Autonomous assistants could manipulate choices, push pricier deals, and prioritize their creators Britain's competition watchdog says the next wave of agentic AI assistants could end up nudging people toward worse deals, manipulating choices, or quietly prioritizing the interests of the companies behind them.

As Citrix slips out a preview of Xen Server 9, the release that brings it back to the V12N mainstream The Xen Project has decided to support all releases of its flagship hypervisor for five years, and one of the first beneficiaries of the change is Citrix, which has delivered a preview of XenServer 9 the release that will take the product back into the mainstream virtualization market.

Solar winds near aliens homes and ours might be blowing away signs of alien technosignatures by broadening signals The SETI Institute, the nonprofit that conducts a search for extraterrestrial intelligence by examining radio waves for artefacts that are unlikely to be the result of natural processes, thinks it may have been going about it the wrong way.

As Department of Agriculture employees return to the office, it needs real- time analytics to optimize employee seat assignments The U.S. Department of Agriculture is using Palantir to figure out where its staff should sit, after deciding only the colorful AI company can do the job.

With memory and storage contributing over half the price of a server, Big Green needs to protect its margins HPE has changed its terms and conditions in ways that allow it to change hardware prices after its issued a quote, due to rampant storage and memory price rises.

First vibe coding, now vibe reviewing ... but the buzz is good as it finds worthy issues Anthropic has introduced a more extensive and expensive way to review source code in hosted repositories, many of which already contain large swaths of AI-generated code.

David and Goliathbut with AI agents Researchers at red-team security startup CodeWall say their AI agent hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform and gained full read and write access to the chatbot in just two hours.

And they abused a Mandiant-developed open source tool in the attacks ShinyHunters told The Register that it has stolen data from about 100 high- profile companies in its latest Salesforce customer data heist, including Salesforce itself.

Enjoy meltdowns from businesses on Yelp over negative reviews? AI is threatening to take that away Angry company responses to customer complaints are a favorite topic of internet amusement and outrage, but they're also embarrassing for the employees who post them. Having AI process customer reviews could be a better way.

Copilot gets tuned to handle long-running knowledge work tasks Microsoft on Monday celebrated freedom of choice by giving customers in the company's Frontier program the option to use Anthropic and OpenAI models via Copilot Chat.

Calls Musks orbital plans speculative despite Bezos touting orbiting compute Amazon wants US regulators to reject a SpaceX application for permission to launch a fleet of orbital datacenter satellites, criticizing it as incomplete, speculative, and unrealistic.

Not a US flag in sight Researchers from China are narrowing down the landing sites for the nations first crewed mission to the Moon, set to take place before 2030.

Feeds are alive, well and can help deshittify things opinion A couple of timely blog posts remind us that RSS is alive, well, and can help you resist enshittification of the Web.

Three agents is about all we can handle As AI adoption in the workplace accelerates, many people find themselves in a position where babysitting bots and agents is a significant part of their day. Those people are feeling a bit like AI has fried their brains.

E7 arrives with a hefty price. Got to keep those shareholders happy Microsoft has finally confirmed that its AI-centric E7 subscription tier - where it licenses AI agent agents like employees - will debut on May 1 for an eye- watering $99 per user per month (pupm).

An attack on the companys AWS platform may have exposed customers' names and home addresses Exclusive ELECQ, maker of smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, is warning customers that their personal details may have been stolen in a ransomware attack that encrypted and copied user data from its cloud systems.

But questions remain over long-term commitment to clustering tech in open source After a couple of years of relative calm, the relationship between MariaDB and its open source foundation was ruffled in February, leaving observers with a few unanswered questions.

Plain-text fans rejoice as Writer gains native CommonMark import and export Markdown has been around for more than 20 years, but native support in LibreOffice might suddenly help to make it viable for more people.

Former policy boss Nick Clegg joins Cheryl Sandberg and one-time Yahoo prez Susan Decker Former British deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has landed a board seat at UK-based neocloud Nscale, alongside fellow ex-Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg and former president of Yahoo Susan Decker.

Two-week deadline to fraudsters to fess up or have their faces plastered across every screen in the country Dutch national police are taking a novel stand against scammers - 100 suspects now have less than two weeks to hand themselves in or face public shaming.

Dutch spies flag large-scale campaign to hijack secure messaging accounts Russian-linked hackers are trying to break into the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of government officials, journalists, and military personnel globally not by cracking encryption, but by simply tricking people into handing over the keys.

Vulcan rocket hardware drafted in amid Artemis reshuffle but still no word on lander NASA has selected United Launch Alliance's Centaur V upper stage for the Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

This isn't just a nostalgia trip billions of legacy microcontrollers may be at risk AI can reverse engineer machine code and find vulnerabilities in ancient legacy architectures, says Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, who used his own Apple II code from 40 years ago as an example.

UK government slams comments as 'sickening and irresponsible' Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok is once again under investigation after it began posting explicit and derogatory remarks about historic football disasters when prompted by users on X.

Atomic clocks will tell you when your Waymo is late The British government is to pour 180 million into ensuring the UK keeps up with the times.

Gargantuan ERP and HR overhaul has committed around 1.7B and affects nearly half a million public workers Opinion On the eve of its fifth birthday, the UK's Shared Services Strategy for Government got a couple of presents. With around 1.7 billion already committed to tech suppliers and a 2028 deadline looming, the 450,000 civil servants and military personnel set to depend on these systems might wonder what was in store.

Britain's Ministry of Defence wants a counter-drone system designed, contracted, and delivered within weeks Britain's Royal Navy is urgently seeking a ship-based counter-drone system and recent world events likely explain why.

Ignorance really was the way to achieve bliss Who, Me? Welcome to another working week, and another installment of "Who, Me?" a weekly reader- contributed column that unearths your errors and reveals how you rebounded afterwards.

Tech-adjacent Dyson, Epson, and Whoop also have a crack World War Fee Tech companies have started suing the US government to seek repayment of tariffs that the Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional.

You gotta start somewhere, and in this case astroboffins would have been nowhere without help from intrepid volunteers NASA has published new analysis of its 2022 planetary defense test that suggests the mission slowed down the target asteroids, albeit infinitesimally.

Cyber is no longer the hush-hush thing it used to be, as team Trump invades Iran with hackers taking the lead Kettle Unlike previous military conflicts, the cyber domain has been front and center since the Trump administration invaded Iran, upending the traditionally quiet role played by hackers in military conflicts.

PLUS: Indonesia joins kids social media ban; China frets about AI job impacts; Indias PC market fails to launch, again; And more Chinas Ministry of Commerce has warned of further disruption to the global semiconductor supply chain after Dutch chipmaker Nexperia cut access to some of its systems for Chinese staff.

PLUS: Europol takes down two crime gangs; LastPass users phished (again); Crooks increase crypto hauls; And more Infosec In Brief The FBI is investigating a breach of its systems which reportedly affected systems related to wiretapping and surveillance.

Crims 'will do what gets them their objective easiest and fastest,' Microsoft threat intel boss tells The Reg interview AI agents allow cybercriminals and nation-state hackers to outsource the "janitorial-type work" needed to plan and carry out cyberattacks, according to Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft's GM of global threat intelligence. North Korea is taking advantage.

What hath science wrought? A clump of living human brain cells wired into a silicon chip has answered the internet's most important computing question: yes, it can run Doom.

Inference at scale is much more complex than more GPUs, more tokens, more profits feature By now you've probably heard AI datacenters called factories. It's an apt description: power goes in and tokens come out.

'There's a naive techno-utopianism in Whitehall' Brits are worried that AI will dehumanize public services, leading to less human contact and oversight as well as job losses, according to people questioned by pollster Ipsos.

Remembering the day the Venera 3 impacted Venus It is 60 years since humanity first got up close and personal with another planet, with the impact of the Soviet Union's Venera 3.

Meta supposidly considering untapped capacity in deal brokered by Nvidia OpenAI and compute partner Oracle have reportedly abandoned a planned expansion of their flagship Stargate datacenter, after negotiations were stalled by financing and Sam Altman's apparent fear of commitment.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and AI feels fine Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory report that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts have predicted.