TheRegister
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?…
UK Cabinet Office hands stalled Microsoft migration to another department
The Cabinet Office, the strategic center of UK government, has handed a much-delayed project to migrate from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 (M365) to another department.…
Ruh-roh. DDR5 memory vulnerable to new Rowhammer attack
Researchers from Google and Swiss university ETH Zurich have found a new class of Rowhammer vulnerability that could allow attackers to access info stored in DDR5 memory.…
Australia to let Big Tech choose its own adventure to enact kids social media ban
Australia’s eSafety commissioner has told social media operators it expects them to employ multiple age assurance techniques and technologies to keep children under sixteen off social media, as required by local law from December 10th.…
Microsoft blocks bait for ‘fastest-growing’ 365 phish kit, seizes 338 domains
Microsoft has seized 338 websites associated with RaccoonO365 and identified the leader of the phishing service - Joshua Ogundipe - as part of a larger effort to disrupt what Redmond's Digital Crimes Unit calls the "fastest-growing tool used by cybercriminals to steal Microsoft 365 usernames and passwords."…
Li-ion roars can predict early battery failure, MIT boffins say
When lithium-ion batteries degrade, they emit acoustic signals that reveal what's going wrong inside. Now, MIT researchers say they've figured out how to interpret those sounds, and the subtle creaks and pops that come before major failures, to help predict problems before things go up in smoke.…
Criminals broke into the system Google uses to share info with cops
Google confirmed that miscreants created a fraudulent account in its Law Enforcement Request System (LERS) portal, which police and other government agencies use to ask for data about Google users.…