The Register

DeepMind geospatial AI model offers comprehensive view of Earth image data

Google has released a new AI model that maps the world in 10-meter squares for machines to read.…

There's a driver at the wheel

Elon Musk's goal of a fully autonomous car that could serve as a Robotaxi is getting another trial this week, albeit with a human operator behind the wheel.…

Investors cash in as design firm goes public after takeover dreams dashed

updated  Adobe competitor and one-time acquisition target Figma debuted on public markets on Thursday with 36,937,080 shares of Class A common stock at $33 apiece, valuing the web design tool developer at $19.3 billion. But the price-setters apparently underestimated demand dramatically, as investors sent the price up more than threefold by the end of the trading day.…

Crims warned 40% of respondents that they and their families would suffer

Ransomware gangs now frequently threaten physical violence against employees and their families as a way to force victim organizations into paying their demands.…

Illumina allegedly lied about its testing devices meeting government standards

Biotech firm Illumina has agreed to cut the US government a check for the eminently affordable amount of $9.8 million to resolve allegations that it has been selling the feds genetic testing systems riddled with security vulnerabilities the company knew about but never bothered to fix.…

Facility to be built with $1 billion investment from Nscale and Aker

OpenAI's Stargate initiative has teleported to Europe, where the AI flag bearer has enlisted datacenter builder Nscale and Norwegian energy magnate Aker ASA to deploy a 100,000-GPU compute cluster in the Arctic by 2026.…

What's next - gonna tell us it's time to migrate to Windows 8?

Watch out, world: The US government has finally found out about DevSecOps, and it has become a late evangelist for the security-by-default software development practice.…

No way this will be abused

Microsoft has upgraded Azure AI Speech so that users can rapidly generate a voice replica with just a few seconds of sampled speech.…

Deal for legacy applications support reaches £322M as they continue to be decommissioned

Updated  UK tax collector His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has awarded Capgemini a £107 million support and services deal, without competition, under a relationship that started more than twenty years ago.…

Government officials say they are monitoring the situation

A major supplier of healthcare equipment to the UK's National Health Service and local councils is on the verge of collapse 16 months after falling victim to cyber criminals.…

H20 silicon under the microscope after slipping through US export bans

China's internet watchdog has hauled Nvidia in for a grilling over alleged backdoors in its H20 chips, the latest twist in the increasingly paranoid semiconductor spat between Washington and Beijing.…

Trauma-inducing startup sound finally axed

Great news! Microsoft has finally squashed a Windows 11 Insider bug. No, it still hasn't "Made the Start Menu Great Again." No, you still can't drag the taskbar wherever you like. But yes, it simply kills the bug that played the Windows Vista boot chime on startup.…

Brit chip biz sees demand surge for turnkey compute subsystems, chiplets, and complete SoC designs

Chip designer Arm says it is looking to bring more compute subsystems, chiplets, and even end-to-end solutions to market as customers increasingly expect a more complete starting point for their custom silicon.…

Russia spying on foreign embassies? Say it ain't so

Russian cyberspies are abusing local internet service providers' networks to target foreign embassies in Moscow and collect intel from diplomats' devices, according to a Microsoft Threat Intelligence warning.…

Ground control to Majorana

Deep dive  The journal Science is preparing to remove an editorial expression of concern that cast doubt on a five-year-old Microsoft quantum computing research paper.…

US court docs reveal that infamous Chinese snoops filed IP papers like tax returns

Security researchers have uncovered more than a dozen patents for offensive cybersecurity tools filed by Chinese companies allegedly tied to Beijing's Silk Typhoon espionage crew.…

Passwordless disk locking is coming, a couple of years later than hoped

Canonical's Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop has published a roadmap for the 25.10 release, which includes a feature that was originally planned for 23.10.…

Can we have this as a global feature in all software? Please?

Zed, a fast new Rust-based text editor aimed at programmers, now lets you totally disable LLM bot integration. We're sure some users will rejoice – but how many?…

Regulators around the globe pay attention as results of 21-month cloud probe published

Britain's competition regulator says Microsoft and AWS are using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers and proposes to designate both with strategic market status (SMS) to take action against them.…

Crew-11 prepares for liftoff on Musk rocket while Boeing's Calamity Capsule remains grounded

The next International Space Station (ISS) crew is set to launch today, commanded by an astronaut who gave up her Crew-9 seat to make way for the Boeing Starliner test team.…