The Register

Student shows 'uniform hashing is optimal' was just wishful thinking

It isn't often that a decades-old assumption underpinning modern technology is overturned, but a recent paper based on the work of an undergraduate and his two co-authors has done just that.…

With drivemaker poised to become 2 publicly traded companies, judge says he has 'concerns' over restructuring

Western Digital has less than a week to file a bond or stump up the $553 million it owes in a patent infringement case, after a federal judge on Tuesday denied the company a stay of execution while it tries to get the ruling overturned.…

De-dupes some roles, hints others aren't needed as the infosec scene shifts

Nine days after completing its $859 million acquisition of managed detection and response provider Secureworks, Sophos has laid off around six percent of its staff.…

Senator, Congressman tell DNI to threaten infosec agreements if Blighty won't back down

US lawmakers want newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to back up her tough talk on backdoors. They're urging her to push back on the UK government's reported order for Apple to weaken iCloud security for government access.…

Objection from open source community heralded as 'great victory for the ecosystem'

The WordPress Foundation's effort to trademark the terms HOSTED WORDPRESS and MANAGED WORDPRESS has been thwarted, for now, following a petition from a dissenting member of the open source WordPress community.…

Not all bad news for Redmond as Australian agency also found strong ROI and some unexpected upsides

Australia’s Department of the Treasury has found that Microsoft’s Copilot can easily deliver return on investment, but staff exposed to the AI assistant came away from the experience less confident it will help them at work.…

Standard FOSS office suite continues to evolve in interesting new directions

FOSDEM 2025  LibreOffice is a big, mature chunk of code now, but that doesn't make it impossible to teach it impressive new tricks. Some of them could make it more important than ever.…

Yet another cash grab from Kim's cronies and an intel update from Microsoft

North Korea has changed tack: its latest campaign targets the NPM registry and owners of Exodus and Atomic cryptocurrency wallets.…

Tech shows customers more humanity than its human staff

It doesn't sleep, it doesn't eat, and it doesn't get sick of dealing with incompetent customers.…

Research after Apple Intelligence fiasco shows bots still regularly make stuff up

Updated  Still smarting from Apple Intelligence butchering a headline, the BBC has published research into how accurately AI assistants summarize news – and the results don't make for happy reading.…

Limited-edition hotfix to get wider release before end of month

Administrators of Palo Alto Networks' firewalls have complained the equipment falls over unexpectedly, and while a fix has bee prepared, it's not yet generally available.…

Also reckons it can dodge DOGE

Cisco has prepared for trade war and thinks it can ride things out by reconfiguring its supply chain if that becomes necessary.…

Don't relax just yet: Redmond has made some certificate-handling changes that could trip unprepared admins

Patch Tuesday  Microsoft’s February patch collection is mercifully smaller than January’s mega-dump. But don't get too relaxed – some deserve close attention, and other vendors have stepped in with plenty more fixes.…

From the billionaire who said real-time surveillance is good for keeping us in check

If governments want AI to improve services and security for their citizens, then they need to put all their information in one place – even citizens’ genomic data – according to Larry Ellison, the Oracle database tycoon.…

FBI, CISA harrumph at Microsoft and VMware in call for coders to quit baking avoidable defects into stuff

US authorities have labelled buffer overflow vulnerabilities "unforgivable defects”, pointed to the presence of the holes in products from the likes of Microsoft and VMware, and urged all software developers to adopt secure-by-design practices to avoid creating more of them.…

Demand described as a 'soft layoff'

IBM has begun what a source describes as a soft layoff for its Finance & Operations business unit, in the form of a return-to-office (RTO) order.…

GOP lawyer Sean Cairncross will be learning on the fly, as we also say hi to new intelligence boss Tulsi Gabbard

President Trump has reportedly chosen a candidate for National Cyber Director — another top tech appointee with no professional experience in that role.…

Cupertino mostly uses bland language when talking security, so this sounds nasty

Apple has warned that some iPhones and iPads may have been targeted by an “extremely sophisticated attack” and has posted patches that hopefully prevent it.…

300+ US companies, 70+ individuals hit by the fraudsters

An Arizona woman who created a "laptop farm" in her home to help fake IT workers pose as US-based employees has pleaded guilty in a scheme that generated over $17 million for herself... and North Korea.…

You gotta fight ... for your Reuters ... to party

Thomson Reuters has won a partial summary judgment in a copyright case against shuttered AI firm Ross Intelligence, a decision that disallows fair use as a defense for training models on proprietary data without permission.…