The Register

Open the pod bay door

Anthropic on Thursday announced the availability of Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, the latest iteration of its Claude family of machine learning models.…

Budget slashing has 'outsized impact' on us, says commander who fears branch not ready for orbital war

The US Space Force has been struggling to achieve its technological goals, and Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman told senators this week that civilian layoffs and budget cuts aren't helping matters at all. …

Intrusions began weeks before Trimble patched the Cityworks hole

A suspected Chinese crew has been exploiting a now-patched remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Trimble Cityworks to break into US local government networks and target utility management systems, according to Cisco's Talos threat intelligence group.…

And it gets even harder when you try to estimate CO2 emissions

A single person with a serious AI habit may chew through enough electricity each day to keep a microwave running for more than three hours. And the actual toll may even be worse, as so many companies keep details about their AI models secret.…

Data sovereignty fears fuel pitch to hyperscalers

Investment biz Bain Capital is getting further into the datacenter sector with the launch of an operation serving hyperscalers in Europe, potentially positioning itself to benefit from customer unease over US hyperscalers.…

Vendor's AI-infused pitch at Sapphire marred by backlash over support costs

News that SAP users face a 30-50 percent premium to get some cloud products – including core ERP – to industry-standard service levels threatens to overshadow the German vendor's annual conference as new pricing models, performance, and partner arrangements dominate the conversation.…

When 'AI-powered' means 'mostly humans and bad decisions'

Comment  The collapse of Builder.ai has cast fresh light on AI coding practices, despite the software company blaming its fall from grace on poor historical decision-making.…

Case in Germany could derail Zuck's plans, noyb tells El Reg fight isn't over

The Irish Data Protection Commission has cleared the way for Meta to begin slurping up the data of European citizens for training AI next week, ongoing legal challenges notwithstanding. …

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mo failed to alert lawmakers about surveillance, senator says

Updated  AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile US failed to set up systems to notify lawmakers when government snoops came calling for their phone records - a contractual obligation that went ignored until recently, according to US Senator Ron Wyden.…

4-year trial is second major initiative this year that clamps down on 'illegal immigrants'

Foreigners in Moscow will now be subject to a new experimental law that affords the state enhanced tracking mechanisms via a smartphone app.…

A media-ready remix with KDE, codecs, and clutter from its BeOS-flavored past

Neptune is a moderately tweaked Debian remix with KDE Plasma 5, a few alternative app choices, and a longer history than we anticipated.…

Chat app blocks Windows' screenshot-happy feature from peeking at private convos

Chat app biz Signal is unhappy with the current version of Microsoft Recall and has invoked some Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality in Windows to stop the tool from snapshotting private conversations.…

Claude passed 80% of tasks assigned in a recent study

Freelance coders take solace: while AI models can perform a lot of the real-world coding tasks that companies contract out, they do so less effectively than a human.…

Barriers stack up: Datacenter capacity, egress fees, platform skills, variety of cloud services. It won't happen, say analysts

European organizations wanting to break free of American cloud operators may find their hopes dashed, according to industry analysts, for a number of reasons including a sheer lack of datacenter capacity.…

Parents and teachers have personal info, ID documents leaked online, but exam season mostly unaffected

Scotland's West Lothian Council has confirmed that data was stolen from its education network after the Interlock ransomware group claimed responsibility for the intrusion earlier this month.…

And other ways to get that Amiga feeling on a budget

The FOSS recreation of AmigaOS is making progress. A new edition runs entirely from a USB key, so you can temporarily turn your PC into an Amiga – without any tricky installation process.…

Report slates end of perpetual licenses, death of monthly pay-as-you-go model, and 'punitive' changes by Broadcom

Broadcom has upped VMware licensing costs by between eight to 15 times since it took over the organization, and a lack of alternatives in the tech industry means trade and end customers have no choice but to play ball.…

Don’t panic! It's related to an earthly bug, eats gelatin, not astronauts, and may have adapted to life in space

Chinse scientists have found a previously unknown species of microbe on the nation’s Tiangong space station, and it may have evolved characteristics that help it to survive in space.…

Choc Fac brings gen mods to Android, Chrome, pretty much everywhere else

Google I/O  Google technical folk laid out a menu of geeky delights on Tuesday at Google I/O, in the hope that software developers will pay to build upon the Chocolate Factory's platforms and services.…

Search? That's now artificial intelligence, too

Google I/O  Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and its Google subsidiary, opened the 17th annual Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday, evangelizing the transformational power of artificial intelligence, as he did last year and the year before that.…