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How to pick the news sources you want to see more (and less)

hands on Even if you have your favorite sites bookmarked or type their URLs in through muscle memory, you probably still spend a lot of time looking for info on Google. Now, you can exert some control over which publishers appear in your results for news stories.…

Users want their customizations and their old models back

There has been more furious backpedalling from OpenAI following the company's ill-judged launch of GPT-5 and the removal of previous model selection.…

Microsoft has made "Pull Print" for Universal Print generally available, letting users authenticate at any registered printer to release queued jobs and reducing the chance that confidential pages sit unattended. The feature, also called "Universal Print Anywhere," supports two modes: direct print and secure release via QR codes that users scan with a phone camera or the Microsoft 365 app. Admins must register devices, enable secure release, and affix printed QR codes. Microsoft plans badge-based release.

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CVE-2017-11882 in discontinued Equation Editor still attracting keylogger campaigns despite software being killed off in 2018

Very few people are immune to the siren song of nostalgia, a yearning for a "better time" when this was all fields and kids respected their elders - and it looks like cyber criminals are no exception.…

China has established a lead in the field of open-source AI, a development that is reportedly sending jolts through both Washington and Silicon Valley. The nation's progress has become a significant event for American policymakers in the U.S. capital. The advancement has registered as a shock within Silicon Valley, the hub of the American technology industry. From the report: The overall performance of China's best open-weight model has surpassed the American open-source champion since November, according to research firm Artificial Analysis. The firm, which rates the ability of models in math, coding and other areas, found a version of Alibaba's Qwen3 beat OpenAI's gpt-oss. However, the Chinese model is almost twice as big as OpenAI's, suggesting that for simpler tasks, Qwen might consume more computing power to do the same job. OpenAI said its open-source model outperformed rivals of similar size on reasoning tasks and delivered strong performance at low cost.

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Reliant on two mega customers? Who says GPU-for-rent kingpin is a not a sustainable biz model?

Rent-a-GPU biz CoreWeave is still racking up eyewatering debts amid mounting net losses as it continues to burn cash on expanding datacenter capacity.…

Extreme heat is breaking temperature records across Europe, early measurements suggest, and driving bigger and stronger wildfires. From a report: In south-west France, records were broken on Monday in Angouleme, Bergerac, Bordeaux, Saint-Emilion and Saint-Girons. Meteo France said the "often remarkable, even unprecedented, maximum temperatures" in the region were 12C above the norm for the last few decades. In Croatia, air temperature records were set in Sibenik, at 39.5C, and Dubrovnik, at 38.9C, while large forest fires raged along its coasts and ripped through neighbouring countries in the Balkans. The day before, Hungary broke its daily maximum temperature record when a weather station in Korosladany hit 39.9C. The capital, Budapest, also broke its daily maximum record as it sweltered through 38.7C heat. Beyond Europe, dozens of temperature records were broken across Canada, and record-breaking heat above 50C in Iraq was blamed for a nationwide blackout. The heatwave in southern Europe comes as Nordic countries recover from unprecedentedtemperatures above 30C in the Arctic Circle this month.

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Hit the button and then go on your own voyage of printer discovery

Microsoft has made the "Pull Print" feature of Universal Print generally available, which means confidential print jobs should no longer appear in unintended locations.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic. The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said. They show the lengths to which the U.S. has gone to enforce its chip export restrictions on China, even as the Trump administration has sought to relax some curbs on Chinese access to advanced American semiconductors. The trackers can help build cases against people and companies who profit from violating U.S. export controls, said the people who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

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But despite the differences, all models excel at making errors and shouldn't be trusted

Generative AI coding models have common strengths and weaknesses, but express those characteristics differently due to variations in coding style.…

The vendor hops aboard GSA’s OneGov train, offering models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more

Not to be left behind in the flurry of government-wide AI purchasing deals, Box has signed a deal with the feds that'll inject some agentic AI into federal government systems. …

Windows 365 Reserve offers 10-day cloud PCs when your machine goes kaput – but you'll still need another device to access them

Microsoft is so confident in the reliability and security of its Windows 11 OS that it's now offering businesses the ability to quickly dump users onto temporary VMs in its cloud when, not if, their desktops and laptops break.…

Seven additional regions across England will now have access to the controversial tech

A fresh expansion of UK crimefighters' access to live facial recognition (LFR) technology is being described by officials as "an excellent opportunity for policing." Privacy campaigners diagree.…

Shock news: billionaire techpreneur is not a fan

Geek-turned-venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen has weighed in on the arguments surrounding the UK's Online Safety Act, accusing the UK government of leaking his input.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Experts at the University of Edinburgh carried out a post-mortem brain examination on 25 cats which had symptoms of dementia in life, including confusion, sleep disruption and an increase in vocalization. They found a build-up of amyloid-beta, a toxic protein and one of the defining features of Alzheimer's disease. The discovery has been hailed as a "perfect natural model for Alzheimer's" by scientists who believe it will help them explore new treatments for humans. Dr Robert McGeachan, study lead from the University of Edinburgh's Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, said: "Dementia is a devastating disease -- whether it affects humans, cats, or dogs. Our findings highlight the striking similarities between feline dementia and Alzheimer's disease in people. This opens the door to exploring whether promising new treatments for human Alzheimer's disease could also help our ageing pets." [...] Previously, researchers have studied genetically-modified rodents, although the species does not naturally suffer from dementia. "Because cats naturally develop these brain changes, they may also offer a more accurate model of the disease than traditional laboratory animals, ultimately benefiting both species and their caregivers," Dr McGeachan said. [...] Prof Danielle Gunn-Moore, an expert in feline medicine at the vet school, said the discovery could also help to understand and manage feline dementia. The findings have been published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

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For now at least, even though government buying can improve, open source is not all it's cracked up to be

Debate Not for the first time, Microsoft is in the spotlight for the UK government's money it voraciously consumes – apparently £1.9 billion a year in software licensing, and roughly £9 billion over five years. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of voices challenging whether this is good use of public money. After all, aren't there plenty of open source alternatives?…

Foundation warns federated servers face biggest risk, but single-instance users can take their time

The maintainers of the federated secure chat protocol Matrix are warning users of a pair of "high severity protocol vulnerabilities," addressed in the latest version, saying patching them requires a breaking change in servers and clients.…

You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI

People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you.…

An encounter with the healthcare system reveals sickening decisions about data

Column We already live in a world where pretty much every public act - online or in the real world - leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I'd seriously imagined.…

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully completed its first-ever national security mission, launching the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite in 48 years. Space.com reports: The mission saw the company's powerful new Vulcan Centaur rocket take off from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Vulcan launched with four side-mounted solid rocket boosters in order to generate enough thrust to send its payload directly into geosynchronous orbit on one of ULA's longest flights ever, a seven-hour journey that will span over 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers), according to ULA. The payload launching on Tuesday's mission was the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite to be launched in 48 years. It is what's known as a position, navigation and timing (PNT) satellite, a type of spacecraft that provides data similar to that of the well-known GPS system. This satellite will be testing many experimental new technologies that are designed to make it resilient to jamming and spoofing, according to Andrew Builta with L3Harris Technologies, the prime contractor for the PNT payload integrated onto a satellite bus built by Northrop Grumman. The satellite, identified publicly only as Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), features a phased array antenna that allows it to "focus powerful beams to ground forces and combat jamming environments," Builta said in a media roundtable on Monday (Aug. 11). GPS jamming has become an increasingly worrisome problem for both the U.S. military and commercial satellite operators, which is why this spacecraft will be conducting experiments to test how effective these new technologies are at circumventing jamming attacks. In addition, the satellite features a software architecture that allows it to be reprogrammed while in orbit. "This is a truly game-changing capability," Builta said.

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