TheRegister

Minors groomed to kill and intimidate victims Nearly 200 people, including minors accused of involvement in murder plots, have been arrested over the last six months as part of Europol's Operational Taskforce (OTF) GRIMM. The operation targets what cops call 'violence-as-a-service' - crime crews recruiting kids and teens online to carry out contract killings and other real-world attacks.…

Native MCP support lands in Insider Dev and Beta builds Microsoft has begun rolling out a public preview of native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the latest Windows 11 Insider builds, edging its much-touted “agentic OS” vision closer to reality.…

Unreleased variants that Jobs killed off found – 7.6 on a G4, anyone? As well as the Mac clones, there were PC-style PowerPC machines – and a version of classic MacOS for them has just been rediscovered, enabling previously unimagined combinations.…

Analysts reckon only a handful of manufacturers will push ahead as the rest hit the brakes Only five percent of carmakers will sustain heavy AI investments by the end of the decade as most fail to meet amibitous goals.…

Intelligence Center features aim to unify management across on-prem, cloud, and containerized estates IBM has topped an autumn flurry of Db2 updates with new features for its Intelligence Center console, promising to let users manage deployments of the 42-year-old database across on-prem, cloud, and containerized environments from a single place.…

Big Blue’s latest mega-buy hands it a real-time data-streaming powerhouse built on Kafka IBM has cracked open its wallet again, agreeing to shell out $11 billion for Confluent in a bid to glue together the data sprawl underpinning the next wave of enterprise AI. …

Atlantic Bastion combines AI systems with warships to counter increased surveillance The UK government has announced enhanced protection for undersea cables using autonomous vessels alongside crewed warships and aircraft, responding to escalating Russian surveillance activities.…

Warning that over-reserved capacity is blocking new connections Datacenters are preventing other energy users from connecting to the grid by reserving far more power than they need, according to a new Uptime Institute report shared with The Register.…

Brussels accused of using Ad Composer quirk to post link disguised as a video X has terminated the European Commission's ad account after Brussels used it to post a video announcing the platform's €120 million Digital Services Act (DSA) fine – which was in fact just a link to the press release.…

Japanese outfit aims to improve comms for aquatic drones Kyocera has demonstrated underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) technology that achieved 5.2 Gbps in lab tests, targeting video feeds and sensor data for ocean exploration and underwater robotics.…

Regulator disappointed as soon-to-be-scrapped algo's problems remained a secret despite consistent engagement The UK's data protection watchdog has criticized the Home Office for failing to disclose significant biases in police facial recognition technology, despite regular engagement between the organizations.…

Body confirms patient and staff details siphoned via Oracle EBS flaw as gang threatens to leak haul Barts Health NHS Trust has confirmed that patient and staff data was stolen in Clop's mass-exploitation of Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS), and says it is now taking legal action in an effort to stop the gang publishing any of the snatched information.…

Kendall says Whitehall will use bulk buying to squeeze better value from cloud giants The UK tech minister has promised more whole-government deals with industry giants following its £9 billion agreement with Microsoft, and is seeking to target cloud service providers.…

Nina Kalinina takes a deep dive into one of the earliest PC desktops Reverse engineering VisiCorp's pioneering GUI for commodity PCs shows how little modern GUIs get from Xerox – and how much we all owe Apple.…

Can’t take decades more synthetic case studies? Get those digital daggers out These are hard times, even for the biggest brands. Facing existential crises, emergency board meetings are in full swing at multinationals Contoso, a huge marketing and sales outfit, and Fabrikam, the famous name in online fashion. ...

Ignorance really can be bliss Who, Me? Opinion varies about the most efficient way to commence a working week. The Register’s contribution to that conversation is Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of your mistakes, and subsequent escapes.…

Analysts worry lazy users could have agents complete mandatory infosec training, and attackers could do far nastier things Agentic browsers are too risky for most organizations to use, according to analyst firm Gartner.…

PLUS: South Korea to strengthen security standards; Canon closes Chinese printer plant; APAC datacenter capacity to triple by 2029; And more Asia In Brief Chinese rocketry outfit LandSpace last week flew what it hoped would be the country’s first reusable rocket, only to watch it explode while attempting to land.…

PLUS: New kind of DDOS from the Americas; Predator still hunting spyware targets; NIST issues IoT advice; And more! Infosec in Brief The Apache Foundation last week warned of a 10.0-rated flaw in its Tika toolkit.…

From Amazon to AMD, everything looks like an NVL72 now Amazon last week revealed its Trainium3 UltraServer rack systems, and if your first thought was 'boy that looks a lot like Nvidia's GB200 NVL72,' your eyes aren't deceiving you. …

Peak Microsoft is whatever you want it to be. Or not The readers have spoken, and the era of peak Microsoft is… open to debate.…

Wanna know a secret? Whether you're logging into your bank, health insurance, or even your email, most services today do not live by passwords alone. Now commonplace, multifactor authentication (MFA) requires users to enter a second or third proof of identity. ...

Tentative ruling signals a potential win for SFC’s copyleft enforcement push Electronics biz Vizio may be required by a California court to provide source code for its SmartCast TV software, which is allegedly based on open source code licensed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.…

Proof of life? Or an active social media presence? Criminals are altering social media and other publicly available images of people to use as fake proof of life photos in 'virtual kidnapping' and extortion scams, the FBI warned on Friday. …

Some within the CRM giant balked, but Benioff prevailed ServiceNow’s dominant spot among IT service management (ITSM) platforms is facing its “most credible” threat to date, as longtime platform rival Salesforce has rolled out an AI agent-powered product that has won early plaudits from one of the largest credit unions in the US.…

Who needs JavaScript? Security researcher Lyra Rebane has devised a novel clickjacking attack that relies on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).…

Security community needs to rally and share more info faster, one researcher says Amid new reports of attackers pummeling a maximum security hole (CVE-2025-55182) in the React JavaScript library, Cloudflare's technology chief said his company took down its own network, forcing a widespread outage early Friday, to patch React2Shell.…

TikTok, by contrast, satisfied DSA concerns over its ad repository transparency The European Union has issued its first-ever Digital Services Act fine, slapping Elon Musk's X with a €120 million penalty for breaching the bloc's rules on ad transparency, data access for researchers, and its revamped blue-checkmark system.…

All those new features won’t fund themselves Microsoft 365 customers have gotten an early Christmas present from Santa Satya: price rises. All that AI goodness isn't going to pay for itself.…

Even as enterprises defer spending and analysts spot dotcom-era warning signs Tech execs are adamant the AI craze is not a bubble, despite the vast sums of money being invested, overinflated valuations given to AI startups, and reports that many projects fail to make it past the pilot stage.…

Laptop maker says a vendor breach exposed some phone camera code, but not its own systems Asus has admitted that a third-party supplier was popped by cybercrims after the Everest ransomware gang claimed it had rifled through the tech titan's internal files.…

State-backed attackers started poking flaw as soon as it dropped – anyone still unpatched is on borrowed time Amazon has warned that China-nexus hacking crews began hammering the critical React 'React2Shell' vulnerability within hours of disclosure, turning a theoretical CVSS-10 hole into a live-fire incident almost immediately.…

With seat and usage-based deals back on the table, CRM giant tells investors agent prices are going up Salesforce has told investors it is upping prices for AI agent platforms, claiming customers will get between three and ten times the value from investment as it introduces new AI charging models.…

Umpteen other distros just put out new versions, but this one is our favorite Kernel 6.18 has already been designated the new LTS release – just as we predicted – and Alpine Linux 3.23 has arrived carrying it ahead of a flurry of other year-end distro updates.…

Diarmuid Early takes world title after outpacing 11 rivals Ireland's Diarmuid Early has won the Excel World Championship. Readers of a certain age may be disappointed to learn he has never used Lotus 1-2-3.…

Plan would create statutory powers for police use of biometrics, prompting warnings of mass surveillance The UK government has kicked off plans to ramp up police use of facial recognition, undeterred by a mounting civil liberties backlash and fresh warnings that any expansion risks turning public spaces into biometric dragnets.…

Project retires 32-bit ports, embraces pkgbase, and modernizes build process The latest release of FreeBSD contains a lot of crucial under-the-hood changes – and drops 32-bit support on both x86 and POWER, although ARM-v7 survives.…

Union fields member complaints as it presses outsourcer over botched rollout Capita has sought Microsoft's help after the launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) left users facing a malfunctioning website designed to process important financial information.…

The Reg is still standing (this time) despite our best efforts Updated Routine Cloudflare maintenance went awry this morning, knocking over the company's dashboard and API and sending sites around the world into error screens.…

You can improve the odds by combining skepticism, verification habits, and a few technical checks Opinion Liars, cranks, and con artists have always been with us. It's just that nowadays their reach has gone from the local pub to the globe.…