For once, Oracle ERP wasnt the problem On Call Fridays can be a drag, but The Register has a formula to inject a little fun by delivering a new instalment of On Call the reader-contributed column in which we share your tech support stories.

Enters the custom AI silicon business with secret silicon for an un-named hyperscaler Qualcomm has quietly entered the market for custom hyperscale silicon, and datacenter CPUs

In talks with Japan, the UK, and Australia on defense tech that can contribute to global stability Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has confirmed the demise of its mainframe business in the year 2035 and hinted its working on significant defense projects.

$227k gets you a hearing for your dot.vanity project, or strings in one of 27 scripts The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday kicked off a new application process for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), its first since 2012.

Mini Shai-Hulud caught spreading credential-stealing malware The wave of supply chain attacks aimed at security and developer tools has washed up more victims, namely SAP and Intercom npm packages, plus the lightning PyPI package.

Stop the sprawl! With the average Global Fortune 500 enterprise expected to run more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 today, theres plenty of room for chaos. Analyst firm Gartner says that, without proper governance, those agents will multiply and run amok.

Mozilla fears wiring an AI API into Chrome will make the web less open Mozilla has reiterated its opposition to Google's decision to build AI plumbing into its Chrome browser, though rather belatedly now that the technology, known as the Prompt API, is already being tested in Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

KnowBe4 says 86% of phishing it tracked used AI, and inboxes are only the start Give a man a phishing kit and he might get lucky a couple of times; teach an AI to phish and it'll change the landscape, if KnowBe4's latest phishing trends report is accurate.

One alleged cyber contractor was extradited to the US over the weekend China's "hacker-for-hire ecosystem has gotten out of control," according to Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division.

Analyst says handsets now stay in pockets for 4.2 years on average Remember the early days of the smartphone revolution when, even after six months, your phone felt outdated? Not anymore. Smartphone replacement cycles are getting longer as discretionary household budgets come under pressure from inflation, with demand for new devices expected to fall for the rest of this year.

Networking kit arrives just in time for Nvidia's 1.6 Tbps ConnectX-9 NICs If you thought 800 Gbps Ethernet was fast, just wait. Celestica's latest switches cram 64 1.6 Tbps ports into a single chassis.

This CVSS 10.0 RCE vuln has been patched, automatically for some, so better check those workflows If you use Gemini CLI, watch out: Google has patched a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability in its command-line AI tool and is warning anyone running it in headless mode, or through GitHub Actions, to review their workflows.

Two computer crime allegations follow up to 18M lines of data surfacing online French prosecutors say police detained a 15-year-old on April 25 over the alleged theft of millions of records from France Titres (ANTS), the agency handling secure documents.

Team wins praise for adding 'disable all AI features' setting for devs who want a code editor to be only a code editor The Rust-built Zed editor has reached version 1.0, released yesterday, with development led by former members of the Atom team at GitHub.

When you can't get 'em with a 'transformation plan,' supply chain pain will do the job The great memory shortage is having yet another effect, pushing enterprises into the waiting arms of the cloud operators as they can't secure enough on-prem compute themselves.

Lock-in worries threaten to dampen the E7 launch party The Coalition for Fair Software Licensing has published research showing that US workers reckon Microsoft is using its productivity tools to lock their employers into the company's AI services.

Concerns over new rules might stop customers from adopting innovations including AI that connect to SAP systems An influential SAP user group has criticized the vendor's API policy update, saying it lacks clarity and potentially prevents users from starting new projects and innovating on their SAP platforms.

But why did those fans go away in the first place, Satya? Microsoft boss Satya Nadella told investors during an earnings call last night that the company needs to "win back" its fans.

AI boom splits between companies hoarding eyeballs and those actually charging for them Anthropic is pulling in more LLM revenue than OpenAI, despite having a fraction of the users.

Turns out the real problem is not AI but staff still clicking on dodgy emails from 'IT support' Nearly half of UK businesses are still getting breached, and in many cases, the attacker's big breakthrough is an employee clicking "sure, why not" on a fake login page.

Just in time for the Trump-Xi summit Exclusive A novel China-linked threat group infiltrated more than a dozen critical networks in Poland, Asian countries, and possibly beyond, beginning in December 2024 and with activity uncovered as recently as this month.

Emergency patches out now for those managing the millions of domains assumed to be affected Emergency patches are available for a critical vulnerability in cPanel and WHM that allows attackers to bypass authentication and gain root access to servers managed using it.

Federation warns members to ditch work devices off duty as force uses AI to probe 600+ cops London cops are being told by their staff association to be "extremely cautious" about carrying work devices off duty, after the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) deployed Palantir's technology to investigate hundreds of its own officers.

Investigation finds no single cause for soldiers falling ill, just bad bolts, cold air, and apparently the soldiers themselves Britain's notorious Ajax armored vehicles are being accepted back from the manufacturer after investigations found no single cause for the symptoms plaguing crews, meaning soldiers will need to grin and bear it.

Great idea, guys. Let's keep all of the data in an Excel file with weak password protection PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we recount the adventures of IT explorers who found their own pile of quicksand and then jumped right into it. This week's story involves keeping sensitive information in a very vulnerable place and then not protecting it adequately.

Can now use SANs for storage, and adds a local control plane and key management Microsoft has given its Azure Local on-prem cloud a major makeover to make it fit for duty powering large-scale sovereign infrastructure.

AI is driving more searches and ads Google Cloud will start selling its custom tensor processing units to some customers, because they want them and the search giant wants to diversify its revenues.

Will write checks for $190 billion and even those megabucks may not satisfy demand If you've felt the sting of surging hardware prices, Microsoft can sympathize because the company on Wednesday said it expects its 2026 capital expenditure will hit $190 billion, with $25 billion of that due to rising component costs.

Patches land for authencesn flaw enabling local privilege escalation Developers of major Linux distributions have begun shipping patches to address a local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability arising from a logic flaw.

The Trainium train keeps a-rollin' Amazon is now among the top three datacenter chip businesses in the world, as its semiconductor business surpassed a $20 billion annual run rate ... and it would be closer to $50 billion if it included itself among the customers, CEO Andy Jassy said during the companys first quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Claude ploughs through months of work in rapid time, helps Wiz researchers nab lucrative award Wiz researchers are set for a tidy payday thanks to their discovery of a high-severity flaw in GitHub's git infrastructure that handed remote attackers full read/write access to private GitHub repositories using a single command.

ORNL says portable detector kit can separate real GPS signals from fake ones even at equal strength GPS spoofing, which sends fake satellite-like signals, and GPS jamming, which drowns receivers in noise, are increasingly serious problems. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have created what they say is the most effective system yet for detecting GPS interference, which could help blunt such attacks.

Second try's a charm? Microsoft and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that attackers are exploiting a zero-click Windows flaw that can expose sensitive information on vulnerable systems.

Microsoft readies the axe once again for yesterday's security Microsoft has warned users still clinging to legacy TLS versions that the end is nigh for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on POP3 and IMAP4 connections to Exchange Online.

Authors say it acquired an LLM that was trained on their copyrighted data, and judge keeps asking for more info Databricks cannot shake a class action lawsuit targeting its LLM, which several book authors contend was created with a database that contained pirated versions of some of their copyrighted books and about 196,000 titles in all.

New sealed bootable container images and Stratis storage, too Fedora Linux 44 has arrived in multiple formats and for several CPU families, including some new container formats and storage options.

Iran went dark twice, AWS got droned, oh and TalkTalk broke something it refuses to talk about The first quarter of 2026 saw a surge in severe and prolonged internet disruptions, from government shutdowns to power outages to the occasional mystery incident.

There is no 6 Nimmt! champion, but a $12 domain registration and one Wikipedia edit convinced several bots there was Unlike search engines that let you judge competing sources, search-backed AI chatbots can turn shaky web material into confident answers. Case in point: A security engineer convinced several bots that he was the reigning world champion of a popular German card game, even though no such championship exists.

Despite looming science cuts, Isaacman finds resources to poke the planetary hornet nest NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman delivered some potentially good news at a Senate hearing this week, as well as some slightly odd news: in an environment of constrained budgets, the space agency was somehow finding resources to contest the decision to relegate Pluto from planet status.

GrassMarlin leaks sensitive information, provided your targeting phishing skills are sharp enough The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning anyone who uses GrassMarlin, a tool developed by the National Security Agency (NSA), about a new vulnerability that attackers can use to snoop on sensitive information.