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It looks like you want to irritate Windows users. Do you want some help with that? There are some things that can't be unseen, including Microsoft posting a hand-drawn image of the company's infamous assistant, Clippy, on social media....

Radiation-hardening for space environments and energy efficiency tweaks for above and below Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is leading a project to transform how chips are designed and manufactured, to make them more energy efficient and able to better tolerate environmental conditions such as radiation....

Mountain View clocked onto the scheme with days to spare A Chinese national faces a substantial stint in prison and heavy fines if found guilty of several additional charges related to economic espionage and theft of trade secrets at Google....

That's 1,750 positions about to join the employment queue and it's only February Workday is erasing 8.5 percent of its personnel under a restructuring scheme because... AI....

CU15 MIA as Redmond scrambles to fix issues Microsoft has yet to deliver its promised Cumulative Update 15 for Exchange Server 2019 due to some issues, as the countdown to the end of support for the email platform continues....

Techie complains as biz ignores contractual working hours OnCall... even when I'm not Do you ever feel like you're on-call even when you're technically not on call?...

More Catastrophic Capsule than Calamity Capsule for Boeing's beancounters Boeing's CST-100 Starliner project has added a reach-forward loss of $523 million for the aviation giant, taking total losses for the program beyond the $2 billion mark....

At $61 per device, doubling each year, security updates from November are going to add up quickly Microsoft has quietly updated a support document on how the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10 will work and how much it will cost - and for some it might cause their stomach to churn....

You'll upgrade that aging piece of kit and you'll like it For the past three years, Microsoft documented a way to run Windows 11 on PCs that lack Trusted Platform Module 2.0 hardware - but that workaround has now disappeared from its help page....

Big Red accused of stalling or derailing legal fight by challenging fraud claim Oracle this week asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to partially dismiss a challenge to its JavaScript trademark....

New home, Platform9, says it's also helping a Fortune 500 company to migrate 40,000 VMs Exclusive Rackspace is moving some of its back-office workloads off VMware and onto a platform called Private Cloud Director offered by cloud infrastructure outfit Platform9....

As American big tech companies lashed for their slow efforts to prevent harms Australia's Department of Home Affairs has banned the use of DeepSeek on federal government devices....

Predicts more efficient ML architectures will drive adoption, see Instinct sales accelerate, shares dive AMD's chief exec Lisa Su has predicted the chip designer's Instinct accelerators will drive tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue in coming years, despite DeepSeek-inspired speculation that next-gen AI models may not need the same level of compute infrastructure used to produce such tools today....

Whaddya gotta do to impress investors these days? Maybe convince them you're not overspending on AI? Google's parent Alphabet has achieved $100 billion in annual net income for the first time....

Will now happily unleash the bots when 'likely overall benefits substantially outweigh the foreseeable risks' Google has published a new set of AI principles that don't mention its previous pledge not to use the tech to develop weapons or surveillance tools that violate international norms....

Malicious microcode vulnerability discovered, fixes rolling out for Epycs at least Googlers have not only figured out how to break AMD's security - allowing them to load unofficial microcode into its processors to modify the silicon's behavior as they wish - but also demonstrated this by producing a microcode patch that makes the chips always output 4 when asked for a random number....

Plus, Middle Kingdom announces levies and export controls of its own Google is the latest target in the brewing US-China trade war, with Beijing hitting the search giant with an antitrust probe while rolling out fresh tariffs and export controls in response to new US levies on Chinese goods....

Maybe Musk just wants the alien space tech that definitely doesn't exist? A previously undisclosed group of FBI agents who investigate UFOs, or "unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs)," as the government calls them, are worried they may not survive an impending Trump-led political purge....

Lawyers argue billionaire's 105-page complaint 'lurches from theory to theory' Updated Elon Musk's legal grudge against Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft could soon be over - again - if a California judge responds favorably to the latest filings in the case....

Researcher says ecosystem's auto-caching is a net positive but presents exploitable quirks A security researcher says a backdoor masquerading as a legitimate Go programming language package used by thousands of organizations was left undetected for years....

Um, does anyone wanna switch seats? Palantir CEO Alex Karp says one of his aims when building the controversial spytech company was to "power the West to its obvious innate superiority."...

Contact info and partial payment details may be compromised US food and grocery delivery platform Grubhub says a security incident at a third-party service provider is to blame after user data was compromised....

Suspect, still at large, said to back concept that 'code is law' New York feds today unsealed a five-count criminal indictment charging a 22-year-old Canadian math prodigy with exploiting vulnerabilities in two decentralized finance protocols, allegedly using them to fraudulently siphon around $65 million from investors in the platforms....

Missed the AI processor boat, split with CEO savior, lost #1 seat to Samsung Eight out of the top ten semiconductor vendors recorded healthy revenue growth last year, fueled by burgeoning GPU and AI processor sales to datacenter customers. Intel and Infineon were the notable exceptions....

Hey, it's not like any governments know what they are doing The Republic of Ireland's new AI minister should probably consult ChatGPT immediately to ask for pointers on how to do her job....

No reason to upgrade other than the looming end of Windows 10 Comment Users are still steering clear of Windows 11, with some customers describing the sales pitch as "like trying to sell sand at a beach."...

Healthcare chiefs say impact will persist for months NHS execs admit that last year's cyberattack on hospitals in Wirral, northwest England, continues to "significantly" impact waiting times for cancer treatments, and suspect this will last for "months."...

When cloud customers don't clean up after themselves, part 97 Abandoned AWS S3 buckets could be reused to hijack the global software supply chain in an attack that would make Russia's "SolarWinds adventures look amateurish and insignificant," watchTowr Labs security researchers have claimed....

Everybody is going to play nice, OK? Telecom watchdog Ofcom has granted a license application from Amazon Kuiper Services Europe for satellite connectivity in the UK....

Tackle longstanding issues around productivity, cyber resilience and public sector culture, advises spending watchdog The UK's government spending watchdog has called on the current administration to make better use of technology to kickstart the misfiring economy and ensure better delivery public services amid tightened budgets....

Also, Netgear fixes critical router, access point vulnerabilities Google has released its February Android security updates, including a fix for a high-severity kernel-level vulnerability, which is suspected to be in use by targeted exploits....

GPU giant could just wait eight minutes for Donald to change his mind US President Donald Trump loves his tariffs and it seems that not even a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang could persuade him to change course....

Who better to trust trillions of dollars, SSNs and other sensitive info with than Elon The chaos in Washington DC continued over the weekend and into Monday with government workers locked out of their offices and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) getting unfettered access to classified materials and a top government payment system....

As UK proposes laws against neural-nets-for-pedophiles Americans may have to think twice about downloading a Chinese AI model or investing in a company behind such a neural network in future. A law proposed last month by Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), if successfully passed by Congress, would impose penalties of up to 20 years in prison or $1 million in fines for violating its restrictions on AI-related trade and collaboration....

Senators ask, Homeland Security watchdog answers: Is it worth the money? The Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General has launched an audit of the Transportation Security Administration's use of facial recognition technology at US airports, following criticism from lawmakers and privacy advocates....

Meanwhile, the Internet Archive races to save what it can - again Vast numbers of webpages have disappeared from federal sites in an effort to meet the deadline to implement the Trump administration's executive orders targeting diversity initiatives and gender....

Canadian province 'won't do business with people hellbent on destroying our economy' Updated The provincial government in Ontario, Canada is hitting back at President Trump's 25 percent tariffs on the US' northern neighbor by scrapping a deal with Elon Musk's Starlink....

Throw Copilot down the same well, too, maybe? No? OK If you were relying on Microsoft's Defender VPN, it's time to find an alternative - Redmond is shutting it down at the end of the month....

A glimmer of light in an otherwise gloomy year for troubled chipmaker Beleaguered chip giant Intel has at least one thing to smile about after receiving a payout of 515.55 million ($536 million) from the EU in relation to an old antitrust case that it challenged....

Peter Tripp Akemann avoids jail, will pay 'Super Scooper' repair costs and is ordered to help with LA's wildfire recovery A Culver City, California resident has admitted to crashing his drone into a 'Super Scooper' firefighting aircraft battling the Los Angeles wildfires. His guilty plea spares him up to a year in prison, according to the Department of Justice....

Takes a bit more time to spout a bit less nonsense OpenAI today launched deep research in ChatGPT, a new agent that takes a little longer to perform a deeper dive into the web to come up with a response to a query....

Sci-fi interstellar travel gets another tiny push Centuries after Western explorers used sail power to discover a world hitherto unknown to them - although well known to people who already lived there - science fiction writers and engineers have wondered if space exploration might be similarly powered by lightsails....

Short-term result likely to be increased energy prices across the board Trump's tariffs are raising a new question mark over US datacenters and their expanding energy consumption, with price hikes possible as Canada threatens to withhold energy supplies in response....

You can't make monopoly money without a monopoly, but you sure can lose it Opinion It would take a heart of stone not to explode with joy at the massive infusion of schadenfreude provided in recent days by the DeepSeek AIpocalypse....

Fun with a FOSS-focused Phosh fondleslab FuriLabs offers a decent-spec smartphone that is based on Debian and can run GNOME apps in your pocket....

Investigating compensation to police whose sensitive info was leaked in 2023 The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has bailed two officers after they were arrested as part of a fraud investigation related to the payments to cops whose sensitive data was mistakenly published in 2023....

Profiteering from emergency services comms network in Britain? Not anymore, says CMA Motorola will not be allowed to again appeal a decision by the UK competition regulator to impose a price cap on the communications network it operates for Britain's emergency services....

Third-party software sticking plaster expected six months late Further delays have hit Birmingham City Council's disastrous attempt to implement a functioning finance system after it emerged that off-the-shelf software to solve "one of the fundamental problems" with the beleaguered Oracle implementation has been put back....

Auditor offers qualified opinion as financial fallout from historic miscarriage of justice remains unclear Updated The UK's spending watchdog has offered a "qualified opinion" on the Department for Business and Trade's accounts, largely down to uncertainties around a scheme designed to mitigate the historic injustice surrounding the Post Office Horizon IT scandal....

Hey! Teacher! Leave our network alone! Who, Me? At the start of working week, it can sometimes feel like you're just another brick in the wall and the next five days will require you to carry weight for others. To ease you into the mucky business of exchanging your labor for currency, The Register therefore uses each Monday to offer a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the column in which you admit to escaping your errors and emerging unscathed....