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A founding member of the Xbox team says she believes Xbox hardware is "dead" and that Microsoft appears to be planning a "slow exit" from the gaming hardware business. Microsoft recently announced partnerships with external hardware companies including the ROG Xbox Ally, which runs Windows and functions as a portable PC that can run games from external stores like Steam. Laura Fryer, one of Microsoft Game Studios' first employees who worked as a producer on the original Gears of War games and served as director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, called the partnerships evidence of Microsoft's inability to ship hardware. "Personally, I think Xbox hardware is dead. The plan appears to be to just drive everybody to Game Pass," Fryer said.

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Court says State arm cannot be left without maintenance, patches and upgrades because of Broadcom's new licensing model

Broadcom's VMware subsidiary must provide a Dutch government organization with continued software support for at least two years while it manages a migration to an alternative platform, according to a court ruling, or else face fines up to €25 million ($29 million).…

Nintendo pulled its products from Amazon's US site after a disagreement over unauthorized sales, meaning the e-commerce company missed out on the recent debut of Nintendo's Switch 2 -- the biggest game console launch of all time. From a report: The Japanese company stopped selling on Amazon after noticing that third-party merchants were offering games for sale in the US at prices that undercut Nintendo's advertised rates, according to a person familiar with the situation. Enterprising sellers were buying Nintendo products in bulk in Southeast Asia and exporting them to the US, said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential information. Nintendo product listings started disappearing from Amazon's US site last year, gaming news outlets reported at the time. The listings had previously appeared as "Sold by Amazon," which typically denotes merchandise the online retailer buys directly from brands. Some Nintendo products remained on the site, but they were listed by independent merchants who sell their goods on Amazon's sprawling online marketplace.

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Device compromises and deep-seated access to critical infrastructure exposed surveillance vulnerabilities in agency's work

A major Mexican drug cartel insider grassed on his fellow drug-peddlers back in 2018, telling the FBI that a cartel "hacker" was tracking a federal official and using their deep-rooted access to the country's critical infrastructure to kill informants.…

If you didn't like 24H2, you're probably not going to like 25H2

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 25H2 is almost here. However, the upgrade will be little more than an exercise in feature enablement since Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 share the same source code.…

"Earth's ozone layer blocks the Sun's shortest wave radiation, called UV-C, which is so damaging to cells in high doses that it's a go-to sterilizer in hospitals," writes Slashdot reader sciencehabit. "UV-C is such a killer, in fact, that scientists have questioned whether life can survive on worlds that lack an ozone layer, such as Mars or distant exoplanets. "But research published this month in Astrobiology suggests one hardy lichen, a hybrid organism made of algae and fungi, may have cracked the UV-C code with a built-in sunscreen, despite never experiencing these rays in its long evolutionary history." Science magazine explains: When scientists brought a sample of the species, the common desert dweller Clavascidium lacinulatum, back to the lab, graduate student Tejinder Singh put the lichen through the wringer. First, Singh dehydrated the lichen, to make sure it couldn't grow back in real time and mask any UV damage. Then he placed the lichen a few centimeters under a UV lamp and blasted it with radiation. The lichen seemed just fine. So Singh purchased the most powerful UV-C lamp he could find online, capable of sending out 20 times more radiation than the amount expected on Mars. When he tested the lamp on the most radiation-resistant life form on Earth, the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, it died in less than a minute. After 3 months—likely the highest amount of UV-C radiation ever tested on an organism—Singh pulled the sample so he could finish his master's thesis in time. About half of the lichen's algal cells had survived. Then, when the team ground up and cultured part of the surviving lichen, about half of its algal cells sprouted new, green colonies after 2 weeks, showing it maintained the ability to reproduce. The species may provide a blueprint for surviving on Mars or exoplanets, which don't have an ozone layer to protect them.

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Server shipments surge 70% in 2025, still shy of datacenter dominance goal

Arm-based servers are rapidly gaining traction in the market with shipments tipped to jump 70 percent in 2025, however, this remains well short of the chip designer's ambitions to make up half of datacenter CPU sales worldwide by the end of the year.…

Test run offers hope for a rail system long past its best-before date

Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Siemens Mobility have managed to get an ICE test train to 405 km/h (251 mph) on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle high-speed line.…

CISPE floats reforms to avoid new costs, fragmentation, and infrastructure flight

The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body has put forward recommendations for the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, perhaps mindful that datacenters are perceived as hugely wasteful of precious water resources.…

"Canada and the United States have resumed trade negotiations," reports Newsweek, "after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to rescind the country's digital services tax on U.S. technology companies." The development follows President Donald Trump's announcement on Friday that he was suspending all trade talks with Canada "effective immediately" over the tax policy... Canada's quick reversal signals the high stakes involved in maintaining trade relationships with the United States, particularly given the countries' deeply integrated economies. Carney's office confirmed on Sunday that both leaders have agreed to restart negotiations after Canada committed to abandoning the 3 percent levy targeting major U.S. tech giants including Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber, and Airbnb. The tax was scheduled to take effect Monday and would have applied retroactively, creating an estimated $2 billion bill for American companies. The conflict escalated rapidly after Canada's Finance Department confirmed Friday that companies would still be required to make their first digital tax payments Monday, despite ongoing negotiations. The tax targeted revenue generated from Canadian users rather than corporate profits, making it particularly burdensome for technology companies operating internationally... Canada's decision to rescind the tax came "in anticipation" of reaching a broader trade agreement, according to government officials. With negotiations resuming, both countries will likely focus on addressing broader trade issues beyond the digital services tax.

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Like being hard to spot? They’d much rather you didn’t

Opinion There are few tech deceptions more successful than Chrome's Incognito Mode.…

Sensible CEO wouldn’t let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap

Who, Me? Welcome again to Who, Me? It's the Monday morning column in which readers of The Register admit to making big mistakes and somehow swerving the consequences.…

Paying for successful problem resolution is a better business model, argues Dimitri Masin

interview Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job.…

Which it will, happily, to create a networking biz that’s still far smaller than Cisco’s or Nvidia’s

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has cleared the way for HPE’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.…

Chipmaker Loongson says server CPUs on par with 2021’s Ice Lake, as local press tout kit to manage 1,024-qubit systems

Chinese chip designer Loongson last week announced silicon it claims is the equal of western semiconductors from 2021.…

Mitch Kapor dropped out of MIT's business school in 1979 — and had soon cofounded the pioneering spreadsheet company Lotus. He also cofounded the EFF, was the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, and is now a billionaire (and an VC investor at Kapor Capital). 45 years later, when the 74-year-old was invited to give a guest lecture at MIT's business school last year by an old friend (professor Bill Aulet), he'd teased the billionaire that "there's only one problem, Mitch, I see here you haven't graduated from MIT." The Boston Globe tells the story... After graduating from Yale in 1971 and bouncing around for almost a decade as "a lost and wandering soul," working as a disc jockey, a Transcendental Meditation teacher, and a mental health counselor, Kapor said he became entranced by the possibilities of the new Apple II personal computer. He started writing programs to solve statistics problems and analyze data, which caught the attention of Boston-area software entrepreneurs Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who co-created VisiCalc, one of the first spreadsheet programs. They introduced Kapor to their California-based software publisher, Personal Software. Midway through Kapor's 12-month master's program, the publisher offered him the then-princely sum of about $20,000 if he'd adapt his stats programs to work with VisiCalc. To finish the project, he took a leave from MIT, but then he decided to leave for good to take a full-time job at Personal. Comparing his decision to those of other famed tech founder dropouts, like Bill Gates, Kapor said he felt the startup world was calling to him. "It was just so irresistible," he said. "It felt like I could not let another moment go by without taking advantage of this opportunity or the window would close...." When Aulet made his joke on the phone call with his old friend in 2024, Kapor had largely retired from investing and realized that he wanted to complete his degree. "I don't know what prompted me, but it started a conversation" with MIT about the logistics of finally graduating, Kapor said. By the time Kapor gave the lecture in March, Aulet had discovered Kapor was only a few courses short. MIT does not give honorary degrees, but school officials allow students to make up for missing classes with an independent study and a written thesis. Kapor decided to write a paper on the roots and development of his investing strategy. "It's timely, it's highly relevant, and I have things to say," he said. One 77-page thesis later, Kapor, donning a cap and gown, finally received his master's degree in May, at a ceremony in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge, not far from where he founded Lotus.

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PLUS: Broadband blimps to fly in Japan; Starbucks China put ads before privacy; and more!

Asia In Brief Canada’s government has ordered Chinese CCTV systems vendor Hikvision to cease its local operations.…

"Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic material from scratch," reports the Guardian, "to learn more about how DNA works and pave the way for the next generation of medical therapies." Scientists on the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project will spend the next five years developing the tools and knowhow to build long sections of human genetic code in the lab. These will be inserted into living cells to understand how the code operates. Armed with the insights, scientists hope to devise radical new therapies for the treatment of diseases. Among the possibilities are living cells that are resistant to immune attack or particular viruses, which could be transplanted into patients with autoimmune diseases or with liver damage from chronic viral infections. "The information gained from synthesising human genomes may be directly useful in generating treatments for almost any disease," said Prof Jason Chin, who is leading the project at the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge... For the SynHG project, researchers will start by making sections of a human chromosome and testing them in human skin cells. The project involves teams from the universities of Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford and Imperial College London... Embedded in the project is a parallel research effort into the social and ethical issues that arise from making genomes in the laboratory, led by Prof Joy Zhang at the University of Kent. "We're a little way off having anything tangible that can be used as a therapy, but this is the time to start the discussion on what we want to see and what we don't want to see," said Dr Julian Sale, a group leader at the LMB.

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PLUS: Crooks target hardware crypto wallets; Bad flaws in Brother printers; ,O365 allows takeover-free phishing; and more

Infosec in Brief Despite warnings not to pay ransomware operators, almost half of those infected by the malware send cash to the crooks who planted it, according to infosec software slinger Sophos.…

The Wall Street Journal reports that "consumers have less trust in offerings labeled as being powered by artificial intelligence, which can reduce their interest in buying them, researchers say." The effect is especially pronounced for offerings perceived to be riskier buys, such as a car or a medical-diagnostic service, say the researchers, who were from Washington State University and Temple University. "When we were thinking about this project, we thought that AI will improve [consumers' willingness to buy] because everyone is promoting AI in their products," says Dogan Gursoy, a regents professor of hospitality business management at Washington State and one of the study's authors. "But apparently it has a negative effect, not a positive one." In multiple experiments, involving different people, the researchers split participants into two groups of around 100 each. One group read ads for fictional products and services that featured the terms "artificial intelligence" or "AI-powered," while the other group read ads that used the terms "new technology" or "equipped with cutting-edge technologies." In each test, members of the group that saw the AI-related wording were less likely to say they would want to try, buy or actively seek out any of the products or services being advertised compared with people in the other group. The difference was smaller for items researchers called low risk — such as a television and a generic customer-service offering... Meanwhile, a separate, forthcoming study from market-research firm Parks Associates that used different methods and included a much larger sample size came to similar conclusions about consumers' reaction to AI in products. "We straight up asked consumers, 'If you saw a product that you liked that was advertised as including AI, would that make you more or less likely to buy it?' " says Jennifer Kent, the firm's vice president of research. Of the roughly 4,000 Americans in the survey, 18% said AI would make them more likely to buy, 24% said less likely and to 58% it made no difference, according to the study. "Before this wave of generative AI attention over the past couple of years, AI-enabled features actually have tested very, very well," Kent says.

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