The Register

'Industry, national governments, and the EU' must pay for maintainers. El Reg says charity shouldn't start at home

GitHub, owned by money-bags Microsoft, has called upon the European Union to create a publicly funded "Sovereign Tech Fund" (EU-STF) to boost the open source software ecosystem.…

You don't become a 'superpower' overnight

Significant hurdles stand in the way of the UK government's push to become a global AI superpower, including energy constraints, planning difficulties and the datacenter investment required for it all.…

How the MITS Altair 8800, a $264 RAM board, and some BASIC changed the world

This week marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of several empires. On July 22, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen signed a deal with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems.…

The "is" package was infected with cross-platform malware after a scam targeting maintainers

The popular npm package "is" was infected with cross-platform malware, around the same time that linting utility packages used with the prettier code formatter were infected with Windows-only malware.…

Sometimes, one small tweak can make a very big difference.

There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow to make IT better, and it would become better. Not better for some, not better for a while, but better for all and forever.…

176.5 Exabytes of the stuff shipped in 2024, another double-digit jump

Shipments of tape storage media increased again in 2024, according to HPE, IBM, and Quantum – the three companies that back the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format.…

G-Cloud on track for $50 billion revenue as AI creates a new generation of Google-eyed youth

Google’s parent company Alphabet has increased its capex budget for the year by $10 billion and now expects to spend $85 billion this year, and more in 2026.…

Nvidia's Jensen Huang just had a win with his argument that the world needs China’s AI brains, now this

Amazon Web Services has closed its AI lab in Shanghai, China.…

But it has no way to compel scofflaws to comply

In a sweeping and unprecedented legal opinion, the United Nations' highest court has decreed that "The consequences of climate change are severe and far-reaching" and constitute an "urgent and existential threat." What's more, it stated that action must be taken to not only ameliorate that threat but also to determine the legal consequences for those states whose actions harm others.…

A working copy of your site can run under Windows Subsystem for Linux

hands on  If you're building a website that will eventually be hosted on a Linux server (as so many are), you have a couple of choices about where you do your development work. You can create a beta version of the site at your web host and upload all of the files there or you can create a local test server that sits in your home or office.…

From scams to violence, the crimes extend beyond the digital realm

A subset of an online group that recruits children and teens for contract shootings, kidnappings, and other real-life violent crimes poses a growing threat to youth, according to the FBI.…

No screenshots for you!

In an effort to protect user privacy, Brave browser 1.81 will prevent Microsoft Recall from screenshotting it by default.…

AI-nxiety is real, and it's causing some bizarre behavior

ai-pocalypse  If you're one of those people who pretend to use AI at work, then worry not: there are likely another 15 of you per hundred employees in your company. That's the finding of a survey from nearshoring tech recruitment company Howdy.com.…

Huge models are error-prone and expensive

Enterprise CIOs have been mesmerized by GenAI claims of autonomous agents and systems that can figure anything out. But the complexity that such large models deliver is also fueling errors, hallucinations, and spiraling bills.…

Unlike traditional input, no cameras or surgery needed, they claim

Researchers at Meta have come up with a wristband that picks up your muscle twitches and turns them into real-time computer commands - no cameras or implants required.…

US DOE among breached government agencies

More than 400 organizations have been compromised in the Microsoft SharePoint attack, according to Eye Security, which initially sounded the alarm on the mass exploitation last Friday, even before Redmond confirmed the critical vulnerabilities.…

Loads of unexplained ones, too. Maybe normalize providing a freaking reason for multi-hour outages, mmm?

The previous quarter was a busy one for internet disruptions, according to Cloudflare, with government-mandated shutdowns in several nations, a massive power outage hitting Spain's infrastructure, damage to fiber optic cabling, and technical issues hitting North America.…

The 2026 tax year ought to be fun

A quarter of the Internal Revenue Service's IT staff has departed since President Trump's workforce reduction efforts began earlier this year, and that has officials worried the 2026 tax season could be a mess.…

Despite pledging help for those who don’t sign for subs, Broadcom says validating their entitlements will delay support

Exclusive  Some customers of Broadcom’s VMware business currently cannot access security patches, putting them at greater risk of attack.…

Hand us the mind bleach, we want to flush our memories of attack

Clorox is suing its service desk provider, Cognizant, for $380 million in a California state court, alleging the IT support crew "enabled a cybercriminal to gain a foothold in Clorox's network" by handing over staffers' passwords to attackers after they simply requested them.…