The Register

AlphaEvolve may optimize your code in ways you hadn’t thought possible. Or not. Not is possible, too

Google's AI shop DeepMind has unveiled AlphaEvolve, its "evolutionary coding agent" powered by large language models to discover and optimize algorithms.…

More than $100M in costs could be cut by gutting duplicative IT alone, making DOGE itself look a bit redundant

Comment  Cost-trimming in the US federal government is all the rage right now – and a new report finds more than $100 million in savings available to the Feds by doing nothing but eliminating redundant and unnecessary IT investments. …

Prince Mohammed bin Bone Saw will take a few hundred thousand GPUs with his missiles and fighter jets

The Saudi government on Tuesday announced a massive $600 billion investment in US defense, transportation, energy, and IT infrastructure.…

Ransomware or critical infra hit? Top US manufacturer maintains steely silence

Nucor, the largest steel manufacturer in the US, shut down production operations after discovering its servers had been penetrated.…

Air Force Dumb

The Trump administration is set to accept a $400 million luxury 747-8 from the royal family of Qatar – a lavish "palace in the sky" meant as a temporary Air Force One. But getting it up to presidential security standards could take years and cost hundreds of millions more.…

Touchdown with no topple? Company aims for third time lucky

Intuitive Machines has blamed poor lighting, a problematic altimeter, and difficulties spotting craters for the company's second lunar lander tipping over.…

GA date slips out on Japanese site, vanishes from English

Red Hat appears to have quietly made RHEL 10 available to paying customers, days ahead of its expected debut at next week's Red Hat Summit.…

Cheaper, open source AI will commoditize the market at expense of their bloated counterparts

The future of large language models is likely to be open source, according to Marc Benioff, co-founder and longstanding CEO of Salesforce.…

Plus: All the fun and frolic of fixes from Adobe, SAP, Ivanti

Patch Tuesday  It's that time of the month again, and Microsoft has made it extra spicy by revealing five flaws it says are under active exploitation – but rates as important rather than critical fixes.…

Cripes, we were only joking when we called Elon's social network the new state media

Updated  The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced Monday that going forward, only urgent alerts tied to emerging threats or major cyber activity will appear on its website. Routine updates, guidance, and other notifications will instead be shared via email, RSS, and X.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before

Updated  A legal claim has been brought against Microsoft over alleged licensing practices that could result in a multibillion-pound payout for UK customers.…

'Legitimate interest' won't wash, says privacy outfit, as Zuck's org claims activists want to 'delay AI innovation'

There's a Max Schrems-shaped object standing in the way of Meta's plans to train its AI on the data of its European users, and he's come armed with several justifications for why Zuckercorp might be violating EU regulations with its stated plans. …

Nightwing claims insider intel helped secure lucrative CISA work but US says decision is unrelated

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) scrapped a highly lucrative cybersecurity contract originally awarded to Leidos following a legal challenge from rival bidder Nightwing, yet insists the pushback had nothing to do with it.…

Ailing chip giant targets 2027 break-even as costly EUV tools raise stakes

Intel is wooing external chip customers for its 14A process node to justify the high costs involved, and aims for the foundry division to break even by 2027 - as part of ongoing effort to shake off the struggles of recent years.…

Vendor says vulns are linked with 2 mystery open source libraries integrated into EPMM product

Australia's intelligence agency is warning organizations about several new Ivanti zero-days chained for remote code execution (RCE) attacks. The vendor itself has said the vulns are linked to two mystery open source libraries which it declined to name.…

Admits due diligence fell short - furious users cry ‘gaslighting’

Customers are blasting VPN Secure's new parent company after it abruptly axed thousands of "lifetime" accounts. The reason? The CEO admits in an interview with The Register that his team didn't dig deep enough before acquiring the virtual private network outfit, and simply can't afford to honor those legacy deals.…

Trump greenlights slot for Riyadh as NASA's pricey booster teeters on the brink

NASA will launch a Saudi satellite aboard what could be its penultimate SLS rocket on the Artemis II mission following a deal announced in Riyadh by US President Donald Trump and de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.…

No rush, according to Gartner chap who says: 'Nobody has ever out-patched threat actors at scale'

Patch Tuesday has rolled around again, but if you don't rush to implement the feast of fixes it delivered, your security won't be any worse off in the short term – and may improve in the future.…

CEO Pichai slumming it on a measly $10.725M compared to lieutenants

The C-suite at Google's parent Alphabet collectively scooped up more than $215 million in compensation for 2024, and the CEO was the worst paid among them.…

Crickets as senior security folk asked about risks at NCSC conference

CYBERUK  Peter Garraghan – CEO of Mindgard and professor of distributed systems at Lancaster University – asked the CYBERUK audience for a show of hands: how many had banned generative AI in their organizations? Three hands went up.…