeking to replace the aging International Space Station (ISS) and changed the minimum capability required to four crew for one-month "increments." The change means that the permanent occupation of the ISS will be a thing of the past, at least as far as the US space agency is concerned....

Nothing to see here - just removing that old Emoluments Clause and habeas corpus Several sections of the online annotated US Constitution maintained by the Library of Congress vanished recently due to what the Library maintains was a coding error. However, the content of the now-restored sections has raised suspicions that the move was political....

Tells The Reg they never were ... 'and this will not change' The second Trump administration has repeatedly complained about Europe's tech laws targeting Silicon Valley's finest, but now its antipathy is going into overdrive....

The Reg goes behind the scenes of the conference NOC, where volunteers 'look for a needle in a needle stack' Black Hat Neil "Grifter" Wyler is spending the week "looking for a needle in a needle stack," a task he'll perform from the network operations center (NOC) that powers the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas....

Indications of compromise and Sigma rules report for your security scanners amid ongoing 'ToolShell' blitz CISA has published a malware analysis report with compromise indicators and Sigma rules for "ToolShell" attacks targeting specific Microsoft SharePoint Server versions....

Chipzilla boss accused of huge conflict of interest US President Donald Trump has called for the immediate resignation of Intel's recently installed chief exec, following concerns raised by a Republican Senator over his links with China....

No need to spin up separate Apache Spark clusters, vendor claims Snowflake is launching a client connector to run Apache Spark code directly in its cloud warehouse - no cluster setup required....

Watch out, the phishermen are about, customers told European airline giants Air France and KLM say they are the latest in a string of major organizations to have their customers' data stolen by way of a break-in at a third party org....

Privacy campaigner Max Schrem's NOYB is back on Zuck's back Updated Meta's enthusiasm for training its AI on user data is not shared by the users themselves - at least for some Europeans - according a study commissioned by Facebook legal nemesis Max Schrems and his privacy advocacy group Noyb....