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Europe's new tech rule aims to keep digital markets open and is not targeted at U.S. tech giants, EU antitrust and tech chiefs told U.S. congressmen, reminding them that U.S. enforcers have in recent years also cracked down on these companies. From a report: The comments by EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunnen came after U.S. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and Scott Fitzgerald, chairman of the subcommittee on the administrative state, regulatory reform and antitrust demanded clarifications on the Digital Markets Act (DMA). "The DMA does not target U.S. companies," Ribera and Virkkunnen wrote in a joint letter dated March 6 to Jordan and Fitzgerald seen by Reuters. "It applies to all companies which fulfil the clearly defined criteria for being designated as a gatekeeper in the European Union irrespective of where they are headquartered," they said.

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Moved from Windows or Linux? Smooth some of the rough edges

Friday FOSS fest There are some idiosyncrasies about macOS that long term Mac users may never notice, but cause frustration in people more used to how Windows does things – or the much more customizable Linux desktop experience. Here are a few of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite tools we routinely install on new machines to make life a little more comfortable or convenient.…

PhD students trained in small research groups are more likely to remain in academia than those from larger labs, according to a comprehensive analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour. The study, which examined 1.5 million scientists and 1.8 million mentorships across chemistry, physics and neuroscience, found that trainees from large research groups had 38-48% lower "survival rates" in academia between the 1980s and 1995 compared to their small-group counterparts. However, researchers from larger labs who do stay in academia tend to achieve greater career success, publishing papers with higher citation rates and more frequently ranking among the most-cited scientists. The research team, led by social-data scientist Roberta Sinatra from the University of Copenhagen, discovered that successful large-group scientists typically published more first-author papers with their mentors as last authors, suggesting they received substantial attention despite the group size.

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The White House is weighing measures to restrict Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart DeepSeek, including banning its chatbot from government devices because of national-security concerns, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: U.S. officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the Chinese company says it stores in servers located in China, the people said. Officials also believe DeepSeek hasn't sufficiently explained how it uses the data it collects and who has access to the data, they said. The Trump administration is likely to adopt a rule that would bar people from downloading DeepSeek's chatbot app onto U.S. government devices, the people said. Officials are also considering two other possible moves: banning the DeepSeek app from U.S. app stores and putting limits on how U.S.-based cloud service providers could offer DeepSeek's AI models to their customers, people close to the matter said. They cautioned that discussions about these two moves were still at an early stage.

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Big Red pushes restart button after users locked out of apps across Veterans Affairs hospitals, other govt departments

Oracle's Federal electronic health records software suffered a US-wide outage this week, causing Veterans Affairs hospitals to invoke "standard contingency procedures."…

An anonymous reader shares a report: A physicist has cast doubt on a test that underlies a high-profile claim by Microsoft to have created the first 'topological qubits', a long-sought goal of the company's quantum computing effort. The critique comes amid mounting speculation about the validity of Microsoft's claim. Microsoft announced the breakthrough, which could lead to a quantum computer more resistant to information loss than with other approaches, on 19 February. Without a peer-reviewed paper backing up the claim, some researchers were sceptical. An accompanying paper in Nature described a method to measure the read-out from future topological qubits, but did not offer proof of their existence. In the latest critique, posted as a preprint, Henry Legg, a theoretical physicist at the University of St Andrews, UK, raises concerns about a test that Microsoft uses to look for Majoranas, so-far undiscovered quasiparticles arising from the collective behaviour of electrons that are needed for the topological qubits to work. Known as the topological gap protocol (TGP), the test is not mentioned in the 19 February Microsoft announcement. But the company has subsequently indicated to Nature's news team, and in a comment online, that it created the topological qubits using the TGP. "Since the TGP is flawed, the very foundations of the qubit are not there," says Legg. Business Insider, separately reports: On February 19, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum processor called Majorana 1. [...] On the same day, Simone Severini, Amazon's head of quantum technologies, emailed CEO Andy Jassy casting doubt on Microsoft's claims, according to a copy of the email obtained by Business Insider. Severini wrote that Microsoft's underlying scientific paper, released in Nature, "doesn't actually demonstrate" the claimed achievement and only showed that the new chip "could potentially enable future experiments." [...] Oskar Painter, Amazon's head of quantum hardware, stressed the need to "push back on BS statements like S. Nadella's," likely in reference to the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's social media post proclaiming major advancements with the Majorana chip. Further reading: Scientists Question Microsoft's Quantum Computing Claims.

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I knew you were trouble, Queens DA might have said

Police have made two arrests in their quest to start a cybercrime crew's prison eras, alleging the pair stole hundreds of Taylor Swift tickets and sold them for huge profit. …

FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, on the site's demise: Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half and my tenure expired too, I know it's a brutal process for everyone involved. It's also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward at 538/FiveThirtyEight. I don't know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced. My heart goes out to them, and I'm happy to provide recommendations for people I worked with there. [...] The basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business. Although they were generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfered in our editorial process, the sort of muscle memory a media property builds early in its tenure tends to stick. We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough "product" people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself. It's always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

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A Brazilian judge has ordered Apple to open its iOS platform to alternative app stores within 90 days, according to Valor International. The ruling cited Apple's compliance with similar requirements in the European Union under the Digital Markets Act without showing "significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model." The case originated from a 2022 complaint by Mercado Livre. Brazil previously issued a 20-day deadline in November for Apple to permit alternative payment options and sideloading, but that injunction was overturned in December. Apple plans to appeal.

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Now that's sticker shock

Eggheads have taken a look at previously developed techniques that can be used to trick self-driving cars into doing the wrong thing – and found cheap stickers stuck on stop and speed limit signs, at least, are pretty effective.…

Intuitive Machines' Athena lander touched down near the lunar south pole Thursday but may have toppled during landing, jeopardizing its scientific mission. "We're trying to evaluate exactly what happened in that last bit," said Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines' chief technology officer. Data from an inertial measurement unit suggests the 15-foot robotic spacecraft is lying on its side. The landing issues mirror problems faced by the company's Odysseus spacecraft last year, which also toppled after touchdown. Noisy data from laser altitude instruments likely contributed to the landing complications, officials said. CEO Steve Altemus reported the spacecraft isn't generating expected power, probably because its solar panels are improperly oriented. The company believes Athena landed somewhere on Mons Mouton, though outside the planned landing zone. The $62.5 million NASA-contracted mission carries several payloads, including a drill to search for frozen water, three small rovers, and a rocket-powered hopping drone. NASA officials indicated some experiments might still function despite the lander's orientation. Intuitive Machines' stock fell 20% Thursday following reports of the spacecraft's problems.

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Thousands brace for layoffs as shares slide 20%

HPE is feeling the effects of the Trump administration's gamesmanship, seeing shares slide after lowering earnings expectations due to uncertainty over how tariffs may affect the cost of imported parts.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DuckDuckGo has big plans for embedding AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company just announced that its AI-generated answers, which appear for certain queries on its search engine, have exited beta and now source information from across the web -- not just Wikipedia. It will soon integrate web search within its AI chatbot, which has also exited beta. DuckDuckGo first launched AI-assisted answers -- originally called DuckAssist -- in 2023. The feature is billed as a less obnoxious version of tools like Google's AI Overviews, designed to offer more concise responses and let you adjust how often you see them, including turning the responses off entirely. If you have DuckDuckGo's AI-generated answers set to "often," you'll still only see them around 20 percent of the time, though the company plans on increasing the frequency eventually. Some of DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers bring up a box for follow-up questions, redirecting you to a conversation with its Duck.ai chatbot. As is the case with its AI-assisted answers, you don't need an account to use Duck.ai, and it comes with the same emphasis on privacy. It lets you toggle between GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku, with the advantage being that you can interact with each model anonymously by hiding your IP address. DuckDuckGo also has agreements with the AI company behind each model to ensure your data isn't used for training. Duck.ai also rolled out a feature called Recent Chats, which stores your previous conversations locally on your device rather than on DuckDuckGo's servers. Though Duck.ai is also leaving beta, that doesn't mean the flow of new features will stop. In the next few weeks, Duck.ai will add support for web search, which should enhance its ability to respond to questions. The company is also working on adding voice interaction on iPhone and Android, along with the ability to upload images and ask questions about them. ... [W]hile Duck.ai will always remain free, the company is considering including access to more advanced AI models with its $9.99 per month subscription.

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PDFs and Powerpoint also lie in wait as 2026 looms

Microsoft is suggesting alternatives to its doomed Publisher product ahead of the software's demise in 2026.…

Which is why taking down chiefs and infra behind big name brand operations isn't working

Interview There's a handful of cybercriminal gangs that Jason Baker, a ransomware negotiator with GuidePoint Security, regularly gets called in to respond to these days, and a year ago only one of these crews — Akira — was on threat hunters' radars and infecting organizations with the same ferocity as it is today.…

Increasingly shaky relationship with the States has Europe considering options

Talks are underway between European leaders and Eutelsat about a possible replacement for Starlink in Ukraine.…

Mistral has launched a new multimodal OCR API that converts complex PDF documents into AI-friendly Markdown files. The API is designed for efficiency, handles visual elements like illustrations, supports complex formatting such as mathematical expressions, and reportedly outperforms similar offerings from major competitors. TechCrunch reports: Unlike most OCR APIs, Mistral OCR is a multimodal API, meaning that it can detect when there are illustrations and photos intertwined with blocks of text. The OCR API creates bounding boxes around these graphical elements and includes them in the output. Mistral OCR also doesn't just output a big wall of text; the output is formatted in Markdown, a formatting syntax that developers use to add links, headers, and other formatting elements to a plain text file. Mistral OCR is available on Mistral's own API platform or through its cloud partners (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Vertex, etc.). And for companies working with classified or sensitive data, Mistral offers on-premise deployment. According to the Paris-based AI company, Mistral OCR performs better than APIs from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The company has tested its OCR model with complex documents that include mathematical expressions (LaTeX formatting), advanced layouts, or tables. It is also supposed to perform better with non-English documents. [...] Mistral is also using Mistral OCR for its own AI assistant Le Chat. When a user uploads a PDF file, the company uses Mistral OCR in the background to understand what's in the document before processing the text. Companies and developers will most likely use Mistral OCR with a RAG (aka Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system to use multimodal documents as input in an LLM. And there are many potential use cases. For instance, we could envisage law firms using it to help them swiftly plough through huge volumes of documents. "Over the years, organizations have accumulated numerous documents, often in PDF or slide formats, which are inaccessible to LLMs, particularly RAG systems. With Mistral OCR, our customers can now convert rich and complex documents into readable content in all languages," said Mistral co-founder and chief science officer Guillaume Lample. "This is a crucial step toward the widespread adoption of AI assistants in companies that need to simplify access to their vast internal documentation," he added.

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Difficulties unpicking 25 years of technical entanglement secure £474.4M without competition

Following protracted negotiations, French outsourcer Atos has scooped up a £474.4 million ($612 million) contract without competition to build systems for a UK state bank at nearly three times the annual rate initially advertised three years ago.…

When 'pickup' means more than just a ride

On Call The week has ebbed away with embarrassing speed, so here we are again with a fresh installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that immortalizes tech support stories.…

€240M found for three-year sprint to develop three chiplets for HPC, AI

A 38-strong group of tech players have founded a project with the snappy name Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe, aka DARE, that aims to develop processor units to power the continent’s supercomputers and other high-performance machines.…