The Register

Nothing says 'We want honest opinions' like a 36,000-letter mailshot with no awkward questions allowed

Members of the UK government’s People’s Panel on Digital ID will spend two weekends in Birmingham and three evenings on Zoom discussing how Britain should build a national digital identity system, earning £550 plus expenses for their trouble.…

Missed flights and more means something has got to give at the border

Greece is taking a flexible approach to introducing the European Union's biometric Entry/Exit System (EES), after some British passport holders missed flights home following the system's implementation on 10 April.…

Computer glitch spawns duplicate jackpots, disgruntled punters, and one very bad career choice

A computer glitch in a Spanish betting shop triggered a chain of events that ended with the store manager being kidnapped and held for €50,000 ($58,000) in ransom, allegedly by one of the shop's own employees.…

Won't somebody think of the children not being hit by a load of building materials?

On Call  Delivering excellent tech support can sometimes require heavy lifting, a feat The Register celebrates each Friday with a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of hoisting glitchy tech back to full function.…

FAST16 could be the first cyberweapon, and its effects could be with us today

Black Hat Asia  Infosec outfit SentinelOne found malware that tries to induce errors in engineering and physics simulation software and therefore represents an attempt at sabotage, and suggests it was created years before the Stuxnet worm that aimed to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges.…

Demonstrated in China, probably applicable elsewhere

Black Hat Asia  Developers of rented internet of things infrastructure – stuff like public EV chargers and shared e-bikes – are prioritizing user convenience over security, and leaving themselves exposed to wide-scale denial of service attacks on their services.…

Two teams, similar diagnosis: Ceramic electrolytes still refusing to cooperate

With more capacity and faster charging, solid-state batteries could be the next big thing in energy. And good news: researchers may have pinned down one major reason these batteries still fail before they can reach widespread commercial use.…

System changes and bugs overlapped to create the impression of general decline

Claude users who complained about the AI service producing lower-quality responses over the past month weren’t imagining it.…

Legit-looking website, camera-on interviews, jokes about backdoors ... it worked

EXCLUSIVE  It all started with a LinkedIn message, as so many employment scams do these days.…

Rising refusal rate from Acceptable Use Classifier leaves customers paying for nothing

Anthropic's release last week of Opus 4.7 came with stronger safeguards to prevent misuse. Unfortunately, these safeguards have also managed to thwart legitimate use.…

Keeping it simple for the developers can lead to very complex headaches later

PWNED  Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we celebrate the people who’ve taught us how not to secure a server. If you’ve ever tied your own shoelaces together, then tripped over them, or attempted to dive into a swimming pool but hit your head on the diving board, we’ll be talking about your cyber equivalent.…

All the Typhoons, everywhere, all at once

A majority of China-linked threat actors are using compromised routers and IoT devices worldwide, turning this gear into proxy networks to carry out further intrusions, steal sensitive data, and disrupt victim organizations’ operations, according to a joint 10-country advisory.…

Three vendors matched to three sites

The US Department of the Air Force (DAF) has selected three companies for possible nuclear microreactor projects at three of its installations under a program aimed at improving energy resilience if the electricity grid goes down.…

What are you doing to solve the memory crisis?

If you follow PC hardware prices, you’ll know AI demand has pushed memory prices higher as manufacturers prioritize memory for datacenters. To deal with that, you can pay through the nose, buy less memory, or ... try to build your own DRAM.…

'Differentiated, but open'

Google Cloud Next  Google Cloud’s Andi Gutmans said that the company holds a structural advantage over its largest rivals in the race to win value from AI agents in the enterprise, arguing that no competitor currently combines cloud computing infrastructure, frontier AI models, and a data platform under one roof.…

Push to protect minors risks hitting everyone online

Proton's boss has waded into the age verification fight with a warning that sounds less like child safety and more like an identity checkpoint for the entire internet.…

Also rolls out agentic Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint, letting 21st century Clippy lend a... hand

Microsoft is giving Copilot the power to stop suggesting edits and start making them.…

World's largest biomedical dataset lifted and shifted on Chinese mega marketplace

Updated  Details of volunteers of UK-based Biobank, which describes itself as the custodian of the world's most comprehensive biomedical dataset, are for sale on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba.…

Report also slams multiple vendors for poor data integration and egress fees

Workday, Rippling, and Salesforce-owned Slack rank among the worst performers for enterprise data movement, according to a new industry benchmark tracking the speeds needed to power analytics, machine learning, and AI agents.…

Down to you to work out the value

Datadog has added GPU monitoring to its observability stack, giving AI-hungry organizations more insight into exactly what's happening on their most expensive silicon.…