The Register

Issues at the very top continue to worsen

The UK government's latest annual data breach survey shows the number of ransomware attacks on the isles is on the increase – and many techies are forced to constantly informally request company directors for defense spending because there's no security people on the board.…

$5.1B cancellations pitched as efficiency move, though costly Trump birthday parade mulled

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has canceled contracts for "consulting and other non-essential services" in the latest round of cuts conceived by Elon Musk's DOGE unit.…

Activist investor finds payments groups lobbying against climate action

An activist investor has called on IBM to report on its lobbying practices, which he alleges include spending “dark money” with organizations that campaign against climate change reporting and legislation.…

Exec pay outlined in Proxy Statement, and things did not go well for either workforce or calls for climate transparency reports

Amazon exec chairman Jeff Bezos may not have a daily operational role at the cloud and e-commerce megacorp he founded, but he still got a bigger compensation package than the person currently pulling the strings from the chief executive's office.…

Models get bulkier, burnier, bank-breakier

AI continues to improve – at least according to benchmarks. But the promised benefits have largely yet to materialize while models are increasing in size and becoming more computationally demanding, and greenhouse gas emissions from AI training continue to rise.…

Consumer campaign group says 'we need lifetime transparency for tech

Those well-meaning agitators at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) are back, this time with an interactive "Electronic Waste Graveyard" cataloging a range of devices tossed aside after software support expires or cloud connections flatline.…

Will future techies feel the same way about Copilot?

The results are in, and it appears that – at least as far as The Register's most loquacious commenters are concerned – Windows Server 2000 was Microsoft's peak.…

Sysadmin sent on road trip that required a lot of time doing nothing

On Call  Some working weeks are full of achievements, and others miserably unproductive. Here at The Register, we always make sure that if nothing else we produce a fresh instalment of On Call, the column that recounts readers' tales of delivering top-notch tech support.…

A new alternative for those pondering what to do when vSphere 7.x goes end of life in October

VMware has revealed another big upgrade is on the way, this time for its vSphere Foundation suite.…

Along with Celine Dion and Elton John - plus some good music too

The Brian-Eno-composed sound played by Windows 95 when booted has been added to the US Library of Congress’s list of nationally significant recordings.…

Former policy boss claims Facebook cared little about national security as it chased the mighty Yuan

Facebook's former director of global public policy told a Senate committee that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was willing to do almost anything to get the social network into China - including, she alleged, offering up Americans' data.…

'There are challenges' but staff recruitment and retention isn't one of them

Interview  Civo shifted its workforce to a four-day working week and while it hasn't changed productivity much at the cloud biz, it has helped attract "new talent" and retain existing staff, CEO Mark Boost says.…

Under-audit political squad also said to be drafting invoices for Uncle Sam

In February, Elon's Musketeers at President Trump's cost-trimming DOGE operation turned up at the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates the kinds of self-driving cars the billionaire wants to build.…

Hyperion ships another patch, which is nice

Belgian software house Hyperion Entertainment has released Update 3 for AmigaOS 3.2, the version of the classic operating system it launched in 2021. The update targets Amigas with 680x0 processors, including systems enhanced with PiStorm accelerator boards.…

Big G reckons this agentic IDE speeds up or simplifies coding. Developers who've used it aren't so sure

Cloud Next  Google on Wednesday announced Firebase Studio, a product pitched as "a cloud-based agentic development environment" – in other words, a browser-based coding workspace that includes AI to help developers to prototype and build apps without writing every line of code themselves.…

License to freak out? El Reg reader recommends reverting to pen, paper, pub

Final update  Readers have flooded our mailboxes with reports that Microsoft 365 Family licensing has fallen over this morning, so those of you who provide tech support to relatives or those using the office suite for a small business, consider yourself warned.…

LLM query caching also lands soon

The return of Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo has borne fruit in the form of a new data type - vector sets - for the widely used cache-turned-multi-model database.…

Billionaire 'tried every tool to harm us', says super lab, and it wants judge to end 'harassment'

OpenAI has countersued co-founder Elon Musk, accusing him of unlawful and unfair tactics to derail its restructuring plans and demanding a judge hold him liable for damage allegedly inflicted on the AI super-lab.…

Customers aren't sure, economy isn't great, tech looks cute, though

Cloud Next  This week Google joined a throng of tech vendors pushing the concept of "agentic AI" on an unsuspecting and perhaps unreceptive collection of enterprise users. Questions remain about how effective this tranche of tools will be at solving business problems and how much it might all cost.…

Alleges cybersecurity agency was ‘weaponized’ to suppress debunked theories

Updated  The Trump administration on Wednesday ordered a criminal investigation into alleged censorship conducted by the USA’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, plus revocation of any security clearances held by the agency's ex-head Chris Krebs and anyone else at SentinelOne, the cybersecurity company where he now works.…