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IBM announced plans to invest $150 billion in the United States over the next five years, with more than $30 billion earmarked specifically for research and development of mainframes and quantum computing technology. The investment follows similar commitments from tech giants including Apple and Nvidia -- each pledging approximately $500 billion -- in the wake of President Trump's election and tariff threats. "We have been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago," said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a statement. The company currently manufactures its mainframe systems in upstate New York and plans to continue designing and assembling quantum computers domestically. The announcement comes amid challenging circumstances for IBM, which recently saw 15 government contracts shelved under the Trump administration's cost-cutting initiatives. Further reading: IBM US Cuts May Run Deeper Than Feared - and the Jobs Are Heading To India; IBM Now Has More Employees In India Than In the US (2017).

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Cyberattack? Bad software update? International oopsie? The cause is unclear, but Iberia is dark

A massive power outage has left Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France without electricity, and the cause has yet to be identified.…

Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, makes a case for why Google shouldn't be forced to sell Chrome: First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn't some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they're supposed to do: rewarding the best. Besides, we have a million alternatives. Firefox still exists, so does Safari, so does the billion Chromium-based browsers like Brave and Edge. And we finally even have new engines on the way with the Ladybird browser. Look, Google's trillion-dollar business depends on a thriving web that can be searched by Google.com, that can be plastered in AdSense, and that now can feed the wisdom of AI. Thus, Google's incredible work to further the web isn't an act of charity, it's of economic self-interest, and that's why it works. Capitalism doesn't run on benevolence, but incentives. We want an 800-pound gorilla in the web's corner! Because Apple would love nothing better (despite the admirable work to keep up with Chrome by Team Safari) to see the web's capacity as an application platform diminished. As would every other owner of a proprietary application platform. Microsoft fought the web tooth and nail back in the 90s because they knew that a free, open application platform would undermine lock-in -- and it did!

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No more asterisks. Voice typing now reflects the true spirit of your rage

Customer feedback wins – Microsoft is adding a toggle to turn off the Windows 11 profanity filter.…

It took a 1 year+ probe, plenty of client calls for VeriSource to understand just how much of a yikes it has on its hands

Houston-based VeriSource Services' long-running probe into a February 2024 digital break-in shows the data of 4 million people – not just a few hundred thousand as it first claimed - was accessed by an "unknown actor".…

Widespread power outages were reported Monday in parts of Spain, Portugal and France, affecting critical infrastructure like airports and causing transportation disruptions. From a report: "The interruption was due to a problem in the European electricity grid," E-Redes, the national energy supplier of Portugal, said in a statement. In addition to Portugal, it said, "The blackout also affected regions of Spain and France, due to faults in very high voltage lines." E-Redes said that the outage was widespread across Spain, with outages in Catalonia, Andalusia, Aragon, Navarre, the Basque Country, Castile and Leon, Extremadura and Murcia. In France, the Portuguese energy supplier said, "the Basque Coast and the Burgundy region also experienced power cuts." Spain's national power company, Red Electricia, said in a post on X that it had restored some power in the north and south of the peninsula. The cause of the outages was not immediately clear. But the effects of the disruption were felt in cities across the region.

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Image board hints that rumors of a poorly maintained back end may be true

Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic."…

Sales of electric vehicles in America jumped 10.6% in the first three months of 2025 (compared to the same period in 2024), reports Bloomberg. And research provider BloombergNEF expects all of 2025 will see a 31.5% sales increase from 2024's sales in the U:S. — slightly above the global increase rate of 30%. (That's 22 million battery-powered vehicles around the world.) "EV adoption is cruising along in the U.S.," Bloomberg writes, with interest "spreading from early-adopters to mainstream consumers" tired of paying for gas and oil changes — and attracted by new products from familiar brands: Of the 63 or so fully electric cars and trucks on the U.S. market, one quarter weren't available a year ago. The product blitz includes the first EV offerings from Acura, Dodge and Jeep, second models from Mini and Porsche and two more battery-powered machines each from Cadillac and Volvo... Many of the new EVs are relatively affordable. Cox Automotive estimates the price spread between EVs broadly and internal combustion cars and trucks has shrunk to just $5,000. General Motors, meanwhile, plans to resurrect its Chevrolet Bolt later this year with a price point around $30,000...

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Government procurement process is very involved

Comment It's easy to miss £125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon scandal became public knowledge.…

Spend will come under scrutiny, but projects with good returns still likely to get backing, analyst says

The ripple effects of recent US tariffs could hit sectors well beyond those currently in the firing line, or so warns TechMarketView.…

Latest profit and loss accounts carry scars of ad spending exodus, but things improving. Maybe not everywhere though

In the months following Tesla CEO and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now rebranded to X, business collapsed in the UK, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31 2023.…

Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem

Opinion Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user – 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable.…

"A new study found that a gene recently recognized as a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease is actually a cause of it," announced the University of California, San Diego, "due to its previously unknown secondary function." "Researchers at the University of California San Diego used artificial intelligence to help both unravel this mystery of Alzheimer's disease and discover a potential treatment that obstructs the gene's moonlighting role." A team led by Sheng Zhong, a professor in the university's bioengineering department, had previously discovered a potential blood biomarker for early detection of Alzheimer's disease (called PHGDH). But now they've discovered a correlation: the more protein and RNA that it produces, the more advanced the disease. And after more research they ended up with "a therapeutic candidate with demonstrated efficacy that has the potential of being further developed into clinical tests..." That correlation has since been verified in multiple cohorts from different medical centers, according to Zhong... [T]he researchers established that PHGDH is indeed a causal gene to spontaneous Alzheimer's disease. In further support of that finding, the researchers determined — with the help of AI — that PHGDH plays a previously undiscovered role: it triggers a pathway that disrupts how cells in the brain turn genes on and off. And such a disturbance can cause issues, like the development of Alzheimer's disease.... With AI, they could visualize the three-dimensional structure of the PHGDH protein. Within that structure, they discovered that the protein has a substructure... Zhong said, "It really demanded modern AI to formulate the three-dimensional structure very precisely to make this discovery." After discovering the substructure, the team then demonstrated that with it, the protein can activate two critical target genes. That throws off the delicate balance, leading to several problems and eventually the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. In other words, PHGDH has a previously unknown role, independent of its enzymatic function, that through a novel pathway leads to spontaneous Alzheimer's disease... Now that the researchers uncovered the mechanism, they wanted to figure out how to intervene and thus possibly identify a therapeutic candidate, which could help target the disease.... Given that PHGDH is such an important enzyme, there are past studies on its possible inhibitors. One small molecule, known as NCT-503, stood out to the researchers because it is not quite effective at impeding PHGDH's enzymatic activity (the production of serine), which they did not want to change. NCT-503 is also able to penetrate the blood-brain-barrier, which is a desirable characteristic. They turned to AI again for three-dimensional visualization and modeling. They found that NCT-503 can access that DNA-binding substructure of PHGDH, thanks to a binding pocket. With more testing, they saw that NCT-503 does indeed inhibit PHGDH's regulatory role. When the researchers tested NCT-503 in two mouse models of Alzheimer's disease, they saw that it significantly alleviated Alzheimer's progression. The treated mice demonstrated substantial improvement in their memory and anxiety tests... The next steps will be to optimize the compound and subject it to FDA IND-enabling studies. The research team published their results on April 23 in the journal Cell.

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When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business

Who, Me? Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" – the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards.…

Redmond reckons $1.50/core/month hotpatch service is worth it to avoid eight Patch Tuesday scrambles each year

Microsoft has announced that its preview of hotpatching for on-prem Windows Server 2025 will become a paid subscription service in July.…

And just-about bricks some of its older models everywhere

Google has given up on smart thermostats in Europe.…

PLUS: Microsoft fixes messes China used to attack it; Mitre adds ESXi advice; Employee-tracking screenshots leak; and more!

Infosec in brief Samsung has warned that some of its Galaxy devices store passwords in plaintext.…

A new DARPA project called expMath "aims to jumpstart math innovation with the help of AI," writes The Register. America's "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency" believes mathematics isn't advancing fast enough, according to their article... So to accelerate — or "exponentiate" — the rate of mathematical research, DARPA this week held a Proposers Day event to engage with the technical community in the hope that attendees will prepare proposals to submit once the actual Broad Agency Announcement solicitation goes out... [T]he problem is that AI just isn't very smart. It can do high school-level math but not high-level math. [One slide from DARPA program manager Patrick Shafto noted that OpenAI o1 "continues to abjectly fail at basic math despite claims of reasoning capabilities."] Nonetheless, expMath's goal is to make AI models capable of: - auto decomposition — automatically decompose natural language statements into reusable natural language lemmas (a proven statement used to prove other statements); and auto(in)formalization — translate the natural language lemma into a formal proof and then translate the proof back to natural language. "How must faster with technology advance with AI agents solving new mathematical proofs?" asks former DARPA research scientist Robin Rowe (also long-time Slashdot reader robinsrowe): DARPA says that "The goal of Exponentiating Mathematics is to radically accelerate the rate of progress in pure mathematics by developing an AI co-author capable of proposing and proving useful abstractions." Rowe is cited in the article as the founder/CEO of an AI research institute named "Fountain Adobe". (He tells The Register that "It's an indication of DARPA's concern about how tough this may be that it's a three-year program. That's not normal for DARPA.") Rowe is optimistic. "I think we're going to kill it, honestly. I think it's not going to take three years. But I think it might take three years to do it with LLMs. So then the question becomes, how radical is everybody willing to be?" "We will robustly engage with the math and AI communities toward fundamentally reshaping the practice of mathematics by mathematicians," explains the project's home page. They've already uploaded an hour-long video of their Proposers Day event. "It's very unclear that current AI systems can succeed at this task..." program manager Shafto says in a short video introducing the project. But... "There's a lot of enthusiasm in the math community for the possibility of changes in the way mathematics is practiced. It opens up fundamentally new things for mathematicians. But of course, they're not AI researchers. One of the motivations for this program is to bring together two different communities — the people who are working on AI for mathematics, and the people who are doing mathematics — so that we're solving the same problem. At its core, it's a very hard and rather technical problem. And this is DARPA's bread-and-butter, is to sort of try to change the world. And I think this has the potential to do that.

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Remember First Light Fusion? Founded in 2011, it was a pioneering British startup that in 2022 "successfully combined atomic nuclei, which U.K. regulators called a milestone in the decades-long push for fusion energy. It's now "pulled the plug on plans to build its first reactor," reports the Telegraph, abandoning its push for a prototype power plant based on its "projectile fusion" technology due to a lack of funding. The technology involves a 5p-sized projectile being fired at a fuel cell at extreme speeds using electromagnets to generate a powerful reaction and simulate collisions at extremely high speeds, such as those in space. Instead of building its own plant, First Light plans to supply other nuclear power companies with one of its inventions, called an "amplifier", which houses a nuclear fuel capsule and boosts the power of fusion reactions. The group has burned through tens of millions of pounds trying to bring its technology to fruition... The decision to ditch its original plan will allow First Light Fusion to be more "capital light", the nuclear group said in March, while licensing its inventions would generate more revenues. The company said it had recently secured the first tranche of a new funding round. Mark Thomas, First Light Fusion's chief executive, said: "We have been very pleased with the response to our strategy pivot, moving to an enabler of inertial fusion while rapidly accelerating revenues... First Light Fusion's other investors include Chinese technology giant Tencent.

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PLUS: Korea's SK Telecom replacing SIMs after attack; India automates satellite docking; China greens its datacenters; and more

Asia In Brief Toyota last week launched a range of electric vehicles in China, one of which use Huawei’s HarmonyOS…