The Register

Companies must realize they can be more than pure consumers, and public sector ought to go beyond 'promotion'

Feature  It is 2025. Linux will turn 34 and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) 40. For the EU and Europe at large, which is famously experimental with government deployments of open source tech, behind initiatives to promote open licensing, and whose governments promote equal opportunity for FOSS vendors in public tendering, it's a crunch point.…

Manager's quality control priorities were upside down

On Call  Welcome again to On Call, The Register's weekly column in which readers share stories of earnestly trying to fix broken tech, and end up feeling broken afterwards.…

Accident causes major copper mine to suspend operations, as commodity and share prices soar

In recent years technology buyers have endured hardware price rises due to a pandemic and its impact on supply chains, the global wave of inflation that followed, tariffs, and surging demand for AI technologies that allowed vendors to charge higher prices. Now, 800,000 tons of mud has pushed copper prices higher.…

Apple prices meet Dell style

Dell has entered the earbud market with a product you can manage from the cloud.…

You'll see the results next year, but it's not the end of Googly lappies

Video  Google has confirmed it will merge its ChromeOS and Android operating systems, and that the mobile OS will emerge triumphant.…

Chipzilla seeks investment from its top fab frenemy

Intel has reportedly sought an investment from rival chipmaker TSMC.…

Brad Smith says 'we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians'

The president of Microsoft has said it's cutting parts of the Israeli military off from Azure after reports that the army was using the platform in a mass surveillance operation against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.…

Plus the Snapdragon 8 Elite turns 5

Qualcomm revealed the second act in its bid to overtake Intel and AMD as the leading laptop CPU maker this week with the paper launch of its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme processors. The company seeks to bring the kind of battery life and performance Apple has gotten out of its Arm-based M-series silicon to the Windows market.…

Keeping Pyongyang's coffers full

North Korean-linked crews connected to the pervasive IT worker scams have upped their malware game, using more advanced tools, including a backdoor that has much of the same code as Pyongyang's infamous Lazarus Group deploys.…

Former FTC chair Khan not happy her legal wrath ended in settlement worth just 14% of Amazon's quarterly net

Amazon has settled the Federal Trade Commission's case against it for making it too hard to quit Prime, and while it naturally didn't admit to any wrongdoing, it's still going to pay out one of the largest settlements in FTC history to make the matter go away. …

Elon Musk's AI appears to be more ideological than competitors

Despite protest letters, concerns that it's biased and untrustworthy, model tweaks to appease its billionaire boss, and even a past incident where it called itself "MechaHitler," xAI's Grok is still being made available to government agencies for mere pennies.…

Images of toddlers and home addresses leaked in reprehensible landmark attack

A cyber criminal crew has targeted Kido International, a preschool and daycare organization, leaking sensitive details about its pupils and their parents.…

New research program seeks ‘energy-aware’ ML that balances performance with power draw

It's notoriously difficult to consistently measure the energy usage of AI models, but DARPA wants to put an end to that uncertainty with new "energy-aware" machine learning systems. …

Industry looks like it's going to come up short – by about $800B

The AI craze is fueling massive growth in infrastructure, but the industry will need to hit $2 trillion in revenue by 2030 to keep funding this habit. Consultants at Bain & Company think it is going to come up short.…

Productivity gains promised, but humans still expected to audit the bots

At its Unscripted event in London, DevOps company Harness presented its latest AI-driven modules, including an AI pipeline builder, AI test automation, autonomous code fixing when builds fail, AI AppSec (application security) and even AI-driven chaos testing, where resiliency is tested by introducing random failures.…

While EC suspects vendor's practices stifle competition, it argues it is in line with industry standards

The European Commission has launched a formal investigation into SAP's behavior in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services in Europe.…

Performance of new version mostly good, but future uncertain

The bcachefs file system, now "externally maintained" outside the Linux kernel codebase, offers packages of its first version to be loadable on the fly.…

Ruby Central is accused of ousting maintainers from core gems under pressure from Shopify

Ruby Central is said to have quietly snatched control of several flagship Ruby open source projects from their long-time maintainers without their consent, following pressure from Shopify, one of its biggest backers.…

Mountain View gripes over slow-moving regulators while Redmond rakes it in

Google is like a dog with a bone over Microsoft's cloud licensing policies, not letting Euro regulators forget about what it sees as anti-competitive practices that penalize those wanting to run Windows software on rival cloud platforms.…

Ballooning leverage and shaky customer funding could strain Big Red's balance sheet

Oracle has raised $18 billion in debt, which could help fund massive datacenter investments aimed at meeting surging demand from AI model builders and enterprise customers.…