The Register

But Chinese startup shakeup doesn't herald 'drastic drop' in need for infrastructure buildout, say analysts

Analysis  The shockwave following the release of competitive AI models from Chinese startup DeepSeek has led many to question the assumption that throwing ever more money at costly large-scale GPU-based infrastructure delivers the best results.…

You can’t make monopoly money without a monopoly, but you sure can lose it

Opinion  It would take a heart of stone not to explode with joy at the massive infusion of schadenfreude provided in recent days by the DeepSeek AIpocalypse.…

Throw Copilot down the same well, too, maybe? No? OK

If you were relying on Microsoft's Defender VPN, it's time to find an alternative - Redmond is shutting it down at the end of the month.…

PLUS: Chinese bus lanes put Tesla in a tangle; India drops electronics tariffs; Samsung worries about soft demand

Asia In Brief  Nvidia’s quarterly results occasionally raise eyebrows because they report that Singapore is a disproportionately large market for its wares. In a Q3 2025 filing [PDF], for example, the accelerator colossus revealed that Singapore is its second-largest market and accounted for 22 percent of revenue.…

A glimmer of light in an otherwise gloomy year for troubled chipmaker

Beleaguered chip giant Intel has at least one thing to smile about after receiving a payout of €515.55 million ($536 million) from the EU in relation to an old antitrust case that it challenged.…

Peter Tripp Akemann avoids jail, will pay 'Super Scooper' repair costs and is ordered to help with LA's wildfire recovery

A Culver City, California resident has admitted to crashing his drone into a 'Super Scooper' firefighting aircraft battling the Los Angeles wildfires. His guilty plea spares him up to a year in prison, according to the Department of Justice.…

Takes a bit more time to spout a bit less nonsense

OpenAI today launched deep research in ChatGPT, a new agent that takes a little longer to perform a deeper dive into the web to come up with a response to a query.…

Fun with a FOSS-focused Phosh fondleslab

FuriLabs offers a decent-spec smartphone that is based on Debian and can run GNOME apps in your pocket.…

Investigating compensation to police whose sensitive info was leaked in 2023

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has bailed two officers after they were arrested as part of a fraud investigation related to the payments to cops whose sensitive data was mistakenly published in 2023.…

Profiteering from emergency services comms network in Britain? Not anymore, says CMA

Motorola will not be allowed to again appeal a decision by the UK competition regulator to impose a price cap on the communications network it operates for Britain's emergency services.…

Third-party software sticking plaster expected six months late

Further delays have hit Birmingham City Council's disastrous attempt to implement a functioning finance system after it emerged that off-the-shelf software to solve "one of the fundamental problems" with the beleaguered Oracle implementation has been put back.…

Hey! Teacher! Leave our network alone!

Who, Me?  At the start of working week, it can sometimes feel like you’re just another brick in the wall and the next five days will require you to carry weight for others. To ease you into the mucky business of exchanging your labor for currency, The Register therefore uses each Monday to offer a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It’s the column in which you admit to escaping your errors and emerging unscathed.…

Australian government staff mixed medical info for folk who share names and birthdays

Australia’s privacy commissioner has found that government agencies down under didn’t make enough of an effort to protect data describing “digital doppelgangers” – people who share a name and date of birth and whose government records sometimes contain data describing other people.…

PLUS: MGM settles breach suits; AWS doesn't trust you with security defaults; A new .NET backdoor; and more

Infosec in brief  The United States Food and Drug Administration has told medical facilities and caregivers that monitor patients using Contec equipment to disconnect the devices from the internet ASAP.…

Reckons completion of Hashicorp buy is around the corner, plans to use some of $7B free cash for more M&A

IBM is hopeful of completing the $6.4 billion purchase of Hashicorp relatively smoothly given what Big Blue perceives to be a "more rational" and "pro-competition" regulatory environment.…

'Research and various other reasons' behind hullabaloo ... but why didn't someone say that a month ago?

Time to pack it up and go home, drone conspiracy theorists: The White House has finally offered an explanation for those mysterious New Jersey drone sightings from late last year - though its rather vague statement raises more questions than it answers.…

But it still has a chance at the network edge and the PC

Comment  Any hope Intel may have had of challenging rivals Nvidia and AMD for a slice of the AI accelerator market dissolved on Thursday as yet another GPU architecture was scrapped.…

As if secure design is the only bullet point in a list of software engineering best practices

Systems Approach  As my Systems Approach co-author Bruce Davie and I think through what it means to apply the systems lens to security, I find that I keep asking myself what it is, exactly, that’s unique about security as a system requirement?…

Nulled and Cracked had a Lorelai-cal rise - until Operation Talent stepped in

Law enforcement officers across Europe assembled again to collectively disrupt major facilitators of cybercrime, with at least one of those cuffed apparently a fan of the dramedy series The Gilmore Girls.…

Raymond Chen reflects on the never-ending cycle of updates and restarts

Comment  Remember when things didn't need constant updating and reboots to work? Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen notes that the affliction has even spread as far as the humble electric toothbrush.…