The Register

PLUS: Chinese robodogs include backdoor; OpenAI helps spammer; A Dutch data disaster; And more!

Infosec In Brief  Fortinet last week admitted that attackers have found new ways to exploit three flaws it thought it had fixed last year.…

PLUS: India's new electronics subsidies; Philippines unplugs a mobile carrier; Alibaba Cloud expands

Asia In Brief  Chinese officials admitted to directing cyberattacks on US infrastructure at a meeting with their American counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal.…

Military units, government nerds appear to join the fray, with physical infra in sights

Feature  From triggering a water tank overflow in Texas to shutting down Russian state news services on Vladimir Putin's birthday, self-styled hacktivists have been making headlines.…

Middle Kingdom retaliates against White House's 'instrument and weapon to bully and coerce'

World War Fee  China is upping tariffs on US imports to 125 percent, branding the Trump administration's tax policies a "joke."…

Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'

The rise of LLM-powered code generation tools is reshaping how developers write software - and introducing new risks to the software supply chain in the process.…

Plus a fresh version ... nine years after its last

After five years, the extremely experimental GoboLinux project is springing back to life with a new maintainer and a new release.…

Multi-protocol chat client is approaching version 3

In the 2020s you might be forgiven for having forgotten that such a thing as a native chat client exists, but a handful still do and they're still useful. One of these is Pidgin, the artist formerly known as GAIM.…

Hang on, wasn't Capita already handling things like billing, etc? Ah, AgentSuite comes to the rescue

Scandal struck UK utility company Southern Water is extending a long-running managed services contract with Capita, everyone's favorite outsourcing badass, for up to five years at an estimated cost of £92.4 million ($121 million).…

One's a world power with extensive cutting-edge electronics manufacturing empire, the other is America

World War Fee  President Trump's trade war with China kicked into gear this week. The upshot is Americans face having to pay more for products and components sourced from the Middle Kingdom, as the eye-watering import tariffs on the gear are set to be passed onto them.…

Middle Kingdom gets 145%. So this is what it's like living in reality TV

World War Fee  The EU voted Wednesday to introduce 25 percent import tariffs on American goods, with the first duties being collected from European consumers on April 15.…

Redmond hopes you’ve forgotten or got over why everyone hated it the first time

After temporarily shelving its controversial Windows Recall feature amid a wave of backlash, Microsoft is back at it - now quietly slipping the screenshotting app into the Windows 11 Release Preview channel for Copilot+ PCs, signaling its near-readiness for general availability.…

No worries, just use neural networks to optimize systems powering neural networks

Analysis  Global datacenter electricity use is set to more than double by 2030 - slightly surpassing Japan's total consumption - with AI named as the biggest driver.…

Carbon capture, SMRs, fusion power - tech titans' climate strategies are packed with moon shots

Comment  AI's appetite for power is exploding. Hyperscalers have only just begun to adopt Nvidia's 120 kW-per-rack systems, and the GPU giant is already charting a course toward 600 kW designs.…

A thing of beauty for map fans and those with kids

Have you ever wanted to explore a blocky low-resolution version of the UK? Well, you're in luck, because the Ordnance Survey has created a Minecraft representation of it, claimed to be as realistic as anything ever can be in the game.…

Issues at the very top continue to worsen

The UK government's latest annual data breach survey shows the number of ransomware attacks on the isles is on the increase – and many techies are forced to constantly informally request company directors for defense spending because there's no security people on the board.…

$5.1B cancellations pitched as efficiency move, though costly Trump birthday parade mulled

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has canceled contracts for "consulting and other non-essential services" in the latest round of cuts conceived by Elon Musk's DOGE unit.…

Activist investor finds payments groups lobbying against climate action

An activist investor has called on IBM to report on its lobbying practices, which he alleges include spending “dark money” with organizations that campaign against climate change reporting and legislation.…

Exec pay outlined in Proxy Statement, and things did not go well for either workforce or calls for climate transparency reports

Amazon exec chairman Jeff Bezos may not have a daily operational role at the cloud and e-commerce megacorp he founded, but he still got a bigger compensation package than the person currently pulling the strings from the chief executive's office.…

Models get bulkier, burnier, bank-breakier

AI continues to improve – at least according to benchmarks. But the promised benefits have largely yet to materialize while models are increasing in size and becoming more computationally demanding, and greenhouse gas emissions from AI training continue to rise.…

Consumer campaign group says 'we need lifetime transparency for tech

Those well-meaning agitators at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) are back, this time with an interactive "Electronic Waste Graveyard" cataloging a range of devices tossed aside after software support expires or cloud connections flatline.…