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PLUS: AirPlay exploits; Six-year old backdoor opens; Raytheon settles federal charges; and more!

Infosec In Brief  Microsoft has decided to push its consumer customers to dump passwords in favor of passkeys.…

Funny what a public scolding from AI luminaries and a word from state AGs can do

OpenAI's contentious plan to overhaul its corporate structure in favor of a conventional for-profit model has been reworked, with the AI giant bowing to pressure to keep its nonprofit in control, even as it presses ahead with parts of the restructuring.…

Content players and smartphone makers made it happen six months after regulator floated the idea

China has flicked the switch on ‘minors mode’, a subset of its internet in which under-18s will only see wholesome content.…

Tech gigs slide, or so this analysis of US jobs data claims

The US jobs market grew faster than expected in April, but most IT pros aren’t among the beneficiaries.…

Fake it till you make it doesn't cut it for mission-critical workloads

Who, Me?  One of the joys of Monday mornings is arriving at work to find messes made over the weekend. The other is reading a new edition of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of somehow recovering from failure.…

With North Korean IT workers storming the gates, too

RSAC  Another RSA Conference has come and gone, with almost 44,000 attendees this year spread across San Francisco's Moscone Center and the surrounding facilities, according to event organizers.…

PLUS: China spring cleans its AIs; South Korea fines Meta, probes Broadcom; and more!

Asia in brief  India’s ambition to become a global semiconductor manufacturing player went backwards last week after two big players changed their plans.…

Hails DOGE operatives for computer skills during interview in which he also flubbed some tech investment figures

US President Donald Trump has said TikTok will be “very strongly protected” as the made-in-China social network has “a warm spot in my heart”.…

El Reg checks out shop in SF

On Thursday, six stores across America opened their doors with a curious proposition: Come on in, let a metal orb scan your irises, and walk out with a new online profile that promises you're an individual human – and a few bucks in crypto for your troubles.…

Easy fix: Telling LLMs to cosplay Lenin makes 'em more gender blind

Open source AI models are more likely to recommend men than women for jobs, particularly the high-paying ones, a new study has found.…

Trademark, domain name, GitHub repos stay under control of open source foundation – no word on any forking off for now

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has reached an agreement with Synadia, the company behind open source messaging system NATS, which will see it control the trademark, domain name, and GitHub repositories.…

Not, it's not the plot of a sci-fi disaster movie

A Soviet probe launched more than half a century ago is due to return to Earth in the next week or two, and there's every chance that the vehicle will make it all the way to our planet's surface.…

Shakeup in US higher education funding means FOSS incubator is short a quarter of a million bucks

Higher education across the USA is facing federal funding cutbacks – and now the Oregon State University (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL) is in trouble.…

A look back at two decades of ODF, from open source hopes to patchy real-world adoption

It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats — and the beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop.…

Trigger-happy Taiwan headline sparks instant apocalypse vibes

World War III might have begun this week, according to British broadsheet The Telegraph.…

Proposed cuts would mean: No Lunar Gateway, Artemis hardware to retire, ISS toast in 2030

The White House has proposed slashing NASA's budget by 24 percent, dropping it from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. If approved, it would mark one of the agency's deepest single-year cuts in federal support, and crash its inflation-adjusted funding to levels not seen in decades.…

Capex could jump by $7B to $72B, Zuckercorp says

World War Fee  Meta's AI ambitions are going to cost more than expected thanks to increased competition and — who could have seen this coming? — the Trump administration's obsession with tariffs, which is driving up the price tag of key components.…

iGiant shifted production to India and Vietnam but has no idea if that will help after tariff pause ends

Apple believes the USA’s new tariffs policy will impact its finances by at least $900 million in its next quarter, has re-organized its supply chains to protect itself from whatever comes next, but can’t predict the impact on its business.…

25-year-old fella pleads guilty to stealing, dumping 1.1TB of data from the House of Mouse

When someone stole more than a terabyte of data from Disney last year, it was believed to be the work of Russian hacktivists protesting for artist rights. We now know it was actually a 25-year-old California resident.…

Switching voltage allows search giant to swap out power delivery system

Google is planning for datacenter racks supporting 1 MW of IT hardware loads, plus the cooling infrastructure to cope, as AI processing continues to grow ever more energy intensive.…