TheRegister
US tech giants pledge $42 billion in UK investment as Trump tours Blighty
America and the UK have announced a $42 billion (£31 billion) trade pact, funded by Microsoft, Google, and others, that predicts bit barns will spring up over Britain's green and pleasant Land. But there's a lot more than money involved.…
Scale AI says 'tanks a lot' to Pentagon for data-classifying deal
Data curation firm Scale AI has partnered with the Pentagon to deploy its AI on Top Secret networks - a move its interim CEO says is necessary if the US wants AI to be useful for national security.…
AMD tries to catch CUDA with performance-boosting ROCm 7 software
AMD closed the performance gap with Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators with the launch of the MI355X this spring. Now the company just needs to overcome Nvidia's CUDA software advantage and make that perf more accessible to developers. …
Scattered Spider gang feigns retirement, breaks into bank instead
Spiders don't change their stripes. Despite gang members' recent retirement claims, Scattered Spider hasn't exited the cybercrime business and instead has shifted focus to the financial sector, with a recent digital intrusion at a US bank.…
Social Security admin denies DB data leak, DOGEs questions about a copy
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has disputed a whistleblower's allegations that claimed DOGE made an unauthorized, unsecured copy of a critical database - but it's what the denial doesn't say that speaks volumes. …
Super-sized space freighter delayed on way to ISS, leaving snacks in jeopardy
NASA has delayed a supply delivery to the International Space Station (ISS) after the engines of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft did not perform as expected during an orbit-raising burn.…
Tariff threat plays havoc with US PC market, economy not helping
Wolrd War Fee The US PC industry is suffering from inventory indigestion caused by resellers over-ordering hardware to avoid Donald Trump's expected import taxes on China-made kit.…
AI in your toaster: Analyst predicts $1.5T global spend in 2025
Tech analysts expect worldwide spending on AI to hit nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025, including $268 billion on optimized servers. These investments will also soon appear in even more consumer products.…
Axiom Space aims for the International Space Station with its Orbital Data Center Node
Axiom Space and Spacebilt have announced plans to add optically interconnected Orbital Data Center (ODC) infrastructure to the International Space Station (ISS).…
OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance
AI models often produce false outputs, or "hallucinations." Now OpenAI has admitted they may result from fundamental mistakes it makes when training its models.…
Return on investment for Copilot? Microsoft has work to do
A Microsoft exec claims Copilot is boosting productivity among the customers that adopted it yet sustained efforts to convince many them of the returns on investment remains a work in progress.…
Strong Java LTS arrives with the release of 25
Oracle has released JDK (Java Development Kit) 25, the first long term support (LTS) version since JDK 21 two years ago. New features include beginner-friendly compact source files, succinct module imports, and more flexible constructors.…
BreachForums kingpin goes from walk-free deal to 3-year stretch
The founder of the popular cybercrime website BreachForums will spend three years in prison after previously being let off with a slap on the wrist.…
UK telco Colt’s recovery from August cyberattack pushes into November
Brit telco Colt Technology Services says its recovery from an August cyberattack might not be completed until late November.…
Sky plans to ditch up to 500 staff in the Technology Group
Exclusive Sky Group, the Brit-based commercial TV and broadband service slinger owned by Comcast, is chopping up to 600 employees from the Technology, Consumer Group and COO divisions in the UK.…
Microsoft pens $15B love letter to the UK with 23,000 Nvidia GPUs attached
Microsoft appears to have trumped Google's UK datacenter ambitions with a $15 billion investment in cloud and AI infrastructure in the country.…
Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers
Lurking within the Windows Bluetooth stack is a hardcoded reference to the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. Is this nostalgic favoritism from Microsoft? Or is it just somebody, somewhere, making a mistake that an engineer had to work around?…
Whitehall lobs £40M at 'critical' phase of police DB reboot
The Home Office is flinging nearly £40 million in taxpayer cash at PA Consulting to get the big-ticket successor to the Police National Computer (PNC) over the finish line.…
AI, Arm, and Copilot: Living with Microsoft's Surface Laptop 7
COMMENT The Arm-based Surface Laptop 7 was introduced in 2024, followed by an Intel-powered version a few months later. As with much of the Surface line, it's a well-engineered piece of hardware. I needed something that could run off the battery for a full day, wouldn't break the strap of a courier bag or the bank, and featured a decent spec.…
UEFI Secure Boot for Linux Arm64 – where do we stand?
Arm devices are everywhere today and many of them run Linux. The operating system also powers cloud computing and IT environments all over the world. However, x86 is still the dominant architecture of global computer hardware, where the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) with Secure Boot incorporated is a standard. But what does UEFI look like from an Arm perspective?…