The Register

Rockstar says it fired staff for leaks, but the IWGB accuses the GTA maker of union-busting

Rockstar Games denies claims that it fired several employees over their union activity, insisting that it sacked the team members for leaking confidential information.…

Science loses when lab workers grapple with costs and availability, claim researchers

Cloud vendors’ commercial models poorly serve scientists, forcing them to struggle for value amid tightening budgets, according to research.…

Amazon's spat with Perplexity shows that technology is not the only blocker for the agentic era

Opinion  The agentic era remains a fantasy world. Software agents, the notional next frontier for generative AI services, cannot escape the gravity of their contradictions, legal ambiguities, and competitive pressures. Not everyone, especially not competing businesses, wants a bot representing the customer.…

Sustainable vision? Who knows

Lenovo says that traditional datacenters are not fit for purpose, and must evolve to future-proof businesses across EMEA. This is based on research, but the PC and server biz has come up with some wacky possible designs, including one that is almost literally in the clouds.…

Shopping bots pick first option and are 'vulnerable to manipulation', Magentic Marketplace trial finds

Ready to have your agent talk to my agent and arrange a sale? Microsoft has published a simulated marketplace to put AI agents through their paces and answer a question for the new age: Would you trust AI with your credit card?…

Most of you still can't do better than 123456?

123456. admin. password. For years, the IT world has been reminding users not to rely on such predictable passwords. And yet here we are with another study finding that those sorts of quickly-guessable, universally-held-to-be-bad passwords are still the most popular ones.…

Intune is where the party's at, even if admins might prefer the Configuration Manager kitchen

Microsoft has officially confirmed that Configuration Manager will transition to an annual release cadence, with Intune as the primary focus for innovation.…

Spies, not crooks, were behind digital heist – damage stopped at the backups, says US cybersec biz

SonicWall has blamed an unnamed, state-sponsored collective for the September break-in that saw cybercriminals rifle through a cache of firewall configuration backups.…

Three hyperscale sheds to double capacity near Heathrow

Colt Data Centre Services has secured approval to invest £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in three hyperscale data centers at its Hayes Digital Park campus in west London.…

Stolen creds let miscreants waltz into 17K employees' chats, spilling info on staff and partners

Japanese media behemoth Nikkei has admitted to a data breach after miscreants slipped into its internal Slack workspace, exposing the personal details of more than 17,000 employees and business partners.…

Parliamentary report calls for sovereign launch capability and reduced dependence on US services

The UK's House of Lords UK Engagement with Space Committee has published a scathing report, "The Space Economy: Act Now or Lose Out," declaring that the 2021 National Space Strategy has "failed to turn its ambitions into reality."…

Middle Kingdom also postpones astronaut return mission after something hit its spaceship

China has matched the European Space Agency’s feat of taking a snapshot of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from a Mars orbiter.…

Even offers refunds if users sign up for AI they don’t want, once it fixed a bad link

Updated  Microsoft Australia has apologized to users of its M365 suite after regulators accused it of steering them towards pricey bundles that include its Copilot AI service.…

Awkward, seeing as they’re close partners

Qualcomm and Arm have offered differing predictions regarding the market for inferencing silicon.…

Some clever networking hacks open the door

AI search provider Perplexity's research wing has developed a new set of software optimizations that allows for trillion parameter or large models to run efficiently across older, cheaper hardware using a variety of existing network technologies, including Amazon's proprietary Elastic Fabric Adapter.…

Degraded performance and possible dependency problems across AZs

Microsoft has warned of a “thermal event” impacting Azure users in its West Europe region, and perhaps elsewhere.…

Images in the test dataset were all sourced with consent

AI models are filled to the brim with bias, whether that's showing you a certain race of person when you ask for a pic of a criminal or assuming that a woman can't possibly be involved in a particular career when you ask for a firefighter. To deal with these issues, Sony AI has released a new dataset for testing the fairness of computer vision models, one that its makers claim was compiled in a fair and ethical way.…

For now it works only with the web version of the Microsoft Store

hands on  Normally, when you install an application in Windows, it comes either from a direct download or as a single choice from the Microsoft Store. But what if you could install several different apps at the same time by creating a custom group?…

An hour’s tablet training and a soldier was sending the bird on autonomous errands

Who needs a drone when you can fly a Black Hawk from a tablet? DARPA's $6 million award to Sikorsky paid off when a National Guard soldier, trained in under an hour, used a handheld tablet to command an optionally piloted Black Hawk through multiple autonomous missions. …

Second time's the charm for after Wiz rejected Google's $23B offer last year

Google's second attempt to acquire cloud security firm Wiz is going a lot better than the first, with the Department of Justice clearing the $32 billion deal, which ranks as Google's largest-ever acquisition.…