The Register

Department putting systems in place to manage 'restrictive licensing practices'

A federal spending watchdog has found the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) faced "challenges" in understanding the correct number of licenses it should hold for the top five vendors in its $985 million annual software expenditure.…

With access to great data comes great responsibility

Snowflake is betting that the biggest bottleneck to building more and better AI agents isn't the models themselves but whether the data those agents depend on is clean, accessible, and governed, Snowflake’s director of product management James Rowland-Jones told The Register.…

Reader and Acrobat flaw let booby-trapped documents profile targets and hijack machines

Adobe has released a fix for an Acrobat and Reader zero-day that attackers had been exploiting for months.…

Names, addresses, dates of birth, and bank details accessed, though not passwords

Basic-Fit, Europe's largest gym chain, has confirmed data including the bank details of around a million customers was stolen from its systems.…

Linux Foundation Europe boss predicts EU will run as fast as it can from US tech companies

Opinion  You want to know who's even sicker of President Donald Trump than American liberals? European governments and companies who are realizing that putting all their eggs in one US basket was a stupid move.…

Benchmarking contract lays groundwork for renegotiating £774M software agreement

NHS England is spending £46,000 on "benchmarking" as it gears up for what looks like the next round of negotiations behind one of the UK public sector's biggest software deals.…

Après ça, le déluge, as plans call for move away from plenty more American software and hardware

France’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) will drop Windows desktops, and adopt Linux instead.…

Optimism is always risky, and defective hardware makes it indigestible

Who, Me?  The best part of the working day is lunchtime, but The Register tries to start Mondays in a pleasant fashion by bringing you a new installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your mistakes and detail your escapes.…

PLUS: Toyota wheels out basketball bot; Arm scores AI server win with SK Telecom; India ponders payment pauses to foil fraudsters; And more!

Asia In Brief  China’s National Data Administration last Friday published its action plan for AI in education which calls for upskilling of the nation’s citizens to ensure they can put the technology to work.…

Most customers don't need the biggest baddest models, just ones that work, are cheap, and won't pirate their proprietary data

FEATURE  Spring has sprung and that means another wave of open weights AI models from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Nvidia. But this time feels a bit different.…

Or it's a bunch of pre-IPO hype. Either way, we're giving it the once-over on this week's episode

Kettle  Anthropic dropped a doozy on us this week with the launch of Mythos, an AI model it says is able to find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities with a shocking level of ability. …

Hundreds of layoffs, but this smells of geopolitics, not downsizing

Red Hat appears to have fired its entire engineering team in China, which it no longer thinks is a country it needs to prioritize. Most of the team will move to India.…

AI-assisted software development is transforming the industry, but you already knew that

Vibe coding works. I wish it didn't. But it does, well enough. And barring some revolution that overturns the new world disorder, machine learning cannot be undone.…

Lock-screen keyboard no longer accepts háček in student's alphanumeric passcode

A university student in the US is in data limbo after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard, preventing him from entering his iPhone passcode.…

Benioff banks on user engagement while McDermott wants to govern AI agents

FEATURE  Salesforce CEO and chief “SaaSquatch” Mark Benioff boasted about the wins his company's ITSM product had last quarter in the terms a proud dad uses to talk about the art work his kids taped to the refrigerator.…

Time to start dropping SBOMs

FEATURE  Two supply chain attacks in March infected open source tools with malware and used this access to steal secrets from tens of thousands – if not more – organizations. We won't know the full blast radius for months.…

Nearly 800 state logins surfaced in breach data, including defense and NATO-linked accounts

Hungary's government has discovered the hard way that the biggest threat to national security might just be its own password choices.…

Firefox maker warns old web tactics are now shaping AI at the expense of user choice

Firefox-maker Mozilla is calling out Microsoft after Redmond said it would scale back some Copilot features in Windows, arguing the rollback shows the company pushed AI too far without enough regard for user choice.…

Trade group warns onshoring demands will leave Americans stuck with older gear

The Global Electronics Association (GEA) warns that the US ban on foreign-made network routers is impractical because few are made domestically, leaving consumers with little choice and delaying access to next-gen products, just as Wi-Fi 7 adoption should be ramping up.…

Sample testing found incorrect payments and delays after college system adopted new HR platform

Updated  A Workday-based HR platform rollout at Minnesota State universities and colleges left faculty and staff with payroll errors.…