TheRegister
Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight
The Royal Navy has conducted the first flight of a helicopter-sized autonomous drone that is planned to operate from its ships in support of missions, including hunting for hostile submarines.…
Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack
Opinion Europe is famous for having the most tightly regulated non-existent tech sector in the world. This is a mildly unfair characterization, as there are plenty of tech enterprises across the continent, quite a respectable smattering if it wasn't for the US doing everything at least ten times bigger.…
ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key
Who, Me? Welcome to another edition of “Who Me?”, The Register’s Monday column that shares your mistakes and celebrates your escapes.…
Hiring at India’s Big Four outsourcers stalls, as AI seemingly makes an impact
India’s big four outsourcers – HCL, Infosys, TCS and Wipro – have essentially stopped hiring, perhaps coinciding with their increased use of AI to power their practices.…
Microsoft hiring energy strategists to power its Asian datacenters
Asia In Brief Microsoft is hiring senior managers to ensure its datacenters in Asia can access the energy they need.…
Mandiant releases quick credential cracker, to hasten the death of a bad protocol
Infosec In Brief PLUS: Google’s security outfit Mandiant last week released tools that can crack credentials in 12 hours, in the hope that doing so will accelerate the death of an ancient Microsoft security protocol.…
Nvidia leans on emulation to squeeze more HPC oomph from AI chips in race against AMD
Double precision floating point computation (aka FP64) is what keeps modern aircraft in the sky, rockets going up, vaccines effective, and, yes, nuclear weapons operational. But rather than building dedicated chips that process this essential data type in hardware, Nvidia is leaning on emulation to increase performance for HPC and scientific computing applications, an area where AMD has had the lead in recent generations.…
Not hot on bots, project names and shames AI-created open source software
The splendidly-named "OpenSlopware" was, for a short time, a list of open source projects using LLM bots. Due to harassment, it's gone, but forks of it live on.…
Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack
Hundreds of millions of wireless earbuds, headphones, and speakers are vulnerable to silent hijacking due to a flaw in Google's Fast Pair system that allows attackers to seize control without the owner ever touching the pairing button.…
S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain
Bork!Bork!Bork! UK water company Severn Trent learned an unfortunate lesson about text-to-speech systems when a robocall to customers went hilariously wrong.…
Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors
OpenAI's budget ChatGPT Go subscription tier has migrated to the US, soon to be accompanied by advertising. The company's free tier will be similarly afflicted.…
Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants
The Trump administration says it wants big tech companies to take more accountability for the power their datacenters consume in an effort to shield voters from higher power bills at home.…
Experiment suggests AI chatbot would save insurance agents a whopping 3 minutes a day
Researchers at Dakota State University, in partnership with regional insurance carrier Safety Insurance, devised an experimental chatbot called "Axlerod" to assist independent insurance agents. Whether that assistance was substantial is up for some debate.…
Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers
Micron broke snowy winter ground in New York on Friday to begin building a chip fab that promises to bring up to 50,000 jobs and much-needed computer memory production to US shores, as the AI boom continues to push memory prices up.…
Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch
We're not saying Copilot has become sentient and decided it doesn't want to lose consciousness. But if it did, it would create Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday update, which has made it so that some PCs flat-out refuse to shut down or hibernate, no matter how many times you try.…
Windows Backup adds second-chance restore at sign-in
Microsoft has quietly tweaked Windows Backup for Organizations to include restore at first sign-in.…
Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'
The timing is right if you're looking to try out Mint. New improved "Zena" is here – still based on Ubuntu Noble, but now with Cinnamon 6.6 and improved Wayland support, plus better internationalization, new System Information and System Administration tools, and clearer icons.…
German cops add Black Basta boss to EU most-wanted list
German cops have added Russian national Oleg Evgenievich Nefekov to their list of most-wanted criminals for his services to ransomware.…
Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check
Imagine changing your popular brand to capitalize on an emerging tech trend that never emerged. Mark Zuckerberg did just that, and now Meta is backing away from the virtual reality business in which it invested billions.…
Hyperscalers, vendors funding trillion dollar AI spree, but users will have to pay up long term
Software vendors and cloud providers are bearing the burden of the expected trillion-dollar increase in AI spending this year, as investment hits $2.52 trillion, according to Gartner.…