Google to buy power from fusion energy startup Commonwealth - if they can ever make it work
Google has agreed to purchase 200 megawatts of fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). That's assuming, of course, the Massachusetts-based startup can actually get the miniaturized sun to make more power than it consumes, something even the Chocolate Factory admits is a bit of a "moonshot."…
Fed chair Powell says AI is coming for your job
ai-pocalypse It may not happen today or even tomorrow, but US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is confident that someday soon AI is going to seriously change the US economy and labor market. …
Norwegian lotto mistakenly told thousands they were filthy rich after math error
Thousands of Norwegians mistakenly thought they'd won life-changing sums in last week's Eurojackpot after a manual coding slip at state-owned operator Norsk Tipping.…
Scattered Spider crime spree takes flight as focus turns to aviation sector
Just a few weeks after warning about Scattered Spider's tactics shifting toward the insurance industry, the same experts now say the aviation industry is now on the ransomware crew's radar.…
Northrop Grumman shows SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on explosions
video Old Space has shown itself to be just as adept at explosive malfunctions as New Space, with Northrop Grumman encountering an anomaly during a static fire test of an updated solid rocket booster design.…
Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour
The man behind Lotus 1-2-3 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has wrapped up a master's degree at MIT Sloan, decades after dropping out to help kickstart the PC software boom.…
Sinaloa drug cartel hired a cybersnoop to identify and kill FBI informants
A major Mexican drug cartel insider grassed on his fellow drug-peddlers back in 2018, telling the FBI that a cartel "hacker" was tracking a federal official and using their deep-rooted access to the country's critical infrastructure to kill informants.…
The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive
Opinion Microsoft, tacitly admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all, is – sort of, kind of – extending Windows 10 support for another year.…
Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade
Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 25H2 is almost here. However, the upgrade will be little more than an exercise in feature enablement since Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 share the same source code.…
Arm muscles into server market – but can't wrestle control from x86 just yet
Arm-based servers are rapidly gaining traction in the market with shipments tipped to jump 70 percent in 2025, however, this remains well short of the chip designer's ambitions to make up half of datacenter CPU sales worldwide by the end of the year.…
Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits
Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Siemens Mobility have managed to get an ICE test train to 405 km/h (251 mph) on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle high-speed line.…
Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate
The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body has put forward recommendations for the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, perhaps mindful that datacenters are perceived as hugely wasteful of precious water resources.…
Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company
Who, Me? Welcome again to Who, Me? It's the Monday morning column in which readers of The Register admit to making big mistakes and somehow swerving the consequences.…
Don't pay for AI support failures, says Gradient Labs CEO
interview Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job.…
DoJ clears HPE to buy Juniper if it sells Instant On Wi-Fi and licenses some code
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has cleared the way for HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.…
China claims breakthroughs in classical and quantum computers
Chinese chip designer Loongson last week announced silicon it claims is the equal of western semiconductors from 2021.…
Canada orders Chinese CCTV biz Hikvision to quit the country ASAP
Asia In Brief Canada’s government has ordered Chinese CCTV systems vendor Hikvision to cease its local operations.…
It's 2025 and almost half of you are still paying ransomware operators
Infosec in Brief Despite warnings not to pay ransomware operators, almost half of those infected by the malware send cash to the crooks who planted it, according to infosec software slinger Sophos.…
How to get free software from yesteryear's IT crowd – trick code into thinking it's running on a rival PC
Before plug and play was blowing up Windows 98 on a Comdex stage, Windows 95 engineers were grappling with the technology – and on one fateful day they found some unusual text in the BIOS of several PCs that they had to work around.…
The network is indeed trying to become the computer
Analysis Moore's Law has run out of gas and AI workloads need massive amounts of parallel compute and high bandwidth memory right next to it – both of which have become terribly expensive. If it weren't for this situation, the beancounters of the world might be complaining about the cost of networking in the datacenter.…
