TheRegister
Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer
Amazon.com has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity in which it insists the AI company prevent its Comet browser from making automated purchases on behalf of users.…
Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters
Google on Tuesday announced a new moonshot – launching constellations of solar-powered satellites packed to the gills with its home-grown tensor processing units (TPUs) to form orbital AI datacenters.…
Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not
If you're filing an immigration form - or helping someone who is - the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases.…
Copilot can replace Search in latest Windows 11 test builds, but it's not a good idea
hands on With Microsoft cramming Copilot into every nook and cranny of its software, it’s no surprise that everyone’s favorite AI assistant is now set to take over the search box. As of the latest Windows Insider Dev and Beta builds, the "Ask Copilot anything" box is available if you know how to switch it on.…
Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate
Recently, I was spinning up yet another terribly coded thing for fun because I believe in making my problems everyone else's problems, and realized something that had been nagging at me for a while: working with AWS is relatively painful.…
IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs
IBM this week began notifying several thousand employees that they will be laid off, according to sources familiar with the matter. …
UK judge delivers a 'damp squib' in Getty AI training case, no clear precedent set
London's High Court has dismissed the major portions of Getty Images' lawsuit against generative AI firm Stability AI for training its image-generation model on copyrighted images, which some legal experts say could weaken intellectual property laws. However, others saw daylight for trademark and copyright protection in the judge's ruling.…
Russian spies pack custom malware into hidden VMs on Windows machines
Russia's Curly COMrades is abusing Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in compromised Windows machines to create a hidden Alpine Linux-based virtual machine that bypasses endpoint security tools, giving the spies long-term network access to snoop and deploy malware.…
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's security falls apart amid layoffs
The infosec program run by the US' Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) "is not effective," according to a fresh audit published by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).…
Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam
The latest edition of Valve's monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out, showing a rise in Steam usage on Linux. Penguin likes to play!…
Python slithers faster by adding lazy imports that load code after startup
Python programs are set to get faster startup times with PEP 810 "Explicit lazy imports," which allows scripts to defer loading imported libraries until they're actually needed rather than at startup.…
Coders paired with bot buddies work fast, but take too many shortcuts
Developers who "pair code" with an AI assistant stand to learn as much as they do in traditional human-human pairings, but also show a less critical attitude toward their silicon-based partner’s output, academics have found.…
Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope
Norway's sovereign wealth fund has opposed Tesla CEO Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion share award, which the carmaker's board says is necessary to retain him.…
Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support
As the dust settles over the end of support for many versions of Windows 10, the operating system remains a significant presence in the Windows market.…
Invasion of the message body snatchers! Teams flaw allowed crims to impersonate the boss
Microsoft Teams, one of the world's most widely used collaboration tools, contained serious, now-patched vulnerabilities that could have let attackers impersonate executives, rewrite chat history, and fake notifications or calls – all without users suspecting a thing.…
$10B + spent on liquid cooling this week – it's only Tuesday
Liquid cooling tech is hot. It's only Tuesday and already infrastructure specialists have forked out more than $10 billion on companies proffering tech that promises to help ease energy bills of datacenter operators.…
Cybercrooks getting violent more often to secure big payouts in Europe
Researchers are seeing a "dramatic" increase in cybercrime involving physical violence across Europe, with at least 18 cases reported since the start of the year.…
OpenAI API moonlights as malware HQ in Microsoft’s latest discovery
Hackers have found a new use for OpenAI's Assistants API – not to write poems or code, but to secretly control malware.…
Keeping the lights on takes up nearly all police IT spending in England and Wales
Police forces in England and Wales spend around 97 percent of their £2 billion ($2.6 billion) annual technology budget on maintaining legacy systems, an official report has found.…
'What the hell, Microsoft?' Users hit with incorrect ESU and LTSC Win10 out-of-support messages
Microsoft says a broken update left some Windows 10 users staring at an out-of-support message despite having an activated Extended Security Updates (ESU) license or a version of Windows 10 that is still officially supported.…