The Register

Microsoft-backed startup now valued at $5.4B Fusion energy startup Helion has yet to prove it can generate electricity, but that hasn't stopped investors from dumping another $425 million into the venture....

Unions fear federal staff purge and RTO will spark chaos for Americans More than two million US federal civilian employees have been invited to resign as of September 30, 2025, with incentives promised for those who agree to quit by February 6, 2025....

'Research and various other reasons' behind hullabaloo - but why didn't someone say that a month ago? Time to pack it up and go home, drone conspiracy theorists: The White House has finally offered an explanation for those mysterious New Jersey drone sightings from late last year - though its rather vague statement raises more questions than it answers....

Not bad for 30 lines of code Hardware keeps getting faster, but it's still worth taking a step back periodically and revisiting your code. You might just uncover a little tweak that wrings out more efficiency or extra throughput than you'd expect....

Exploding market led to $73B in M&A activity in 2024 Updated figures from Synergy Research Group show the datacenter market was even hotter last year than thought, with mergers and acquisitions (M&A) topping $73 billion in value and showing no sign of slowing down....

US civil sector boldly goes where Concorde has gone before The US civilian aviation sector has achieved what Concorde managed half a century ago - piloted supersonic flight in a domestically built jet....

Blue Screen of Death becomes the Blue Triangle of Doom for your wrist Garmin has experienced its very own CrowdStrike incident after owners of the company's smartwatches complained the faces were showing a blue triangle of death following a seemingly faulty update....

And now you won't stop calling me, I'm kinda busy A new variant of the Mirai-based malware Aquabot is actively exploiting a vulnerability in Mitel phones to build a remote-controlled botnet, according to Akamai's Security Intelligence and Response Team....

SpaceX was already planning to return 'virtually abandoned' astros. Did Elon forget? An early morning post by US President Donald Trump caused some furrowed brows in the space community after he instructed Elon Musk to "go get" the crew of Boeing's Starliner, who are currently enjoying an unexpected stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS)....

Fallout continues from per-employee licensing shift in 2023, survey finds Only around one in ten Oracle Java customers are likely to stick around following costly licensing changes Big Red made to its development and runtime environments in January 2023, according to research....

Netherlands biz riding AI boom, though China crackdown looms Dutch tech giant ASML is buoyed up by a wave of new orders during Q4 2024, and expects its business in China to return to a more normal level after a period of high revenue. However, there is uncertainty over whether the Trump administration may try to further restrict its sales there....

Mastermind begs colluders to bury evidence later used to imprison him In announcing the sentencing of three Brits who ran OTP Agency, an account-takeover business, the National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed how a 2021 report sent the fraudsters into a panicked frenzy....

What falls down and doesn't get back up? Full fiber broadband in Glasgow UK broadband provider Hyperoptic has taken a long weekend, leaving some customers disconnected after the company's systems went down following a storm....

Auditors find solution design 'was not fully resolved' when it went live in 2022 An Oracle-based ERP system used by Europe's largest local authority is still not "safe and compliant" two-and-a-half years after it went live and has "effectively crippled the council's ability to manage and report on finances," according to external auditors....

If you need legacy drivers, you might want to keep your older OS version - possibly indefinitely The Reg FOSS desk spent some quality time downgrading Ubuntu to restore graphics acceleration. How and why would we do this?...

Development dashboard destined for ditching Microsoft is killing off its unloved Dev Home control center after the app spent less than two years in preview....

But where are the comprehensive archives to protect digital works, or allow us to memorialize friends? Column When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life's work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters....

Think government cybersecurity is bad? Guess again. It's alarmingly so The UK government is significantly behind on its 2022 target to harden systems against cyberattacks by 2025, with a new report from the spending watchdog suggesting it may not achieve this goal even by 2030....

Slew of embarrassing answers sends open source chatterbox back for more schooling As China demonstrates how competitive open source AI models can be via the latest DeepSeek release, France has shown the opposite....

Lawsuit challenges effort to create federal-wide centralized inbox expected to be used for mass firings Two anonymous US government employees have sued Uncle Sam's HR department - the Office of Personnel Management - claiming the Trump administration's rapid roll out of a new federal email system broke the law....

It's another cousin of Spectre, here to read your email, browsing history, and more Many recent Apple laptops, desktops, tablets, and phones powered by Cupertino's homegrown Silicon processors can be exploited to reveal email content, browsing behavior, and other sensitive data through two newly identified side-channel attacks on Chrome and Safari....

Big-game hunting to the extreme Hellcat, the ransomware crew that infected Schneider Electric and demanded $125,000 in baguettes, has aggressively targeted government, education, energy, and other critical industries since it emerged around mid-2024....

From AI startup CISO to running federal IT - sure, why not? The US has a new federal chief information officer who, based on his resume, has no prior experience as a CIO but is now tasked with overseeing IT operations and strategy for the entire federal government....

Pay no attention to the DeepSeek behind the headlines OpenAI has announced ChatGPT Gov, a variant of the Enterprise version of the product specifically tailored for use by the US government....

No wonder OpenAI needs $500B for Stargate Americans could soon see the price of electronics skyrocket in response to a 25-100 percent import tariff on computer chips promised by US President Donald Trump on Monday....

With all the AI hype swirling around, you'd think someone would've cracked this one already Tracking down and preventing money laundering is a slow, time-consuming, manual procedure. DARPA is hoping it can provide some relief for exhausted analysts by automating the process....

Nvidia says its chips are still needed, OpenAI says it'll keep buying them en masse, but shares are still down US tech shares, rattled yesterday by the release of a supposedly more efficient AI model by Chinese outfit DeepSeek, appear to have staunched the bleeding, but not recovered....

Official is official Among the flurry of executive orders expelled from Donald J Trump following his inauguration as US President last week, one of the more impotent was "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness."...

Qualifying orgs may get 2033 extension, just don't call it a U-turn SAP has confirmed that it will extend support for legacy systems beyond its previously stated deadlines for customers who have already signed up for a specific ERP cloud transition deal....

Brit monopoly plod files report on health of local sector, says technical barriers and Redmond's licensing practices hurting smaller rivals + customers The UK's market regulator says "competition is not working as well as it could" in the local cloud services sector, and it plans to look harder at what AWS and Microsoft are doing - while giving Google a pass - in its Cloud Services Investigation....

In Redmond, no one can hear the audiophiles scream The list of known issues in the Windows January 14 update continues to grow with USB audio device users the latest to be hit....

Data leak, shmata leak. It will all work out, right? IT and security pros say they are more confident in their ability to manage ransomware attacks after nearly nine in ten (88 percent) were forced to contain efforts by criminals to breach their defenses in the past year....

Prisoners of ware can't escape by looking at each other. Form a committee, soldiers Opinion With Broadcom putting the bite on VMware customers with more abandon than Dracula in a blood bank, one has to wonder. Why hang around? Why better bled than fled?...

Popular community site became unmentionable - the irony is thick enough to compile Facebook has lifted a temporary ban preventing users from posting links to popular OS comparison site Distrowatch - after going so far as to lock the account of the site's editor....

O-ring erosion on Discovery would have disastrous effects a year later It has been 40 years since NASA launched the first dedicated Department of Defense Space Shuttle mission, after which engineers spotted O-ring seal defficiencies that would doom Challenger a year later....

If you want a desktop that's secure and reliable, forget about Microsoft Opinion Come October 14, 2025, Windows 10 support dies. Despite that, more users than ever are using Windows 10 rather than moving to Windows 11....

Tech and commercial functions need to get in shape for the challenges ahead It's a line Brits love to quote: "You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me, it's a full-time job. Now, behave yourself." Michael Caine's iconic dialogue as the Get Carter protagonist sums up how tech companies see the government: big, in bad shape, and here to do what they say....

An elder returns, for those still seeking it Enlightenment is one of the granddaddies of Linux desktops, and after a couple of years, the project has a shiny new release....

Cupertino kicks off the year with a zero-day Apple has plugged a security hole in the software at the heart of its iPhones, iPads, Vision Pro goggles, Apple TVs andmacOS Sequoia Macs, warning some miscreants have already exploited the bug....

Police relied on unreliable tech for search warrant, omitted details ... so judge has disallowed evidence A murder case in Cleveland, Ohio, could collapse because the city's police relied on AI-based facial recognition software to obtain a search warrant....

Crouching tiger, hidden layer(s) Barely a week after DeepSeek's R1 LLM turned Silicon Valley on its head, the Chinese outfit is back with a new release it claims is ready to challenge OpenAI's DALL-E 3....

Despite impressive benchmarks, the Chinese-made LLM is not without some interesting issues DeepSeek's open source reasoning-capable R1 LLM family boasts impressive benchmark scores - but its erratic responses raise more questions about how these models were trained and what information has been censored....

Uncle Sam will 'no longer blindly dole out money,' State Dept says US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has frozen nearly all foreign aid cash for a full-on government review, including funds to defend America's allies from cyberattacks as well as steer international computer security policies....

Maxwell, Pascal and Volta, oh my! But fear not, driver support is still safe The end of the road is nearing for a range of aging Nvidia graphics cards, as support for several architectures was marked as feature-complete in the latest release of its CUDA runtime this month....

VC Summer units 2 and 3, abandoned in 2017, are looking for a buyer; owners say tech industry needs are a perfect fit Abandoned in 2017, a pair of incomplete South Carolina nuclear reactors may get a new lease on life due to the growing need to power AI datacenters....

We're not in Kansas anymore Microsoft has launched a document database platform constructed on a relational PostgreSQL back end....

Chinese AI startup grapples with consequences of sudden popularity Updated China's DeepSeek, which shook up American AI makers with the debut of its V3 and reasoning-capable R1 LLM families, has limited new signups to its web-based interface to its models due to what's said to be an ongoing cyberattack....

Latest trope is tricky enough to fool even the technical crowd... almost Google says it's now hardening defenses against a sophisticated account takeover scam documented by a programmer last week....

Advocates also cut as company focuses on 'priorities of our key customers' Citrix is winding up its Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) program, a move described as "a short-sighted decision that reflects a lack of vision for the future."...

Boxes stuck in boot loops and various other malfunctions Zyxel customers are dealing with a range of issues including reboot loops after an update on Friday went awry....