The Register

PLUS: Lexmark’s Chinese owners sell to Xerox; India, Australia, target underwater drones; JPMorgan drops custom TLDs; and more!

Asia In Brief  Australian collaborationware company Atlassian has migrated the four million Postgres databases that back its customers’ Jira implementations to Amazon Web Services’ Aurora.…

Also, Swiss ransomware posture looks like its cheese, the CVE Program wants YOU, more sus checks and more

Infosec In Brief  A security researcher looking at samples of stalkerware discovered an SQL vulnerability that allowed him to steal a database of 62,000 user accounts. …

It's not cheap or high end, but it should last you for years to come

The sixth generation of the Fairphone repairable mobile was launched at the end of June. Now spudger-flingers iFixit have got their hands on it, and liked the result.…

¡Cuidado! Time to double-check before entering your Microsoft creds

Cybersecurity experts are reporting a 19x increase in malicious campaigns being launched from .es domains, making it the third most common, behind only .com and .ru.…

Possibility of joining IRIS² remote as Britain grapples with fiscal squeeze

A UK minister has told Parliament that joining Europe's answer to Starlink — Elon Musk's satellite-based mobile internet service — would be a "stretch" given the nation's current financial challenges.…

Shira Perlmutter lost her job after her office published report on generative AI and fair use limits

The former head of the US Copyright Office has pushed back against arguments from President Donald Trump's team that her dismissal was lawful.…

New modeling of carbon cycle shows unsteady but habitable history before liquid water disappeared

New models from recent Martian probe data suggest the fourth planet from the Sun once hosted a fluctuating desert environment with intermittent oases of water.…

Venerable command line tool to depart Windows

Users still clinging on to PowerShell 2.0 just received notice to quit as the command-line tool is officially leaving Windows.…

It's almost like AWS is building its own Stargate

deep dive  Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in the process of building out a massive supercomputing cluster containing "hundreds of thousands" of accelerators that promises to give its model building buddies at Anthropic a leg up in the AI arms race.…

Fears mount while distie remains silent and phone lines down

Exclusive  Widespread outages across Ingram Micro's websites and client service portals are being attributed to "technical difficulties." …

There's more to the Wikimedia organization than the famous encyclopedia

Comment  Multiple other projects also use the vast linked data store that underpins ubiquitous internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and some of them are helping the fight for democracy.…

'JFC, again?'

Microsoft's latest round of layoffs has triggered an outpouring of emotion from inside and outside the company, with at least one former staffer asking: "How many billions must be burned in the AI furnace before this stops?"…

Righteous mockery entranced execs in ways slideware could not

On Call  Friday dawns with the promise of precious freedom, yet the world of tech support is seldom free from trouble. The Register always finds a way to celebrate anyway, by bringing you a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of breaking away from bad bosses and ungrateful users.…

Zuck backs a ‘digital majority age’ and Google open sources tech that might enforce it

Google and Meta have independently taken actions to support a safer internet for kids – and given blockchain boosters a moment to celebrate.…

Mistral fears continental companies may not get time to escape 'distant, behemoth corporations'

French AI business Mistral on Thursday announced an initiative called “AI for Citizens,” which it says offers a way to work with governments and public institutions to transform public services using AI.…

If you come out of a coma in 2026, this is the machine you might see staring down at you

Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries have revealed a jointly developed robotic nursing assistant they hope to start selling in 2026.…

Job cuts aren’t big, symbolism of quitting the world’s fifth-most-populous nation might be

Exclusive  Microsoft has decided to close its presence in Pakistan.…

And with some increases to rural broadband funds, fresh spectrum auctions, and wholesale dismantling of clean energy subsidies

Lawmakers have passed President Trump's budget reconciliation but removed one of its most tech-contentious measures - the ban of state-level AI regulation – meaning the law will have little effect on the tech industry.…

A thermoelectric material called CHESS is pretty cool

Scientists at Johns Hopkins and Samsung have developed a nano-engineered thermoelectric material that is twice as efficient at material-level cooling as existing alternatives, paving the way for broader adoption of solid-state refrigeration technology.…

Cutting out middle man dents coffers of larger service providers, helps Redmond offset AI investments

The sweeping changes Microsoft is making to its licensing incentives for large service providers is taking hold.…