One was patched almost 14 years ago Crooks are exploiting four Microsoft vulnerabilities - one patched 14 years ago and another tied to ransomware activity - according to America's lead cyber-defense agency, which on Monday gave federal agencies two weeks to patch them.

What, you think basic usability is improved just for your benefit, human? Cloudflare is rebuilding Wranglers command-line tooling by adding commands for products and interfaces that still lack CLI support. And yes, AI agents are a big reason why.

Brief outage follows growing number of quality complaints Once the AI darling of programmers everywhere, Anthropic's Claude has been stumbling mightily, both in terms of cost and perceived quality. The service was down briefly on Monday with "a major outage," service trouble that only amplifies growing discontent from customers that even a bot can see.

'AI is now infused in every package that we offer to our addressable market,' SVP John Aisien told us ServiceNow's latest product announcements show how hardcore the company has become about embedding AI across its go-to-market strategy.

Dev reports suggest long sessions now burn through usage much faster Anthropic last month reduced the TTL (time to live) for the Claude Code prompt cache from one hour to five minutes for many requests, but said this should not increase costs despite users reporting faster depleting quotas.

Hallucinations don't fly in a court of law Opinion For a sector at the heart of US economic growth, AI claims and counter-claims remain curiously hard to reconcile. Models are improving at the speed of light, AI firms claim, yet the message from the codeface remains that benefits are more than offset by the downsides.

Advisers say fewer staff could mean slower answers and tougher renewals Oracle customers have been warned to watch for changes in support and pricing as Larry Ellisons company makes huge datacenter spending commitments to support its AI ambitions.

ShinyHunters claims it accessed Snowflake metrics via third-party tool ShinyHunters is back, this time pinning Rockstar Games to its leak site and claiming it didn't so much hack its way in as walk through a door someone else left wide open.

GG noob, who cleared you to land? The Federal Aviation Administration continues to face an air traffic controller shortage, and it's hoping that a new demographic of potential applicants can fill the ranks: Video gamers.

MoD plans rapid procurement of Cambridge Aerospace's Skyhammer system at home and abroad Britain is set to buy interceptors from a homegrown startup to counter Iranian Shahed-style attack drones, equipping both its own armed forces and allies in the Persian Gulf region.

AI gubbins still there, just tucked under 'Writing Tools' Copilot is on its way out of Notepad, but a return to the basic text editor is not on the cards.

Travel giant says names, contact details, dates, and hotel messages potentially exposed Booking.com is warning customers that their reservation details may have been exposed to unknown attackers, in the latest reminder that the travel giant still can't quite keep a lid on the data flowing through its platform.

Controlled Feature Rollouts headed for the trash among other changes Microsoft is giving the Windows Insider program another makeover in the hope of making it less baffling.

Department putting systems in place to manage 'restrictive licensing practices' A federal spending watchdog has found the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) faced "challenges" in understanding the correct number of licenses it should hold for the top five vendors in its $985 million annual software expenditure.

Reader and Acrobat flaw let booby-trapped documents profile targets and hijack machines Adobe has released a fix for an Acrobat and Reader zero-day that attackers had been exploiting for months .

Names, addresses, dates of birth, and bank details accessed, though not passwords Basic-Fit, Europe's largest gym chain, has confirmed data including the bank details of around a million customers was stolen from its systems.

Linux Foundation Europe boss predicts EU will run as fast as it can from US tech companies Opinion You want to know who's even sicker of President Donald Trump than American liberals? European governments and companies who are realizing that putting all their eggs in one US basket was a stupid move.

Aprs a, le dluge, as plans call for move away from plenty more American software and hardware Frances Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) will drop Windows desktops, and adopt Linux instead.

Optimism is always risky, and defective hardware makes it indigestible Who, Me? The best part of the working day is lunchtime, but The Register tries to start Mondays in a pleasant fashion by bringing you a new installment of "Who, Me?" the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your mistakes and detail your escapes.

PLUS: Toyota wheels out basketball bot; Arm scores AI server win with SK Telecom; India ponders payment pauses to foil fraudsters; And more! Asia In Brief Chinas National Data Administration last Friday published its action plan for AI in education which calls for upskilling of the nations citizens to ensure they can put the technology to work.

Makes Rust support official, adds code for ancient Alpha and SPARC CPUs Linus Torvalds has released version 7.0 of the Linux kernel.

Or it's a bunch of pre-IPO hype. Either way, we're giving it the once-over on this week's episode Kettle Anthropic dropped a doozy on us this week with the launch of Mythos, an AI model it says is able to find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities with a shocking level of ability.

AI-assisted software development is transforming the industry, but you already knew that Vibe coding works. I wish it didn't. But it does, well enough. And barring some revolution that overturns the new world disorder, machine learning cannot be undone.

Most customers don't need the biggest baddest models, just ones that work, are cheap, and won't pirate their proprietary data FEATURE Spring has sprung and that means another wave of open weights AI models from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Nvidia. But this time feels a bit different.

Lock-screen keyboard no longer accepts hek in student's alphanumeric passcode A university student in the US is in data limbo after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard, preventing him from entering his iPhone passcode.

Benioff banks on user engagement while McDermott wants to govern AI agents FEATURE Salesforce CEO and chief SaaSquatch Mark Benioff boasted about the wins his company's ITSM product had last quarter in the terms a proud dad uses to talk about the art work his kids taped to the refrigerator.

Time to start dropping SBOMs FEATURE Two supply chain attacks in March infected open source tools with malware and used this access to steal secrets from tens of thousands if not more organizations. We won't know the full blast radius for months.

Nearly 800 state logins surfaced in breach data, including defense and NATO- linked accounts Hungary's government has discovered the hard way that the biggest threat to national security might just be its own password choices.

With access to great data comes great responsibility Snowflake is betting that the biggest bottleneck to building more and better AI agents isn't the models themselves but whether the data those agents depend on is clean, accessible, and governed, Snowflakes director of product management James Rowland-Jones told The Register .

Hundreds of layoffs, but this smells of geopolitics, not downsizing Red Hat appears to have fired its entire engineering team in China, which it no longer thinks is a country it needs to prioritize. Most of the team will move to India.

Firefox maker warns old web tactics are now shaping AI at the expense of user choice Firefox-maker Mozilla is calling out Microsoft after Redmond said it would scale back some Copilot features in Windows, arguing the rollback shows the company pushed AI too far without enough regard for user choice.

Trade group warns onshoring demands will leave Americans stuck with older gear The Global Electronics Association (GEA) warns that the US ban on foreign-made network routers is impractical because few are made domestically, leaving consumers with little choice and delaying access to next-gen products, just as Wi-Fi 7 adoption should be ramping up.

Six-hour breach turned trusted links into a coin toss between legit tools and credential stealers Visitors to the CPUID website were briefly exposed to malware this week after attackers hijacked part of its backend, turning trusted download links into a delivery mechanism for something far less welcome.

Investors urged to reject proposal for more disclosure on whether AWS expansion risks climate goals Amazon's board of directors is urging shareholders to reject a proposal that would have the megacorp disclose more information on the impact of datacenters on its climate commitments.

Forget about investment value! Call it a 'strategic enabler for enterprisewide transformation,' says KPMG Most UK business leaders will keep AI at the top of their spending priorities, with 65 percent planning to maintain investment whether they see immediate measurable returns or not.

Just what FOSS developers need a flood of AI-discovered vulnerabilities Opinion Anthropic describes Project Glasswing as a coalition of tech giants committing $100 million in AI resources to hunt down and fix long-hidden vulnerabilities in critical open source software that it's finding with its new Mythos AI program. Or as The Reg put it , "an AI model that can generate zero-day vulnerabilities."

Four-week call for evidence intended to help shape laws aimed at devices linked to crime The UK government is seeking views on radiofrequency jammers as it prepares legislation to ban the controversial devices.

Sellafield says sticking with German giant is only way off legacy ECC before support runs dry The government-owned company that runs the UK's most important nuclear site has begun plans to replace its legacy SAP ERP mainstream support for which ends in 2027 via a 33 million award to the German vendor, without competition.

Most sole traders and landlords ignore marketing campaigns, though fines are coming Fewer than three-tenths of those required to sign up for quarterly software-based Making Tax Digital (MTD) reporting for the latest tax year that started this month have done so, according to HM Revenue & Customs.

The right person for the job didn't have the right passport for the job On Call Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that shares your stories of tech support incidents that crossed a line.