The Register

Britain's Ministry of Defence wants a counter-drone system designed, contracted, and delivered within weeks

Britain's Royal Navy is urgently seeking a ship-based counter-drone system and recent world events likely explain why.…

Ignorance really was the way to achieve bliss

Who, Me?  Welcome to another working week, and another installment of "Who, Me?" – a weekly reader-contributed column that unearths your errors and reveals how you rebounded afterwards.…

You gotta start somewhere, and in this case astroboffins would have been nowhere without help from intrepid volunteers

NASA has published new analysis of its 2022 planetary defense test that suggests the mission slowed down the target asteroids, albeit infinitesimally.…

LibreOffice steward pleased says Commish saw the light, no longer requires Excel feedback form

UPDATED  The Document Foundation has taken a swipe at the European Commission over its consultation on guidance for the EU's Cyber Resilience Act – because the feedback template is only available as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.…

Cyber is no longer the hush-hush thing it used to be, as team Trump invades Iran with hackers taking the lead

Kettle  Unlike previous military conflicts, the cyber domain has been front and center since the Trump administration invaded Iran, upending the traditionally quiet role played by hackers in military conflicts.…

PLUS: Indonesia joins kids social media ban; China frets about AI job impacts; India’s PC market fails to launch, again; And more

China’s Ministry of Commerce has warned of further disruption to the global semiconductor supply chain after Dutch chipmaker Nexperia cut access to some of its systems for Chinese staff.…

PLUS: Europol takes down two crime gangs; LastPass users phished (again); Crooks increase crypto hauls; And more

Infosec In Brief  The FBI is investigating a breach of its systems which reportedly affected systems related to wiretapping and surveillance.…

Meta supposedly considering untapped capacity in deal brokered by Nvidia

OpenAI and compute partner Oracle have reportedly abandoned a planned expansion of their flagship Stargate datacenter, after negotiations were stalled by financing and Sam Altman's apparent fear of commitment.…

Remembering the day the Venera 3 impacted Venus

It is 60 years since humanity first got up close and personal with another planet, with the impact of the Soviet Union's Venera 3.…

Crims 'will do what gets them their objective easiest and fastest,' Microsoft threat intel boss tells The Reg

interview  AI agents allow cybercriminals and nation-state hackers to outsource the "janitorial-type work" needed to plan and carry out cyberattacks, according to Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft's GM of global threat intelligence. North Korea is taking advantage.…

What hath science wrought?

A clump of living human brain cells wired into a silicon chip has answered the internet's most important computing question: yes, it can run Doom.…

Inference at scale is much more complex than more GPUs, more tokens, more profits

feature  By now you've probably heard AI datacenters called factories. It's an apt description: power goes in and tokens come out.…

'There's a naive techno-utopianism in Whitehall'

Brits are worried that AI will dehumanize public services, leading to less human contact and oversight as well as job losses, according to people questioned by pollster Ipsos.…

It's the end of the world as we know it, and AI feels fine

Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory report that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts have predicted. …

US unemployment ticked up to 4.4%

The US economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs. The shortfall stoked growing fears that AI could be contributing to higher unemployment.…

Now if only device makers would deliver higher quality components

Thanks to Anthropic's AI and its bug-detecting abilities, Firefox users can now enjoy stronger security. Unfortunately, if browser crashes rather than security flaws are the problem, Claude probably can't help.…

Steals SMS messages, location data, contacts … and delivers it to Hamas-linked crew

Hamas-linked attackers are dropping spyware disguised as an emergency-alert app on Israelis' smartphones via SMS messages, according to security researchers.…

Bad legislation, but an especially big headache for FOSS

Many web sites, social media services, and other platforms require age verification on the theory that it will protect kids from seeing inappropriate content. But now some US states want to require the operating system itself to check your age and that could cause big headaches for FOSS vendors.…

Switchzilla says flaws could allow file overwrites or privilege escalation

Just when network admins thought the Cisco SD-WAN patch queue might finally be shrinking, Switchzilla has confirmed miscreants are exploiting more vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN management software.…

Brands Trump administration decision 'legally unsound' and has 'no choice but to challenge it in court'

AI giant Anthropic says that it has "no choice" but to sue the US government after being officially designated a supply chain risk to national security.…