TheRegister
Azure budget alerts go berserk after Microsoft account migration misfire
Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts.…
Larry Ellison bankrolling £118M AI vaccine research at Oxford University
A research group funded by tech billionaire Larry Ellison is set to invest £118 million ($169.6 million) in applying AI to vaccine research with the UK's Oxford University.…
Norway's £10B UK frigate deal could delay Royal Navy ships
Norway has ordered British-made Type 26 frigates in a contract valued at roughly £10 billion to the UK economy, but this may delay the introduction of the Royal Navy's own desperately needed ships.…
DDoS is the neglected cybercrime that's getting bigger. Let's kill it off
Opinion Agatha Christie stuck a dagger in the notion that crime doesn't pay. With sales of between two and four billion books – fittingly, the exact number is a mystery – she built a career out of murder that out-bloodied Jack the Ripper. It's a fair bet that had she chosen to write about accountancy fraud instead, her sales would be between two and four billion fewer. Some crime is sexy. Some is not.…
LegalPwn: Tricking LLMs by burying badness in lawyerly fine print
Researchers at security firm Pangea have discovered yet another way to trivially trick large language models (LLMs) into ignoring their guardrails. Stick your adversarial instructions somewhere in a legal document to give them an air of unearned legitimacy – a trick familiar to lawyers the world over.…
ESA's Solar Orbiter will help space boffins predict desctructive coronal ejections
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter probe has pinpointed the source of electrons expelled by the Sun, with implications for forecasting space weather.…
I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA
Who, Me? No two mistakes are the same, but The Register thinks they're all worth celebrating each Monday when we serve up a fresh edition of Who, Me? – the reader-contributed column in which we share your most magnificent messes, and your means of making it out alive.…
Traffic to government domains often crosses national borders, or flows through risky bottlenecks
Internet traffic to government domains often flows across borders, relies on a worryingly small number of network connections, or does not require encryption, according to new research.…
China launches new ‘AI+’ policy to ‘deepen information technology revolution’
Asia In Brief China’s State Council last week announced a new IT policy called “AI +”, the successor to 2015’s “Internet +”.…
WhatsApp warns of 'attack against specific targeted users'
Infosec In brief A flaw in Meta's WhatsApp app “may have been exploited in a sophisticated attack against specific targeted users.”…
AI spies questionable science journals, with some human help
About 1,000 of a set of 15,000 open access scientific journals appear to exist mainly to extract fees from naive academics.…
Bring your own brain? Why local LLMs are taking off
Feature After a decade or two of the cloud, we're used to paying for our computing capability by the megabyte. As AI takes off, the whole cycle promises to repeat itself again, and while AI might seem relatively cheap now, it might not always be so.…
Programmers: you have to watch your weight, too
opinion To fight the enshittification of software, the first step is to pinpoint why and how it happens. Some observers are trying to do that.…
Kilopixel creator kills livestream switch before woodblock display hits Crysis point
All good things must come to an end, and so too must the blocky glory of the Kilopixel. As the wood and robotic marvel crested the 200,000-pixel mark, its creator pulled the metaphorical plug.…
Uncle Sam doesn't want Samsung, SK Hynix making memories in China
The US government already has a lot to say about what products chipmakers can and can't sell in China. This week the Commerce Department moved to make it harder for South Korean memory vendors Samsung and SK Hynix to continue manufacturing in the region.…
Researcher who found McDonald's free-food hack turns her attention to Chinese restaurant robots
A researcher caught the world’s leading supplier of commercial service robots using shoddy admin security that let attackers redirect the delivery machines to anywhere and make them follow any command.…
Alibaba looks to end reliance on Nvidia for AI inference
Alibaba has reportedly developed an AI accelerator amid growing pressure from Beijing to curb the nation's reliance on Nvidia GPUs. …
xAI's Grok has no place in US federal government, say advocacy groups
Public advocacy groups are demanding the US government cease any use of xAI's Grok in the federal government, calling the AI unsafe, untested, and ideologically biased.…
AMD Ryzen CPUs fry twice in the face of heavy math load, GMP says
Chipmaker AMD is looking into a report from the GMP project about two Ryzen processors that failed during testing. Could too much math be to blame?…
AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content
With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots.…