TheRegister
China's president Xi Jinping jokes about backdoors in Xiaomi smartphones
Chinese president Xi Jinping has joked that smartphones from Xiaomi might include backdoors.…
LLMs are lousy at reading Asian languages, finds Singapore’s Grab
Proprietary large language models are bad at interpreting Asian languages, according to Singaporean super-app company Grab, which has built its own model instead.…
AN0M, the backdoored ‘secure’ messaging app for criminals, is still producing arrests after four years
Australian police last week made 55 arrests using evidence gathered with a backdoored messaging app that authorities distributed in the criminal community.…
Cisco suggests a stubby chassis, shrunken servers and router, to tame the edge
Cisco entered the server market in 2009 because the company thought incumbent vendors weren’t satisfying customers. On Monday, the networking giant entered the edge infrastructure market for the same reason.…
Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all
Palantir CEO Alex Karp used his quarterly shareholder letter to take aim at critics after the company beat Q3 2025 earnings estimates.…
MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS
Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont.…
Ransomware negotiator, pay thyself!
A ransomware negotiator and an incident response manager at two separate cybersecurity firms have been indicted for allegedly carrying out ransomware attacks of their own against multiple US companies.…
Google yanks Gemma after US senator says model ‘hallucinated’ her committing crimes
If Google's Gemma were an employee, it might be facing HR right now. The company yanked the model from AI Studio after it allegedly invented criminal accusations about a US senator and a conservative activist. However, it seems like the aggrieved parties went out of their way to get the offending output.…
AWS, Nvidia, Crowdstrike seek security startups to enter the arena
Cloud and AI security startups have two weeks to apply for a program that fast-tracks access to investors and mentors from Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike, and Nvidia.…
OpenAI spreads the imaginary wealth beyond Microsoft with $38B AWS deal
OpenAI has signed a seven-year, $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services, adding another hyperscaler alongside Microsoft Azure for its growing AI compute needs. Where it's getting all this money was not disclosed.…
Alaska Air phones a friend to find out what caused massive October outage
Alaska Airlines has called in consultants to advise it on what went wrong during a late October IT meltdown that grounded flights and wreaked havoc for two days.…
Microsoft, Alphabet throw more cash on the AI bonfire
Tech companies continue to sling crazy amounts of money at AI, with Microsoft announcing deals worth billions in Texas and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), while Google parent Alphabet is selling bonds in Europe to raise cash for more AI expansion.…
Cybercrooks team up with organized crime to steal pricey cargo
Cybercriminals are increasingly orchestrating lucrative cargo thefts alongside organized crime groups (OCGs) in a modern-day resurgence of attacks on freight companies.…
Gullible bots struggle to distinguish between facts and beliefs
Large language models often fail to distinguish between factual knowledge and personal belief, and are especially poor at recognizing when a belief is false.…
Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports
Debian's APT package manager will have a "hard requirement" on Rust from May 2026. This move may make some rather big waves.…
ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews
The European Space Agency (ESA) has coined a tortured acronym for its project to feed astronauts on long-duration missions: HOBI-WAN (Hydrogen Oxidizing Bacteria In Weightlessness As a source of Nutrition).…
Paradox: Agentic AI dev roles are less in demand as agents take over
Demand for software development skills in AI-related roles is set to fall next year as agentic AI accelerates across business markets, according to an IEEE industry survey.…
Metropolitan Police hails facial recognition tech after record year for arrests
London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) says the hundreds of live facial recognition (LFR) deployments across the Capital last year led to 962 arrests, according to a new report on the controversial tech's use.…
Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs
The maker of the Grand Theft Auto game series, Rockstar Games, has fired more than 30 coders and graphic designers in an act described by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry."…
Pop!_OS deejays prepare to release holiday remix along with Cosmic v 1.0
Ubuntu Summit System76's POP!_OS is one of the more substantially modified Ubuntu based distros out there, and so it was something of a surprise to see the company's substantial presence at the Ubuntu Summit. And its stable release along with version 1.0 of its custom desktop, COSMIC, is imminent.…