UK government's £45B AI savings pitch built on broad-brush guesswork, MPs told
UK government's plans to save £45 billion through the application of AI in the public sector lack clarity and are based on broad-brush assumptions, Members of Parliament have heard.…
AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage
Column Steve Jobs probably didn't remember how many times he skinned his knees learning to ride a bike before describing a personal computer as a "bicycle for the mind." Jobs' point was that both tools help us to go further, faster, with just a little extra effort.…
Salesforce pumps the dream of AI agents as helpers, not replacements
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff heralded the arrival of the agentic era during his keynote at the CRM giant's annual Dreamforce conference.…
Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack
Spooky season is in full swing, and this extends to Microsoft's October Patch Tuesday with security updates for a frightful 175 Microsoft vulnerabilities, plus an additional 21 non-Microsoft CVEs. And even scarier than the sheer number of bugs: three are listed as under attack, with three others publicly known, and 17 deemed critical security holes.…
CISA cuts more staff and reassigns others as government stays shut down
The Trump administration has continued to cut staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and is reportedly reassigning others, further imperiling the US' cybersecurity posture. …
18 zettaFLOPS of new AI compute coming online from Oracle late next year
Oracle on Tuesday revealed it would field more than 18 zettaFLOPS worth of AI infrastructure from Nvidia and AMD by the second half of next year.…
Some like it bot! ChatGPT promises AI-rotica is coming for verified adults
OpenAI has mitigated ChatGPT behavior that might exacerbate users' mental health issues, claims CEO Sam Altman, so the natural next step is to make ChatGPT act more human again - complete with the ability to generate "erotica for verified adults."…
Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide
Most corporate laptop fleets consist primarily of PCs. However, there’s always a contingent of users who beg for Macs. Deciding who gets a Mac in your organization involves balancing IT’s need for simplicity, finance’s requirement to keep costs under control, and users’ desire to work with their preferred tools.…
Microsoft seeding Washington schools with free AI to get kids and teachers hooked
Not content to shove Copilot into every corner of the enterprise it can think of, Microsoft has announced plans to force feed AI to students across its home state of Washington. …
Chinese gang used ArcGIS as a backdoor for a year – and no one noticed
A Chinese state-backed cybergang known as Flax Typhoon spent more than a year burrowing inside an ArcGIS server, quietly turning the trusted mapping software into a covert backdoor.…
Unwary SAP private cloud users face 10% renewal hikes, warns Gartner
Gartner has reported that SAP customers opting for private cloud have seen price increases of 10 percent or more on renewal proposals if they fail to negotiate a renewal price cap in the original deal.…
What do we want? Windows 10 support! When do we want it? Until 2030!
Updated Campaigners staged a protest outside Microsoft's Brussels office yesterday over the company's decision to end support for Windows 10.…
DGX Spark, Nvidia’s tiniest supercomputer, tackles large models at solid speeds
hands on Nvidia bills its long-anticipated DGX Spark as the "world's smallest AI supercomputer," and, at $3,000 to $4,000 (depending on config and OEM), you might be expecting the Arm-based mini-PC to outperform its less-expensive siblings.…
EU biometric border system launch hits inevitable teething problems
The European Union's new biometric Exit/Entry System (EES) got off to a chaotic start at Prague's international airport, with travelers facing lengthy queues and malfunctioning equipment forcing border staff to process arrivals manually.…
KuzuDB says so long and thanks for all the commits, marooning community
The KuzuDB embedded graph database, open source under the MIT license, has been abandoned by its creator and sponsor Kùzu Inc, leaving its community pondering whether to fork or find an alternative.…
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Another 550 employees set to leave the building
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is facing another round of layoffs, with 550 additional employees set to lose their jobs.…
Asahi breach leaves bitter taste as brewer fears personal data slurped
Asahi's cyber hangover just got worse, with the brewer now admitting that personal information may have been tapped in last month's attack.…
SpaceX limbers up for Starship flight 11 as launch pad faces retirement
Updated SpaceX is counting down to today's 11th flight test of its monster Starship rocket, with weather looking suitable for the opening of the launch window at 18:15 CT (or around 17:00 CT, if the company's billionaire boss is to be believed).…
Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company
Who, Me? Welcome to another week of nimble newsifying from The Register, which as always kicks off the working week with a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes that almost trashed your career.…
Mozilla is recruiting beta testers for a free, baked-in Firefox VPN
Mozilla is working on a built-in VPN for Firefox, with beta tests opening to select users shortly.…