TheRegister
UK Covid-19 Inquiry finds early pandemic surveillance was weeks out of date
During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, it took up to three weeks for confirmed cases to be recorded on the health database used at the time.…
Dev's last-day-of-contract code helped to crash app used by 350,000 people
Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and therefore to a new instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly column that shares your tales of workplace errors and absolution.…
Cryptology boffins’ association to re-run election after losing encryption key needed to count votes
The International Association for Cryptologic Research will run a second election for new board members and other officers, after it was unable to complete its first poll due to a lost encryption key.…
OVH CEO predicts some cloud prices to rise 5-10 percent by mid-2026
The price of some cloud services will have to rise by five to ten percent by mid-2026, maybe sooner, according to Octave Klaba, CEO of French cloud OVH.…
70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture
Asia In Brief Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has suggested Indian citizens should work even longer, suggesting his previous target of 70-hour weeks could climb to 72.…
Weaponized file name flaw makes updating glob an urgent job
Infosec In Brief Researchers have urged users of the glob file pattern matching library to update their installations, after discovery of a years-old remote code execution flaw in the tool's CLI.…
Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job
The COVID-19 lockdown meant a surge in remote work, and the trend toward remote and hybrid workplaces has persisted long after the pandemic receded. That has changed the nature of workplace management as well. Bosses can't check for butts in seats or look over their employees' shoulders in the office to make sure they're working instead of having a LAN party. So they've turned to software tools to fill the gap.…
It's TEE time for Brave's AI assistant Leo
Brave Software has joined the rush to make using cloud-based AI services more private.…
Copackaged optics have officially found their killer app - of course it's AI
SC25 Power is becoming a major headache for datacenter operators as they grapple with how to support ever larger deployments of GPU servers - so much so that the AI boom is now driving the adoption of a technology once thought too immature and failure-prone to merit the risk.…
Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away
If you’ve ever watched Mission Impossible, where Jim Phelps gets instructions from an audio tape that catches fire after five seconds, TeamGroup has an external SSD with your name on it. The T-Create Expert P35S is a portable USB-powered SSD that comes with a self-destruct button, which wipes all your data and physically renders the device useless.…
Researchers get inside the mind of bots, find out what texts they trained on
If you've ever wondered whether that chatbot you're using knows the entire text of a particular book, answers are on the way. Computer scientists have developed a more effective way to coax memorized content from large language models, a development that may address regulatory concerns while helping to clarify copyright infringement claims arising from AI model training and inference.…
ShinyHunters 'does not like Salesforce at all,' claims the crew accessed Gainsight 3 months ago
EXCLUSIVE ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for the Gainsight breach that allowed the data thieves to snarf data from hundreds more Salesforce customers.…
Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino
Qualcomm quietly rewrote the terms of service for its newest acquisition, programmable microcontroller and SBC maker Arduino, drawing intense fire from the maker community for grabbing additional rights to user-generated content on its platform and prohibiting reverse-engineering of what was once very open software.…
Pentagon pumps $29.9M into bid to turn waste into critical minerals
The US Department of Defense is asserting its desire to be an integral part of the American rare earths and critical minerals supply chain with a deal to establish a domestic pipeline of gallium and scandium production.…
Big Red borrows a lot of green, hopes AI will put it in the black
opinion The weather's cooling, and so is Wall Street's patience with Oracle's AI makeover. Big Red is spending big, and the risk metrics aren't looking cozy.…
Rhyme is the key to set AIs free when verse outsmarts security
Are you a wizard with words? Do you like money without caring how you get it? You could be in luck now that a new role in cybercrime appears to have opened up – poetic LLM jailbreaking.…
Google's AI is eating your email by default. Here's how to shut its mouth
Google's "don't be evil" ethos is so 2015. These days, the Chocolate Factory is all about integrating users with bots, whether they like it or not. Now, it's rolling out Workspace "smart features" that process personal content with AI, and many users are finding the settings enabled by default.…
SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap
SpaceX has responded to Blue Origin's announcement of a heftier version of its New Glenn rocket in the only way it knows how – by accidentally destroying a Starship booster.…
Four charged over alleged plot to smuggle Nvidia AI chips into China
Four people have been charged in the US with plotting to funnel restricted Nvidia AI chips into China, allegedly relying on shell firms, fake invoices, and covert routing to slip cutting-edge GPUs past American export controls.…
You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source
Microsoft developer boss Scott Hanselman saved the company's Ignite shindig this week by unveiling the source code for Zork I-III, all available under the MIT license.…