The Register

Watchdog drops official probe but IT giant's deal with Inflection AI and Amazon's with Anthropic still in play

Britain's competition watchdog does not think Microsoft's investment in Mistral AI constitutes a merger situation – just weeks after calling for industry views on the agreement.…

Rival coders must have Europe-based staff to build and test non-WebKit surfing

Exclusive  Apple's grudging accommodation of European law – allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices – apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region.…

Could 2030 bring touchdown at last?

NASA and ESA have signed an agreement to finally send the long-delayed ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to the Red Planet.…

You get a GPU, you get a GPU, everyone gets a ZeroGPU!

Open source AI champion Hugging Face is making $10 million in GPU compute available to the public in a bid to ease the financial burden of model development faced by smaller dev teams.…

TLDR: Peace in our time is really really hard

Interview  On Wednesday the FBI and international cops celebrated yet another cybercrime takedown – of ransomware brokerage site BreachForums – just a week after doxing and imposing sanctions on the LockBit ransomware crew's kingpin, and two months after compromising the gang's website.…

Ensure there are no sperm whales in the area

Underwater datacenters have yet to take off in any meaningful way, but it seems they could prove vulnerable to attack using sound waves, according to researchers.…

It'll own the datacenters, but keep data and employees local

AWS is to invest €7.8 billion in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany and make the first AWS Region in the State of Brandenburg available to all customers by the end of 2025.…

Over-50s to get early retirement offer

Toshiba says it will cut up to 4,000 jobs within Japan, a number that accounts for six percent of the company's national workforce, by offering early retirement packages.…

How to handle sales pressure and licensing 'negotiations' to make sure it plays to your advantage

Feature  You might be able to tell what time of year it is by the blossom on the trees or bluebells in the woods. But for Oracle customers stuck in an office somewhere, there is another way of knowing that it's May without consulting a calendar.…

The machine was so dead, hospital staff treated it like a corpse

On Call  The Register knows that tech support people are heroes. That's why each Friday we offer a new installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column featuring your stories of dutifully and selflessly taking on the endless and thankless challenge that is tech support.…

Office could be decimated with around 800 offers reportedly made

Microsoft is said to have offered up to 800 China-based employees the chance to relocate to the US, Australia, New Zealand, or Ireland.…

Spoiler alert: it's not really IT support controlling your device

A cybercrime gang has been abusing Microsoft's Quick Assist application in social engineering attacks that ultimately allow the crew to infect victims with Black Basta ransomware.…

AST still only has a single test satellite in orbit, so don't hold your breath

Not to be outdone by Starlink and T-Mobile, AT&T and AST SpaceMobile have finalized a deal to eventually bring a space-based connectivity option to AT&T, too. …

Bitcoin cowboys now have guaranteed freedoms

Oklahoma's governor has signed a bill into law defining legal rights for one of the most marginalized groups in the US – cryptocurrency holders.…

Judge gives green light to lawsuit over autonomous ambitions

Tesla is facing a lawsuit over claims made about its self-driving technology after a US judge rejected the company's motion to dismiss the case.…

Browser ditches x64 blues for a snappier tune

Opera has become the latest Chromium browser for Windows on Arm, fueling industry talk about Microsoft's plans for the neglected operating system.…

Fake science challenges academic publishing

US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal.…

Now that traders are drinking the Kool-AI-d, companies can either fuel the hype or face the consequences

Comment  Dell's share price surged sharply on Wednesday as market analysts telegraphed their confidence in the OEM's ability to capitalize on the AI market.…

Sustained workloads need not apply

Updated  Amazon Web Services added another set of cost-optimized instances to its EC2 lineup on Tuesday, aimed at customers whose workloads aren't pegging the CPU 100 percent of the time.…

Has social media biz done enough to comply with Digital Services Act? Maybe not

The European Commission has opened formal proceedings to assess whether Meta, the provider of Facebook and Instagram, may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to the protection of minors.…