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As government says £9B could end up in Redmond, poll says it's time for new thinking

Register debate series Register readers are backing a shift away from Microsoft software as a default across the UK public sector after the government confirmed it expects to spend £9 billion with the software giant over five years.…

Bloc working on anti-jamming measures and plans extra sat to help

A plane carrying European Commission (EC) president Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria was forced to resort to manual navigation techniques after GPS jamming that authorities have pinned on Russia.…

Premium bottled water is emerging as restaurants' answer to declining alcohol consumption as establishments offer curated water menus featuring bottles priced up to $25.70. La Popote in Cheshire has introduced a seven-water selection ranging from $6.75 Peak District spring water to $25.70 Portuguese Vidago, served in wine glasses at room temperature. Water sommelier Doran Binder, who created the menu and founded Crag spring water, reports 7 million monthly social media views for water content. The movement extends beyond Britain -- over a dozen US restaurants maintain water lists, while new producers like Hampshire's Chorq plan champagne-style bottles with corks. Michael Mascha's FineWaters has certified more than 100 water sommeliers globally as demand grows for waters distinguished by mineral content ranging from 14 to 3,300 milligrams per liter of dissolved solids.

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Cisco finds hundreds of Ollama servers open to unauthorized access, creating various nasty risks

Cisco’s Talos security research team has found over 1,100 Ollama servers exposed to the public internet, where miscreants can use them to do nasty things.…

Google denied claims Monday that it had issued a security warning to Gmail users about a major vulnerability. The company stated that recent reports claiming a broad Gmail security alert were "entirely false." Google said its email service blocks more than 99.9% of phishing and malware attempts from reaching users' inboxes.

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College students have integrated generative AI into their academic routines at an unprecedented scale as 85% report usage for coursework in the past year, according to new Inside Higher Ed survey data. The majority employ AI tools for brainstorming ideas, seeking tutoring assistance, and exam preparation rather than wholesale academic outsourcing. Only 25% admitted using AI to complete assignments entirely, while 19% generated full essays. Students overwhelmingly reject institutional policing approaches, with 53% favoring education on ethical AI use over detection software deployment. Despite widespread adoption, 35% of respondents report no change in their perception of college value, while 23% view their degrees as more valuable in the AI era.

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eBPF, shared SmartNICs, and smart scheduling have improved reliability and cut costs

Chinese web giant Alibaba has reduced network outages by 92 percent, cut load balancing costs by 18.9 percent, and found ways to improve SmartNIC performance by offloading workloads to idle infrastructure.…

International tourism to the United States faces an unprecedented 8.2% decline in 2025, with the World Travel and Tourism Council projecting a $12.5 billion loss in visitor spending -- the only decline among 184 economies analyzed. Canadian visitors, traditionally comprising 28% of international arrivals, have dropped by approximately 25% through July. Seattle tour operators report 30-50% fewer Canadian customers with many explicitly citing recent tariff policies and political rhetoric as deterrents. The newly implemented $250 "visa integrity fee" for certain countries compounds existing concerns about immigration policies and National Guard deployments in major cities. Tourism Economics now projects full recovery to pre-pandemic levels won't occur until 2029, three years later than initially forecast.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking to The Logan Bartlett Show on Friday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the use of AI agents had enabled him to "rebalance" his headcount in the customer support division by trimming 4,000 jobs. "I've reduced it from 9,000 head to about 5,000 because I need less heads," Benioff said. Benioff called the first eight months of 2025, during which an estimated 10,000 jobs have been lost to AI, "eight of the most exciting months of my career." "There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people," Benioff said. "We just couldn't call them back. But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Union will deploy additional satellites in low Earth orbit to strengthen resilience against GPS interferences and will improve capabilities to detect it, EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said on Monday. His remarks followed an incident on Sunday in which the GPS system aboard European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's aircraft was jammed en route to Bulgaria. Bulgarian authorities suspect the jamming was due to due to interference by Russia, an EU spokesperson said.

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The century-old duty-free import exemption that transformed American online shopping has ended, The Atlantic argues, closing a loophole that allowed packages valued under $800 to enter the United States without tariffs. The de minimis threshold, raised from $200 in 2016, processed millions of daily shipments directly from overseas sellers to American consumers. China lost access earlier this year; the exemption now terminates for all countries. Platforms including Shein, Temu, and marketplace sellers on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay built business models around direct shipping from manufacturing hubs in Asia and elsewhere. Import duties will apply to all international packages regardless of value, with tariffs reaching 50% for some countries. The policy shift affects everything from $30 specialty faucet parts shipped from Britain to handmade crafts from India, fundamentally altering the economics of cross-border e-commerce that emerged over the past decade.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts. An alarmed Register reader got in touch after receiving warnings from Azure's automated systems that they had significantly exceeded their budgets, and a glance at Microsoft's support forums indicates their issue was not isolated. The problem was that costs had suddenly ramped up. One user, with a budget threshold of $85, received an automated alert indicating that their spend was forecast to reach $1,027. Another said: "We're actively seeing the same issue, costs have blown up by a crazy amount. No official notice or announcement from Microsoft either, it's appalling."

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Americans are having a record low amount of sex -- even less than they did during the Covid-19 pandemic -- according to a new study led by researchers at the Institute for Family Studies. WSJ: This continues the downward shift in sexual activity that has been worrying sociologists and psychologists for decades. For the report, called "The Sex Recession," researchers at the IFS analyzed the data on sex and intimacy in the latest General Social Survey produced by NORC at the University of Chicago, which was collected in 2024 and released in May. They found that just 37% of people age 18-64 reported having sex at least once a week, down from 55% in 1990. The decline is even more striking for young adults: Almost a quarter of people age 18-29, or 24%, said they had not had sex in the past year; this is twice as many as in 2010. Much has been written in recent years about the trend of young people having less sex, attributed to everything from stunted social skills to a rise in internet pornography. Yet the IFS study shows that the same trend holds true for people up to the age of 64, of all sexual orientations, both married and single. (After age 64, there was no significant change in the amount of sex people have, largely because this group reports having sex less frequently to begin with, the researchers said.)

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Taylor Otwell says skip the clever code, keep it simple

Taylor Otwell, inventor and maintainer of popular PHP framework Laravel, is warning against overly complex code and the risks of bypassing the framework.…

Waymo robotaxis are repeatedly selecting identical parking spots in front of specific Los Angeles and Arizona homes between rides, puzzling residents who document the same vehicles returning to precise locations daily. The company states its vehicles choose parking based on local regulations, existing vehicle distribution, and proximity to high-demand areas but cannot explain the algorithmic specificity. Carnegie Mellon autonomous vehicle expert Phil Koopman attributes the behavior to machine learning systems optimizing for specific spots without variation. Waymo said it had received neighbor complaints and has designated certain locations as no-parking zones for its fleet. The vehicles comply with three-hour parking limits, according to Los Angeles Department of Transportation regulations, governing commercial passenger vehicles under 22 feet.

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Could dramatically reduce latency between datacenters and on mobile nets

A team of networking boffins has published fresh research on hollow fiber cables that it claims could offer the lowest ever recorded optical loss for a fiber – meaning the signal would weaken less as it travels, leading to faster speeds and lower latencies.…

A review of published meta-analyses examining protein supplementation found no evidence supporting intake beyond 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight daily, according to an analysis by cardiologist Eric Topol. The review examined multiple randomized controlled trials encompassing thousands of participants. The most widely cited Morton study, which included 1,863 participants across 49 trials, showed no statistically significant benefit at higher protein levels, with a p-value of 0.079. Recent research from Washington University identified the essential amino acid leucine as activating mTOR in macrophages, promoting atherosclerosis progression. The mechanism was demonstrated in both mouse models and human studies measuring circulating monocyte changes following acute high-protein challenges increasing dietary protein from 22% to 50% of energy intake. Current USDA data indicates 55% of American men and 35% of women already exceed the 0.8 g/kg/day recommendation from the National Academy of Medicine. The protein supplement industry, exemplified by David bars containing 28 grams of protein in 150 calories using a modified plant fat called EPG, projects $180 million in 2025 sales.

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Executive order adds space agency to National Security Exclusions, voiding collective bargaining rights for staff

Happy Labor Day. The US administration has removed union recognition from NASA as budget cuts and layoffs loom.…

Cloud customers left reeling as forecasts leap hundreds of percent

Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts.…

Oracle billionaire funds project to predict immunity and develop treatments for hard-to-prevent diseases

A research group funded by tech billionaire Larry Ellison is set to invest £118 million ($169.6 million) in applying AI to vaccine research with the UK's Oxford University.…