The Register

Now flying again, but not saying what went wrong

UPDATED  US carrier Alaska Airlines has grounded its fleet due to an unspecified IT issue.…

PLUS: Perplexity AI scores 360-million-customer win in India; Australian billionaire’s political party suffers data breach, won’t contact victims; and more

Asia In Brief  Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory last week announced the discovery of a small body with an orbit beyond Pluto’s, and scientists think its presence means the “Planet 9” theory should be revisited.…

PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more

Infosec In Brief  Microsoft has warned users of SharePoint Server that three on-prem versions of the product include a zero-day flaw that is under attack – and that its own failure to completely fix past problems is the cause.…

Fancy Bear can't keep its claws out of Outlook inboxes

The UK government is warning that Russia's APT28 (also known as Fancy Bear or Forest Blizzard) has been deploying previously unknown malware to harvest Microsoft email credentials and steal access to compromised accounts.…

Insiders tell The Register that a company-wide automation push means jobs are disappearing

Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy's predictions that automation would cost jobs at the company have proven accurate at Amazon Web Services.…

Computer scientist Peter Gutmann tells The Reg why it's 'bollocks'

The US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has been pushing for the development of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms since 2016.…

OpenAI delayed its promised open-weights model since GPT-2, leaving the Middle Kingdom clearly in the lead

Comment  OpenAI was supposed to make good on its name and release its first open-weights model since GPT-2 this week.…

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Interview  Scattered Spider and Iranian government-backed cyber units have more in common than a recent uptick in hacking activity, according to Ariel Parnes, a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces' cyber unit 8200.…

Moolenaar demands answers from Commerce Secretary

The Republican chair of the US House Select Committee on China has protested the Trump administration's decision this week to lift restrictions on the sale of Nvidia H20 GPUs and similar processors, warning the chips could be used to advance Chinese AI and military interests.…

GPAI code asks for transparency, copyright, and safety pledges

Two weeks before the EU AI Act takes effect, the European Commission issued voluntary guidelines for providers of general-purpose AI models. However, Meta refused to sign, arguing that the extra measures introduce "legal uncertainties" beyond the law's scope.…

Three perfect 10s in the last month - ISE, ISE, baby

Updated  Cisco has issued a patch for a critical 10 out of 10 severity bug in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to run arbitrary code on the operating system with root-level privileges. …

That's just... checks notes... two years behind everyone else

Japanese foundry upstart Rapidus says it's on track to begin volume production of 2nm process tech after achieving a major milestone this week.…

Analysts have warned Broadcom may slow innovation

VMware on Wednesday announced it has extended the time between major releases from two years to three and extended support for those releases to six years.…

Jon Prosser and alleged accomplice accused of stealing trade secrets from development device

Apple has sued tech YouTuber Jon Prosser for allegedly leaking iOS 26 information to the public ahead of its reveal at WWDC in June.…

Big Red incentivizes perpetual licenses with 76% savings as it parks racks in hyperscaler datacenters

Oracle began incentivizing perpetual licenses in favor of subscription deals as it introduced its database systems via rival cloud vendors, say licensing experts.…

We spoke to the smoot's namesake

Interview  On a chilly October evening in 1958, a group of MIT students shuffled onto the Harvard Bridge, which separates the university town of Cambridge from Boston proper. The shortest among them lay down on the sidewalk at the bridge's start, his friends marked his length, he got up, moved forward, and repeated the process.…

WeTransfer added the magic words 'machine learning' to its ToS and users reacted predictably

Analysis  WeTransfer this week denied claims it uses files uploaded to its ubiquitous cloud storage service to train AI, and rolled back changes it had introduced to its Terms of Service after they deeply upset users. The topic? Granting licensing permissions for an as-yet-unreleased LLM product.…

Non-competitive £220M datacenter deal with tax collector tops £510M pile of public money

Updated  Fujitsu has been awarded around £510 million ($682 million) in UK public sector contracts since a TV dramatization of the Horizon Post Office scandal – including a recent £220 million ($294 million) deal with the UK tax collector, awarded without competition.…

2.6.1 adds Plucky Puffin and Firefox actually works this time

Rescuezilla 2.6.1 has introduced a new version based on the latest interim Ubuntu release, while also updating its existing builds on older versions.…

With watchdog set to publish report into health of market next month, will it hold AWS and Microsoft's feet to the fire?

Comment  The UK's ambition to become a global AI superpower hinges on a vibrant and competitive cloud market. The next few days will show if its competition regulator really appreciates both the pace of change and the scale of remedies needed to achieve both of these things.…