The Register

Brussels rolls out €500M plan to lure boffins with grants and actual respect for research

The European Commission (EC) is looking to make Europe the home of science by tempting researchers and scientists to relocate to the continent amid a more hostile stance toward academic freedom in the US.…

Data giant backs federal austerity push, saying it's 'the right thing' for US

Palantir, the controversial US surveillance and analytics firm, says it welcomes scrutiny of government spending by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the controversial cost-cutting agency led by Elon Musk.…

Azure Virtual Desktop App attach users might want to sit this one out for a bit longer

Microsoft is celebrating the milestone of Windows 11 24H2 reaching broad availability with… yet another "known issue." This time, it is related to Azure Virtual Desktop applications.…

From ubiquitous go-to system for early Noughties startups to a legacy like no other

Before Donald Trump became US president and the UK left the EU – both arguably the result of a new kind of online politics – a rather nervous-looking Mark Zuckerberg shuffled out onto a Harvard University lecture hall floor to offer some insight into the inner workings of a website he had created less than two years earlier.…

'Trust us, we're from Trumpland' may not help Microsoft as much as it hopes

Opinion  It is a nation's first duty to protect its citizens from harm. A fine maxim, and one we can all agree on, even in these disagreeable times. Sadly, that's as far as it goes. What the harm is and how to protect against it is where light turns to heat.…

One distro has to be the most extra – and here it is

A Commodore-themed talking Linux desktop, complete with hundreds of games, makes for the biggest distro we've seen yet.…

Can we turn to govt, academic models instead?

RSAC  Corporate AI models are already skewed to serve their makers' interests, and unless governments and academia step up to build transparent alternatives, the tech risks becoming just another tool for commercial manipulation.…

A few million here, a few million there, pretty soon you're talking real money

Microsoft partners can now tailor private offers that allow buyers to vary the amount and timing of payments for some SaaS products and services.…

State-backed chip slinger inches closer to cloud-scale relevance

Chinese chip designer Loongson claims more than 100 products now run on its homegrown LoongArch architecture, including an OpenStack-based cloud stack from domestic hyperscale heavyweight Inspur.…

Because who needs cybersecurity when there’s culture wars to win

President Trump's dream 2026 budget would gut the US govt's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, by $491 million - about 17 percent – and accuses the organization of abandoning its core mission in favor of policing online speech.…

PLUS: AirPlay exploits; Six-year old backdoor opens; Raytheon settles federal charges; and more!

Infosec In Brief  Microsoft has decided to push its consumer customers to dump passwords in favor of passkeys.…

Funny what a public scolding from AI luminaries and a word from state AGs can do

OpenAI's contentious plan to overhaul its corporate structure in favor of a conventional for-profit model has been reworked, with the AI giant bowing to pressure to keep its nonprofit in control, even as it presses ahead with parts of the restructuring.…

Content players and smartphone makers made it happen six months after regulator floated the idea

China has flicked the switch on ‘minors mode’, a subset of its internet in which under-18s will only see wholesome content.…

Tech gigs slide, or so this analysis of US jobs data claims

The US jobs market grew faster than expected in April, but most IT pros aren’t among the beneficiaries.…

Fake it till you make it doesn't cut it for mission-critical workloads

Who, Me?  One of the joys of Monday mornings is arriving at work to find messes made over the weekend. The other is reading a new edition of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of somehow recovering from failure.…

With North Korean IT workers storming the gates, too

RSAC  Another RSA Conference has come and gone, with almost 44,000 attendees this year spread across San Francisco's Moscone Center and the surrounding facilities, according to event organizers.…

PLUS: China spring cleans its AIs; South Korea fines Meta, probes Broadcom; and more!

Asia in brief  India’s ambition to become a global semiconductor manufacturing player went backwards last week after two big players changed their plans.…

Hails DOGE operatives for computer skills during interview in which he also flubbed some tech investment figures

US President Donald Trump has said TikTok will be “very strongly protected” as the made-in-China social network has “a warm spot in my heart”.…

El Reg checks out shop in SF

On Thursday, six stores across America opened their doors with a curious proposition: Come on in, let a metal orb scan your irises, and walk out with a new online profile that promises you're an individual human – and a few bucks in crypto for your troubles.…

Easy fix: Telling LLMs to cosplay Lenin makes 'em more gender blind

Open source AI models are more likely to recommend men than women for jobs, particularly the high-paying ones, a new study has found.…