TheRegister

Who needs 600 kilowatt racks when a single computer can span entire datacenters? Exclusive Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs announced a new collaboration with Global Unichip Corp (GUC) on Sunday to integrate its optical I/O chiplets into the Taiwanese semiconductor design services provider's XPU reference designs.…

Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp weights impact of densification on the datacenter and the rise of the AI factory Interview In the datacenter biz, power is the product. You either have it or you don't, Chris Sharp tells El Reg.…

When is an app not an app? When it’s a mini app inside another app Apple has cut its take to 15 percent on purchases inside mini apps running within other iOS apps, and reached a parallel agreement with Tencent that brings WeChat's vast mini-program ecosystem into its revenue net.…

Leaving buyers to cry, AI AI AI If you haven't noticed, DRAM memory has gotten a lot more expensive in recent weeks. …

Who guards the guardrails? Often the same shoddy security as the rest of the AI stack Large language models frequently ship with 'guardrails' designed to catch malicious input and harmful output. But if you use the right word or phrase in your prompt, you can defeat these restrictions.…

More than a month after PoC made public Fortinet finally published a security advisory on Friday for a critical FortiWeb path traversal vulnerability under active exploitation – but it appears digital intruders got a month's head start.…

Enterprise Linux vendors keep jostling to see who can prop up geriatric distros the longest Last year, Canonical increased its paid extended support lifespan to 12 years. Now, it's increasing it again, to 15 years... for a price.…

Amazon spilled the TEA Yet another supply chain attack has hit the npm registry in what Amazon describes as 'one of the largest package flooding incidents in open source registry history' - but with a twist. Instead of injecting credential-stealing code or ransomware into the packages, this one is a token farming campaign.…

Just when you thought virtual collaboration couldn’t get worse, OpenAI stuffs a bot into your group conversations Feel like your team's group chat is a bit lifeless? Remote coworkers not really collaborating as well as they should be? There's a new way to stir the pot now that OpenAI has piloted ChatGPT group chats: cram a chatbot into the conversation and let it chime in whenever it thinks ...

Mercury Research blames stockpiling and low-end shortages for unusually flat CPU market AMD continues to claw market share away from Intel in CPU shipments, growing faster than its rival in most segments. Meanwhile business in the x86 processor arena is unusually flat overall, likely due to stockpiling over tariff fears.…

Starlink challenger drops the codename, but full-blown service still years out Amazon has rebranded its satellite broadband plan from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo. And no, Leo doesn't stand for 'Late Entrants Only,' even though the project is years behind Starlink and still not ready for anyone to use.…

Crooks spoof US insurers, threaten bogus extradition to pry loose personal data and cash Chinese speakers in the US are being targeted as part of an aggressive health insurance scam campaign, the FBI warns.…

VDURA boss: Your x86 clusters are obsolete, metadata is eating 20% of I/O, and every idle GPU second burns cash The supercomputing landscape is fracturing. What once was a relatively unified world of massive multi-processor x86 systems has splintered into competing architectures, each racing to serve radically different masters: traditional academic workloads, extreme-scale physics ...

Advisory updated as leading cybercrime crew opens up its target pool The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued new guidance to organizations on the Akira ransomware operation, which poses an imminent threat to critical sectors.…

Company behind THESPECTRUM brings the holiday season early for retro computing fans Retro Games Ltd (RGL), the company behind THESPECTRUM and THEA500 Mini, has started accepting pre-orders for its full-size Amiga 1200 replica, THEA1200.…

Original spacecraft deemed unsafe after cracks spotted in window The Shenzhou-20 astronauts have returned to Earth on the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft after engineers deemed the Shenzhou-20 vehicle unsafe following a debris strike while it was docked to the Tiangong space station.…

Linux-powered PC, Arm VR headset, and refreshed controller all land on pre-order for next year The holiday season is almost upon us, but the new gear on gamers' wish lists won't arrive until next year.…

Brussels reviewing proposal as Mountain View insists it will appeal antitrust ruling Google has proposed a plan to the European Commission aimed at addressing antitrust concerns following a €2.95 billion fine imposed on the company for its online advertising practices.…

AI, cybersecurity, and geopolitical jitters forecast to push market to $1.4T next year IT spending in Europe will grow 11 percent next year to hit $1.4 trillion amid a desire for cloud sovereignty, according to Gartner.…

'Stay in control and think for yourself' Feature Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the way software gets built, tested, and maintained — but not in the simplistic, headline-grabbing sense of 'AI replacing developers.'…

Public Accounts Committee tears into department responsible for the most dangerous breach in British history The UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has failed to appropriately improve its data protection mechanisms, three years after the infamous 2022 Afghan data breach.…

Trillionaire fantasies, investor dreams, reality nightmares Opinion At Tesla's annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, more than 75 percent of voting shares backed a compensation deal for CEO Elon Musk that would make him history's first trillionaire.…

Windows giant disagrees and plans to appeal Microsoft's attempt to claim that its software can't be resold has hit a wall at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, which decided that Office having clipart does not mean customers can't sell their licenses on.…

Watchdog says program buckled under procurement failures and technical complexity Updated The UK's state-owned savings bank has blown past its budget by £1.3 billion on a digital transformation program beset by delays, according to the National Audit Office.…

Cybercrime crew has ravaged multiple private organizations using Oracle EBS zero-day for months The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is investigating claims of a cyberattack by extortion crew Clop.…

FOMO trumps corporate governance when it comes to AI More than two-thirds of corporate executives say they've violated their own AI usage policies in the past three months, and over half of the leaders also ranked security and compliance as the greatest AI implementation challenge.…

Org chart games were more important than speed and accuracy On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of tech support troubles and other workplace woes.…

Getting by with a meager $2 billion quarterly capex – vastly less than rivals, but still cashing in on AI Chinese web giant Tencent’s capital expenditure is slowing and the company expects it will decelerate further due to its inability to buy all the GPUs it wants.…

Maintenance to end next year after ‘helpful options’ became ‘serious security flaws’ Kubernetes maintainers have decided it’s not worth trying to save Ingress NGINX and will instead stop work on the project and retire it in March 2026.…

Anthropic dubs this the first AI-orchestrated cyber snooping campaign Chinese cyber spies used Anthropic's Claude Code AI tool to attempt digital break-ins at about 30 high-profile companies and government organizations – and the government-backed snoops 'succeeded in a small number of cases,' according to a Thursday report from the AI company.…

Consumer advocacy researchers at PIRG tested four AI toys, and none of them passed muster Picture the scene: It's Christmas morning and your child is happily chatting with the AI-enabled teddy bear you got them when you hear it telling them about sexual kinks, where to find the knives, and how to light matches. This is not a hypothetical scenario. …

Browser maker scolds AI objectors, 'The web is changing, and sitting it out doesn’t help anyone' Mozilla is apparently a lot more excited about adding AI features to Firefox than its community. The org has decided that AI deserves its own new environment in the browser, a move its fans met with withering criticism.…

Checkout.com will instead donate the amount to fund cybercrime research Digitial extortion is a huge business, because affected orgs keep forking over money to get their data back. However, instead of paying a ransom demand after getting hit by extortionists last week, payment services provider Checkout.com donated the demanded amount to fund cybercrime research.…

Chinese search giant plans to bring custom silicon to the rack scale in 2026 with 256- and 512-chip systems Chinese search giant Baidu unveiled two new AI accelerators this week amid a national push to end reliance on Western chips.…

Lawmakers warn of ‘information gap’ lets immigration agents sidestep states’ data safeguards Democratic lawmakers say some states that don't want to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may be unintentionally allowing the agency access to residents' driver and criminal records through a law-enforcement data network.…

Under a third of PoCs make it past testing, but those that do often boost productivity It is the best of AI times; it is the worst of AI times, depending on whom you ask. Nearly a third of firms are seeing almost total failure of their AI proof-of-concept (PoC) projects, while 46 percent are successfully moving more than 10 percent of theirs into operational use.…

The goal of 'oxidizing' the Linux distro hits another bump Two vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 25.10's new 'sudo-rs' command have been found, disclosed, and fixed in short order.…

Third-party framework builds alternative backend using its own renderer and WebAssembly Microsoft's MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), the official.NET solution for cross-platform desktop and mobile apps, will get Linux and browser support via Avalonia, a third-party framework.…

Lack of executive backing, unrealistic plans, and muddled goals remain recipe for failure In Barcelona this week, consultancy Gartner once again tried to answer one of the perennial questions in IT: what is it about ERP projects that makes them so likely to fail?…

Bezos booster blasted by solar emissions A blast from the Sun kept Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the pad as the Northern Lights forced NASA to halt the launch.…