Updated: 19:40 Wed, Dec 24 2025. (Last checked: 42 mins ago) |
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AI faces closing time at the cash buffet - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:23:06 GMT)Will businesses continue to invest in something that's shown so little return?opinion It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime.… |
Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 18:22:31 GMT)AI goes off the rails … because of shoddy guardrailsResearchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts. Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."… |
Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:21:48 GMT)ATC: 'I don't know if you can hear me but cleared to land'In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado.… |
US shuts down phisherfolk’s $14.6M password-hoarding platform - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:07:43 GMT)Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money theftsThe US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts.… |
Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0 - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:48:20 GMT)Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the areaWaymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week.… |
Sight of Clippy, Internet Explorer scares baby - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:24:21 GMT)Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amusedMicrosoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by.… |
One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 13:42:12 GMT)Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not aloneFeature Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero measurable returns on these efforts.… |
North American air defense troops ready for 70th year of Santa tracking - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:30:07 GMT)A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technologySeventy years ago, a child phoned the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) looking for Santa Claus – and found him, or at least some kindly military personnel who were willing to play along by helping the youngster to track Santa's location as he zipped around the globe.… |
NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:32:11 GMT)Time running out for savin' MAVEN as stricken spacecraft still silent as Mars solar conjunction nearsNASA's MAVEN spacecraft is continuing to evade attempts by engineers to make contact as the solar conjunction nears, halting contact with any Mars missions until January 16, 2026.… |
Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:30:13 GMT)Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026Part 1 You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two.… |
Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030 - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:39:45 GMT)Plans move to Rust, with help from AIMicrosoft wants to translate its codebase to Rust, and is hiring people to make it happen.… |
AWS adds hybrid cloud storage support for Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 02:35:44 GMT)VMware's main challenger already embraces multiple storage optionsAmazon Web Services has given Nutanix a lovely Christmas present: Support for its AHV hypervisor in hybrid cloud storage rigs.… |
US punishes China’s ‘dominance’ of legacy chips with zero percent tariffs - (pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:02:20 GMT)President Trump previously threatened 100 percent tariffs, administration now plans something else starting in 2027World War Fee The United States will impose tariffs on semiconductors imported from China, starting in 2027.… |
ServiceNow opens $7.7B ticket titled 'Buy security company, make it Armis' - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:17:00 GMT)Customers will be able to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows.After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products.… |
21K Nissan customers' data stolen in Red Hat raid - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:23:38 GMT)Automaker's third security snafu in three yearsThousands of Nissan customers are learning that some of their personal data was leaked after unauthorized access to a Red Hat-managed server, according to the Japanese automaker.… |
Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:58:29 GMT)Spacecraft set to burn up in a few weeks, but it could have been worseAs if to underscore the need to avoid the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario in which cascading debris can make some orbits difficult to use, a Starlink satellite vented propellant and released debris following an onboard "anomaly" late last week.… |
Microsoft rushes an out-of-band update for Message Queuing bug - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:37:15 GMT)Redmond gets in early for the twelve whoopsies of ChristmasMicrosoft has hustled out an out-of-band update to address a Message Queuing issue introduced by the December 2025 update.… |
Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:23:32 GMT)You’ll need to be using a Windows Insider build to see itThe Windows 11 Run dialog box is one of the oldest pieces of user interface still in use. It works just fine, but it has an aesthetic that harkens back to earlier versions of Microsoft’s operating system. Now, that’s set to change.… |
Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:05:12 GMT)Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of itOpinion Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.… |
Like a Virgin Airways bot, planning for the very first time - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:21:16 GMT)Airline deploys AI travel agent and it hasn't been a disasterNon-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning." … |
UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:08:09 GMT)Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... worksComputer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.… |
Oracle's new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:48:11 GMT)The company that bet the farm on AI said to have made things worse with AIOracle's new AI-powered support portal is frustrating customers and support engineers who are struggling to find the basics, such as old tickets, links to database patch programs and release schedules for current databases.… |
Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:25:11 GMT)Menu.exe not foundBork!Bork!Bork! The bork desk has temporarily reopened during the festive period. The tech world might be having a nap on the sofa after one mince pie too many, but bork never sleeps.… |
Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:19:06 GMT)Cab drivers protested Uber’s arrival, but Westminster has rolled out the welcome mat for clanker chauffeursRobot taxis are coming to The Register’s London home in 2026.… |
France’s post office partly offline for over 12 hours after 'major network incident' - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:39:21 GMT)Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fixLa Poste, France’s postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident.… |
Japan loses another H3 launcher, plus the satnav bird it carried - (pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:09:43 GMT)25 percent failure rate for JAXA's space truck, with the second stage again proving perilousJapan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has created a Special Task Force to investigate the failed launch of its H3 rocket on Monday.… |
Poisoned WhatsApp API package steals messages and accounts - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:04:19 GMT)And it's especially dangerous because the code worksA malicious npm package with more than 56,000 downloads masquerades as a working WhatsApp Web API library, and then it steals messages, harvests credentials and contacts, and hijacks users' WhatsApp accounts.… |
Palo Alto's new Google Cloud deal boosts AI integration, could save on cloud costs - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:19:51 GMT)SEC filings show the outfit cut projected 2027 cloud purchase commitments by $114MSecurity vendor Palo Alto Networks is expanding its Google Cloud partnership, saying it will move "key internal workloads" onto the Chocolate Factory's infrastructure. The outfit also claims it is tightening integrations between its security tools and Google Cloud to deliver what it calls a "unified" security experience. At the same time, Palo Alto may trim its own cloud purchase commitments.… |
SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:28:03 GMT)Masayoshi Son better hope he made Santa's nice listJapanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI.… |
Spy turned startup CEO: 'The WannaCry of AI will happen' - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:39:58 GMT)Ah, the good old days when 0-day development took a yearInterview "In my past life, it would take us 360 days to develop an amazing zero day," Zafran Security CEO Sanaz Yashar said.… |
Nvidia wasting no time to flog H200s in China - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:49:12 GMT)Shipments still waiting on approval from BeijingNow that it can legally export them, Nvidia has reportedly informed its Chinese customers that it'll begin shipping H200s, one of its most potent graphics accelerators for AI training and inference, in time for Chinese New Year. One caveat: Beijing could spike the deal before then.… |
Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:24:49 GMT)Anna’s Archive’s idealism doesn’t quite survive its own blog postWhat would happen to the world's music collections if streaming services disappeared? One hacktivist group says it has a solution: scrape around 300 terabytes of music and metadata from Spotify and offer it up for free as what it calls the world’s first “fully open” music preservation archive.… |
Conman and wannabe MI6 agent must repay £125k to romance scam victim - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 16:37:09 GMT)Judge says former most-wanted fugitive Mark Acklom will likely never return to the UKThe UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says a fraudster who claimed to be part of MI6 must repay £125,000 ($168,000) to a former love interest that he conned.… |
What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:35:11 GMT)Wasn't 2025 the year it happened? Yes. No. Answers on a Christmas cardOpinion I've run Linux desktops since the big interface question was whether to use Korn or Bash for your shell. Before that, I'd used Unix desktops such as Visix Looking Glass, Sun OpenWindows, and SCO's infamous Open Deathtrap Desktop.… |
EU offers UK early gift: Data adequacy until 2031 - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:35:31 GMT)Relief for those dealing with data pipelines between the two, but move has its criticsThe EU has extended its adequacy decision, allowing data sharing with and from the UK under the General Data Protection Regulation for at least six more years.… |
Vultures rake our claws over COSMIC as Pop OS 24.04 LTS with 'Epoch 1' emerges - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:01:13 GMT)Even with the latest Gparted Live, it's not easy to dual boot – but it's worth the hassleHands On It's been a long time coming but version 1.0 of the first ground-up Rust-based desktop is here… and it is shaping up very well.… |
Around 1,000 systems compromised in ransomware attack on Romanian water agency - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:13:10 GMT)On-site staff keep key systems working while all but one region battles with encrypted PCsRomania's cybersecurity agency confirms a major ransomware attack on the country's water management administration has compromised around 1,000 systems, with work to remediate them still ongoing.… |
AI is rewriting how power flows through the datacenter - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 11:16:15 GMT)Rising rack densities are driving changes from grid connection to chip-level deliveryPower semiconductors are soon set to become as vital as GPUs and CPUs in datacenters, handling the rapidly increasing loads forecast for AI infrastructure.… |
Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:22:15 GMT)Public bodies migrate in the bloc as hyperscalers claim sovereigntyFeature Europe’s quest for digital sovereignty is hampered by a 90 per cent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, claims Cristina Caffarra, a competition expert and a driving force behind the Eurostack initiative.… |
The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:30:11 GMT)Something messy happens when the cat hairs of reality meet the shiny hype of smart techOpinion Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are trumped by accountancy's First Law of Finance: you must make money. iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with its Chinese manufacturing partner-cum-creditor poised to pick over the bones.… |
AI has pumped hyperscale capex, capacity – but how long can it last? - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 08:27:13 GMT)Total operational capacity just keeps risingHyperscale datacenter operators nearly tripled their spending on infrastructure over the past three years in response to the AI craze, while the amount of operational capacity added each quarter has increased by 170 percent, with little sign so far of any slowdown.… |
New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 07:38:13 GMT)Mousey wouldn’t work, wah-wah-wahWho, Me? Welcome to Christmas week at The Register, an occasion we’ll celebrate with another installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of workplace mistakes and mischief.… |
There’s so much stolen data in the world, South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 04:11:51 GMT)SK Telecom's epic infosec fail will cost it another $1.5 billionSouth Korea's government on Friday announced it will require local mobile carriers to verify the identity of new customers with facial recognition scans, in the hope of reducing scams.… |
Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan - (pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:14:11 GMT)PLUS: Debian supports Chinese chips ; Hong Kong’s Christmas Karaoke crackdown; Asahi admits it should have prevented hack; And more!APAC in Brief Google and Apple last week started to allow developers of mobile applications to distribute their wares through third-party app stores and accept payments from alternative payment providers.… |
Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard - (pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 22:34:04 GMT)PLUS: Texas sues alleged TV spies; The Cloud is full of holes; Hospital leaked its own data; And moreInfosec In Brief Google will soon end its “Dark Web Report”, an email service that alerts users when their personal information appears on the internet’s dark underbelly.… |
Workers should control the means of agentic production, suggests WorkBeaver boss - (pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:21:13 GMT)What if AI vendors focused on the demand side?Interview "I think everybody is adopting AI irresponsibly and I think it's going to have a net negative outcome on the socio-economic standing of the world," said Bars Juhasz. "So let's see if we can't pitch more of a win-win future."… |
NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift - (pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 07:40:41 GMT)Time signals shifted by a tiny amount that only very sensitive users would find upsettingUPDATED A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.… |
Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul - (pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 11:01:14 GMT)We haven't even hit the peak, TechInsights tells El RegIf you were hoping for some relief from stratospheric memory pricing, don't hold your breath. DRAM prices aren't expected to peak until at least 2026, TechInsights analyst James Sanders tells El Reg.… |
Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck - (pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2025 21:04:12 GMT)Custom-designed $10,000 scooter goes 65mph, has a 60-mile range, and runs silentlyhands on Infinite Machine, a New York-based electric vehicle startup, began with a stolen Vespa. … |
ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US - (pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:15:11 GMT)Latest charges join the mountain of indictments facing alleged Tren de Aragua membersA Venezuelan gang described by US officials as "a ruthless terrorist organization" faces charges over alleged deployment of malware on ATMs across the country, illegally siphoning millions of dollars.… |
