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Updated 2025-11-30 01:00
Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer
Perplexity likens Amazon's legal threat to an attempt to ban access to ... wrenches? Amazon.com has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity in which it insists the AI company prevent its Comet browser from making automated purchases on behalf of users....
Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters
Chocolate Factory's latest moonshot aims to put AI supercomputing cluster in sun-sychronous orbit Google on Tuesday announced a new moonshot - launching constellations of solar-powered satellites packed to the gills with its home-grown tensor processing units (TPUs) to form orbital AI datacenters....
Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not
DHS rule would expand biometric collection to immigrants and some citizens linked to them If you're filing an immigration form - or helping someone who is - the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases....
Copilot can replace Search in latest Windows 11 test builds, but it's not a good idea
When you opt in, your taskbar becomes an extension of the Copilot app, but with some search added in hands on With Microsoft cramming Copilot into every nook and cranny of its software, it's no surprise that everyone's favorite AI assistant is now set to take over the search box. As of the latest Windows Insider Dev and Beta builds, the "Ask Copilot anything" box is available if you know how to switch it on....
Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate
They have no need to prove their bonafides Recently, I was spinning up yet another terribly coded thing for fun because I believe in making my problems everyone else's problems, and realized something that had been nagging at me for a while: working with AWS is relatively painful....
IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs
Resource Actions expected to hit half of US Infrastructure group IBM this week began notifying several thousand employees that they will be laid off, according to sources familiar with the matter....
UK judge delivers a 'damp squib' in Getty AI training case, no clear precedent set
Experts disagree about what the ruling means for AI training on copyrighted material London's High Court has dismissed the major portions of Getty Images' lawsuit against generative AI firm Stability AI for training its image-generation model on copyrighted images, which some legal experts say could weaken intellectual property laws.However, others saw daylight for trademark and copyright protection in the judge's ruling....
Russian spies pack custom malware into hidden VMs on Windows machines
Curly COMrades strike again Russia's Curly COMrades is abusing Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in compromised Windows machines to create a hidden Alpine Linux-based virtual machine that bypasses endpoint security tools, giving the spies long-term network access to snoop and deploy malware....
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's security falls apart amid layoffs
Security program fails to meet federal standards as government cuts drain resources The infosec program run by the US' Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) "is not effective," according to a fresh audit published by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG)....
Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam
Only a point up in a year, but that's a 50% leap for Linux gamers The latest edition of Valve's monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out, showing a rise in Steam usage on Linux. Penguin likes to play!...
Python slithers faster by adding lazy imports that load code after startup
PEP 810 approved following lengthy debate among developer community Python programs are set to get faster startup times with PEP 810 "Explicit lazy imports," which allows scripts to defer loading imported libraries until they're actually needed rather than at startup....
Coders paired with bot buddies work fast, but take too many shortcuts
Trust me bro, says GitHub Copilot. And programmers just... do Developers who "pair code" with an AI assistant stand to learn as much as they do in traditional human-human pairings, but also show a less critical attitude toward their silicon-based partner's output, academics have found....
Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope
Norges Bank Investment Management votes against excessive award, automaker's share price skids Norway's sovereign wealth fund has opposed Tesla CEO Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion share award, which the carmaker's board says is necessary to retain him....
Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support
Popular operating system much more sticky than Windows 7 was during its EOL As the dust settles over the end of support for many versions of Windows 10, the operating system remains a significant presence in the Windows market....
Invasion of the message body snatchers! Teams flaw allowed crims to impersonate the boss
Check Point lifts lid on a quartet of Teams vulns that made it possible to fake the boss, forge messages, and quietly rewrite history Microsoft Teams, one of the world's most widely used collaboration tools, contained serious, now-patched vulnerabilities that could have let attackers impersonate executives, rewrite chat history, and fake notifications or calls - all without users suspecting a thing....
$10B + spent on liquid cooling this week – it's only Tuesday
Eaton and Vertiv splash cash as HPC infrastructure and AI factories run hot Liquid cooling tech is hot. It's only Tuesday and already infrastructure specialists have forked out more than $10 billion on companies proffering tech that promises to help ease energy bills of datacenter operators....
Cybercrooks getting violent more often to secure big payouts in Europe
France-based victims hit especially hard, while UK named most-targeted country generally Researchers are seeing a "dramatic" increase in cybercrime involving physical violence across Europe, with at least 18 cases reported since the start of the year....
OpenAI API moonlights as malware HQ in Microsoft’s latest discovery
Redmond uncovers SesameOp, a backdoor hiding its tracks by using OpenAI's Assistants API as a command channel Hackers have found a new use for OpenAI's Assistants API - not to write poems or code, but to secretly control malware....
Keeping the lights on takes up nearly all police IT spending in England and Wales
Plans for investing in AI and service transformation held up as treasury pulls plug, NAO finds Police forces in England and Wales spend around 97 percent of their 2 billion ($2.6 billion) annual technology budget on maintaining legacy systems, an official report has found....
'What the hell, Microsoft?' Users hit with incorrect ESU and LTSC Win10 out-of-support messages
Microsoft accidentally tells supported users that they aren't Microsoft says a broken update left some Windows 10 users staring at an out-of-support message despite having an activated Extended Security Updates (ESU) license or a version of Windows 10 that is still officially supported....
AI's trillion dollar deal wheel bubbling around Nvidia, OpenAI
How to build a trillion-dollar industry: Step 1, invest in your customers. Step 2, sell them stuff Feature In late 2025, a series of multi-billion-dollar deals in the artificial intelligence sector is causing deja vu among industry veterans. Money, computer chips, and cloud credits are rotating in a closed loop among a handful of companies: Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, AMD, CoreWeave, xAI, and a few others. This has fueled a trillion-dollar AI boom or bubble built on intertwined investments and contracts....
Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting
Government spending watchdog eviscerates penny wise, pound foolish approach Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is being criticized for undermining its F-35 stealth fighter program through years of short-term budget decisions that have increased long-term costs and left the fleet understrength and undercapable....
Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons
Experience leads company boss to decide 'I cannot rely on having a Google account for production use cases' The founder of a service that manages SSL certificates says Google Cloud has suspended his account three times, without good reason, and recommended not using the G-Cloud for serious workloads....
China's president Xi Jinping jokes about backdoors in Xiaomi smartphones
South Korea's president laughed, so perhaps it was funny? Unlike China's censorship and snooping Chinese president Xi Jinping has joked that smartphones from Xiaomi might include backdoors....
LLMs are lousy at reading Asian languages, finds Singapore’s Grab
Superapp company that chased Uber away built its own model to do the job right Proprietary large language models are bad at interpreting Asian languages, according to Singaporean super-app company Grab, which has built its own model instead....
AN0M, the backdoored ‘secure’ messaging app for criminals, is still producing arrests after four years
55 cuffed last week after court ruled sting operation was legal Australian police last week made 55 arrests using evidence gathered with a backdoored messaging app that authorities distributed in the criminal community....
Cisco suggests a stubby chassis, shrunken servers and router, to tame the edge
'Unified Edge' designed so even retail workers can replace a server Cisco entered the server market in 2009 because the company thought incumbent vendors weren't satisfying customers. On Monday, the networking giant entered the edge infrastructure market for the same reason....
Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all
If you want your First Amendment rights, make money the Palantir way Palantir CEO Alex Karp used his quarterly shareholder letter to take aim at critics after the company beat Q3 2025 earnings estimates....
MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS
Even AI has doubts about the claim that '80% of ransomware attacks are AI-driven' Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont....
Ransomware negotiator, pay thyself!
Rogues committed extortion while working for infosec firms A ransomware negotiator and an incident response manager at two separate cybersecurity firms have been indicted for allegedly carrying out ransomware attacks of their own against multiple US companies....
Google yanks Gemma after US senator says model ‘hallucinated’ her committing crimes
Still available via API, the developer-facing AI isn't even really designed to answer general-purpose questions If Google's Gemma were an employee, it might be facing HR right now. The company yanked the model from AI Studio after it allegedly invented criminal accusations about a US senator and a conservative activist. However, it seems like the aggrieved parties went out of their way to get the offending output....
AWS, Nvidia, CrowdStrike seek security startups to enter the arena
Last year's winner scored a $65M funding round on a $300M valuation Cloud and AI security startups have two weeks to apply for a program that fast-tracks access to investors and mentors from Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike, and Nvidia....
OpenAI spreads the imaginary wealth beyond Microsoft with $38B AWS deal
Amazon deal still dwarfed by $250B Azure commitment made as part of OpenAI's for-profit transformation OpenAI has signed a seven-year, $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services, adding another hyperscaler alongside Microsoft Azure for its growing AI compute needs. Where it's getting all this money was not disclosed....
Alaska Air phones a friend to find out what caused massive October outage
Accenture to poke around the beleaguered airline's IT infrastructure Alaska Airlines has called in consultants to advise it on what went wrong during a late October IT meltdown that grounded flights and wreaked havoc for two days....
Microsoft, Alphabet throw more cash on the AI bonfire
The spending will continue until ROI improves Tech companies continue to sling crazy amounts of money at AI, with Microsoft announcing deals worth billions in Texas and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), while Google parent Alphabet is selling bonds in Europe to raise cash for more AI expansion....
Cybercrooks team up with organized crime to steal pricey cargo
Old-school cargo heists reborn in the cyber age Cybercriminals are increasingly orchestrating lucrative cargo thefts alongside organized crime groups (OCGs) in a modern-day resurgence of attacks on freight companies....
Gullible bots struggle to distinguish between facts and beliefs
Researchers point to risks in high-stakes applications as well as the potential to spread misinformation Large language models often fail to distinguish between factual knowledge and personal belief, and are especially poor at recognizing when a belief is false....
Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports
Memory safety trumps retro computing: Alpha, PA-RISC, m68k, SH4 face the chop in 2026 Debian's APT package manager will have a "hard requirement" on Rust from May 2026. This move may make some rather big waves....
ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews
Help me, HOBI-WAN, you're my only hope for lunch The European Space Agency (ESA) has coined a tortured acronym for its project to feed astronauts on long-duration missions: HOBI-WAN (Hydrogen Oxidizing Bacteria In Weightlessness As a source of Nutrition)....
Paradox: Agentic AI dev roles are less in demand as agents take over
IEEE survey of senior techies in six countries finds recrutiment for data analytics, and machine learning on the up Demand for software development skills in AI-related roles is set to fall next year as agentic AI accelerates across business markets, according to an IEEE industry survey....
Metropolitan Police hails facial recognition tech after record year for arrests
But question marks remain over the tech's biases London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) says the hundreds of live facial recognition (LFR) deployments across the Capital last year led to 962 arrests, according to a new report on the controversial tech's use....
Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs
Does Discord need some stars for when Management is watching? The maker of the Grand Theft Auto game series, Rockstar Games, has fired more than 30 coders and graphic designers in an act described by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry."...
Pop!_OS deejays prepare to release holiday remix along with Cosmic v 1.0
Christmas is coming, the GNOME is getting fat... please put a penny in the old red hat? Ubuntu Summit System76's POP!_OS is one of the more substantially modified Ubuntu based distros out there, and so it was something of a surprise to see the company's substantial presence at the Ubuntu Summit. And its stable release along with version 1.0 of its custom desktop, COSMIC, is imminent....
The race to shore up Europe’s power grids against cyberattacks and sabotage
Ukraine first to demo open source security platform to isolate incidents, stop lateral movement Feature It was a sunny morning in late April when a massive power outage suddenly rippled across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southwestern France, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity for hours....
Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds
Boffins say outsourcing your homework leaves you sounding less knowledgeable, short on facts A study of how people use ChatGPT for research has confirmed something most of us learned the hard way in school: to be a subject matter expert, you've got to spend time swotting up....
Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu
Jon Seager, VP of Engineering, talks exclusively to The Reg Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical's vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation....
From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world
Taking belief in LLMs very literally indeed Opinion It's not been a year since his ouster as Intel's CEO, but Pat Gelsinger is firmly back on the tech leadership pony. He's done hardware with Intel, software with VMWare. This time, it's faithware....
‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’
One SQL slip-up is survivable. Not learning from the first mess meant change Who, Me? Another Monday is upon us and The Register therefore presents a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed confessional column in which you admit to making mistakes, and explain how you made it out alive afterwards....
Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land
It's less bonkers than it sounds given the challenges of wiring Africa African carrier Seacom is investigating the feasibility of building a submarine cable that would run across the heart of Africa, on land....
ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare
When operators see danger, innocent users are dragged down along with bad actors Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that understood its importance managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses, actions that today mean many users in the rest of the world are more likely to find their connections throttled or blocked....
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