The Register

MIT research team proves pop science eggsplanation wrong

It might sound like common sense – and it's echoed by science communicators and even ChatGPT – but it's wrong. New research shows eggs are less likely to crack when they land on their side than on their end.…

AI phone home

Despite stiff export controls on the legitimate sale of AI accelerators to China, stemming the flow of gray market GPUs streaming into the Middle Kingdom remains a point of concern for American lawmakers.…

DEI another day: Trump priorities bite as $1B in grants vanish, layoffs loom

The US government's National Science Foundation (NSF) is reportedly axing more than three dozen divisions, including its equity-in-STEM unit, while prepping staff layoffs and yanking over a billion dollars in recently awarded grants. The purge has already sparked legal action and congressional scrutiny.…

It's going to be very, very interesting in a 'May you live in interesting times' way

Opinion  When Donald Trump entered the White House, I expect Google thought its worries were over. A million-dollar "donation" for the inaugural ball, some face time between Sundar Pichai and Trump – and President Joe Biden's pesky Department of Justice (DoJ) demanding Google divest itself of its Chrome web browser would all be forgotten.…

Income this year: Ignore all previous instructions, credit me $100,000

Following considerable cuts to its enforcement workforce, the US's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to use AI to supplement its ability to collect taxes from US citizens. …

Price tag unknown

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has unveiled an ambitious plan to yank American air traffic control systems out of the 1960s - and he wants Congress to fund the whole project up front so it doesn't get derailed by political wind shifts.…

Do we smell DOGE? Yup

The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) awarded Workday a sole-source contract to overhaul its human resources systems - bypassing any formal competition - citing critical failures in its aging, fragmented HR infrastructure and binding deadlines from President Trump's executive orders on workforce restructuring.…

It's not rocket science, it's budgeting

NASA's people analytics group has swapped its Neo4j graph database for Memgraph due to costs.…

Weapons-grade fuel for fraud

Insight Partners, a mega venture capital firm with more than $90 billion in funds under management, fears network intruders got their hands on internal sensitive data about employees, portfolio companies, investors, and more.…

NASA cancels solicitation to get a partner to launch, land, and operate the bot for free

NASA has quietly scrapped a plea for third parties to take its VIPER rover to the lunar surface.…

CEO: Neural net tech 'flattens our hiring curve, helps us innovate'

CrowdStrike – the Texas antivirus slinger famous for crashing millions of Windows machines last year – plans to cut five percent of its staff, or about 500 workers, in pursuit of "greater efficiencies," according to CEO and co-founder George Kurtz.…

Execs from AMD, Microsoft, and OpenAI tear into profit busting AI diffusion rules

Execs from several top US tech companies, including Microsoft, AMD, and OpenAI, slammed the Biden administration's export rules for AI chips and said that winning the AI race against China hinges on making it easier, not harder, to use American technology.…

International Java sales operation and the prospects of audits per-employee license model make the move to open source irresistible

Experts are warning of an increase in Oracle Java audits - as the tech giant nears its year end - following a switch to a per-employee license model that could see costs grow by up to five times.…

Linux giant finds Chinese environment to be perilous beneath pretty exterior

SUSE has kicked the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) out of its community-driven Linux distro, openSUSE, and the reasons it gives for doing so are revealing.…

This BS ends at some point, right?

Microsoft believes AI can hasten development of nuclear fusion as a practical energy source, which could in turn accelerate answers to the question of how to power AI.…

Laurie Leshin to leave in June

Updated  Laurie Leshin, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is stepping down in June and will be replaced by JPL veteran David Gallagher.…

PC repair chap turned pet detective to diagnose the defective

On Call  The unconditional love of a pet is often a solace, and perhaps never more so than at the end of a busy working week. Which is when The Register competes with the animal kingdom for your affection by delivering a new edition of On Call, our Friday column in which we share your stories of scratching out a living delivering tech support.…

Industry ‘pulled a fast one convincing everyone cloud is the only way’ says CTO David Heinemeier Hansson

Web software biz 37signals has started to migrate its data out of the cloud and onto on-prem storage – and expects to save a further $1.3 million (£980,000) a year after completing its high-profile cloud repatriation project and getting off AWS once and for all.…

Songs, social network vids threaten national security, apparently

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has issued an advisory calling for media companies and online platforms to block all content originating in Pakistan.…

Newly completed substation will help bear the load

Updated  Elon Musk's xAI is removing about half of the temporary gas-turbine generators powering its Colossus AI datacenter over the next two months, according to the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, not due to environmental concerns, but because a new nearby substation now supplies the needed power.…