today
yesterday
Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions – but was often wrong – has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall.…
Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors.…
A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations.…
Thousands more Oregonians will soon receive data breach letters in the continued fallout from the TriZetto data breach, in which someone hacked the insurance verification provider and gained access to its healthcare provider customers across multiple US states.…
The Register
Tax season 2026 could be an interesting one as the IRS seeks to replace the staff it sent to the unemployment line with AI. Bots could handle tasks ranging from reviewing an org's request for tax-exempt status to processing amended individual filings.…
Cloud storage firm Backblaze says that a sharp rise in AI-driven data traffic to neocloud operators may signal a shift from internet-style traffic patterns to large, high-bandwidth flows characteristic of large-scale model training and inference work.…
The Register
Oracle is taking steps to "repair" its relationship with the MySQL community, according to sources, by moving "commercial-only" features into the database application's Community Edition and prioritizing developer needs.…
Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs.…
Countries intent on digital sovereignty will need to invest at least 1 percent of their entire gross domestic product (GDP) into AI infrastructure by 2029, according to analyst biz Gartner.…
OpenAI is sunsetting some of its ChatGPT models next month, a move it knows "will feel frustrating for some users."…
Opinion I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy.…
HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto took to X this week to unveil the secret of workplace success: stay off your phone, sweep the floor, and clean the machines after that.…
The UK Cabinet Office is being forced to promise "interim support measures" for struggling retired government workers as Capita's botched takeover of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) lurches from bad to worse.…
Bark!Bark!Bark! Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site.…
A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans.…
On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs.…
MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI.…
Java developers still struggle to secure containers, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions.…
2026-01-29
opinion Maybe everything is all about timing, like the time (this week) America's lead cyber-defense agency sounded the alarm on insider threats after it came to light that its senior official uploaded sensitive documents to ChatGPT.…
The Register
Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots.…
Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that lets AI Ultra subscribers generate and explore interactive 3D environments from text or image prompts.…
ShinyHunters has added a fresh notch to its breach belt, claiming it has pinched more than 10 million records from Match Group, a US firm that owns some of the world's most widely used swipe-based dating platforms.…
Corporate use of AI agents in 2026 looks like the Wild West, with bots running amok and no one quite knowing what to do about it - especially when it comes to managing and securing their identities.…
ai-pocalypse The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing. However, we now have another case study. Dow Chemical blames AI automation for its plans to cut 4,500 jobs, about 12.5 percent of its work force.…
Fossil fuel-fired power plant development is roaring back to life in the US thanks to the AI datacenter boom, with data from 2025 suggesting we're reaching the point where the renewable energy transition - and efforts to ease carbon emissions - may well be doomed.…
Crims love to make it look like their traffic is actually coming from legit homes and businesses, and they do so by using residential proxy networks. Now, Google says it has "significantly degraded" what it believes is one of the world's largest residential proxy networks.…
A spat has erupted between antivirus vendor eScan and threat intelligence outfit Morphisec over who spotted an update server incident that disrupted some eScan customers earlier this month.…
The Department of Energy (DOE) is inviting US states to host "Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses" to revitalize atomic power amid reports the agency has weakened safety rules governing the way nuclear sites operate.…
Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kühl and Christian Brauner.…
IBM's leader has trumpeted an AI-on-the-mainframe future as generative AI fills in the COBOL gap left by earlier generations of techies.…
The Register
Oracle could cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell health tech unit Cerner to ease its AI datacenter financing challenges, investment banker TD Cown has claimed, amid changing sentiment on Big Red's massive build-out plans.…
Tesla reported 2025 revenue of $94.8 billion, down 3 percent year-on-year and marking the first annual revenue decline since the electric car maker began publishing financial results in 2010.…
What good is a fix if you don't use it? Experts are urging security teams to patch promptly as vulnerability exploits now account for the majority of intrusions, according to the latest figures.…
Microsoft is famously reticent about operating system usage figures unless it has something to boast about. So CEO Satya Nadella stating that Windows 11 had reached one billion users raised a few eyebrows.…
Meta is to nearly double its capital investments aimed at AI this year, spending more on infrastructure than the entire output of some mid-sized economies, as the AI datacenter feeding frenzy shows no sign of ending.…
Interview Vivaldi has raised a middle finger to the influx of AI in the browser space with its latest version.…
Cybersecurity experts involved in the cleanup of the cyberattacks on Poland's power network say the consequences could have been lethal.…
Opinion It's not your fault Amazon hired you for a position that it no longer deems necessary - blame bad planning or unanticipated market conditions. Everybody guesses wrong sometimes, even with the power of the most sophisticated business analysis software and the smartest prognosticators one can hire.…
Birmingham City Council's SAP-to-Oracle project is set to cost £144.4 million – more than seven times earlier estimates – as it waits for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date.…
The UK government will work with supplier Anthropic to build an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for job seekers, despite its chief executive’s doom-laden views of the job market.…
The Register
Bork!Bork!Bork! Lidl is a well-known purveyor of inexpensive groceries, random goods via the Middle of Lidl, and now… bork.…
What should have been a banner second quarter for Microsoft was met with tepid apprehension on Wall Street on Wednesday, sending its share price by 6 percent in after-hours trading.…
Google has reworked its Chrome browser to include a new side panel for interacting with the company's Gemini model, in an effort to support AI-assisted interactions with websites.…
2026-01-28
The Register
Though some recent studies cast doubt on the ability of AI agents to complete complex tasks, ServiceNow boasts that its bots are better, because they can rely on 20 years and 80 billion workflows worth of experience. The underlying model, they say, is just a small part of the product.…
Ransomware crims have just lost one of their best business platforms. US law enforcement has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum's dark web and clearnet domains.…
Don't you hate it when machines can't follow simple instructions? Anthropic's Claude Code can't take "ignore" for an answer and continues to read passwords and API keys, even when your secrets file is supposed to be blocked.…
Anyone scanning the news might think it's pedal to the metal as far as AI agent implementations go, but there is a slump in rollouts as many organizations figure out what to do next, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope told The Register.…
Come one, come all. Everyone from Russian and Chinese government goons to financially motivated miscreants is exploiting a long-since-patched WinRAR vuln to bring you infostealers and Remote Access Trojans (RATs).…
It's no secret that datacenters use a ton of water for cooling, a demand that can strain local supplies. Despite reported internal forecasts showing sharply higher water use by 2030, Microsoft continues to splash cash on new AI bit barns.…
The Register
Forty years ago, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight, killing its crew of seven and exposing the management culture and decision-making process that led NASA to launch on a freezing January day.…
Hands On For all the buzz surrounding them, AI agents are simply another form of automation that can perform tasks using the tools you've provided. Think of them as smart macros that make decisions and go beyond simple if/then rules to handle edge cases in input data. Fortunately, it's easy enough to code your own agents and below we'll show you how.…
The UK's tax collector is budgeting to spend more than £2 billion on new tech deals in the next couple of years, including a contract set for AWS and another for Capgemini to be awarded without competition.…
Things aren't over yet for Fortinet customers – the security shop has disclosed yet another critical FortiCloud SSO vulnerability.…
Users of Meta's WhatsApp messenger looking to simplify the process of protecting themselves are in luck, as the company is rolling out a new feature that combines multiple security settings under a single, toggleable option. …
SK hynix is surfing the AI hype wave by setting up what it nebulously describes as a solutions biz to further exploit the hysteria.…
West Midlands Police's acting Chief Constable has suspended use of Microsoft Copilot following a controversy that led to the early retirement of his predecessor over a recommendation to ban Israeli football fans from a Birmingham match.…
Microsoft patched a bevy of bugs that allowed bypasses of Windows Administrator Protection before the feature was made available earlier this month.…
Opinion Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a novella-length essay about the risk of superintelligent AI, something that doesn't yet exist.…
Police in England and Wales will increase their use of live facial recognition (LFR) and artificial intelligence (AI) under wide-ranging government plans to reform law enforcement.…
The Register
Feature Large language model inference is often stateless, with each query handled independently and no carryover from previous interactions. A request arrives, the model generates a response, and the computational state gets discarded. In such AI systems, memory grows linearly with sequence length and can become a bottleneck for long contexts. …
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users reported an outage late last week in its London region, yet despite complaints from Register readers, Big Red is staying quiet.…
Microsoft has issued an emergency Office patch after confirming a zero-day flaw is already being used in real world attacks.…
Microsoft Azure, or at least the part of it that handles the OpenAI service in the Sweden Central region, was down and out for the count yesterday, leaving users facing errors for much of the working day.…
The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has directly awarded a £240.6 million contract to US technology company Palantir to continue to licence and support its data analytics work.…
Bork!Bork!Bork! Behold an ATM crying out for a man-in-the-middle attack. An obsolete Microsoft operating system cannot be blamed here. This is all about the hardware.…
TikTok's new life under majority American ownership is off to a rough start, after users complained of widespread service disruptions the company blamed on a datacenter power outage.…
2026-01-27
It's not enough to have its agents in streets and schools; ICE now wants to see what data online ads already collect about you. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a Request for Information (RFI) asking data and ad tech brokers how they could help in its mission.…
The mobile app emperors have no clothes. Apple and Google have made millions of dollars from AI apps that let users undress people even as both companies claim to ban such software from their stores, according to a new study.…
ShinyHunters says it stole several slices of data from Panera Bread, but that's just the yeast of everyone's problems. The extortionist gang also claims to have stolen data from CarMax and Edmunds, in addition to three other organizations it posted to its blog last week.…
For most mobile devices, the OS is either Android or iOS, but a pair of new systems promises a host of additional OS options you can dual boot into. The Android phone can run Linux and boot into Windows 11 where it functions as a PC while the tablet runs a smorgasbord of Google-free OSes.…
Security concerns for the new agentic AI tool formerly known as Clawdbot remain, despite a rebrand prompted by trademark concerns raised by Anthropic. Would you be comfortable handing the keys to your identity kingdom over to a bot, one that might be exposed to the open internet?…
Despite a growing number of reports that AI is not benefiting many businesses, Lenovo and IDC say that firms in EMEA are pushing ahead with pilot deployments and still expect it to drive growth and transform how they operate.…
Flush with cash from skyrocketing memory prices, Micron continued its fab expansion this week, this time breaking ground on a $24 billion manufacturing complex that will eventually produce chips used in storage devices.…
Salesforce is getting cosier with the US Army via a deal worth up to $5.6 billion, selling cloud analytics as the groundwork for a future agentic AI push across the service and the wider DoD.…
feature TrapC, a memory-safe version of the C programming language, is almost ready for testing.…
Catholics need to develop critical thinking skills to counter the dark side of AI and counter unnatural attachments to chatbots, the pope said this week in a message marking the Church's social communications day.…
The Register
Chinese state-linked hackers are accused of spending years inside the phones of senior Downing Street officials, exposing private communications at the heart of the UK government.…
The Register
Microsoft illegally installed cookies on a school pupil's devices without consent, according to a ruling by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB).…
US spending watchdogs have called on the National Weather Service (NWS) to deliver an updated plan for its AI language translation project to reduce the risk posed by extreme weather events to people not proficient in English.…
NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6.…
The Register
France has officially told Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the US videoconferencing herd to take a hike in favor of its own homegrown app.…
The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?…
Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu are working with America's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build and operate next-gen compute infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), in line with President Trump's Genesis Mission.…
The High Court will hear from privacy campaigners this week who want to reshape the way the Metropolitan Police is allowed to use live facial recognition (LFR) tech.…
NASA has confirmed that its planet hunter, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), entered safe mode due to a command error that inadvertently left the spacecraft's solar arrays angled away from the Sun.…
Feature Open source developer Geoff Huntley wrote a script that sometimes makes him nauseous. That's becaues it uses agentic AI and coding assistants to create high-quality software at such tiny cost, he worries it will upend his profession.…
It is 40 years since Voyager 2 performed the first and, so far, only flyby of the planet Uranus. The resulting trove of data, however, was a bonus that almost didn't happen.…
Gartner is warning Salesforce users that a capped enterprise agreement for its AI and data platforms will not be available when they come to renew, leaving a struggle to predict costs and understand value.…
The Register
Bork!Bork!Bork! London's Elizabeth Line is the latest thing in urban development (at least as far as the UK is concerned). So it seems appropriate that its borks should be similarly up to date, and its emoticons rotated so the intent cannot be mistaken.…
2026-01-26
The Register
Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan recently blamed AI for forcing him to lay off three workers.…
The Register
For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't.…
ShinyHunters has targeted around 100 organizations in its latest Okta single sign-on (SSO) credential stealing campaign, according to researchers and the criminal group itself.…
Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new in-house AI accelerator to rival Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs.…
exclusive The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won't attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register.…
Anthropic's Claude can now present the interfaces of other applications within its chat window, thanks to an extension of the Model Context Protocol (MCP).…
More than 400 tech workers have urged their CEOs to "call the White House and demand ICE leave our cities" after masked federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti over the weekend and the world's richest and most powerful chief executives remained silent.…
The Register
AI adoption in the workplace stalled in the fourth quarter of 2025, but those who have already started using it are making increased use of it, according to a survey by pollster Gallup. Don't let that fool you into thinking AI is taking over work, though: frequent AI users are still a tiny minority of overall workers.…
Agents may be the next big thing in AI, but they have limits beyond which they will make mistakes, so exercise extreme caution, a recent research paper says.…
The internet spent the closing months of 2025 being knocked over by cut cables, broken power grids, bad weather, military strikes, and the occasional self-inflicted technical wound, according to Cloudflare's latest global traffic data.…
KDE Plasma 6.6 is approaching, and one of its more controversial changes is a new login screen that depends on systemd – meaning that it won't work on the non-Linux operating systems KDE still nominally supports.…
Alaska Air's CEO says IT outages last year damaged the company on multiple fronts despite "triple redundancies" built into its disaster recovery plan.…
Not content with rendering Doom in PCB design software or playing it on an oscilloscope, engineer Mike Ayles has got the 1990s shooter running in a computer-aided design (CAD) modeler.…
feature Bernard Lambeau, a Belgium-based software developer and founder of several technology companies, created a programming language called Elo with the help of Anthropic's Claude Code.…
Boffins at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs are working to develop cheap and power efficient LEDs to replace lasers. One day, they let a trio of AI assistants loose in their lab.…
The European Commission has launched an investigation into X amid concerns that its GenAI model Grok offered users the ability to generate sexually explicit imagery, including sexualized images of children.…
feature Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins said when his company decides on a location for a datacenter, he asks town officials to sign non-disclosure agreements to stop politicians from leaking insider information.…
Nike says it is probing a possible breach after extortion crew WorldLeaks claimed to have lifted 1.4TB of internal data from the sportswear giant and posted samples on its leak site.…
Microsoft is investigating reports that its January 2026 security updates are leaving some Windows 11 machines stuck in a boot loop, adding another entry to this month's bumper post–Patch Tuesday borkage list.…
Opinion AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won't say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: "We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor."…
Russia was probably behind the failed attempts to compromise the systems of Poland's power companies in December, cybersecurity researchers claim.…
Opinion The Net is born free, but everywhere is in chains. This is a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract where he said the same about humans, but it's nonetheless true. The Net is built out of open, free protocols and open, free code. Yet it and we are bound by the rulemakers who build the services and set the laws of the places we go and the things that we do, not to our advantage.…
Microsoft dropped a weekend treat for administrators with yet another out-of-band update to deal with Outlook freezes and broken cloud storage.…
Britain's Royal Navy is using Oracle Cloud edge infrastructure to operate AI-driven defenses on the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales.…
The UK government has revealed some thinking about digital identity in response to written questions from MPs, while continuing to say next to nothing about the scheme's cost.…
Who, Me? Everyone makes mistakes, but only The Register celebrates them every week in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that shares your worst workplace moments then records how you bounced back.…
