The Register

As military memo makes it official policy

The US Army intends to secure the right to repair its own equipment, a right that hasn't always been available under past procurement contracts - and one of the very few things that Democrats in Congress and the Trump administration broadly agree upon.…

Can't run Windows 11? Microsoft suggests renting it instead

Microsoft has announced a price cut for Windows 365 alongside a not-so-subtle suggestion that Windows 10 users might consider taking advantage of the offer to keep security updates flowing.…

UK starts prosecution days after FBI vowed to clamp down on the crime

Three young Brits are accused of stateside swatting offences and will appear in a UK court today to face their charges after a joint investigation by the FBI and Merseyside cops.…

Ireland privacy watchdog says transfers violated GDPR, as Chinese app confirms €1B datacenter in Finland

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has confirmed a fine of €530 million ($600 million) against social media biz TikTok for transferring European user data to China.…

Report into alternative networks says competition with BT and co making life harder than ever

Alternative network providers (altnets) are facing tough competition from the big players in the UK broadband market, with consolidation likely in the face of slowing growth in fiber internet uptake.…

Experts suggest the obvious: There is an ongoing coordinated attack on UK retail sector

Harrods, a globally recognized purveyor of all things luxury, is the third major UK retailer to confirm an attempted cyberattack on its systems in under two weeks.…

Used his loaf and found sweet solution for bakery borkage

On Call  Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that each Friday serves up your stories of biting into half-baked tech support problems.…

Blu-3 accused of paying off former Mace Group associates

UK authorities on Wednesday arrested three individuals in connection with a multi-million-pound bribery probe tied to the construction of a Microsoft datacenter in the Netherlands.…

This couldn't possibly be about Chinese model builders taking some of the shine off US rivals, could it?

+Comment  Anthropic has urged the White House to further tighten so-called AI diffusion rules – which are already set to hurt Nvidia and co by limiting or blocking the sale of higher-end GPUs and accelerators outside the US and a select few allies from mid-May.…

The spreadsheet from Hell

From the department of "but… why?" comes news of Linux running in Microsoft Excel, although all might not be as it seems.…

House Oversight probes missing Musk disclosures, background checks, data mess at NLRB

Elon Musk is backing away from his Trump-blessed government gig, but now House Democrats want to see the permission slip that got him in the door.…

Seriously, HTF does Reality Labs bleed SIXTY BILLION US DOLLARS in FIVE years?

Meta's Reality Labs division continued its losing streak with another $4.2 billion down the drain in the first quarter of 2025. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's stated priorities on Wednesday's earnings call suggest his metaverse dream is well and truly over.…

Satya Nadella reveals attempts to merge Word, PowerPoint, Excel, which may now happen with LLMs

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has claimed about thirty percent of code in at least some of the Windows titan's repositories was written by an AI.…

Why optimize code when you can just start running sooner?

Microsoft later this month plans to begin loading Word shortly after folks' computers begin booting up – to "optimize performance" or at least improve their perception of it.…

This time criminals targeted partner’s third-party software

It's more bad news from Ascension Health which is informing some of its patients, potentially for the second time in the space of a year, that their medical data was compromised during a major cyberattack.…

Keep plugging those LLMs into your apps, folks. This neural network told me it'll be fine

Some smart cookies have found that when AI models face a conflict between telling the truth or accomplishing a specific goal, they lie more than 50 percent of the time.…

Will the personal assistant shop for groceries? Or get hijacked by a teen?

RSAC  If Amazon's Alexa+ works as intended, it could show how an AI assistant helps with everyday tasks like making dinner reservations or arranging an oven repair. Or things could go terribly wrong: it might turn on the oven and turn dinner plans into a house fire.…

Whole thing gonna be a real PITA for tech sector, says ABI Research

World War Fee  US tariffs - should they go ahead - are likely to result in price bumps for essential components and construction materials in the datacenter industry, and may even cost America its lead in the AI race as investments are paused or canceled.…

Sees economic strife as chance to sell even more stuff than its $70bn Q3 haul

Microsoft’s capital expenditure was slightly lower than forecast, in part due to “normal variability from the timing of delivery of data center leases” that the company was at pains to argue are not in any way bad news.…

New plan may remain too restrictive for some developers

Redis, the company behind the popular value-key database of the same name, has returned its main system to an open source license, although the move failed to satisfy some critics.…