The Register

Microsoft veteran on breaking down numbers at the computer store Windows 95 will soon turn 30. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen recalled that when testing Microsoft's reimagining of Windows, an overflow was discovered that had nothing to do with the operating system itself....

Combining quantum entanglement with hash chains promises randomness which can be relied on Scientists in the US have built a system for creating truly random numbers which cannot be tampered with by a third party....

We take a quick look at the headline features - and the growing differences Rocky Linux 10 has caught up to the other high-profile RHELatives, but gaps between them are widening, both in tech and other ways....

Execs from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI join Detachment 201 Several of Silicon Valley's top techies are joining the Army Reserve as part of a newly created unit that will be trying to accelerate the use of AI in military planning and operations....

With Tehran's military weakened, digital retaliation likely, experts tell The Reg The current Israel-Iran military conflict is taking place in the era of hybrid war, where cyberattacks amplify and assist missiles and troops, and is being waged between two countries with very capable destructive cyber weapons....

But the five-satellite upstart has a short time window A messy legal fight between Ligado and Inmarsat over direct-to-cellular (D2C) spectrum has been settled, giving upstart AST a chance to gain ground on Starlink....

Some trace back to an outfit under US export controls for alleged PLA links Both Apple's and Google's online stores offer free virtual private network (VPN) apps owned by Chinese companies, according to researchers at the Tech Transparency Project, and they don't make this fact readily known to people downloading the apps....

Oracle's 80-year-old co-founder pulls off a $25 billion cloud day to leapfrog Zuck and Bezos into the No. 2 spot Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has reclaimed the No. 2 spot on Forbes's real-time billionaire list, trailing only Elon Musk after leapfrogging Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos....

Please insert another million dollars to continue Broader AI adoption by enterprise customers is being hindered by the complexity of trying to forecast inferencing costs amid a fear being saddled with excessive bills for cloud services....

Mark Zuckerberg reached out to our source directly Exclusive Meta has made lavish and lucrative offers to a select set of AI researchers in an effort to develop superintelligent AI....

Work on next gen already underway, while bandwidth needs for datacenters just keep rising The PCI Special Interest Group (PIC-SIG) just released official specs for PCIe 7.0, doubling the bandwidth again for high-performance kit such as network cards, while hinting that PCIe 8.0 may not achieve the same....

Zero-day potentially tied to around 100 suspected infections in 2025 and a spyware scandal on the continent Apple has updated its iOS/iPadOS 18.3.1 documentation, confirming it introduced fixes for the zero-click vulnerability used to infect journalists with Paragon's Graphite spyware....

Sales of HDDs to non-hyperscale outfits increasingly rare, say analysts Feature In early May, independent digital storage analyst Thomas Coughlin shared news of falling sales and revenue in the first quarter of 2025, continuing a trend that started in around 2010. Coughlin cites data from that year showing around 600 million annual hard disk shipments....

Infosec employers demanding too much from early-career recruits, says ISC2 Cybersecurity hiring managers need a reality check when it comes to hiring junior staff, with job adverts littered with unfair expectations that are hampering recruitment efforts, says industry training and cert issuer ISC2....

Superstitions stoked by blackout of iPortal centralized platform when no maintenance was scheduled Barclays Bank is wrestling with some digital gremlins affecting its corporate banking services this Friday the 13th of June - the final day of the working week for many of us, but perhaps not the poor techies beavering away to restore normal play....

Jutes revolt against Redmond: Minister for Digital Affairs aims the longboats away from Vinland Comment The boss of Denmark's Ministry for Digitalization says her department will move away from Microsoft - starting with LibreOffice....

Deal includes 'waiver of historic fees' UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023."...

More like FlAIme Of The Week Flame Of The Week It's been a while since our last Flame Of The Week, but it appears that AI is generating some strong feelings among our beloved readership....

It was one of the offenders' final warning Four staffers at the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) were let off with warnings over separate cases involving the transmission of regulator data to their personal email accounts....

Abusive manager had to be told there's no such thing as an atomic laptop On Call By Friday morning, Reg readers' batteries can sometimes be a little low, which is why we always use the day to offer a jolt of amusement in the form of On Call - the reader contributed column in which we celebrate the lows and lows of tech support....

STEP sucked up 220 million in 2022, and it's still not apparent what that accomplished The UK government has just allocated another 2.5 billion to an ambitious fusion energy project without any indication it's progressed much beyond the planning stages....

Alleges dirty PR campaign to slur its tech China's Yangtze Memory Technologies has accused rival chipmaker Micron of defamation through a campaign to publish nasty stories and reports about it....

Mattel-OpenAI deal paves the way for an AI beach-off Toy giant Mattel has signed a deal with OpenAI to bring the tech industry's buzziest technology to the very youngest generation....

Good news: The vendor patched the flaw in January. Bad news: Not everyone got the memo Ransomware criminals infected a utility billing software providers' customers, and in some cases disrupted services, after exploiting unpatched versions of SimpleHelp's remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool, according to a Thursday CISA alert....

Only while parked Apple is enabling video playback on its CarPlay automotive operating system and has integrated it into iOS 26, as long as you're parked....

Baby got Blackwell GPUs Google Cloud on Wednesday celebrated the debut of virtual machines incorporating Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPU technology, claiming to be the first cloud provider to sell this particular offering....

The DoD has ignored many past recommendations US government auditors have been trying to whip the Pentagon's IT programs into shape for half a decade, and the latest report suggests it continues to be an uphill battle....

Despite 'multiple enforcement actions,' Joy Timeline HK allegedly wouldn't stop Meta has sued an app maker for advertising on Facebook and Instagram a so-called "nudify" app that uses AI to generate nude and sexually explicit images and videos of individuals without their consent....

Big G said it was fixed, but acknowledged ongoing customer pain UPDATED Google Cloud went down hard on Thursday, and took Cloudflare and some of its customers with it....

Aircraft didn't even get its wheels up before sinking into suburban area A Boeing 787 flying from India to London's Gatwick airport has crashed, leaving one reported survivor among the 242 people aboard....

University collab underscores pivot to Asia amid unpredictable US policy TSMC has opened a joint research lab with the University of Tokyo in Japan, the company's first such collaboration with an academic institute outside of Taiwan, amid ongoing concerns over the Trump administration's attitude to foreign tech firms....

Who'd have thunk? The bigger the iron, the more efficient it gets With Moore's Law on its last legs and datacenter power consumption a growing concern, AMD is embarking on an ambitious new goal to boost the energy efficiency of its chips 20-fold before 2030. And it sees rack-scale architectures as a key design point to get there....

House of Zen's biggest iron yet boasts 72 MI400 GPUs, 260 TBps of UALink bandwidth, and 2.9 exaFLOPS of FP4 AMD offered its best look yet at the rack-scale architecture that'll underpin its MI400-series GPUs in 2026 at its Advancing AI event in San Jose on Thursday....

Another one bites the dust at America's top cybersecurity agency The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has lost another senior leader: executive director Bridget Bean departed on Wednesday....

Weather and propulsion system problems conspire to keep astronauts away from the ISS The Axiom-4 private astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has been held up by a liquid oxygen leak in the Falcon 9's first stage....

And the House of Zen wants to put 128 of them in your rack Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators have been on the market for just over six months, and AMD says it's already achieved performance parity with the launch of its MI350-series GPUs on Thursday....

New front-of-the-meter agreement avoids direct delivery snag that drew regulator pushback Amazon has amended its deal with Talen Energy to buy power for a Pennsylvania datacenter from an adjacent nuclear power plant after regulators raised their eyebrows at the original deal....

Distros align with GNOME 49's move to make Wayland the only supported session Like any other distro with GNOME 49, the next interim release of Ubuntu will be Wayland-only - at least in its GNOME variant....

DRIVE stack promises safer roads and smarter cars - eventually GTC Paris Nvidia has officially rolled out its autonomous vehicle (AV) software, despite telling a UK car mag that fully self-driving vehicles are not likely before the next decade....

Time to stop giving cold storage the cold shoulder Feature The future of archival data storage is tape, more tape, and then possibly glass-based tech, with DNA and other molecular tech still a distant prospect....

Competition Appeals Tribunal gives nod for claim to go to trial A billion-pound legal action against Google over Play Store fees can proceed to trial....

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Between a borrowing rock and a fiscal hard place, Labour chases efficiency In the UK's first multi-year Spending Review since 2021, the government has announced 10 billion ($14 billion) in NHS technology and digital transformation by 2028-29, an increase of nearly 50 percent on the current financial year....

And why supporting quantum computing is easier than supporting a 1MW rack Interview When the great and the good of the datacenter world got together in Cannes last week for Datacloud Global Congress, storage was barely mentioned, with shortages of GPUs, power and land the key talking points....

Incident responders suggested sweeping improvements following Active Directory database heist Exclusive Cybercriminals broke into systems belonging to the UK's NHS Professionals body in May 2024, stealing its Active Directory database, but the healthcare organization never publicly disclosed it, The Register can reveal....

A survey from AI biz Qodo finds robo-coding productivity gains are unevenly distributed Exclusive Software developers largely appreciate the productivity improvements they get from AI coding tools, but they don't entirely trust their output, according to a survey conducted by AI coding biz Qodo....

Government revives shelved project with fresh funding but scaled-back ambitions The UK government has disclosed plans for the country's most powerful supercomputer to be built in Edinburgh - less than a year after cancelling an identical plan....

UC San Diego hopes humans spend less time fighting fires, more time repelling 'exquisite' attacks from abroad that researchers accidentally invited Cisco Live Experienced IT professionals should share their experience so their employers can create digital twins and AI agents that do parts of their own jobs, to relieve them of repetitive work and after-hours troubleshooting chores....

Confusingly, the magnetic north and south poles are both down there, where the Solar Orbiter can see them Occupants of planet Earth can't see the Sun's poles - unless they look at images the Solar Orbiter spacecraft has just sent home....

Big Red hails growth from 'astronomical' and 'insatiable' demand for cloud and huge IaaS growth Oracle has surfed demand for cloud services to post revenues that beat its own forecast, fuelled by demand for non-AI cloud services....