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Former Microsoft engineer calls the Windows of today 'a tool that's a bit of an adversary' Comment Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has weighed in on why Microsoft moved from paid upgrades to Windows as a Service. As ever, the old adage applies - when the product is free, the product is probably you......

'Europe Stand Tall' campaign kicks off amid fear, uncertainty and doubt about Trump administration Danish consultancy Netcompany is the latest European business to warn of dependency on US technology as unpredictability in the White House continues to eat away at trust in the country overseas....

Bake in security now or pay later, says Mike Rogers AI engineers should take a lesson from the early days of cybersecurity and bake safety and security into their models during development, rather than trying to bolt it on after the fact, according to former NSA boss Mike Rogers....

Despite Horizon fallout, Japanese supplier continues to win public sector work Fujitsu has won a 125 million ($167 million) contract to build Northern Ireland's new land registry system, despite promising not to bid for UK public sector work in the wake of the Post Office Horizon scandal....

The CVE system nearly dying shows that someone has lost the plot Opinion We almost lost the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database system, but that's only the tip of the iceberg of what President Trump and company are doing to US cybersecurity efforts....

Because nobody wants a bazillion volts zorching critical infrastructure Japanese tech conglomerate NTT has created a drone that triggers lightning, is then struck by a heavenly bolt it instigated, and survives the experience - all in the name of preventing damage from natural lightning....

Ten billion bucks coming in for a soft landing, customers may be about to experience a bumpy ride Beleaguered aerospace giant Boeing has sold some of its Digital Aviation Solutions" portfolio to private equity outfit Thoma Bravo....

India and China deliver a nice milestone, with help from ancient internet history Asia has become the second region in the world to reach 50 percent IPv6 capability, according to data from labs run by the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC)....

Meanwhile, OpenAI expresses an interest in unbundling Chrome from Google Google has agreed to unbundle its Play Store and Android operating system in India, but only on smart TVs, and will also cough up a $2.4 million fine after being found to have breached competition law....

Detail? Rationale? Timeline? Nope! Maybe a struggling stock market and Beijing hinting about 'countermeasures' helped? World War Fee President Donald Trump on Tuesday said his administration plans to lower the 145 percent tariffs it levies on goods imported into America from China, continuing his pattern of unpredictable shifts in policy....

Not-so-beloved Tesla tycoon promises to 'significantly' reduce his scouring of Uncle Sam for contracts and staff to ax, data to peruse Government fixer Elon Musk says his days steering the Trump-blessed cost-trimming, data-scouring DOGE unit are all but done....

IT guy says their claims are toothless - and they owe him $400K A group of pediatric dental practices in North Carolina have accused a longtime contractor of refusing to return control of several web domains after his contract was terminated....

Uncle Sam says Chinese factories use proxies to dodge import taxes world war fee Solar panels made in a number of Southeast Asian countries face massive new import duties into America, some as steep as 3,521 percent, after a US Department of Commerce probe apparently found the countries were being used as tariff-dodging proxies for Chinese state-subsidized manufacturers....

Chrome will keep third-party cookies, a win for web giant's ad rivals After six years of work, Google's Privacy Sandbox, technology for delivering ads while protecting privacy, looks like dust in the wind....

As cyber-agency faces cuts, makes noises about switching up program Two top officials have resigned from Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, furthering fears of a brain drain amid White House cuts to the federal workforce....

In effect: 'Ha ha - the government is borked and so are you' Ransomware scumbags - potentially those behind the Fog gang - are channeling their inner Elon Musk with their latest ransom note, spotted by researchers at Trend Micro....

Security bods can earn up to $10K per report Ransomware threat hunters can now collect rewards of $10,000 for each piece of intel they file under a new bug bounty that aims to squash extortionists....

Retailer tight-lipped on details as digital hiccup disrupts customer orders UK high street mainstay Marks & Spencer told the London Stock Exchange this afternoon it has been managing a "cyber incident" for "the past few days."...

What used to be a serious issue mainly in Southeast Asia is now the world's problem Scam call centers are metastasizing worldwide "like a cancer," according to the United Nations, which warns the epidemic has reached a global inflection point as syndicates scale up and spread out....

Hyperscaler says there's no decrease in demand, it's just looking for good deals Amazon has joined Microsoft in pausing some datacenter leasing deals, sparking fresh concerns about whether the AI hype train may be running out of steam....

Plenty of tortillas onboard but not quite so much science this time SpaceX's latest cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) - CRS-32 - just docked to the orbiting outpost, bringing extra crew supplies, which resulted in the deferral of several science payloads....

Running GenAI models is easy. Scaling them to thousands of users, not so much Hands On You can spin up a chatbot with Llama.cpp or Ollama in minutes, but scaling large language models to handle real workloads - think multiple users, uptime guarantees, and not blowing your GPU budget - is a very different beast....

On a road trip with an AI by your side UK-based autonomous vehicle biz Wayve is continuing its global expansion by opening a testing and development center in Yokohama, Japan....

Can't run Windows 11? Don't want to? There are surprisingly legal options You will have to reinstall everything, but there is another way to escape the end of Windows 10 support in October - and it's cheaper than a new PC....

I was into Adversarial Noise before they were famous Opinion 6:56 PM. April 11, 2025. Write it down. That's the precise moment the tech-bro-niverse imploded due to the gravitational force of irony at its core. That was the moment Jack Dorsey posted "Delete all IP law" on X. A little later, Elon Musk added his approval with "I agree."...

PLUS: Malware developers adopt Node.js; US disinformation warriors disbanded; Gig worker accounts for sale; and more Infosec In Brief Email security outfit EasyDMARC recently spotted a phishing campaign that successfully spoofed Google with a sophisticated attack....

Which is one reason US regulators just sued the rideshare and delivery giant The USA's Federal Trade Commission on Monday launched a lawsuit against Uber, alleging the rideshare giant ripped off customers by enrolling them in its Uber One" membership scheme without permission, failing to deliver promised savings, and making it devilishly difficult to opt out....

Receiver warns of potential interferences' and appoints senior British lawyers to oversee candidate nomination process The African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) will hold elections on June 23rd, perhaps giving the regional internet registry the chance to convene a board for the first time in three years....

10 other certificates 'were mis-issued and have now been revoked' Certificate issuer SSL.com's domain validation system had an unfortunate bug that was exploited by miscreants to obtain, without authorization, digital certs for legit websites....

Sam says it's Son's money well spent Conventional wisdom holds that being polite to AI chatbots makes them respond better, but no one stops to think how much energy that politeness is wasting....

No one should be excluded - unless you have certain views on the Mid-East crisis In line with Trump administration directives, the US government's National Science Foundation has started canceling grants for studies into workplace diversity and the spread of misinformation....

Erlang? Er, man, no problem. ChatGPT, Claude to go from flaw disclosure to actual attack code in hours The time from vulnerability disclosure to proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code can now be as short as a few hours, thanks to generative AI models....

Only Peter Thiel-backed biz can pull off $30M IT deal, apparently US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an urgent need for a new software system to help implement the Trump administration's deportation plans, and it's turning to longtime ICE supplier Palantir for a rush build job....

It's now hitting govt, enterprise targets On March 11 - Patch Tuesday - Microsoft rolled out its usual buffet of bug fixes. Just eight days later, miscreants had weaponized one of the vulnerabilities, using it against government and private sector targets in Poland and Romania....

Wrangling your data into LLMs just got easier, though it's not all sunshine and rainbows Hands On Getting large language models to actually do something useful usually means wiring them up to external data, tools, or APIs. The trouble is, there's no standard way to do that - yet....

Fiddling with the production database - what could possibly go wrong? Who, Me? Monday mornings are a nasty time of week that can be redeemed by two things: bantering about weekend sporting results, and reading another edition of "Who, Me?" - The Register's weekly column that shares your stories of dropping the ball at work but somehow recovering for at least an honorable draw....

On top of that, Trump's increased federal spending almost completely negates $150B in cuts Comment Elon Musk's Trump-blessed DOGE unit has made a lot of noise and a lot of headlines for its heavy-handed hatchet tactics within supposedly bloated governmental organizations....

When it comes to sales and rebates, PC giant takes 'Keep Reinventing' seriously HP Inc has agreed to pay $4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in the US that alleged it used deceptive pricing tactics on its website, including fake discounts and misleading limited-time offers....

AI-spoofed Mark joins fellow billionaires as the voice of the street - here's how it was probably done Video Crosswalk buttons in various US cities were hijacked over the past week or so to - rather than robotically tell people it's safe to walk or wait - instead emit the AI-spoofed voices of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg....

Oh. You expected serious suggestions? It isn't just devices unable to upgrade to Windows 11 that are headed to digital landfill this year. The first version of Microsoft's Surface Hub is also destined for the tech trashcan as Windows 10 support ends. So, what do you do with a big black wall ornament?...

Just us or is AI increasingly appearing like an unwanted party guest? Microsoft customers are claiming the Windows giant's Copilot AI service sometimes ignores commands to disable the thing, and thus turns itself back on like a zombie risen from the dead....

Making up subscription limits as it goes? Super encouraging from a code assistant. Anyways, back to int main(enter the void)... In a fitting bit of irony, users of Cursor AI experienced the limitations of AI firsthand when the programming tool's own AI support bot hallucinated a policy limitation that doesn't actually exist....

Using LLMs to pick programs, people, contracts to cut is bad enough - but doing it with Musk's Grok? Yikes A group of 48 House Democrats is concerned that Elon Musk's cost-trimmers at DOGE are being careless in their use of AI to help figure out where to slash, creating security risks and giving the oligarch's artificial intelligence lab an inside track to train its models on government info....

Some in the infosec world definitely want to see Big Red crucified CISA - the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency - has issued an alert for those who missed Oracle grudgingly admitting some customer data was stolen from the database giant's public cloud infrastructure....

MITRE, EUVD, GCVE ... WTF? Comment The splintering of the global system for identifying and tracking security bugs in technology products has begun....

Lad who 'stays in his bedroom on his computer' emerged ready to deliver brilliant tech support On Call It may be a holiday Friday in much of the Reg-reading world but that won't stop us from delivering another installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales....

'Return to client' push coincides with RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge Exclusive IBM, which employees wryly or ruefully say stands for I've Been Moved, is once again moving its employees....

After battle with Uncle Sam over online competition, web giant vows to appeal the bit it lost, celebrates the half it won For the second time in less than a year, a federal judge has found that some parts of Google broke US antitrust law....

Illegitimi non carborundum? Nice password, Mr Ex-CISA Chris Krebs, the former head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and a longtime Trump target, has resigned from SentinelOne following a recent executive order that targeted him and revoked the security clearances of everybody at the company....

As Huang jets to Middle Kingdom after H20 ban forces $5.5B hit Nvidia's troubles with the US government have just begun: The day after the Trump administration's export restrictions on its AI chips triggered a $5.5 billion charge, US elected officials are now demanding answers about how advanced silicon ended up in China.Meanwhile, CEO Jensen Huang has flown to China to try and smooth things over with the regime there....