The Register

Mattel-OpenAI deal paves the way for an AI beach-off

Toy giant Mattel has signed a deal with OpenAI to bring the tech industry's buzziest technology to the very youngest generation.…

Some trace back to an outfit under US export controls for alleged PLA links

Both Apple's and Google's online stores offer free virtual private network (VPN) apps owned by Chinese companies, according to researchers at the Tech Transparency Project, and they don't make this fact readily known to people downloading the apps.…

Oracle’s 80-year-old co-founder pulls off a $25 billion cloud day to leapfrog Zuck and Bezos into the No. 2 spot

Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has reclaimed the No. 2 spot on Forbes's real-time billionaire list, trailing only Elon Musk after leapfrogging Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.…

Mark Zuckerberg reached out to our source directly

Exclusive  Meta has made lavish and lucrative offers to a select set of AI researchers in an effort to develop superintelligent AI.…

Please insert another million dollars to continue

Broader AI adoption by enterprise customers is being hindered by the complexity of trying to forecast inferencing costs amid a fear being saddled with excessive bills for cloud services.…

Work on next gen already underway, while bandwidth needs for datacenters just keep rising

The PCI Special Interest Group (PIC-SIG) just released official specs for PCIe 7.0, doubling the bandwidth again for high-performance kit such as network cards, while hinting that PCIe 8.0 may not achieve the same.…

Deal includes 'waiver of historic fees'

UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to £9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023."…

Zero-day potentially tied to around 100 suspected infections in 2025 and a spyware scandal on the continent

Apple has updated its iOS/iPadOS 18.3.1 documentation, confirming it introduced fixes for the zero-click vulnerability used to infect journalists with Paragon's Graphite spyware.…

Only while parked

Apple is enabling video playback on its CarPlay automotive operating system and has integrated it into iOS 26, as long as you're parked.…

Sales of HDDs to non-hyperscale outfits increasingly rare, say analysts

Feature  In early May, independent digital storage analyst Thomas Coughlin shared news of falling sales and revenue in the first quarter of 2025, continuing a trend that started in around 2010. Coughlin cites data from that year showing around 600 million annual hard disk shipments.…

Infosec employers demanding too much from early-career recruits, says ISC2

Cybersecurity hiring managers need a reality check when it comes to hiring junior staff, with job adverts littered with unfair expectations that are hampering recruitment efforts, says industry training and cert issuer ISC2.…

Superstitions stoked by blackout of iPortal centralized platform when no maintenance was scheduled

Barclays Bank is wrestling with some digital gremlins affecting its corporate banking services this Friday the 13th of June – the final day of the working week for many of us, but perhaps not the poor techies beavering away to restore normal play.…

Jutes revolt against Redmond: Minister for Digital Affairs aims the longboats away from Vinland

Comment  The boss of Denmark's Ministry for Digitalization says her department will move away from Microsoft – starting with LibreOffice.…

More like FlAIme Of The Week

Flame Of The Week  It's been a while since our last Flame Of The Week, but it appears that AI is generating some strong feelings among our beloved readership.…

All about consolidation as mission mouthpieces archived in pursuit of 'improving the experience'

NASA is shutting down many of its social media accounts, including those dedicated to the Voyager mission and the Mars Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.…

It was one of the offenders' final warning

Four staffers at the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) were let off with warnings over separate cases involving the transmission of regulator data to their personal email accounts.…

Abusive manager had to be told there's no such thing as an atomic laptop

On Call  By Friday morning, Reg readers’ batteries can sometimes be a little low, which is why we always use the day to offer a jolt of amusement in the form of On Call – the reader contributed column in which we celebrate the lows and lows of tech support.…

Alleges dirty PR campaign to slur its tech

China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies has accused rival chipmaker Micron of defamation through a campaign to publish nasty stories and reports about it.…

Good news: The vendor patched the flaw in January. Bad news: Not everyone got the memo

Ransomware criminals infected a utility billing software providers' customers, and in some cases disrupted services, after exploiting unpatched versions of SimpleHelp’s remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool, according to a Thursday CISA alert.…

Baby got Blackwell GPUs

Google Cloud on Wednesday celebrated the debut of virtual machines incorporating Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPU technology, claiming to be the first cloud provider to sell this particular offering.…