The Register

Did Facebook giant rizz up LLM to win over human voters? It appears so

Meta submitted a specially crafted, non-public variant of its Llama 4 AI model to an online benchmark that may have unfairly boosted its leaderboard position over rivals.…

What a MIME field

A bug in WhatsApp for Windows can be exploited to execute malicious code by anyone crafty enough to persuade a user to open a rigged attachment - and, to be fair, it doesn't take much craft to pull that off.…

How will 'gutting' civilian defense agency make American cybersecurity great again?

Analysis  Slashing staff at the US govt's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, and scrapping vital programs, isn’t exactly boosting national security, say infosec and national security officials watching America’s digital defenses unravel in real time.…

70 years old, yes. Obsolete? Not by a long shot

Comment  There is something about Elon Musk's career trajectory that compels onlookers to hang around for the seemingly inevitable crash landing. Tesla, SpaceX, and X – formerly known as Twitter – have all become hosts to the man's galactic ego.…

Small IT hardware firms feel the heat from Trump making prices great

World War Fee  Modular laptop maker Framework is pausing sales of models it would make a loss on, while a small US keyboard biz is facing hundreds of dollars slapped on its products that American consumers will have to pay.…

Disconnected device scenarios cause headaches for Microsoft

Microsoft is extending support for a product scheduled for deprecation. Sadly for some, it's not Windows 10.…

Despite arrests, eight-legged menace targeted more victims this year

Despite several arrests last year, Scattered Spider's social engineering attacks are continuing into 2025 as the cybercrime collective targets high-profile organizations and adds another phishing kit to its arsenal along with a new version of Spectre RAT malware.…

Go on, then, knock yourself out, pal

Procter & Gamble says organizations should rethink how they're run to take better advantage of innovation enabled by generative AI.…

Lugging a solar furnace to melt it could slash the need to launch bulky power gear from Earth

You've perhaps heard of using Moon dirt for building roads and other structures for future lunar explorers. But a group of German scientists reckon they've found another use for the grey stuff: Turn it into glass and use it to assemble solar power cells right there on the Moon.…

Who wouldn't want predictive business insights in a week like this? (We jest, it can't solve for Trump tariffs)

IBM's latest mainframe builds on the platform's traditional attributes of security and reliability for mission-critical workloads, adding AI to support large language models (LLMs), assistants, and agents.…

Government boasts of £14B in R&D spending, but grant body takes £300M hit

Despite ambitions to position itself as a science and tech superpower, the UK has cut the budget for the government body responsible for university research funding.…

Multiple red-rated performance metrics blamed on inability to answer rising numbers of data protection worries

The UK's data protection watchdog is recruiting more warm bodies to tackle its red-rated backlog of unresolved complaints.…

Chinese tech giant has fired two staff, but Europe's anti-fraud org isn't probing

European authorities last week charged eight people with offenses including corruption and money laundering linked to the European Parliament – and perhaps also to Huawei.…

May also have fixed AI memory biz if better-than-expected revenue guidance is anything to go by

World War Fee  Samsung Electronics doesn’t fear the impact of the USA’s new tariffs regime on its displays business because it makes many of them in Mexico, according to Yong Seok-woo, president and head the company’s visual display business,…

Reliability, honesty, accuracy. And then there's this lot

Oracle has briefed some customers about a successful intrusion into its public cloud, as well as the theft of their data, after previously denying it had been compromised.…

Redmond’s not alone: AWS, Alibaba, DeepSeek also rely on others blazing the trail

Analysis  Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has extolled the virtues of playing second fiddle in the generative-AI race.…

Shock and ore, 北京-style

World War Fee  Beijing has responded to the Trump administration's latest round of import taxes with retaliatory tariffs and new restrictions on rare earth minerals.…

By putting services in scope, €18 trillion trade bloc looks to focus tech sector minds

World War Fee  Speaking ahead of today's extraordinary meeting of the European Union's trade ministers, a spokesperson for the French government was clear that the trading bloc's response to blanket tariffs on goods could include services, bringing US tech giants within its scope.…

Video app's future once again caught between trade war and political whiplash

World War Fee  A deal to sell off TikTok's US operations to White House-approved owners appears to have hit a tariff-shaped roadblock, with the Chinese government signalling it won't allow the move.…

President to up tariffs on Middle Kingdom goods to 104% from 54%

World War Fee  President Donald Trump has threatened to increase tariffs on Chinese goods by a further 50 percent this week, meaning imports from the Middle Kingdom into America would have a 104 percent levy. And buyers are expected to pick up the extra cost.…