The Register

Solar winds near aliens’ homes – and ours – might be blowing away signs of alien technosignatures by broadening signals

The SETI Institute, the nonprofit that conducts a search for extraterrestrial intelligence by examining radio waves for artefacts that are unlikely to be the result of natural processes, thinks it may have been going about it the wrong way.…

As Department of Agriculture employees return to the office, it needs ‘real-time analytics to optimize employee seat assignments’

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is using Palantir to figure out where its staff should sit, after deciding only the colorful AI company can do the job.…

With memory and storage contributing over half the price of a server, Big Green needs to protect its margins

HPE has changed its terms and conditions in ways that allow it to change hardware prices after it’s issued a quote, due to rampant storage and memory price rises.…

First vibe coding, now vibe reviewing ... but the buzz is good as it finds worthy issues

Anthropic has introduced a more extensive – and expensive – way to review source code in hosted repositories, many of which already contain large swaths of AI-generated code.…

David and Goliath…but with AI agents

Researchers at red-team security startup CodeWall say their AI agent hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform and gained full read and write access to the chatbot in just two hours.…

And they abused a Mandiant-developed open source tool in the attacks

ShinyHunters told The Register that it has stolen data from about 100 high-profile companies in its latest Salesforce customer data heist, including Salesforce itself.…

Enjoy meltdowns from businesses on Yelp over negative reviews? AI is threatening to take that away

Angry company responses to customer complaints are a favorite topic of internet amusement and outrage, but they're also embarrassing for the employees who post them. Having AI process customer reviews could be a better way. …

Copilot gets tuned to handle long-running knowledge work tasks

Microsoft on Monday celebrated freedom of choice by giving customers in the company's Frontier program the option to use Anthropic and OpenAI models via Copilot Chat.…

Calls Musk’s orbital plans “speculative” despite Bezos touting orbiting compute

Amazon wants US regulators to reject a SpaceX application for permission to launch a fleet of orbital datacenter satellites, criticizing it as incomplete, speculative, and unrealistic.…

Not a US flag in sight

Researchers from China are narrowing down the landing sites for the nation’s first crewed mission to the Moon, set to take place before 2030.…

Feeds are alive, well and can help deshittify things

opinion  A couple of timely blog posts remind us that RSS is alive, well, and can help you resist enshittification of the Web.…

Three agents is about all we can handle

As AI adoption in the workplace accelerates, many people find themselves in a position where babysitting bots and agents is a significant part of their day. Those people are feeling a bit like AI has fried their brains. …

E7 arrives with a hefty price. Got to keep those shareholders happy

Microsoft has finally confirmed that its AI-centric E7 subscription tier - where it licenses AI agent agents like employees - will debut on May 1 for an eye-watering $99 per user per month (pupm).…

An attack on the company’s AWS platform may have exposed customers' names and home addresses

Exclusive  ELECQ, maker of smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, is warning customers that their personal details may have been stolen in a ransomware attack that encrypted and copied user data from its cloud systems.…

But questions remain over long-term commitment to clustering tech in open source

After a couple of years of relative calm, the relationship between MariaDB and its open source foundation was ruffled in February, leaving observers with a few unanswered questions.…

Plain-text fans rejoice as Writer gains native CommonMark import and export

Markdown has been around for more than 20 years, but native support in LibreOffice might suddenly help to make it viable for more people.…

Its aim is wide, covering everything from social networks to GenAI

Norway's Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.…

Former policy boss Nick Clegg joins Cheryl Sandberg and one-time Yahoo prez Susan Decker

Former British deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has landed a board seat at UK-based neocloud Nscale, alongside fellow ex-Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg and former president of Yahoo Susan Decker.…

Two-week deadline to fraudsters to fess up or have their faces plastered across every screen in the country

Dutch national police are taking a novel stand against scammers - 100 suspects now have less than two weeks to hand themselves in or face public shaming.…

Dutch spies flag large-scale campaign to hijack secure messaging accounts

Russian-linked hackers are trying to break into the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of government officials, journalists, and military personnel globally – not by cracking encryption, but by simply tricking people into handing over the keys.…