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The controls were left wide open on Pudu's robots

A researcher caught the world’s leading supplier of commercial service robots using shoddy admin security that let attackers redirect the delivery machines to anywhere and make them follow any command.…

End of verified end user status means South Korean memory vendors will need licenses to bring restricted chipmaking tech into Chinese fabs

The US government already has a lot to say about what products chipmakers can and can't sell in China. This week the Commerce Department moved to make it harder for South Korean memory vendors Samsung and SK Hynix to continue manufacturing in the region.…

But the cure may ruin the web....

Opinion  With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots.…

Chinese cloud provider reportedly joins the homegrown silicon party

Alibaba has reportedly developed an AI accelerator amid growing pressure from Beijing to curb the nation's reliance on Nvidia GPUs. …

Bias, a lack of safety reporting, and the whole 'MechaHitler' thing are all the evidence needed, say authors

Public advocacy groups are demanding the US government cease any use of xAI's Grok in the federal government, calling the AI unsafe, untested, and ideologically biased.…

GMP library test meltdown has AMD looking for answers

Chipmaker AMD is looking into a report from the GMP project about two Ryzen processors that failed during testing. Could too much math be to blame?…

Platform's staffer complains security review was 'rushed'

Microsoft-owned collaborative coding platform GitHub is deepening its ties with Elon Musk's xAI, bringing early access to the company's Grok Code Fast 1 large language model (LLM) into GitHub Copilot. However, a whistleblower has claimed that the rollout suffers from inadequate security testing and an engineering team operating under duress.…

Look who's visiting the watering hole these days

Amazon today said it disrupted an intel-gathering attempt by Russia's APT29 to trick Microsoft users into unwittingly granting the Kremlin-backed cyberspies access to their accounts and data.…

'It blows my mind,' says SecDef

The Pentagon has formally kiboshed Microsoft's use of China-based employees to support Azure cloud services deployed by US government agencies, and it's demanding Microsoft do more of its own digging to determine whether any sensitive data was compromised. …

Chocolate Factory says people keep marking them as such, so QED

The Trump administration has accused Google of discriminating against Republicans' emails and warned that the tech giant could be in line for a crackdown.…

A remarkable mixture of different components, but it works

RefreshOS is a Debian and KDE-based distro with a difference: it casts its net a lot wider for tools and components.…

Limited Run Games swaps in silicon to emulate Super FX chip and hit 20 fps

Forget Windows 95, it's 30 years since Doom was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. And thanks to the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller, the game is back in cartridge form.…

Up to 29,000 organizations and potentially 370,000 security and IT pros affected

Australian development house Click Studios has warned users of its Passwordstate enterprise password management platform to update immediately if not sooner, following the discovery of an authentication bypass vulnerability that opens the doors to an emergency administration account with nothing more than a "carefully crafted URL."…

Nobody knows why they need one, but folk seem to be buying them

HP says AI PCs now make up a quarter of its sales, boosting revenue thanks to their higher price tags and the Windows 11 refresh.…

Senior officials summoned to science and tech committee to explain further

Senior officials are being summoned to the UK's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee to explain why the government has not fully implemented the security recommendations made in a secret review following the 2021 Afghan data breach.…

Microsoft shifts cellular management to Settings and the web

Microsoft is to permanently hang up on its Mobile Plans app, directing users to the web and the Windows Settings app in the future.…

Hang on, what happened to gov.UK's bitbarn-favoring Industrial Strategy?

Datacenter developers in the UK are turning to gas for power generation amid lengthy wait times for a connection to the electricity grid.…

The once mighty Wintel supercontinent is cracking in more ways than you might think

Opinion  Say what you like about its role in the destruction of civilization, the net is still good for a few party games. Take bets on when the "Wintel Empire" was first reported as under attack, and by what. Then go and find out.…

Maybe someday we'll just call it 'data processing' again

Feature  In IT, terms and categories come and go. Distinctions disappear as computing evolves and as something that was shiny and new simply becomes the way that we do things.…

Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops

On Call  Why, look at the time! 7:30 AM on Friday morning, the moment at which The Register regularly runs a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that shares your finest tech support stories.…