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AI agents build something that mostly works but worries the project's creator An Anthropic researcher's efforts to get its newly released Opus 4.6 model to build a C compiler left him "excited," "concerned," and "uneasy."...

Latest evidence that the world has gone mad If you're running an online business, it helps to own a memorable domain. That's why a wealthy tech exec just paid $70 million to buy the hottest word you can own: AI.com....

Still supported with no death date set, but no new features planned Salesforce has decided to stop developing new features for its Heroku platform-as-a-service....

Co-founder Aneel Bhusri returns to top job after turbulent year Carl Eschenbach has stepped down as Workday CEO and been replaced by co-founder and executive Aneel Bhusri following a round of job cuts and share price volatility....

Staff data belonging to the regulator and judiciary's governing body accessed The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) says it was one of the many organizations popped when attackers raced to exploit recent Ivanti vulnerabilities as zero-days....

West US datacenter incident disrupted Microsoft Store and system patching for several hours Microsoft suffered a service disruption over the weekend after a power incident at an Azure datacenter in the West US region affected Windows Update....

FAA signs off on rocket's return and CEO floats ambitious lunar settlement plan SpaceX resumed launching Falcon 9 rockets this weekend after last week's second stage incident. At the same time, CEO Elon Musk claimed that the company has shifted its focus from Mars to "building a self-growing city on the Moon" within a decade....

Gartner predicts strong uptake driven by concerns over reliance on foreign providers European spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure services is forecast to more than triple from 2025 to 2027 as geopolitical tension drives investment in homegrown services, according to Gartner....

Moving 40% of semiconductor production to America is 'impossible' says vice premier Taiwan's vice-premier has ruled out relocating 40 percent of the country's semiconductor production to the US, calling the Trump administration's goal "impossible."...

Euro watchdog says Zuckercorp blocked rival assistants, weighs emergency action to force 'em back in Brussels has accused Meta of breaking EU competition rules by locking rival AI chatbots out of WhatsApp, opening the door to emergency action that could force the tech giant to let competitors back onto the platform....

Security devs forced to hide Boolean logic from overeager optimizer FOSDEM 2026 The creators of security software have encountered an unlikely foe in their attempts to protect us: modern compilers....

Average Swiss salaries dwarf those on offer across the rest of the continent European techies looking for the biggest payday are far better off in Switzerland than anywhere else, with average salaries eclipsing all other countries on the continent....

UK's pay-to-watch license fee gets inflation-linked hike amid funding debate Brits will soon pay more to legally watch the BBC's output than to subscribe to some of the world's biggest streaming services, after the UK government confirmed the TV license fee will climb to 180 a year from April....

Officials explore issue affecting infrastructure after CERT-EU detected suspicious activity Brussels is digging into a cyber break-in that targeted the European Commission's mobile device management systems, potentially giving intruders a peek inside the official phones carried by EU staff....

One-to-one and group messaging, encrypted VoIP calls, video conferencing - the open protocol handles them all FOSDEM 2026 Amid growing interest in digital sovereignty and getting data out of the corporate cloud and into organizations' ownership, the Matrix open communication protocol is thriving....

Sudo make me a star Opinion Thirty years is a big ol' chunk of anyone's life. It can take you from new parent to new grandparent, from bright young thing to mid-life crisis, and from shaver to graybeard. In the case of Todd C Miller, one thing hasn't changed. He's been the sole maintainer of the Linux sudo utility. He's not giving up just yet, but he needs help and no help has come....

You can fix all sorts of things with a paperclip, but not gullibility Who, Me? You can fool some of the people some of the time, but The Register tries to entertain all of its readers most of the time and especially early on Monday mornings, when we present a new installment of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace mayhem and mischief....

Upgraders and home lab builders flaunt their memory-inflated wealth The rising price of memory has produced an interesting phenomenon: technologists wondering if the memory they have installed in home labs, or bottom drawers, might make them rich....

PLUS: China broadens cryptocurrency crackdown; Australian facial recognition privacy revisited; Singapore debuts electric VTOL; and more! Asia In Brief The Commissioner of Police in the Indian city of Hyderabad, population 11 million, has called for AI agents to be issued with identity cards - or at least their digital equivalent....

But first, kernel 6.19 is upon us, with many goodies Penguin emperor Linus Torvalds has announced the next version of the Linux kernel will be version 7.0, a matter of some small interest, because it continues his convention of not using version numbers he can't count on his fingers and toes, and perhaps cements a numbering convention that sees kernel series end with version 19....

PLUS: OpenClaw teams with VirusTotal; Crypto kidnappings in France; Critical vulns at SmarterMail; And more Infosec In Brief So-hot-right-now AI assistant OpenClaw, which is very much not secure right now, has teamed up with security scanning service VirusTotal....

Meet llama3pure, a set of dependency-free inference engines for C, Node.js, and JavaScript Developers looking to gain a better understanding of machine learning inference on local hardware can fire up a new llama engine....

After decades in the trenches, this engineer is done with hype cycles Opinion The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits....

Researchers claim model can cut years from testing cycles Scientists have developed a machine learning method that could dramatically slash the cost and energy required to develop new lithium-ion batteries that the modern world is becoming increasingly reliant....

AI pioneer Vishal Sikka warns to never trust an LLM that runs alone interview Don't trust; verify. According to AI researcher Vishal Sikka, LLMs alone are limited by computational boundaries and will start to hallucinate when they push those boundaries. One solution? Companion bots that check their work....

Research shows productivity and judgment peak decades after graduation A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees....

Half a million businesses face successive price hikes ahead of PTSN shutdown Openreach is warning British businesses that the old phone network shuts down in less than a year, with half a million commercial lines still unmigrated....

Marketing stunt backfires with creators The first rule of AI-generated job loss is you don't talk about AI-generated job loss ... if you're the company that caused it. Higgsfield.ai, a startup offering AI video creation tools, recently generated outrage when it claimed it had caused artists to hit the unemployment line....

There's about $35M up for grabs if your circuits can beat today's limits It's no lightweight matter. DARPA is putting about $35 million in total funding on the table in the hope that it will spur researchers to work around fundamental physical constraints and build much larger-scale photonic circuits that do more of the computing with light, not electronics....

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft eye $635B in infrastructure spend Four tech megacorps intend to collectively fork out roughly $635 billion this year on capex, much of it for datacenters and AI infrastructure - more than the entire output of Israel's economy and well beyond all global cloud infrastructure services revenue generated last year....

Attackers may have snapped user locations and activity information, message warns Legacy image-sharing website Flickr suffered a data breach, according to customers emails seen by The Register....

UK leaps to sixth in global flood charts as mega-swarm unleashes 31.4 Tbps Yuletide pummeling Cloudflare says DDoS crews ended 2025 by pushing traffic floods to new extremes, while Britain made an unwelcome leap of 36 places to become the world's sixth-most targeted location....

Rhapsody in beige An enterprising engineer has evoked the spirit of Acorn's BBC Micro with a custom paintjob for a Raspberry Pi 500+ computer-in-a-keyboard and a natty set of replacement keycaps....

System worked as intended, but staff then kicked out innocent bystander A British supermarket says staff will undergo further training after a store manager ejected the wrong man when facial recognition technology triggered an alert....

Windows giant might try turning it off and on again to see who notices Microsoft has laid out a timeline for the disablement and shutdown of Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online....

A year to replace end-of-support firewalls, routers, and VPN gateways America's federal agencies have been told to hunt down and rip out aging firewalls, routers, and other network gatekeepers before attackers use them as skeleton keys into government systems....

Corruption probe takes detour as staff facing trial reportedly asked AI if seat-blocking scams caused financial damage More than 30 Romanian railway employees accused of running a bribery and ticket resale racket allegedly tried to crowdsource their legal strategy from ChatGPT....

Crew-12 and Artemis II astros may soon snap, shoot, and share from orbit NASA's Administrator has stated that smartphones will accompany the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts on their missions....

Benefits system trials automation amid growing interest in universal basic income AI-pocalypse Britain's welfare system is experimenting with AI to manage Universal Credit claimants - even as evidence piles up that artificial intelligence may soon be pushing more people onto benefits in the first place....

West Sussex plans to triple use of property sales as ERP budget blows past original estimates In a budget-busting leap from SAP to Oracle, West Sussex County Council is trebling its raid on capital assets such as buildings to fund its "transformational" ERP project....

Supermarket printer error gets holiday off to a shabby start BORK!BORK!BORK! When this vulture excuses himself from The Register's Australian eyrie for a little rest and recreation, I first avoid pyromaniac birds and carnivorous koalas, before settling into a bucolic beach town to catch a few waves, read a few books, and tune out from the world of tech....

Poking around in deep menus found a fault that flummoxed old hands On Call Change is a constant - and so is On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs every Friday to share your tech support tales....

Government decides theoretical knowledge vs. experience debate is worth settling Pakistan's Higher Education Commission (HEC) has introduced a competency test for students who take degrees in IT, to assess whether they emerge with skills employers will find useful....

CEO feels under-appreciated amid year-long value slump Atlassian has assured investors it can add AI to its services without blowing out its costs or shrinking margins....

'As fast as we install this AI capacity, we are monetizing it,' says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy AWS has an open cash spigot for AI infrastructure, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy telling investors the company has been monetizing compute capacity as fast as it brings it online and it plans to double capacity by the end of 2027....

The end isn't nigh after all Chrome's latest revision of its browser extension architecture, known as Manifest v3 (MV3), was widely expected to make content blocking and privacy extensions less effective than its predecessor, Manifest v2 (MV2)....

Skills marketplace is full of stuff - like API keys and credit card numbers - that crims will find tasty Another day, another vulnerability (or two, or 200) in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw....

IPO, we're halfway there: AI, livin' on a prayer OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That's not confusing at all....

Contact details were accessed in an intrusion that went undetected for months, the blogging outfit says Newsletter platform Substack has admitted that an intruder swiped user contact details months before the company noticed, forcing it to warn writers and readers that their email addresses and other account metadata were accessed without permission....

And their toolkit includes a new, Linux kernel rootkit A state-aligned cyber group in Asia compromised government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries in an ongoing espionage campaign, according to security researchers....