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.

Annual CEO letter reveals two customers want all Graviton servers, huge drone rollout, a million robo

Everyone gets unlimited 400 Kbps access, oldies get expanded caps, and leaky telcos get their social license back Universal basic income is an idea that hasnt gained much traction, but South Korea on Thursday implemented a universal basic mobile data access scheme.

Just in time to get buyers thinking as physical PC prices rise Microsoft has told its channel partners to get ready for a 20 percent price cut for Windows 365 cloud PCs, effective May 1st.

Urge restraints before AdLand does this without appropriate disclosures Large language models can be very persuasive, and researchers say that's a problem when theyre used to create advertising.

Possible link to Mr. Raccoon's claimed Adobe break-in A new extortion crew has targeted several dozen high-value corporations through phishing and helpdesk social-engineering, according to Google.

Want to run your business on autopilot? For better or worse, Managed Agents might help with that If you need AI agents to do a lot of ongoing tasks for your business, Anthropic has a new answer for you. The Claude maker has introduced Managed Agents, a service to help organizations create and deploy cloud-hosted knowledge work automations.

Custom ASIC biz now running at a $1B annual pace for Intel Google will continue to work with Intel, buying SmartNICs for its public cloud rather than blazing its own trail as AWS has done with its Nitro NICs.

Cops bust latest scam, return $12m to bilked victims US, UK, and Canadian law enforcement Thursday said that they disrupted a $45 million global cryptocurrency scam, freezing $12 million in stolen funds and identifying more than 20,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to fraud victims across 30 countries.

C-suite forced to take sandwiches into work, cycle home It's going to be hard holding back our tears. The C-suite lieutenants at Amazon didnt exactly get the bumper payday that many El Reg readers would expect, particularly compared with prior years.

Your agent will be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered AI agents should not be secret agents, at least in corporate environments. But when companies deploy software automations, they don't always have visibility into what their roboscripts are actually doing.

The core product is solid and priced fairly I've spent over a decade telling anyone who'd listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it.

FTC lawsuit lingers, while encouraging signs point to Iowa bill succeeding too Agriculture manufacturing giant John Deere has agreed to a proposed $99 million settlement following a class action lawsuit in Illinois.

ACM salutes Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia with $250K prize The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded its annual Prize in Computing to Matei Zaharia for his work developing open source data and analytics software, including the widely used Apache Spark analytics engine.

Arm support is on the agenda, too, because AI is going to run on everything Exclusive Nutanix plans to support KubeVirt to allow its customers to run both containers and VMs on the edge.

UK and US customers stuck waiting after fleet management SaaS vendor took affected environments offline A cybersecurity incident has knocked FleetWave into a "major outage" across the UK and US after Chevin Fleet Solutions pulled parts of its SaaS platform offline and left customers scrambling for answers.

Sam Altman's datacenter dreams hit a wall of watts and wonkery, cooling Britain's AI ambitions OpenAI is pausing its planned Stargate datacenter project in the UK just months after announcing it, citing the regulatory environment and cost of energy as reasons for putting it on hold.

Malicious PDFs abuse legit features to harvest system data and decide which victims get a 2nd-stage payload Hackers have been quietly exploiting what appears to be a zero-day in Adobe Acrobat Reader for months, using booby- trapped PDFs to profile targets and decide who's worth fully compromising.