The Register

Lack of skills left Birmingham officials unable to challenge suppliers and with a system incapable of managing finances

Council officers heading up a disastrous Oracle implementation that left Europe's largest local authority unable to manage its finances lacked an understanding of the cloud-based solution they had chosen to buy.…

Plus: Anthropic rolls out Claude 3.7 Sonnet

A federal magistrate judge has recommended $15,000 in sanctions be imposed on an attorney who cited non-existent court cases concocted by an AI chatbot.…

Big Blue eyes integration with its AI development studio

IBM plans to buy DataStax, the AI and data biz that supports and contributes to the open source Cassandra wide column database.…

Scientists pool data from ESA and NASA spacecraft to come up with a ferrihydrite theory

Scientists reckon the red hue of Mars might have originated in an earlier period in the planet's past when liquid water was widespread on the surface.…

Sly like a PRC cyberattack

A Chinese government-backed group is spoofing legitimate medical software to hijack hospital patients' computers, infecting them with backdoors, credential-swiping keyloggers, and cryptominers.…

911 gets VIP treatment in 'one of the most congested and demanding environments for connectivity'

Updated  T-Mobile US has signed a deal to provide telecoms for emergency services in New York City using network slicing to their ensure calls and data traffic are prioritized above other users.…

Plus: Fandroid alert – Android devices sometimes say '5G' when connecting to 4G

London is bottom of the table when it comes to 5G mobile service, according to a report gauging major European cities on the overall quality of user experience. And, Europe itself lags behind other regions in 5G SA deployment.…

What is it with high-powered execs and their love for U2?

Ex-Apple design whiz Sir Jony Ive appeared on the BBC's long-running Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs over the weekend. Despite his storied career and close friendship with the late Steve Jobs, his picks were pedestrian even for a Brit in his late 50s.…

Fuxnet and FrostyGoop were both used in the Russia-Ukraine war

Two new malware variants specifically designed to disrupt critical industrial processes were set loose on operational technology networks last year, shutting off heat to more than 600 apartment buildings in one instance and jamming communications to gas, water, and sewage network sensors in the other.…

Dispute settled, but not the causes

A clash over different Flatpak-packaged versions of OBS Studio highlights problems with distro-maintained software repositories versus external ones.…

Leaked chats and spilled secrets as AI helps decode circa 200K private talks

Southern Water neither confirms nor denies offering Black Basta a $750,000 ransom payment following its ransomware attack in 2024.…

Bureau of Labor Statics warns lawyers and customer service reps to brace for change, says techies will be fine

Developers worried about their careers in the age of AI might be able to relax a little after the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicted employers will hire another 300,000 coders by 2033.…

Blueprints shared for jail-breaking models that expose their chain-of-thought process

Analysis  AI models like OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking can mimic human reasoning through a process called chain of thought.…

No matter how deep you are in Apple's 'ecosystem,’ there are ways to stay encrypted in Blighty

Apple customers, privacy advocates, and security sleuths have now had the weekend to stew over the news of the iGadget maker's decision to bend to the UK government and disable its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature.…

Sunk cost fallacy? No, I just need a little more cash for this AGI thing I’ve been working on

Comment  Despite persistent worries that vast spending on AI infrastructure may not pay for itself, cloud providers, hyperscalers, and datacenter operators have continued to shovel billions of dollars into ever-larger GPU clusters.…

'Appropriate action will be taken,' we're told – as federal HR email sparks uproar, ax falls on CISA staff

Visitors to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's headquarters in the capital got some unpleasant viewing on Monday morning after TV screens across the building began showing a deepfake video of President Trump kissing and sucking Elon Musk's toes.…

Everyone knew texted OTPs were a dud back in 2016

Google has confirmed it will phase out the use of SMS text messages for multi-factor authentication in favor of more secure technologies.…

Sorry, that should read: Boost US manufacturing and R&D, believe in the American people, etc etc

As computer makers grapple with Trump's tariffs, Apple is doubling down on US manufacturing and research-and-development investments, announcing plans to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people over the next four years in America to support these efforts.…

But you're probably not cool enough for Chipzilla's 288-core monster

Facing stiff competition from its long-time rival AMD and the ever-present specter of custom Arm silicon in the cloud, Intel on Monday emitted another wave of Xeon 6 processors.…

Investment bank claims software giant ditched 'at least' 5 land parcels due to potential 'oversupply'

Microsoft has reportedly cancelled leases on datacenter capacity in the US, raising questions about whether the company may have overestimated demand for AI services and the compute power it needs to drive them.…