The Register

Fears surrendering to GenAI makes humans less competitive

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson has suggested AIs should be allowed to fight other AIs, because evolution brings balance to ecosystems, but also thinks humans should stop using AI before it dumbs down our species.…

Extending all the dumped devices' lives by 12 months? Like taking 2M cars off the road each year

Tech buyers should purchase refurbished devices to push vendors to make hardware more repairable and help the shift to a more circular economy, according to a senior analyst at IDC.…

Plus: How to make Google less unhelpful

As search engines are intentionally made worse, and software grows ever bigger and more complex, a possibly unexpected ally emerges: the European Union.…

Failure could've triggered a small explosion

NASA has revived a set of thrusters on the nearly 50-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft after declaring them inoperable over two decades ago. …

Beast of Redmond runs scared from EC antitrust cops half decade after rivals complained

Microsoft is offering to make a series of concessions for up to ten years to pacify European Commission antitrust regulators. This follows protests from users that tying Teams with its biz productivity applications hinders competition.…

Lawyers prepare to get suited and booted if 'Plan B' to address unfair competition claims is a no show

Microsoft has failed to deliver a special version of Azure for EU cloud providers on time, raising the specter of legal action if it is unable to devise a "commercially equivalent solution" in less than two months' time.…

Success of UK's Universal Credit has lessons for government IT projects, former minister claims

Former UK government minister Sir Iain Duncan Smith has told a committee of MPs that the digitization of Universal Credit is a success story other government departments can learn from.…

After UK spends hundreds of millions, several say existing systems are better

English hospitals are voicing their concern about the functionality provided by Palantir, the US spy-tech firm that won a £330 million ($437 million) deal to run the Federated Data Platform for NHS England, as around a third of trusts go live on the system.…

Self-taught coders who work in HR and have a doctorate in English tend to do that

On Call  Bosses often ask IT pros to clean up messes made by amateurs, and in this week's On Call – The Register's reader-contributed tech support column – we have just such a tale to tell.…

Gives both platforms the ‘generative AI will freshen it up and shift it to the cloud’ treatment

In 2017 Amazon Web Services and VMware were best buddies as they launched a combined cloud service. In 2025 AWS is dismissing Virtzilla as a legacy outfit that needs to be re-platformed to the cloud ASAP before it sinks your business.…

Cupertino's plan to spend $500bn stateside wasn’t enough to placate the tycoon of tariffs

US president Donald Trump has told Apple CEO Tim Cook he has a problem with his plan to manufacture iThings in India.…

They're smishing, they're vishing

The FBI has warned that fraudsters are impersonating "senior US officials" using deepfakes as part of a major fraud campaign.…

Entire process took less than five minutes, prosecutors say

A former DoorDash driver has pleaded guilty to participating in a $2.59 million scheme that used fake accounts, insider access to reassign orders, and bogus delivery reports to trigger payouts for food that was never delivered.…

AI footnote fail triggers legal palmface in music copyright spat

An attorney defending AI firm Anthropic in a copyright case brought by music publishers apologized to the court on Thursday for citation errors that slipped into a filing after using the biz's own AI tool, Claude, to format references.…

Expert tells us: 'It is the most unique breach disclosure I've ever seen'

Coinbase says some of its overseas support staff were paid off to steal information on behalf of cybercriminals, and the company is now being extorted for $20 million.…

Partly because America does AI wrong and it can get more done with less

Chinese web giant Tencent says it has enough high-end GPUs to train new AI models for years, in part because it’s found more efficient ways to do so.…

IT department keeps the infrastructure. Then this new persona takes over and handles the AI stuff

Some organizations have started hiring for a new tech job: The Machine Learning Administrator – aka the “ML admin”.…

Every shipment you make, every FLOP you generate, Uncle Sam will be watching you

Proposed legislation gaining steam in Congress this week would require high-end GPUs and AI chips to include location-tracking safeguards to ensure US-designed components don't end up in nations against Uncle Sam's wishes, with exporters on the hook for compliance.…

DragonForce-riding ransomware ring also has 'shiny object syndrome' so will likely move on to another sector soon

Interview  The same miscreants behind recent cyberattacks on British retailers are now trying to dig their claws into major American retailers' IT environments – and in some cases even deploying ransomware, according to Google.…

Surely Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric has nothing to do with it

US immigration officials say they are winning the war on H-1B fraud – and say they've got the numbers to prove it.…