The Register

Neural net devs are finally getting serious about efficiency Feature If you've been following AI development over the past few years, one trend has remained constant: bigger models are usually smarter, but also harder to run....

Chinese manufacturers are advertising how they dodge tariffs, and tech leaders know they're in a new world Computex Every time I attend Taiwan's Computex exhibition I'm bewildered by the dozens of vendors selling unremarkable keyboards and mice....

But it's still going to come in through the back door Comment As AI pilots within enterprises increasingly flame out, OpenAI is making a pivot to consumers, suggesting AI is more likely to sneak into the enterprise through users than walk in through the front door. But IT departments will still have to deal with it once it arrives....

Michael Daniel also thinks Uncle Sam should increase help to orgs hit by ransomware INTERVIEW Uncle Sam's cybersecurity apparatus can't only focus on China and other nation-state actors, but also has to fight the much bigger damage from plain old cybercrime, says former White House advisor Michael Daniel. And the Trump administration's steep cuts to federal government staff are making that a lot harder....

The original leak site that never sold out, never surrendered Obituary John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know....

Computing pioneer's personal papers expected to fetch tens of thousands Precious scientific papers once belonging to wartime codebreaking genius Alan Turing - rescued from an attic clear-out where they faced destruction - are set to fetch a fortune at auction next month....

SQL Server and Cosmos DB added to data lake platform as lure for building AI features into transactional systems Microsoft is throwing more transactional database systems into its Fabric analytics and data lake environment in expectation the proximity will help users that are adding AI to their systems....

Bank accounts, personal details all hoovered up in the attack Nova Scotia Power on Friday confirmed it had been hit by a ransomware attack that began earlier this spring and disrupted certain IT systems, and admitted the crooks leaked data belonging to about 280,000 customers online. The stolen info may have included billing details and, for those on autopay, bank account numbers....

Fastly acquisition asks that redirects be set up before December 31 Three years after confirming its acquisition by Fastly, Glitch is pulling the plug on its app hosting platform....

Cyberbaddies are coming for your M365 creds, US infosec agency warns The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that SaaS companies are under fire from criminals on the prowl for cloud apps with weak security....

A simple text editor that dates back to Windows 1.0 is getting smartified Microsoft has continued to shovel AI into its built-in Windows inbox apps, and now it's rolling out a Notepad update that will use Copilot to write text for you....

The coffee shows no signs of cooling Feature It was 30 years ago when the first public release of the Java programming language introduced the world to Write Once, Run Anywhere - and showed devs something cuddlier than C and C++....

From bit barn to algae farm? Euro datacenter operator Data4 is trialling a project to reuse heat from its servers and captured carbon dioxide to grow algae that can then be used in the agri-food or pharmacology sectors....

Aircraft Hazard Area now stretches 1,600 nautical miles Updated The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch Starship Flight 9, but has nearly doubled the size of the vehicle's Aircraft Hazard Area (AHA)....

AI-optimized CPUs promise 4.6GHz clocks, at least for one in eight cores Computex When Nvidia first teased its Arm-based Grace CPU back in 2021, many saw it as a threat to Intel and AMD. Four years later, the Arm-based silicon is at the heart of the GPU giant's most powerful AI systems, but it has not yet replaced x86 entirely....

Worries about uncertainty, even as AI pushes revenue and profit higher Chinese hardware giant Lenovo thought it had prepared for a trade war, but its plan proved insufficient once the US started to rapidly change its tax policies in imported goods....

It's not radical, but it is slim and pretty - usually a winning combination AnduinOS, a one-man project from a Chinese Microsoft engineer, is quite a new Ubuntu remix that reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11....

Care board defers decision to adopt national system Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board (ICB) has decided not to adopt a national data platform - prescribed by the UK government and run by Palantir - until it has more evidence of the benefits and risks....

Callous fraudster tricked elderly gents into smuggling meth hidden in chocolate truffles A ruthless cyber conman who duped elderly pensioners - including an 80-year-old man - into smuggling deadly class A drugs was this week locked up....

Annoyed at poor or missing salary increase offer as Brit telco pays out dividend BT is facing a revolt over pay from its line managers, with unions complaining today about the telco giant dishing out increased dividends to shareholders from its fiscal 2025 earnings....

For once, the IT department was rewarded for finding the fix, and the perfect-if-unexpected fixer On Call Welcome to a fresh instalment of On-Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which you share your tales of tech support triumph, and we try to retell them in an amusing fashion....

Says it will serve half of humanity but testing that claim produced a hilarious ChatGPT fail Stargate, the Open AI led consortium that aims to build giant AI datacenters, has picked the United Arab Emirates as its first non-US destination....

Consumer affairs Minister is not happy with Uber for following local players with this scheme to encourage rapid pickups India's consumer affairs minister has criticized Uber for adding a feature that allows users to tip their driver before a trip as an incentive to take a job....

And the associated fraud'n'spy botnet is about to be shut down The US Department of Justice has unsealed indictments against 16 people accused of spreading and using the DanaBot remote-control malware that infected more than 300,000 computers, plus operating a botnet of the same name, and appears set to shutter its operations....

If it ain't broke? A suspected Chinese government spy group is behind the rash of attacks that exploit two Ivanti bugs that can be chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE), according to analysts at threat intelligence outfit EclecticIQ....

Blackmailed teen allegedly scared into carving his handle onto her arm The FBI has filed an affidavit detailing how it identified a US Navy man who was allegedly distributing child sex abuse material (CSAM) through Discord....

Agents thought they shut this all down in 2023, but the duck quacked again Uncle Sam on Thursday unsealed criminal charges and a civil forfeiture case against a Russian national accused of leading the cybercrime ring behind Qakbot, the notorious malware that infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and helped fuel ransomware attacks costing victims tens of millions of dollars....

Open the pod bay door Anthropic on Thursday announced the availability of Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, the latest iteration of its Claude family of machine learning models....

Budget slashing has 'outsized impact' on us, says commander who fears branch not ready for orbital war The US Space Force has been struggling to achieve its technological goals, and Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman told senators this week that civilian layoffs and budget cuts aren't helping matters at all....

Intrusions began weeks before Trimble patched the Cityworks hole A suspected Chinese crew has been exploiting a now-patched remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Trimble Cityworks to break into US local government networks and target utility management systems, according to Cisco's Talos threat intelligence group....

Data sovereignty fears fuel pitch to hyperscalers Investment biz Bain Capital is getting further into the datacenter sector with the launch of an operation serving hyperscalers in Europe, potentially positioning itself to benefit from customer unease over US hyperscalers....

Vendor's AI-infused pitch at Sapphire marred by backlash over support costs News that SAP users face a 30-50 percent premium to get some cloud products - including core ERP - to industry-standard service levels threatens to overshadow the German vendor's annual conference as new pricing models, performance, and partner arrangements dominate the conversation....

Case in Germany could derail Zuck's plans, noyb tells El Reg fight isn't over The Irish Data Protection Commission has cleared the way for Meta to begin slurping up the data of European citizens for training AI next week, ongoing legal challenges notwithstanding....

4-year trial is second major initiative this year that clamps down on 'illegal immigrants' Foreigners in Moscow will now be subject to a new experimental law that affords the state enhanced tracking mechanisms via a smartphone app....

A media-ready remix with KDE, codecs, and clutter from its BeOS-flavored past Neptune is a moderately tweaked Debian remix with KDE Plasma 5, a few alternative app choices, and a longer history than we anticipated....

Chat app blocks Windows' screenshot-happy feature from peeking at private convos Chat app biz Signal is unhappy with the current version of Microsoft Recall and has invoked some Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality in Windows to stop the tool from snapshotting private conversations....

Claude passed 80% of tasks assigned in a recent study Freelance coders take solace: while AI models can perform a lot of the real-world coding tasks that companies contract out, they do so less effectively than a human....

Barriers stack up: Datacenter capacity, egress fees, platform skills, variety of cloud services. It won't happen, say analysts European organizations wanting to break free of American cloud operators may find their hopes dashed, according to industry analysts, for a number of reasons including a sheer lack of datacenter capacity....

And other ways to get that Amiga feeling on a budget The FOSS recreation of AmigaOS is making progress. A new edition runs entirely from a USB key, so you can temporarily turn your PC into an Amiga - without any tricky installation process....

Parents and teachers have personal info, ID documents leaked online, but exam season mostly unaffected Scotland's West Lothian Council has confirmed that data was stolen from its education network after the Interlock ransomware group claimed responsibility for the intrusion earlier this month....

Report slates end of perpetual licenses, death of monthly pay-as-you-go model, and 'punitive' changes by Broadcom Broadcom has upped VMware licensing costs by between eight to 15 times since it took over the organization, and a lack of alternatives in the tech industry means trade and end customers have no choice but to play ball....

Names spies, web hosts, GPS jammers, fishing (not phishing) biz The European Union has sanctioned Russia-linked entities it says jammed GPS signals, sabotaged undersea cables, and ran a web hosting business that aided "information manipulation interference and cyber-attacks."...

Don't panic! It's related to an earthly bug, eats gelatin, not astronauts, and may have adapted to life in space Chinse scientists have found a previously unknown species of microbe on the nation's Tiangong space station, and it may have evolved characteristics that help it to survive in space....

Cable Labs predicts two percent packet loss and 10ms latency in some buildings unless more spectrum freed Rapid growth in Wi-Fi use means the 6 GHZ band's carrying capacity may soon be exhausted, according to CableLabs, the nonprofit networking think tank run by cable television operators....

The agentic era may not be all that it's cracked up to be google i/o At Google I/O this week, the Chocolate Factory argued for its AI supremacy, making the case with benchmark-topping machine learning models, developer tools, and a few promising products....

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mo failed to alert lawmakers about surveillance, senator says AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile US failed to set up systems to notify lawmakers when government snoops came calling for their phone records - a contractual obligation that went ignored until recently, according to US Senator Ron Wyden....

The 19-year-old and a partner first tried to extort an unnamed telco, but failed A 19-year-old student has agreed to plead guilty to hacking into the systems of two companies as part of an extortion scheme, and The Register has learned that one of the targets was PowerSchool....

LLM trained on decades of weather data claimed to be faster, and cheaper Scientists have developed a machine learning model that can outperform official agencies at predicting tropical cyclone tracks, and do it faster and cheaper than traditional physics-based systems....

Chocolate Factory comes for Meta's Ray-Bans with Warby Parker pact Google I/O Google and eyeglass maker Warby Parker have partnered to create a more stylish successor to Google Glass, which cofounder Sergey Brin quipped will actually be polished before launch this time....

And it gets even harder when you try to estimate CO2 emissions A single person with a serious AI habit may chew through enough electricity each day to keep a microwave running for more than three hours. And the actual toll may even be worse, as so many companies keep details about their AI models secret....