-
5 days ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has unveiled an ambitious plan to yank American air traffic control systems out of the 1960s - and he wants Congress to fund the whole project up front so it doesn't get derailed by political wind shifts.
-
6 days ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) awarded Workday a sole-source contract to overhaul its human resources systems - bypassing any formal competition - citing critical failures in its aging, fragmented HR infrastructure and binding deadlines from President Trump's executive orders on workforce restructuring.
-
6 days ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
Following considerable cuts to its enforcement workforce, the US's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to use AI to supplement its ability to collect taxes from US citizens. News of the IRS's plan came from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a House Appropriations Committee hearing Tuesday to discuss the Treasury's budget proposal.
-
1 week ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
Clippy is back - and this time, its arrival on your desktop as a front-end for locally run LLMs has nothing to do with Microsoft. In what appears to be a first for the 90s icon, Clippy has finally been made useful, ish, in the form of a small application that allows users to chat with a variety of AI models running locally, with Gemma 3, Qwen3, Phi-4 Mini and Llama 3.2 serving as built-in ready-to-download versions. Clippy can also be configured to run any other local LLM from a GGUF file.
-
1 week ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
An Apple executive's backhanded endorsement of AI as a replacement for traditional internet searches has sent Google stock tumbling. Apple senior vice president of services Eddy Cue made a number of interesting statements about the future of AI, and its potential impact on Google's bottom line, during testimony Wednesday in the remedies phase of the US Department of Justice's lawsuit against Google parent Alphabet.
-
1 week ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
The Attorneys General of 17 states and Washington, DC have sued the Trump administration over an executive order halting all federal approvals for wind energy projects. Led by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, the coalition of AGs filed a lawsuit [PDF] in Massachusetts federal court on Monday seeking an injunction to pause Trump's January 20 directive that froze all approval for wind energy projects, pending an open-ended multi-agency review.
-
1 week ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
Exasperated by the prolix verbiage and gratuitously convoluted phraseology that so often permeates technical treatises, philosophical discourses, or the meandering expositions of journalists afflicted by a lack of rhetorical economy? Then Google has a new AI feature for you - provided you use iOS, that is. The Chocolate Factory added a new feature to the Google app for iOS on Tuesday, dubbed "Simplify," which is meant to dumb down complicated writing without losing its meaning.
-
1 week ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
The US jobs market grew faster than expected in April, but most IT pros aren’t among the beneficiaries. The US economy added 39,000 more jobs than anticipated in April, according to JP Morgan's reading of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. IT consultancy Janco’s analysis of the same data found 10,600 IT jobs disappeared in April after the same quantity of job losses in March. Tech certification org CompTIA also looked at the bureau’s data and concluded 214,000 tech jobs overall disappeared.
-
1 week ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
OpenAI's contentious plan to overhaul its corporate structure in favor of a conventional for-profit model has been reworked, with the AI giant bowing to pressure to keep its nonprofit in control, even as it presses ahead with parts of the restructuring. OpenAI published a letter from CEO Sam Altman on Monday informing employees, stakeholders, and the public that while its for-profit subsidiary will transition into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), its nonprofit parent will remain in control.
-
1 week ago | 
theregister.com | Brandon Vigliarolo
Infosec In Brief Microsoft has decided to push its consumer customers to dump password in favor of passkeys. The software giant announced the move Thursday, May 1, traditionally known as "World Password Day," with a declaration it had joined forces with the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance to re-name the pseudo-holiday "World Passkey Day."Redmond’s not just playing with words as the company has also decided that all new Microsoft accounts will use passkeys by default.
