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Lack of effective data flows and reduced scientific investment hampered response 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.…

Customer signed off and a remaining staffer triggered the mess 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.…

The shoemaker’s children have new friends 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.…

Or maybe even sooner, warns Octave Klaba, as AI sends storage costs soaring 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.…

PLUS: Manga publishers win Cloudflare copyright case; India, EU to link payment systems; Storm over Australia’s weather website; And more! Asia In Brief Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has suggested Indian citizens should work 72-hour weeks, up from his previous target of 70 hours.…

PLUS: CISA issues drone warning; China-linked DNS-hijacking malware; Prison for BTC Samourai; And more 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.…

A lot of companies are turning to employee monitoring tools to make sure workers aren't slacking off 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. ...

Browser maker wraps cloud AI data processing in confidential computing Brave Software has joined the rush to make using cloud-based AI services more private.…

With power in such short supply, every watt counts 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.…

Catch: you have to plug it into a computer first 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. ...

RECAP agent overcomes model alignment efforts to hide memorized proprietary content If you've ever wondered whether that chatbot you're using knows the entire text of a particular book, answers are on the way. ...

Shiny talks to The Reg EXCLUSIVE ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for the Gainsight breach that allowed the data thieves to snarf data from hundreds more Salesforce customers.…

But the Wiring folks were disenchanted even before Qualcomm swallowed 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.…

It's unclear how much scandium and gallium ElementUSA will contribute to the supply chain, or when 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.…

Cost of insuring against Oracle debt default spikes as September seems a long time ago 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.…

Poetry proves potent jailbreak tool for today's top models 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.…

Want out of those new 'smart features'? We’ve got you covered 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.…

Redesigned booster ruptures during early checks, delaying latest Starship iteration 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.…

Prosecutors say front companies, falsified paperwork, and overseas drop points used to dodge US export rules 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.…

Redmond dusts off Infocom's classic text adventures and puts the originals into public hands 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.…

Storing credentials safely and securely is the real trick It's important to have your login in hand, literally. Zi Teng Wang, a magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage, has admitted losing access to it because he forgot the password.…

UK cops trace street-level crime to sanctions-busting networks tied to Moscow's war economy On Christmas Day 2024, a Russian-linked laundering network bought itself a very special present: a controlling stake in a Kyrgyzstan bank, later used to wash cybercrime profits and funnel money into Moscow's war machine, according to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA).…

EFF wants to know if citizens had their First Amendment rights violated The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing two government departments to understand how they compelled tech companies to remove ICE-tracking apps and websites from their platforms.…

Nvidia CPUs and GPUs dominate the bi-annual leaderboard, but FP64 performance regressions leave its long term prospectives in doubt SC25 There's a new efficiency champ at the top of the Green500 ranking of the world's most sustainable supercomputers.…

Decision marks second penalty issued under the UK's Online Safety Act The UK's online regulator has lobbed a £50,000 fine at an AI nudification website for failing to implement mandatory age checks, potentially allowing under-18s to waltz past the virtual velvet rope.…

Committee hears departments may have to stump up cash before savings materialize A UK tech minister has declined to put a figure on the cost of the government's digital ID plans as MPs question the contributions expected from central departments.…

The tech is impressive. Shoehorning it into absolutely everything is not Opinion In a tweet lamenting all the 'cynics' unmoved by AI, Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman demonstrated that Redmond's Reality Distortion Field is running at full power.…

AutoGuard uses injection text for good Computer scientists based in South Korea have devised what they describe as an 'AI Kill Switch' to prevent AI agents from carrying out malicious data scraping.…

Somewhat daft scheme worked until it didn’t On Call The working week can be burdensome, so each Friday morning The Register tries to lighten the load by bringing you a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you let go of tech support stories that weigh on your memory.…

It’s an ethereal and weighty problem, not a powerful conundrum The Open Compute Project (OCP) has commenced a workstream to learn how to deploy quantum computers alongside classical high performance computers in the same datacenter.…

Relies on very loose permissions, but don’t worry – Google wrote it in Rust Google has linked Android’s wireless peer-to-peer file sharing tool Quick Share to Apple’s equivalent AirDrop.…

Plans a universal API to back up all hypervisors, too Backup software vendor Veeam has thrown its weight behind more alternatives to VMware.…

Company 'clearly delighted' with the outcome The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has abandoned the lawsuit it pursued against SolarWinds and its chief infosec officer for misleading investors about security practices that led to the 2020 SUNBURST attack.…

Hydrogen-powered turbines, megawatt-scale coolant loops, and 800V power take center stage at annual supercomputing conference SC25 Hydrogen-fueled gas turbines, backup generators, and air handlers probably aren't the kinds of equipment you'd expect on the show floor of a supercomputing conference. But your expectations would be wrong.…

Featuring an image of a man creating an image of a man creating an image... hands on Google Gemini users can now use the AI's app and website to figure out whether an image is AI-generated, though with some considerable limitations.…

Unfashionable web workhorse refreshed for its ongoing run PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser, marking one of the scripting language's more substantial updates.…

They keep coming back for more Salesforce has disclosed another third-party breach in which criminals - likely ShinyHunters (again) - may have accessed hundreds of its customers' data.…

Researchers tried to get ChatGPT to do evil, but it didn't do a good job LLMs are getting better at writing malware - but they're still not ready for prime time.…

LLM makers may be training on user chat with few privacy safeguards, lawmakers hear The US House of Representatives has heard that LLM builders can exploit users’ conversations for further training and commercial benefit with little oversight or concern for privacy risks.…

If at first you don’t succeed, swing again - Big Tech certainly isn’t complaining The Trump administration and congressional Republicans are trying again to eliminate state-level AI regulations in favor of a federal standard. The plan faces opposition from many state governments and civil-society organizations, while AI vendors have welcomed it.…