The Register

'Your well-honed customer experience is noise to an agent'

As software agents powered by foundation models become more commonplace, marketers need to revisit their assumptions about website design and advertising.…

Dutch intel services, Microsoft go big-game hunting

A previously unknown Kremlin-linked group has conducted cyber-espionage operations against Dutch police, NATO member states, Western tech companies, and other organizations of interest to the Russian government since at least April 2024, according to Dutch intelligence services and Microsoft.…

The rebellion grows and it seems resistance is not futile

Despite high-profile calls for employees to get their butts back behind their desks in a traditional workplace setting, more people - at least in the UK - are ignoring return-to-office mandates, a study has found.…

Nick Clegg, former politico and Zuckcorp policy Prez, seems confused, can Reg readers help him?

Former British deputy PM and Meta apologist Sir Nick Clegg says that forcing AI companies to ask for the permission of copyright holders before using their content would destroy the AI industry overnight.…

He'll need to be way more aggressive than a 25% tariff, say analysts, and even then it would take years

US President Donald Trump can huff, puff, and threaten to blow Tim Cook's house down with a 25 percent iPhone import tariff, but analysts say even that threat is unlikely to bring Apple's manufacturing home.…

Hackers take personal data bytes from the brand with three stripes

Adidas is warning customers some of their data was stolen after an "unauthorized" person lifted it from a "third-party customer service provider."…

Marc Benioff eyes up all those lovely data tools for AI push

Salesforce is to buy Informatica, the enterprise data management and analytics biz, for around $8 billion.…

Commercial customers, STEM students all feeling the pain after mega outage of engineering data-analysis tool

Software biz MathWorks is cleaning up a ransomware attack more than a week after it took down MATLAB, its flagship product used by more than five million people worldwide.…

Taxpayers on hold for 798 years might wish for a better service

The UK's tax collector has confirmed plans to contract out call center services with an associated price tag of £500 million ($677 million).…

Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse

Opinion  I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google.…

Or, rediscovering the KISS principle, the long way round

Comment  Linux distro wars are nothing new. "Advocacy" (a euphemism for angry argument) about hardware, OSes, programming languages and editors goes back as long as different computers have existed. Computers appeal to geeky folks, and geeky folks readily get a little too attached to things — and then become possessive and defensive about them.…

Nothing will change while big tech sets the rules. We'll need someone even scarier

Opinion  How much harm does AI cause the environment? As a report from the MIT Technology Review just confirmed, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares enough to try and find out. Even if lots of people did care a lot, it wouldn’t change things. The driver of AI’s insane energy addiction is no more amenable to argument than a labrador in possession of an entire roast chicken.…

No, not Amazon. China’s SHEIN is in the spotlight for fake discounts, grubby greenery, and evading inquiries

The European Commission has warned Chinese e-tailer SHEIN to clean up its act, after finding several practices on its website breach local consumer law.…

But pauses tech-adjacent threat to slap all Euro-imports with 50 percent duties

World War Fee  US president Donald Trump has threatened a tariff that would apply only to Apple, and appears to have referred to the European Union’s treatment of American tech companies as part of a threat to slap the bloc with higher tariffs.…

Chipmaker Hygon, which recently teased a 128-core, 512-thread CPU, merges with server-maker Sugon

China has spawned a supercomputing contender.…

Taiwan's tech expo dishes up the usual oddities - some less bonkers than they seem

Computex  Taiwan’s Computex conference sprawls across four exhibition halls in which almost 1,500 exhibitors jostle for attention.…

Life in a corporate aquarium didn’t go swimmingly

Who, Me?  Another Monday has arrived, bringing with it the chance for work-in-progress meetings at which managers will recite corporate clichés with astounding sincerity. Which is why The Register always opens the week with a new edition of Who, Me? It's the column in which you share stories of trying to meet your KPIs and somehow escaping when you don't.…

The original leak site that never sold out, never surrendered

Obituary  John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know.…

PLUS: Original emoji retired; Xiaomi's custom silicon; Pakistan dedicates 2,000 MW to AI and crypto

Asia In Brief  China last week approved rules that will see Beijing issue identity numbers that netizens can use as part of a federated identity scheme that will mean they can use one logon across multiple online services.…

PLUS: Interpol kills more malware; GoDaddy settles in awful infosec case; Giant stolen creds DB exposed

Infosec In Brief  Secrets of the Trump administration may have been exposed after a successful attack on messaging service TeleMessage, which has been used by some officials.…