The Register

Hold Alt + Spacebar for two seconds, and Clippy 2.0 is all ears

Microsoft has added yet another Copilot tweak for Windows Insiders. Hold down Alt + Spacebar for two seconds, and the AI assistant will pop up for a voice chat.…

Non-password-protected, unencrypted 108GB database … what could possibly go wrong

Exclusive  More than 86,000 records containing nurses' medical records, facial images, ID documents and more sensitive info linked to health tech company ESHYFT was left sitting in a wide-open misconfigured AWS S3 bucket for months — or possibly even longer — before it was closed it last week.…

Nothing says 'sustainable AI' like the burps of Appalachian industry

Three companies in the US are teaming up to address the burgeoning energy needs of datacenters by using coal mine methane piped to on-site fuel cells at locations that are already hotspots for building bit barns.…

Windows App the way ahead as support pulled from May 27

The end is nigh for Microsoft's Remote Desktop application. The IT giant will pull support on May 27 when users must transition to the corp's Windows App, with all the positives and negatives that entails.…

Folks with LaserJets complain of error code even when using approved supplies

Owners of HP laser printers are complaining about a firmware update that stops the hardware from printing, where the toner cartridge is not recognized even when they've got the expensive HP version installed.…

Researchers claim efficiency boost plus reduction in environmental harm

Scientists claim to have made a breakthrough in the search for more powerful and lower-cost lithium-metal batteries by including common polymer nylon in the design.…

It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP

The body that runs New Zealand’s public health system uses a single Excel spreadsheet as the primary source of data to consolidate and manage its finances, which aren’t in great shape perhaps due to the sheet’s shortcomings.…

Plus, startup's inference service makes debut on Hugging Face

Cerebras has begun deploying more than a thousand of its dinner-plate sized-accelerators across North America and parts of France as the startup looks to establish itself as one of the largest and fastest suppliers of AI inference services.…

First new version in about five years, but it's who did it that matters more

The WINE project has put out its first release of Mono, the original FOSS .NET runtime, since it took the project over from Microsoft six months ago.…

Center will reuse and recondition systems returned from field

Updated  Chipmaking tool biz ASML plans to open a new facility in China this year amid rising trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.…

It took a whistleblower to expose disastrous ERP go-live

Birmingham City Council did not tell its official auditors about the disastrous Oracle implementation for ten months after the suite of applications went live, and appeared to obstruct access to the new system needed to complete their work.…

1900 MHz band dormant since Y2K, but not available until 2029

Britain's telecoms regulator wants to repurpose unused mobile spectrum for the upcoming Emergency Services Network (ESN) and to overhaul communications in the railway sector.…

$1M donation to inauguration fund and a personal appearance by Pichai appear to have been pointless

If Google had hoped a bit of cosying up to President Trump would soften the US government's breakup demands in the wake of its search antitrust conviction, then it was seemingly mistaken.…

The thermosphere usually drags space junk to its doom. As it thins, ruined orbits are a possibility

Earth's atmosphere is shrinking due to climate change and one of the possible negative impacts is that space junk will stay in orbit for longer, bonk into other bits of space junk, and make so much mess that low Earth orbits become less useful.…

Nothing like an OpenAI-powered agent leaking data or getting confused over what someone else whispered to it

AI models with memory aim to enhance user interactions by recalling past engagements. However, this feature opens the door to manipulation.…

Big Blue's legal eagles soar on both sides of the pond

IBM scored a pair of legal wins this week: The US Supreme Court declined to reinstate a $1.6 billion judgment previously awarded to BMC Software, and the High Court in London, England, ruled in favor of Big Blue in a lawsuit against LzLabs, which was accused of misappropriating IBM's mainframe technology.…

Guessed tax obligations wrong which helped to disappoint Wall Street even as sales boomed

Oracle on Monday announced customers committed to $48 billion of future cloud services consumption – just $5 billion less that its annual revenue for FY 2024 – but investors aren’t impressed.…

Facebook giant allegedly didn't want neural networks to emit results that would give the game away

A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models.…

Oh, and Musk blames ‘Ukraine area’ for X downtime

Domain registrar, website host, and email provider Gandi.net suffered a major outage over the weekend. The latest update from the French biz, some 14 hours ago, stated it was "still working on resolving all the issues," which we understand to mean it has largely fixed itself by now.…

Crooks built bots to exploit astoundingly bad quotation website and made off with data on thousands

New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it.…