The Register

'This is not a copyright message'

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.…

Masked networking costs are coming to AI systems

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.…

Watch out for supply chain hacks especially

interview  The ceasefire between Iran and Israel may prevent the two countries from firing missiles at each other, but it won't carry any weight in cyberspace, according to former NATO hacker Candan Bolukbas.…

$61B business offers $10K–$50K grants to assess AI’s job-market impact

AI biz Anthropic is trying to recruit academics to find out exactly how much its technology could crater the jobs market.…

Taking advantage of the ridiculously complex US healthcare billing system

Criminals masquerading as insurers are tricking patients and healthcare providers into handing over medical records and bank account information via emails and text messages, according to the FBI.…

Over 18? Prove it

The US Supreme Court has ruled that Texas' age certification law for viewing sexually explicit content is valid, meaning that viewers of such material will have to prove their age.…

When AI is a nesting doll of networks, so why reinvent the wheel when you can license it instead

feature  GPUs dominate the conversation when it comes to AI infrastructure. But while they're an essential piece of the puzzle, it's the interconnect fabrics that allow us to harness them to train and run multi-trillion-parameter models at scale.…

When police come to investigate tech support, make sure you have your story straight

On Call  Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates the frolicsome fun that readers have experienced when asked to deliver tech support.…

'No impact on safety,' FAA tells The Reg

update  Hawaiian Airlines said a "cybersecurity incident" affected some of its IT systems, but noted that flights are operating as scheduled. At least one researcher believes Scattered Spider, which previously targeted retailers and insurance companies, could be to blame.…

'Memory vulnerabilities pose serious risks to national security and critical infrastructure,' say CISA and NSA

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) this week published guidance urging software developers to adopt memory-safe programming languages.…

The AI boom needs power, and startup The Nuclear Company aims to help build

Palantir has become the latest tech company to jump on the nuclear power bandwagon - not by making a datacenter deal like Microsoft or Amazon, mind you, but by providing its data analytics software to a startup aiming to help build nuclear plants faster and cheaper.…

Now play dead, like a lot of NASA science programs if the White House gets its way

The team behind NASA's 19-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been busy teaching an old spacecraft new tricks, persuading the vehicle to perform a 120-degree roll to peer more clearly into the red planet.…

Getting it in might mean re-racking the entire datacenter and rebuilding the network, though

Cisco is talking up the integration of security into network infrastructure such as its latest Catalyst switches, claiming this is vital to AI applications, and in particular the current vogue for "agentic AI."…

Pen Test Partners hijack data from Renault Clio to steer, brake, and accelerate in SuperTuxKart

Cybersecurity nerds figured out a way to make those at-home racing simulators even more realistic by turning an actual car into a game controller.…

When it was all about the baud rate

The world of datacenter networking is crammed with exotic technology and capabilities beyond the imaginings of administrators charged with running big iron decades ago. However, while it might have been a slower and more proprietary time, it was also perhaps a little simpler.…

Finance, health, and national identification details compromised

Multinational grocery and retail megacorp Ahold Delhaize says upwards of 2.2 million people had their data compromised during its November cyberattack with personal, financial and health details among the trove.…

Or so hear members of Parliament in the UK

UK lawmakers have learned there is no international protocol for making decisions over how to respond to a prospective life-threatening asteroid strike on Earth.…

Pick a provider based on how good their local 4G and 5G coverage is

The UK's telecoms regulator has released an overhauled tool comparing mobile coverage and performance across the country, claiming this will help the millions of Brits missing out on the best local network.…

Authors are having a hard time protecting their works from the maws of the LLM makers

Updated  Californian courts have not been kind to authors this week, with a second ruling going against an unlucky 13 who sought redress for use of their content in training AI models.…

But like cloud computing and digital transformation, this may be a buzzword they can't ignore forever

HPE Discover 2025  HPE envisions a future where customer systems are filled with its agentic AI products, but reactions from the HPE Discover show floor in Las Vegas this week suggest the company has a way to go to convince folks to buy in.…