The Register

VC giant rebuilt boxes, patched holes, and says it’s beefed up security – but won’t say who did it

Venture capital giant Insight Partners has confirmed that a January ransomware attack compromised the personal data of more than 12,000 people, including employees, former staff, and the firm's usually-secretive limited partners.…

Proofpoint spots efforts to spy on US economic policy nerds

Chinese state-aligned online attackers are back at it, targeting US trade policy wonks as Washington and Beijing spar over economic ties.…

Model can also explain its answers, researchers find

Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shown it can improve the reasoning of its LLM DeepSeek-R1 through trial-and-error based reinforcement learning, and even be made to explain its reasoning on math and coding problems, even though explanations might sometimes be unintelligible.…

As old-school virtual desktop player Omnissa distances itself further from VMware

Microsoft thinks cloudy PCs might be overkill for some users, so has started streaming individual apps instead as part of its Windows 365 service.…

And knits a graph DB out of LinkedIn cast-offs

Microsoft is extending its Fabric cloud-based data platform by including Oracle and Google's BigQuery data warehouse in its mirroring capability, and launching a new graph database based on an in-house LinkedIn project.…

Officials say there's no time to switch suppliers if they want the PNC off life support before March 2026

The Home Office is flinging nearly £40 million in taxpayer cash at PA Consulting to get the big-ticket successor to the Police National Computer (PNC) over the finish line.…

'Just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU...'

Open Source Summit  At OSS EU, LWN editor and long-time kernel developer Jonathan Corbet shared a long-term perspective on how and why Linux has thrived for a third of a century.…

Project to get off Google remains a red risk, according to government assessment

Updated  The Cabinet Office, the strategic center of UK government, has handed a much-delayed project to migrate from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 (M365) to another department.…

LEGO Mindstorms, PlayStation 2 and Furby all resonate today in their own way

Column  Twenty-five years ago this month I published a book called The Playful World that explored a simple idea: that the seeds of the future can be found in the present by considering the dazzling toys we started giving our children at the turn of the millennium.…

On the same day that fellow Chinese giant Tencent says its overseas cloud clientele doubled

Chinese tech giant Huawei has kicked off its annual “Connect” conference by laying out a plan to deliver increasingly powerful AI processors that look to have enough power that Middle Kingdom users won’t need to try getting Nvidia parts across the border.…

It's worst when going over older code, one user tells us

AI coding service Replit is in trouble again as users are protesting steep cost increases and some glitches when employing the newest version of its service.…

Huawei or another, we're gonna getcha off Nvidia

Nvidia has reportedly been cut off from the Chinese market after regulators in Beijing ordered the nation's top tech companies to suspend testing and cancel orders of the GPU giant's accelerators.…

Datacenters galore, plus some vague cooperation on AI, nuclear, quantum, and more

America and the UK have announced a $42 billion (£31 billion) trade pact, funded by Microsoft, Google, and others, that predicts bit barns will spring up over Britain's green and pleasant Land. But there's a lot more than money involved.…

First up: $41M to use human annotators to label all that unstructured military data. What could go wrong?

Data curation firm Scale AI has partnered with the Pentagon to deploy its AI on Top Secret networks - a move its interim CEO says is necessary if the US wants AI to be useful for national security.…

House of Zen promises 3.5x improvement in inference and 3x uplift in training perf over last-gen software

AMD closed the performance gap with Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators with the launch of the MI355X this spring. Now the company just needs to overcome Nvidia's CUDA software advantage and make that perf more accessible to developers. …

You didn't really trust the crims to keep their word, did you?

Spiders don't change their stripes. Despite gang members' recent retirement claims, Scattered Spider hasn't exited the cybercrime business and instead has shifted focus to the financial sector, with a recent digital intrusion at a US bank.…

Carefully crafted response makes no mention of whether DOGE employees duplicated critical database

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has disputed a whistleblower's allegations that claimed DOGE made an unauthorized, unsecured copy of a critical database - but it's what the denial doesn't say that speaks volumes. …

Crew will have to wait a little longer for science supplies, spares, and 'fun food'

NASA has delayed a supply delivery to the International Space Station (ISS) after the engines of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft did not perform as expected during an orbit-raising burn.…

American businesses join Win 10 upgrade train, consumers happy to sit on the platform

World War Fee  The US PC industry is suffering from inventory indigestion caused by resellers over-ordering hardware to avoid Donald Trump's expected import taxes on China-made kit.…

Arm, AI, and Copilot, oh my!

hands on  The Arm-based Surface Laptop 7 was introduced in 2024, followed by an Intel-powered version a few months later. As with much of the Surface line, it's a well-engineered piece of hardware. I needed something that could run off the battery for a full day, wouldn't break the strap of a courier bag or the bank, and featured a decent spec.…