The Register

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.…

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.…

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 déjà 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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

'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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…