The Register

When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business

Who, Me?  Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" – the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards.…

Still plans to invest $75B in CapEx this year as unable to meet capacity demand

Google says the mega capital splurge on datacenters in recent years is putting more strain on its balance sheet due to rising depreciation costs, yet it still plans to splash $75 billion on bit barns in 2025.…

And just-about bricks some of its older models everywhere

Google has given up on smart thermostats in Europe.…

PLUS: Korea's SK Telecom replacing SIMs after attack; India automates satellite docking; China greens its datacenters; and more

Asia In Brief  Toyota last week launched a range of electric vehicles in China, one of which use Huawei’s HarmonyOS…

Jia Rong Low hopes to make registries interesting again

Interview  Before you get to know Jia Rong Low, the recently appointed director general of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), you might want to check your definition of "the internet."…

One eight-person publisher says it'll be forced to pay $1.5M

WORLD WAR FEE  The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table.…

Moscow likely to respawn elsewhere

The British government is banning the export of video game controllers to Russia, claiming these can be repurposed for piloting drones on the frontline in Ukraine.…

Infosec is a team sport … unless you're in the White House

Opinion  Just when it seems they couldn't be that careless, US officials tasked with defending the nation go and do something else that puts American critical infrastructure, national security, and troops' lives in danger.…

What next for US-bankrolled vulnerability tracker? It's edging closer to a more independent, global future

Kent Landfield, a founding member of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program and member of the board, learned through social media that the system he helped create was just hours away from losing funding.…

GreyNoise says it is the kind of activity that typically precedes new vulnerability disclosures

Ivanti VPN users should stay alert as IP scanning for the vendor's Connect Secure and Pulse Secure systems surged by 800 percent last week, according to threat intel biz GreyNoise.…

Hello, operator? Book me to Memphis, Tennessee

Interview  For all the talk of the "agentic era" from AI vendors like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and just about everyone else in the space, corporate use of the technology is still tentative. Virgin Atlantic has been conducting flight tests of its website with an AI agent called Operator, and early results are promising, pointing the way toward how agents might actually be used to help customers book flights.…

Where have we heard this before? Feb security update needs its own fix

More than one month after complaints starting flying, Microsoft has fixed a Windows bug that caused some Remote Desktop sessions to freeze.…

Big Blue downplays impact of Elon-gated cost-cutting

IBM beat Wall Street's expectations for both revenue and income in the first quarter of 2025, but its stock price still dropped more than six percent in after-hours trading.…

Thousands face ax, more given RTO orders in quest to suck less

Intel's new CEO Lip-Bu Tan is swinging the ax again, with another round of layoffs incoming as Chipzilla tries to reboot its core.…

Volts make jolts

On Call  By the time Friday morning rolls around, starting the day with a stimulating beverage feels like a fine idea. And so does delivering a freshly brewed installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which you share tales of tech support triumph and torture.…

Biofuel lowers pollutants, but won't eliminate 'em, and could mean DCs compete for supplies

Datacenter operators are being encouraged to adopt hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) as a replacement for diesel in generators, however, analysts say the sustainable stand-in is not emission-free and has its own drawbacks.…

One step forward and one step back as earlier hopes of progress dashed by latest update

Marks & Spencer has paused online orders for customers via its website and app as the UK retailer continues to wrestle with an ongoing "cyber incident."…

German software giant paywalls details, but experts piece together the clues

SAP's latest out-of-band patch is for a perfect 10/10 bug in NetWeaver that experts suspect could have already been exploited as a zero-day.…

Remember when NASA was laser focused on that?

It was 35 years ago when the Hubble Space Telescope deployed into orbit, sent by a space agency facing an existential crisis. Thirty-five years on, not much seems to have changed.…

UK org backing it promises 'legal certainty' for devs, money for creators... but is it too late?

Updated  A UK non-profit is planning to introduce a new licensing model which will allow developers of large language models to use copyrighted training data while paying the publishers it represents.…