The Register

Taxpayers on hold for 798 years might wish for a better service

The UK's tax collector has confirmed plans to contract out call center services with an associated price tag of £500 million ($677 million).…

Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse

Opinion  I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google.…

Or, rediscovering the KISS principle, the long way round

Comment  Linux distro wars are nothing new. "Advocacy" (a euphemism for angry argument) about hardware, OSes, programming languages and editors goes back as long as different computers have existed. Computers appeal to geeky folks, and geeky folks readily get a little too attached to things — and then become possessive and defensive about them.…

Nothing will change while big tech sets the rules. We'll need someone even scarier

Opinion  How much harm does AI cause the environment? As a report from the MIT Technology Review just confirmed, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares enough to try and find out. Even if lots of people did care a lot, it wouldn’t change things. The driver of AI’s insane energy addiction is no more amenable to argument than a labrador in possession of an entire roast chicken.…

No, not Amazon. China’s SHEIN is in the spotlight for fake discounts, grubby greenery, and evading inquiries

The European Commission has warned Chinese e-tailer SHEIN to clean up its act, after finding several practices on its website breach local consumer law.…

But pauses tech-adjacent threat to slap all Euro-imports with 50 percent duties

World War Fee  US president Donald Trump has threatened a tariff that would apply only to Apple, and appears to have referred to the European Union’s treatment of American tech companies as part of a threat to slap the bloc with higher tariffs.…

Chipmaker Hygon, which recently teased a 128-core, 512-thread CPU, merges with server-maker Sugon

China has spawned a supercomputing contender.…

Taiwan's tech expo dishes up the usual oddities - some less bonkers than they seem

Computex  Taiwan’s Computex conference sprawls across four exhibition halls in which almost 1,500 exhibitors jostle for attention.…

Life in a corporate aquarium didn’t go swimmingly

Who, Me?  Another Monday has arrived, bringing with it the chance for work-in-progress meetings at which managers will recite corporate clichés with astounding sincerity. Which is why The Register always opens the week with a new edition of Who, Me? It's the column in which you share stories of trying to meet your KPIs and somehow escaping when you don't.…

The original leak site that never sold out, never surrendered

Obituary  John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know.…

PLUS: Original emoji retired; Xiaomi's custom silicon; Pakistan dedicates 2,000 MW to AI and crypto

Asia In Brief  China last week approved rules that will see Beijing issue identity numbers that netizens can use as part of a federated identity scheme that will mean they can use one logon across multiple online services.…

PLUS: Interpol kills more malware; GoDaddy settles in awful infosec case; Giant stolen creds DB exposed

Infosec In Brief  Secrets of the Trump administration may have been exposed after a successful attack on messaging service TeleMessage, which has been used by some officials.…

Worries about uncertainty, even as AI pushes revenue and profit higher

Chinese hardware giant Lenovo thought it had prepared for a trade war, but its plan proved insufficient once the US started to rapidly change its tax policies in imported goods.…

Neural net devs are finally getting serious about efficiency

Feature  If you've been following AI development over the past few years, one trend has remained constant: bigger models are usually smarter, but also harder to run.…

Chinese manufacturers are advertising how they dodge tariffs, and tech leaders know they’re in a new world

Computex  Every time I attend Taiwan's Computex exhibition I'm bewildered by the dozens of vendors selling unremarkable keyboards and mice.…

But it's still going to come in through the back door

Comment  As AI pilots within enterprises increasingly flame out, OpenAI is making a pivot to consumers, suggesting AI is more likely to sneak into the enterprise through users than walk in through the front door. But IT departments will still have to deal with it once it arrives.…

Bank accounts, personal details all hoovered up in the attack

Nova Scotia Power on Friday confirmed it had been hit by a ransomware attack that began earlier this spring and disrupted certain IT systems, and admitted the crooks leaked data belonging to about 280,000 customers online. The stolen info may have included billing details and, for those on autopay, bank account numbers.…

Michael Daniel also thinks Uncle Sam should increase help to orgs hit by ransomware

INTERVIEW  Uncle Sam's cybersecurity apparatus can't only focus on China and other nation-state actors, but also has to fight the much bigger damage from plain old cybercrime, says former White House advisor Michael Daniel. And the Trump administration's steep cuts to federal government staff are making that a lot harder.…

Computing pioneer's personal papers expected to fetch tens of thousands

Precious scientific papers once belonging to wartime codebreaking genius Alan Turing – rescued from an attic clear-out where they faced destruction – are set to fetch a fortune at auction next month.…

And the associated fraud'n'spy botnet is about to be shut down

The US Department of Justice has unsealed indictments against 16 people accused of spreading and using the DanaBot remote-control malware that infected more than 300,000 computers, plus operating a botnet of the same name, and appears set to shutter its operations.…