Now available in preview, DeepSeek V4 cuts inference costs to a fraction of R1 Chinese AI darling DeepSeek is back with a new open weights large language model that promises performance to rival the best proprietary American LLMs. Perhaps more importantly, it claims to dramatically reduce inference costs and it extends support for Huawei's Ascend family of AI accelerators.

New LTS is here, with more tooling for GPGPU and AI workloads Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon," the latest LTS release from Canonical, arrives with GNOME 50, Linux kernel 7.0, and drops the Xorg option from Ubuntu Desktop while still running X11 applications through Xwayland.

What, you didn't expect autonomous military craft to stay in the sky forever? Drones: they're not just for the sky anymore. DARPA is seeking compact deep- ocean autonomous craft developed faster, smaller, and cheaper than today's full-ocean-depth AUV systems.

Silicon often from US, but the kit from APAC and elsewhere America's telco regulator has clarified its ban on foreign-made routers also includes mobile hotspots and domestic routers that use a 5G cellular connection to the internet.

Leak-site bragging meets breach hunters as Have I Been Pwned flags millions of records Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise company, is dealing with choppy waters after Have I Been Pwned flagged what it claimed were 7.5 million unique email addresses all allegedly tied to one of its subsidiaries.

Latest in long-running pwning of Cisco kit found in mystery Fed agency A US federal agency was successfully targeted by a previously unknown backdoor malware called Firestarter, according to CISA cybersnoops and their UK counterparts neither of which disclosed the agency's name.

One way to deal with bug hunting LLMs: ditch the old drivers One tactic to deal with LLM-powered vulnerability detection is simple just speed up the removal of old code. If it's gone, it no longer matters if it's buggy.

We gotta get boring to get graduated Grafanacon The founder of the Open Telemetry project says its maintainers may need to turn to AI tools to get some elements robust enough for the project as a whole to graduate.

Windows giant offers buyouts to eligible staffers willing to walk Microsoft has committed to improving the quality and reliability of Windows, and a step on the path to that goal is encouraging a chunk of its US staff to leave the company.

Chipzilla hopes agents, robots, and edge devices make CPUs cool again... now it has to build the chips Intel is betting on AI to reverse its fortunes, wagering that inference and agentic workloads will restore the CPU to the center of compute - even as its chip manufacturing struggles persist.

After flubbing the Metaverse, Zuck embraces the Neoverse Meta plans to deploy tens of millions of Amazon Web Services' Graviton 5 CPU cores as part of a multi-year collaboration that will make the social network among the largest- ever consumers of the cloud giants homegrown silicon.

Ailing scaling blamed by Windows-maker for unreadable missives Microsoft's update to harden Remote Desktop against phishing attacks has arrived. When users open a Remote Desktop (.rdp) file, they should now see a warning listing all requested connection settings - or they would if it was displaying correctly.

OpenAI's first security hire, Ari Herbert-Voss, thinks more automated bug finding will improve security without costing jobs Black Hat Asia Open source models can find bugs as effectively as Anthropic's Mythos, according to Ari Herbert-Voss, CEO of AI-powered security startup RunSybil and OpenAI's first security hire.

Oval Office resident rants about Blighty's Digital Services Tax with threats that dont quite add up Donald Trump has threatened to whack the UK with a "big tariff" if it doesn't scrap its tax on large US tech firms, reviving a long- running spat over who gets to skim the proceeds from Silicon Valley's global empire.

Missed flig

Nothing says 'We want honest opinions' like a 36,000-letter mailshot with no awkward questions allowed Members of the UK governments Peoples Panel on Digital ID will spend two weekends in Birmingham and three evenings on Zoom discussing how Britain should build a national digital identity system, earning 550 plus expenses for their trouble.

Computer glitch spawns duplicate jackpots, disgruntled punters, and one very bad career choice A computer glitch in a Spanish betting shop triggered a chain of events that ended with the store manager being kidnapped and held for 50,000 ($58,000) in ransom, allegedly by one of the shop's own employees.

Won't somebody think of the children not being hit by a load of building materials? On Call Delivering excellent tech support can sometimes require heavy lifting, a feat The Register celebrates each Friday with a new instalment of On Call the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of hoisting glitchy tech back to full function.

FAST16 could be the first cyberweapon, and its effects could be with us today Black Hat Asia Infosec outfit SentinelOne found malware that tries to induce errors in engineering and physics simulation software and therefore represents an attempt at sabotage, and suggests it was created years before the Stuxnet worm that aimed to destroy Irans uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Demonstrated in China, probably applicable elsewhere Black Hat Asia Developers of rented internet of things infrastructure stuff like public EV chargers and shared e-bikes are prioritizing user convenience over security, and leaving themselves exposed to wide-scale denial of service attacks on their services.

System changes and bugs overlapped to create the impression of general decline Claude users who complained about the AI service producing lower-quality responses over the past month werent imagining it.

Legit-looking website, camera-on interviews, jokes about backdoors ... it worked EXCLUSIVE It all started with a LinkedIn message, as so many employment scams do these days.

Two teams, similar diagnosis: Ceramic electrolytes still refusing to cooperate With more capacity and faster charging, solid-state batteries could be the next big thing in energy. And good news: researchers may have pinned down one major reason these batteries still fail before they can reach widespread commercial use.

Rising refusal rate from Acceptable Use Classifier leaves customers paying for nothing Anthropic's release last week of Opus 4.7 came with stronger safeguards to prevent misuse. Unfortunately, these safeguards have also managed to thwart legitimate use.

Keeping it simple for the developers can lead to very complex headaches later PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we celebrate the people whove taught us how not to secure a server. If youve ever tied your own shoelaces together, then tripped over them, or attempted to dive into a swimming pool but hit your head on the diving board, well be talking about your cyber equivalent.

All the Typhoons, everywhere, all at once A majority of China-linked threat actors are using compromised routers and IoT devices worldwide, turning this gear into proxy networks to carry out further intrusions, steal sensitive data, and disrupt victim organizations operations, according to a joint 10-country advisory.

Three vendors matched to three sites The US Department of the Air Force (DAF) has selected three companies for possible nuclear microreactor projects at three of its installations under a program aimed at improving energy resilience if the electricity grid goes down.

What are you doing to solve the memory crisis? If you follow PC hardware prices, youll know AI demand has pushed memory prices higher as manufacturers prioritize memory for datacenters. To deal with that, you can pay through the nose, buy less memory, or ... try to build your own DRAM.

'Differentiated, but open' Google Cloud Next Google Clouds Andi Gutmans said that the company holds a structural advantage over its largest rivals in the race to win value from AI agents in the enterprise, arguing that no competitor currently combines cloud computing infrastructure, frontier AI models, and a data platform under one roof.

Push to protect minors risks hitting everyone online Proton's boss has waded into the age verification fight with a warning that sounds less like child saf

Also rolls out agentic Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint, letting 21st century Clippy lend a... hand Microsoft is giving Copilot the power to stop suggesting edits and start making them.

World's largest biomedical dataset lifted and shifted on Chinese mega marketplace Updated Details of volunteers of UK-based Biobank, which describes itself as the custodian of the world's most comprehensive biomedical dataset, are for sale on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba.

Down to you to work out the value Datadog has added GPU monitoring to its observability stack, giving AI-hungry organizations more insight into exactly what's happening on their most expensive silicon.

Storage vendor predicts current crunch will outlast COVID disruptions The supply crunch gripping the storage market has pushed Everpure the artist formerly known as Pure Storage to reassure customers it won't make things worse.

Revolutionary telescope aiming for space after multiple near death experiences NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is ready for launch ahead of schedule despite repeated attempts by both Donald Trump's first and second administrations to cut funding.

Wins $300M deal over Salesforce, IBM because of 'integration with existing USDA systems,' among other things Palantir has won a $300 million contract from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to support the National Farm Security Action Plan (NFSAP) and modernize how USDA delivers services to America's farmers.

Bad news for multiple general server components as vendors switch to more lucrative gear The chip shortage is spreading to power and management controller silicon, threatening server shipments as vendors prioritize capacity for higher-margin AI server products.

Windows Admin Center flaws mean on-prem can attack cloud, and vice-versa Black Hat Asia Israeli researchers found a series of flaws in Microsoft's Windows Admin Center (WAC) and suggest this shows hybrid cloud management tools are a two-way attack surface that users don't spend enough time worrying about.

EV maker leaning on still-in-development 14A process for Terafab, says it needs to build own silicon Elon Musk used Tesla's latest earnings call to reveal plans to build AI chips on Intel's not-yet-finished 14A process a bet on silicon that doesn't exist.

Sony project claims a significant breakthrough with applications in task requiring speed and accuracy Rise of the Machines The ancient games of chess and Go are now mere staging posts in the journey toward robots demonstrating their superior performance to humans - the machines can now beat us fleshbags at ping-pong.