The Register

Image board hints that rumors of a poorly maintained back end may be true

Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic."…

Government procurement process is very involved

Comment  It's easy to miss £125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon scandal became public knowledge.…

Spend will come under scrutiny, but projects with good returns still likely to get backing, analyst says

The ripple effects of recent US tariffs could hit sectors well beyond those currently in the firing line, or so warns TechMarketView.…

Latest profit and loss accounts carry scars of ad spending exodus, but things improving. Maybe not everywhere though

In the months following Tesla CEO and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now rebranded to X, business collapsed in the UK, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31 2023.…

Reg hack pines for simpler times, then tries to recapture them

Sometimes, the size and complexity of modern OSes – even the FOSS ones – is enough to make us miss the days when an entire bootable OS could fit in three files, when configuring a PC for production meant editing two plain-text files, which contained maybe a dozen lines each. DOS couldn't do very much, but the little it did was enough. From the early 1980s for a decade or two, much of the world ran on DOS. Then Windows 3 came along, which is arguably the point where the rot set in.…

Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem

Opinion  Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user – 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable.…

When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business

Who, Me?  Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" – the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards.…

Still plans to invest $75B in CapEx this year as unable to meet capacity demand

Google says the mega capital splurge on datacenters in recent years is putting more strain on its balance sheet due to rising depreciation costs, yet it still plans to splash $75 billion on bit barns in 2025.…

And just-about bricks some of its older models everywhere

Google has given up on smart thermostats in Europe.…

PLUS: Korea's SK Telecom replacing SIMs after attack; India automates satellite docking; China greens its datacenters; and more

Asia In Brief  Toyota last week launched a range of electric vehicles in China, one of which use Huawei’s HarmonyOS…

Jia Rong Low hopes to make registries interesting again

Interview  Before you get to know Jia Rong Low, the recently appointed director general of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), you might want to check your definition of "the internet."…

One eight-person publisher says it'll be forced to pay $1.5M

WORLD WAR FEE  The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table.…

Moscow likely to respawn elsewhere

The British government is banning the export of video game controllers to Russia, claiming these can be repurposed for piloting drones on the frontline in Ukraine.…

Infosec is a team sport … unless you're in the White House

Opinion  Just when it seems they couldn't be that careless, US officials tasked with defending the nation go and do something else that puts American critical infrastructure, national security, and troops' lives in danger.…

What next for US-bankrolled vulnerability tracker? It's edging closer to a more independent, global future

Kent Landfield, a founding member of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program and member of the board, learned through social media that the system he helped create was just hours away from losing funding.…

GreyNoise says it is the kind of activity that typically precedes new vulnerability disclosures

Ivanti VPN users should stay alert as IP scanning for the vendor's Connect Secure and Pulse Secure systems surged by 800 percent last week, according to threat intel biz GreyNoise.…

Hello, operator? Book me to Memphis, Tennessee

Interview  For all the talk of the "agentic era" from AI vendors like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and just about everyone else in the space, corporate use of the technology is still tentative. Virgin Atlantic has been conducting flight tests of its website with an AI agent called Operator, and early results are promising, pointing the way toward how agents might actually be used to help customers book flights.…

Where have we heard this before? Feb security update needs its own fix

More than one month after complaints starting flying, Microsoft has fixed a Windows bug that caused some Remote Desktop sessions to freeze.…

Big Blue downplays impact of Elon-gated cost-cutting

IBM beat Wall Street's expectations for both revenue and income in the first quarter of 2025, but its stock price still dropped more than six percent in after-hours trading.…

Thousands face ax, more given RTO orders in quest to suck less

Intel's new CEO Lip-Bu Tan is swinging the ax again, with another round of layoffs incoming as Chipzilla tries to reboot its core.…