The Register

No, really, those are the magic words

A clever AI bug hunter found a way to trick ChatGPT into disclosing Windows product keys, including at least one owned by Wells Fargo bank, by inviting the AI model to play a guessing game.…

Built on Chromium, ironically

Perplexity has released its own web browser called Comet, and it's clearly aimed at Google.…

Hey, teacher, leave those kids to AI

After committing more than $13 billion in strategic investments to OpenAI, Microsoft is splashing out billions more to get people using the technology.…

Welcome back to the age of dark patterns

The US was supposed to celebrate the enforcement date for an FTC rule requiring companies to offer simple, clear, one-click subscription cancellations next Monday, but a panel of appeals court judges has decided otherwise.…

Including frequencies that overlap with Wi-Fi 6E and private mobile networking

updated  A provision in the new US budget bill opens a wide swath of spectrum for sale, including some that overlaps with frequencies currently allotted for private mobile networks and Wi-Fi 6E. …

Turns out outsourcing coders to bankroll Kim’s nukes doesn’t jibe with Uncle Sam

The US Treasury has imposed sanctions on 38-year-old Song Kum Hyok, a North Korean accused of attempting to hack the Treasury Department and posing as an IT worker to collect revenue and secret data for Pyongyang.…

Low-severity bugs but infosec pros claim they are a 'critical' overall threat – patch accordingly

AMD is warning users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack affecting a broad range of its chips that could lead to information disclosure.…

Chasing the hype without a clear use case? You may crash and burn

US Environmental Protection Agency CIO Carter Farmer has a blunt message for AI hype-chasers: Shiny-object syndrome too often drives teams to leap into AI without defining a clear use case or vetting their data, leaving them to wonder why it doesn't work.…

Design sent to TSMC as startup wraps €130M funding round and targets 2026 silicon

Euro chip designer SiPearl has finally taped out its Rhea1 processor destined for Jupiter, the first European exascale supercomputer, just as its Series A financing round ends with an injection of cash from a new investor.…

'We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court’s order'

The Georgia Court of Appeals has tossed an order from the US state trial court because it relied on cases that do not exist, presumably generated by an AI model.…

Lucy in the sky with calcium

Astroboffins have found the first evidence of a double-detonated Type Ia supernova, which could explain why we have enough bright points of reference in the skies to plot our place in the universe.…

Plus: Confirms less serious data points like meal preferences also leaked

Qantas says that when cybercrooks attacked a "third party platform" used by the airline's contact center systems, they accessed the personal information and frequent flyer numbers of the "majority" of the circa 5.7 million people affected.…

But Chocolate Factory love-in sorely lacks detail

The UK government has signed a pact with Google Cloud to "upskill" as many as 100,000 civil servants in the latest tech by 2030.…

No word on who pressed the 'MechaHitler' button

xAI is scrambling to contain the fallout after its Grok chatbot went – and there is no other way of putting this – full Nazi in its X (formerly Twitter) posts.…

Version 140 has built-in MS Exchange support – and a year's updates ahead

The latest version of the messaging client from Mozilla subsidiary MZLA has a bunch of useful new features, and will get updated until mid 2026.…

Oodles of euros on offer for not accidentally blowing up stuff

Comment  The European Space Agency (ESA) is pressing ahead with its European Launcher Challenge (ELC), and the good news is that three of the five pre-selected candidates have yet to explode anything in public.…

Customers say things are still far from perfect as lengthy support queues hamper business dealings

Ingram Micro says it is gradually reactivating customer's ordering capabilities across the world, region by region, now its ransomware attack is thought to be "contained".…

'If this is the priority for our tax dollars, we are doomed'

The US Congress has passed President Donald Trump's budget bill. In addition to the possibility of a Space Shuttle move, significant changes are on the way for NASA.…

Activists argue the resources spent on tech aren't leading to worthwhile numbers

Privacy activists are unimpressed with London's Metropolitan Police and its use of live facial recognition (LFR) to catch criminals, saying it is not effective use of taxpayer money and an overreach by government.…

First volume of inquiry report focuses on the UKscandal's human impact

Senior Post Office staff in the UK – and those working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL – knew or should have known about the defects causing errors in the Horizon system that contributed to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of branch workers, 13 of whom committed suicide, most probably as a result, according to the first volume of a report submitted by the independent public inquiry into the computer scandal.…