The Register

'Intense year' ahead, warned Zuck. Got to spend billions on AI and work to stay out of Trump's bad books

Meta has confirmed to The Register that today marks the start of a mass redundancy process with thousands of workers getting the chop.…

IT hiring ticks up in January, but unemployment climbs to 5.7%

The latest job numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics make IT hiring look like it's in freefall, but that's not the case at all, says consultancy firm Janco. …

Free text messages for users of its own and rival networks during test period

T-Mobile US has started a public beta of its Direct-to-Cell service using Starlink satellites, offering just text messages for now, with data and voice calls coming later. Access will be free until July – after which it will cost $15 per month.…

Simian saboteur or a grid screaming for modernization?

Sri Lanka's electricity grid was brought down nationwide on Sunday after monkey business struck a power station south of the capital of Colombo.…

Overdue, over budget and now... perhaps just over?

Boeing has notified staff that hundreds of jobs could be eliminated if the Artemis program is canceled or heavily revised.…

Publications across 25 states either producing smaller issues or very delayed ones

US newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises is one week into tackling a nondescript "cybersecurity event," saying the related investigation may take "weeks or longer" to complete.…

OKD project also has its own immutable CentOS image, which could be fun

FOSDEM 2025  CentOS Connect, the FOSDEM-adjacent meetup, delivered a few notable updates: Firefox is returning as a native package on CentOS, an immutable Stream variant is being explored, and AlmaLinux is doing things its own way.…

And up to 70% of stalled energy generation projects are unlikely to be approved, claims regulator Ofgem

While the UK government wants to turbocharge datacenter construction, a newly published report says there are already 400 GW worth of outstanding requests for connection to the power grid around London, and regulator Ofgem estimates 60-70 percent of these will never happen.…

High starting salaries promised after public sector infosec pay criticized

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is fast-tracking cybersecurity specialists in a bid to fortify its protection against increasing attacks.…

That's not even the worst part of this story, which features a flood, broken promises, and plenty of panic

Who, Me?  The working week has rolled around again, bringing with it the promise of new achievements – and the chance to mess things up in ways that we cover here in "Who, Me?" The Register's reader-contributed column in which you admit to your failures.…

With over 2,000 banks in operation, a domain only they can use has potential to make life harder for fraudsters

India’s Reserve Bank last week announced a plan to use adopt dedicated second-level domains – bank.in and fin.in – in the hope it improves trust in the financial services sector.…

Also claims it’s found DeepSeek-eque optimizations that reduce AI infrastructure requirements

Cloudflare has declared it’s found optimizations that reduce the amount of hardware needed for inferencing workloads, and is in early talks to re-invent the World Wide Web for the age of AI…

PLUS: Spanish cops think they've bagged NATO hacker; HPE warns staff of data breach; Lazy Facebook phishing, and more!

Infosec In Brief  DeepSeek’s iOS app is a security nightmare that you should delete ASAP, according to researchers at mobile app infosec platform vendor NowSecure.…

PLUS: Japan shifts to pre-emptive cyber-defense; Thailand cuts cords connecting scam camps; China to launch 'moon hopper' in 2026; and more!

Asia In Brief  Huawei chair Liang Hua last week told a conference in China that the company expects to meet its revenue targets for 2024, meaning it earned around ¥860 billion ($118.25 billion) – 22 percent growth compared to its 2023 result.…

And US government adverts at that, say senators

Updated  US Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Friday sent letters to the CEOs of Amazon and Google asking why their ad businesses fund websites hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and allow government ads to appear on sites with illegal imagery.…

Oh look, a mini Stargate, how quaint

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France this week announced plans for a one-gigawatt AI datacenter campus dedicated to advancing development of artificial intelligence.…

Vladimir Putin opens airlock after just three years

Roscosmos boss Yury Borisov has been fired from the Russian space agency by executive order of the country's president, Vladimir Putin.…

We did Nazi see that coming

Updated  Marko Elez, a former SpaceX, Starlink, and X engineer who was granted deep access to a critical US Treasury payment system by the Trump-blessed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has quit that team after he was linked to a racist Twitter account.…

20 years? More like five for real-world workloads, says q-AI lead

Despite ongoing breakthroughs, quantum computing has struggled to shake the perception that it's always another ten years away from being practical. However, researchers at Google now argue the tech is actually much closer to commercial viability than some would have you believe.…

Funding freeze while Feds review priorities

If you were hoping the Biden administration's $5 billion investment in building a cross-country network of EV chargers would soon have you road-tripping in an electric car without range anxiety, think again: The Trump-led US Dept of Transport has put the plan under review and halted new funding.…