The Register

Study finds emotional support from chatbots is more readily accepted if participants don't know it's an AI

A study of AI chat sessions has shown people tend to have more empathy with a chatbot if they think it is human.…

The silly mistakes to the flagrant failures

They say that success breeds complacency, and complacency leads to failure. For cybercriminals, taking too many shortcuts when it comes to opsec delivers a little more than that. …

Users tired of being 'yanked around' as end of support looms

Microsoft's latest attempts to ease the transition to Windows 11 for Windows 10 users "don't go far enough," according to privacy campaigners that worry about the prospect of millions of PCs going to landfill.…

Don't leave the door open to disgruntled workers

A judge has sentenced a disgruntled IT worker to more than seven months in prison after he wreaked havoc on his employer's network following his suspension, according to West Yorkshire Police.…

Fears that DDR4 has hit the end of the road and the return of tariffs may be to blame

Spot prices for DRAM have doubled in the last week.…

Refrigerators and game consoles are the worst, but Apple, surprisingly, rates well

A year after the Right to Repair laws passed in California and Minnesota, many product makers still aren't doing much to help consumers fix the gear they bought.…

Makes the usual complaints about control and cost, adds argument Apple's practices harm privacy

Secure comms biz Proton has joined a lawsuit that alleges Apple’s anticompetitive ways are harming developers, consumers, and privacy.…

America recently extended tech export bans specifically to stop Beijing building this sort of thing

China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University last week flew a hypersonic craft and claimed the test achieved some world-first feats.…

Could it be an AI model builder? A Chinese e-tailer? Perhaps a TikTok mass migration

Oracle has landed a mystery customer that will add more than $30 billion to the database giant's annual revenues, more than doubling the size of its current cloud business.…

Resulting in two indictments, one arrest, and 137 laptops seized

The US Department of Justice has announced a major disruption of multiple North Korean fake IT worker scams.…

It could just be the new 'proficient with MS Word'

ai-pocalypse  For job seekers wondering which AI skills to bone up on, the answer appears to be simple based on a look at the past year of employment data: Just learn to use it. …

No replacement in the wings for info streamed from past their prime rigs, 'termination will be permanent'

updated  Satellite data used for hurricane forecasting was to be abruptly cut off from the end of June due to "recent service changes," but the department in charge has now put the date off another month.…

Ask a model to guess a number from 1 to 50 and it's likely to answer 27

Asked to guess a number between 1 and 50, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Meta's Llama 4 all provided the same answer: 27.…

Someday, my prince will come

Google has agreed to purchase 200 megawatts of fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). That's assuming, of course, the Massachusetts-based startup can actually get the miniaturized sun to make more power than it consumes, something even the Chocolate Factory admits is a bit of a "moonshot."…

AI will make 'significant changes' to economy, labor market

ai-pocalypse  It may not happen today or even tomorrow, but US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is confident that someday soon AI is going to seriously change the US economy and labor market. …

Oh, you have to divide by 100?

Thousands of Norwegians mistakenly thought they'd won life-changing sums in last week's Eurojackpot after a manual coding slip at state-owned operator Norsk Tipping.…

Time ticking for defenders as social engineering pros weave wider web

Just a few weeks after warning about Scattered Spider's tactics shifting toward the insurance industry, the same experts now say the aviation industry is now on the ransomware crew's radar.…

NASA's future Artemis booster sputters during test

video  Old Space has shown itself to be just as adept at explosive malfunctions as New Space, with Northrop Grumman encountering an anomaly during a static fire test of an updated solid rocket booster design.…

During which he coded Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founded Mozilla and the EFF

The man behind Lotus 1-2-3 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has wrapped up a master's degree at MIT Sloan, decades after dropping out to help kickstart the PC software boom.…

Device compromises and deep-seated access to critical infrastructure exposed surveillance vulnerabilities in agency's work

A major Mexican drug cartel insider grassed on his fellow drug-peddlers back in 2018, telling the FBI that a cartel "hacker" was tracking a federal official and using their deep-rooted access to the country's critical infrastructure to kill informants.…