TheRegister

Menu.exe not found Bork!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.…

Cab drivers protested Uber’s arrival, but Westminster has rolled out the welcome mat for clanker chauffeurs Robot taxis are coming to The Register’s London home in 2026.…

Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fix La Poste, France’s postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident.…

25 percent failure rate for JAXA's space truck, with the second stage again proving perilous Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has created a Special Task Force to investigate the failed launch of its H3 rocket on Monday.…

And it's especially dangerous because the code works A 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.…

SEC filings show the outfit cut projected 2027 cloud purchase commitments by $114M Security vendor Palo Alto Networks is expanding its Google Cloud partnership, saying it will move 'key internal workloads' onto the Chocolate Factory's infrastructure. ...

Masayoshi Son better hope he made Santa's nice list Japanese 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.…

Ah, the good old days when 0-day development took a year Interview 'In my past life, it would take us 360 days to develop an amazing zero day,' Zafran Security CEO Sanaz Yashar said.…

Shipments still waiting on approval from Beijing Now 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.…

Anna’s Archive’s idealism doesn’t quite survive its own blog post What 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.…

Judge says former most-wanted fugitive Mark Acklom will likely never return to the UK The 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.…

Wasn't 2025 the year it happened? Yes. No. Answers on a Christmas card Opinion 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.…

Relief for those dealing with data pipelines between the two, but move has its critics The 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.…

Even with the latest Gparted Live, it's not easy to dual boot – but it's worth the hassle Hands 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.…

On-site staff keep key systems working while all but one region battles with encrypted PCs Romania'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.…

Rising rack densities are driving changes from grid connection to chip-level delivery Power semiconductors are soon set to become as vital as GPUs and CPUs in datacenters, handling the rapidly increasing loads forecast for AI infrastructure.…

Public bodies migrate in the bloc as hyperscalers claim sovereignty Feature 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.…

Something messy happens when the cat hairs of reality meet the shiny hype of smart tech Opinion 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.…

Total operational capacity just keeps rising Hyperscale 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.…

Mousey wouldn’t work, wah-wah-wah Who, 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.…

SK Telecom's epic infosec fail will cost it another $1.5 billion South 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.…

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.…

PLUS: Texas sues alleged TV spies; The Cloud is full of holes; Hospital leaked its own data; And more Infosec 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.…

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.'…

Time signals shifted by a tiny amount that only very sensitive users would find upsetting UPDATED A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable backup generators powering some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.…

We haven't even hit the peak, TechInsights tells El Reg If 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.…

Custom-designed $10,000 scooter goes 65mph, has a 60-mile range, and runs silently hands on Infinite Machine, a New York-based electric vehicle startup, began with a stolen Vespa. …

Latest charges join the mountain of indictments facing alleged Tren de Aragua members A 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.…

But not Phil Collins, sadly The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a Christmas gift for the AI industry in the shape of agreements for collaboration in the Trump administration's Genesis Mission, which aims to use AI to drive scientific discoveries.…

Newly disclosed vulnerability already being abused, users urged to lock down exposed firewalls WatchGuard is in emergency patch mode after confirming that a critical remote code execution flaw in its Firebox firewalls is under active attack.…

Attackers helped themselves to historical personal info on 27K people The University of Sydney is ringing around thousands of current and former staff and students after admitting attackers helped themselves to historical personal data stashed inside one of its online code repositories.…

UK state-owned bank admits revised plan runs beyond contract end with Atos Already £1.4 billion over budget and four years late, a tech transformation project at a UK state-owned bank is outside HM Treasury spending limits and timetable under a revised plan from systems integrator Capgemini.…

Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheen The new pearOS distro is a Romanian project that picks up the concepts behind the original Pear Linux from 2011 and updates them. It's not going to turn the distro world upside down, but it's fun, interesting, and a showcase for the versatility and customizability of the Linux desktop.…

Maximum-severity vuln lets unauthenticated attackers execute code on trusted infra management platform Hewlett Packard Enterprise has told customers to drop whatever they're doing and patch OneView after admitting a maximum-severity bug could let attackers run code on the management platform without so much as a login prompt.…

Virgin Media the last to go as users of older mobiles warned to upgrade Britain is set to become a post-3G nation as Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) prepares to be the last of the country's mobile networks to switch off its 3G service, although it may linger for a while at a few sites.…

Tech exec admits not dead cert it'll find the right solution Exclusive Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider.…

Officials admit 'there certainly has been a hack,' but refuse to confirm China link or data theft The UK's Foreign Office is investigating a confirmed cyberattack it learned about in October, senior ministers say.…

Ofcom survey finds 18-34s increasingly see life online as bad for society and their mental health Young Brits are souring on the internet, with increasing numbers seeing it as damaging to society and their mental health, according to latest research published by Ofcom.…

Coming with added 'filters and rules' after prototype spat out inaccurate or outright wrong responses The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) will add an AI chatbot to its GOV.UK app in early 2026, before rolling it out across the GOV.UK website used by most government departments and services.…

Are pasties a proxy for weight? Or a cypher for circumference? The Reg Standards Bureau was plunged into uproar this week when a reader suggested a new unit for weight, inspired by Cornwall's revamped food recycling service.…