TheRegister
Leak suggests US government is fibbing over FEMA security failings
Infosec in brief On August 29, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency fired its CISO, CIO, and 22 other staff for incompetence but insisted it wasn't in response to an online attack. New material suggests FEMA's claim may be false.…
AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true
Opinion It has been less than three years since ChatGPT lit the fuse of the current explosion of AI everywhere. AI years move even faster than internet years, so there's been time not only for the forcible injection of AI into the workplace courtesy of Microsoft, but the first scientific studies of the effect. Productivity may not have gone up, but anxiety, confusion and annoyance most certainly have.…
Qualcomm in the dock over 'patent tax' on smartphones
Qualcomm is facing a UK trial over allegations that it abused its dominant position in the smartphone chipset market to charge inflated license fees, ultimately driving up device prices for Brit consumers.…
Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it
Who, Me? Oh, bother, it's Monday. But rather than curse about another working week rolling around, The Register welcomes it with another instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace whoopsies and reveal how you survived them.…
AI chatbots that butter you up make you worse at conflict, study finds
State-of-the-art AI models tend to flatter users, and that praise makes people more convinced that they're right and less willing to resolve conflicts, recent research suggests.…
Hacking contest kerfuffle over copied rules pits Wiz against ZDI
A new hacking contest has caused a social media kerfuffle over allegations of rule copying and plagiarism.…
Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face
Conference-room screens at Ford's Dearborn HQ were briefly hijacked on Thursday to display a protest image in an apparent swipe at the carmaker's return-to-office policy.…
India's tech talent pipeline is sputtering
Feature Shubh Kumar graduated from IIT Patna, one of India's famed Institutes of Technology – universities that attract millions of applicants but admit only 18,000 undergraduates.…
ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking contractors to trawl social media and other open-source data for potential immigration enforcement leads, assuming public posts can yield actionable intelligence.…
Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally
Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos says that, within two decades, gigawatt-scale datacenters powered by a continuous stream of photons from the sun will fill Earth's orbit.…
No suds for you! Asahi brewery attack leaves Japanese drinkers dry
Ransomware has left Japan's biggest brewer struggling to ship beer, with Asahi warning domestic customers to brace for patchy supplies while its core systems stay offline.…
'Retired' cybercrime group demands $989M not to leak 1B Salesforce records
Despite at least three arrests and talk of retirement, a crew now calling itself Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has reemerged with a data-leak site listing about 40 companies’ Salesforce environments, and is demanding $989.45 to prevent what it claims is about 1 billion stolen records from being published online.…
Google goes straight to shell with AI command line coding tool
In the beginning was the command line, and despite all the machine-learning froth, developers still live there. That is why Google has shoved its Jules coding agent into a terminal with a new tool it calls Jules Tools.…
Startups binge on AI while big firms sip cautiously, study shows
The Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm (aka A16z) crunched startup spending data and found young firms stuffing AI into everything, while bigger businesses remain far more restrained.…
Red Hat fesses up to GitLab breach after attackers brag of data theft
What started as cyber crew bragging has now been confirmed by Red Hat: someone gained access to its consulting GitLab system and walked away with data.…
AI devs close to scraping bottom of data barrel
Those spiffy AI systems that tech companies keep promising require mountains of training data, but high-quality sources may have already run out—unless enterprises can unlock the information trapped behind their firewalls, according to Goldman Sachs…
Apple ices ICE agent tracker app under government heat
Apple has deep-sixed an app that tracks the movements of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents – apparently bowing to government pressure.…
Munich Airport chaos after drone sightings spook air traffic control
Munich Airport was temporarily closed last night following reports of drones buzzing around the area.…
All eyes on markets for AI Bubble Watch: Is it a Floater or a Popper?
Analysis In an employee share sell-off this week, OpenAI achieved a nominal value of $500 billion. In terms of valuation, the posterchild of GenAI — which is yet to make a profit — left in its dust companies like Toyota, the world's largest automaker.…
UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest
The British government has finally given more details about the proposed digital ID project, directly responding to the 2.76 million naysayers that signed an online petition calling for it to be ditched.…