TheRegister
The race to shore up Europe’s power grids against cyberattacks and sabotage
Feature It was a sunny morning in late April when a massive power outage suddenly rippled across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southwestern France, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity for hours.…
Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds
A study of how people use ChatGPT for research has confirmed something most of us learned the hard way in school: to be a subject matter expert, you've got to spend time swotting up.…
Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu
Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical's vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation.…
From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world
Opinion It's not been a year since his ouster as Intel's CEO, but Pat Gelsinger is firmly back on the tech leadership pony. He's done hardware with Intel, software with VMWare. This time, it's faithware.…
‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’
Who, Me? Another Monday is upon us and The Register therefore presents a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed confessional column in which you admit to making mistakes, and explain how you made it out alive afterwards.…
Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land
African carrier Seacom is investigating the feasibility of building a submarine cable that would run across the heart of Africa, on land.…
ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare
Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that understood its importance managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses, actions that today mean many users in the rest of the world are more likely to find their connections throttled or blocked.…
White House says China to lift rare earth export bans, stop probes into US tech companies
Asia In Brief Last week’s trade talks between the USA and China have seen the two countries ease some trade restrictions.…
Attackers targeting unpatched Cisco kit notice malware implant removal, install it again
Infosec in brief Australia’s Signals Directorate (ASD) last Friday warned that attackers are installing an implant named “BADCANDY” on unpatched Cisco IOS XE devices and can detect deletion of their wares and reinstall their malware.…
Fortytwo's decentralized AI has the answer to life, the universe, and everything
Fortytwo, a Silicon Valley startup, was founded last year based on the idea that a decentralized swarm of small AI models running on personal computers offers scaling and cost advantages over centralized AI services.…
Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys
The tentacles of AI seem to be reaching everywhere, even to the humble lawnmower. We tested the Sunseeker Elite X5, a robotic mower that uses machine learning to steer around your lawn, to see what happens when artificial intelligence meets whirling blades of doom.…
AI blew open software security, now OpenAI wants to fix it with an agent called Aardvark
After helping expand the modern software attack surface with the rise of AI services prone to data poisoning and prompt injection, OpenAI has thrown a bone to cyber defenders.…
Datacenter biz and nuke startup join forces for Texas AI ranch
Texas is set to get another nuclear-powered datacenter project thanks to Blue Energy and Crusoe, but any atomic action isn't likely until the next decade.…
Ransomware gang runs ads for Microsoft Teams to pwn victims
Imagine searching for Microsoft Teams, seeing a text link at the top of the results, visiting it, and then getting hit with malware. The Rhysida ransomware gang, an especially insidious criminal organization that has stolen millions of people's info, has been placing fake ads for Microsoft Teams in search engines and then infecting victims who make the mistake of clicking them.…
YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous
Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions.…
A word about comments and forums...
One of the biggest surprises of my tenure at El Reg so far is the activity in our forums and article comments. Reg readers are engaged, opinionated, and unafraid to express themselves. I love this. Thank you for reading, and for commenting.…
Microsoft Task Manager now tasking PCs with running multiple copies of itself
Microsoft's ability to add bugs in the most unexpected of places has continued into its latest update to Windows 11, which spawns multiple copies of Task Manager, sucking down resources you'd normally use Task Manager to kill.…
Russia finally bites the cybercrooks it raised, arresting suspected Meduza infostealer devs
Russia's Interior Ministry says police have arrested three suspects it believes helped build and spread the Meduza infostealer.…
Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB
Stripping Windows to the bare essentials is a favorite hobby among enthusiasts, especially as Microsoft continues loading its OS with unwanted bloat. The latest achievement is Windows 7 being reduced to 69 MB.…
International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is ditching Microsoft Office for a European software alternative amid mounting fears about being reliant on US technology.…