The Register

Slicing Windows 11 to the bone while Microsoft piles on the features

How low can Windows 11 go? Storage-wise, it can take up less than 3 GB, as demonstrated by some impressive engineering from the same individual behind the Nano11 "diet" build.…

Deal promises sovereign datacenters, AI, and cybersecurity to strengthen communication links with US

The UK's Ministry of Defence has signed a £400 million ($540 million) contract with Google sovereign cloud to support security and analytics workloads.…

Slack's complaint sparked a five-year investigation, but Redmond walks away fine-free

The EU has signed off on Microsoft's concessions over Teams bundling, letting Redmond dodge a monster antitrust fine in a deal that will barely rock the boat for anyone.…

Big Brother Watch says a so-called BritCard could turn daily life into one long identity check – and warn that Whitehall can’t be trusted to run

A national digital ID could hand the government the tools for population-wide surveillance – and if history is anything to go by, ministers probably couldn't run it without cocking it up.…

UK data watchdog says students behind most education cyberattacks

The UK's data protection watchdog says more than half of cyberattacks in schools are caused by students, and that parents should act early to prevent their offspring from falling into the wrong crowds.…

Science fiction? Battle bots already used in Ukraine

Opinion  I've read military science fiction since I was a kid. Besides the likes of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books, where people held the lead roles, I read novels such as Keith Laumer's Bolo series and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker space opera sf series, where machines are the protagonists and enemies. Even if you've never read war science fiction, you certainly at least know about Terminators. But what was once science fiction is now reality on the Ukrainian battlefields. It won't stop there.…

Traceroute was also a mystery to this mountebank

On Call  The very premise on which The Register is built is that our readers know quite a lot about information technology, and that stories featured each Friday in On Call – our weekly tales of your support experiences – therefore reflect your working lives.…

Incorruptible e-government AnswerBot ‘Djella’, which reportedly runs in Azure, given job of running public procurement

Albania’s prime minister has proposed appointing an artificial intelligence as a minister.…

Ovoid-themed in-memory malware offers a menu for mayhem

Infosec outfit Bitdefender says it’s spotted a strain of in-memory malware that looks like the work of Chinese advanced persistent threat groups that wanted to achieve persistent access at a “military company” in the Philippines.…

On the plus side we'll all be getting fewer unwanted emails

Microsoft confirmed a major email service outage across North America that is stopping inboxes from filling up and may be hitting other apps when logging in.…

Ronak Singhal will be moving onto better and brighter opportunities at the end of the month

The chief architect behind Intel's Xeon line of server CPUs is leaving Chipzilla for greener pastures.…

Atlantic Council warns US investors are fueling a market that undermines national security

After years of being dominated by outsiders, the computer surveillance software industry is booming in the United States as investors rush into the ethically dodgy but highly lucrative field.…

For whom the bill tolls

Content creation and delivery companies have introduced a digital licensing mechanism in an effort to compensate media makers when AI companies use their work.…

Okta uncovers new phishing-as-a-service operation with 'multiple entities' falling victim

Multiple attackers using a new phishing service dubbed VoidProxy to target organizations' Microsoft and Google accounts have successfully stolen users' credentials, multi-factor authentication codes, and session tokens in real time, according to security researchers.…

Still far short of the 50% market share Arm infra chief was hoping for

Nvidia isn’t the only one riding the AI boom. During the second quarter, Arm CPUs captured a quarter of the server market, according to a recent Dell’Oro Group report.…

It all started with a May report saying that some bot training may need licensing or permission

A US appeals court has thrown a wrench into the White House's attempt to oust US Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter, ruling that the president likely has no authority to fire her.…

Original author of open source database 'not surprised' but 'saddened' as critics slam vendor's layoffs

Oracle has instigated "widespread layoffs" across its core MySQL development team, sparking concern about the future of one of the world's most popular open-source databases.…

Shady, China-based company, all the apps needed for a fully automated attack - sounds totally legit

Villager, a new penetration-testing tool linked to a suspicious China-based company and described by researchers as "Cobalt Strike's AI successor," has been downloaded about 10,000 times since its release in July.…

Benchmark bonanza shows big wins across JSON, compression, JIT, and more

The first release candidate of .NET 10 is out, complete with a "go-live" license, meaning that Microsoft supports production use. The company has also detailed performance improvements in this long-term support release, translating to real-world savings for users.…

The technology isn't the hard part, says enterprise business services SVP, it's managing people

At Walmart, "everybody's using AI every day across the enterprise," according to David Glick, senior vice president of the retail behemoth's enterprise business services.…