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Apple's iOS 26 appears to be witnessing the slowest adoption rate in recent memory, with third-party analytics from StatCounter indicating that only 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running the operating system nearly four months after its September release. The figures stand in stark contrast to iOS 18, which had reached approximately 63% adoption by January 2025, and iOS 17, which hit 54% by January 2024. iOS 16 had surpassed 60% by January 2023. StatCounter's breakdown for January 2026 shows iOS 26.1 accounting for roughly 10.6% of devices, iOS 26.2 at about 4.6%, and the original iOS 26.0 at 1.1%. More than 60% of iPhones tracked by the analytics firm remain on iOS 18. MacRumors' own visitor data tells a similar story: 89.3% of the site's readers were on iOS 18 during the first week of January 2025, but only 25.7% are running iOS 26 during the same period this year. iOS 26 introduced Liquid Glass, a sweeping visual redesign that replaces much of the traditional opaque interface with translucent layers, blurred backgrounds, and dynamic depth effects.

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Trixie plus a carefully configured MATE setup, and absolutely nothing else

The Desktop Classic System is a rather unusual hand-built flavor of Debian featuring a meticulously configured spatial desktop layout and a pleasingly 20th-century look and feel.…

Basketball player accused of aiding cybercrime gang extradition blocked in exchange for Swiss NGO consultant

France has released an alleged ransomware crook wanted by the US in exchange for a conflict researcher imprisoned in Russia.…

Amazon is now requiring its corporate employees to submit a list of three to five accomplishments that represent their best work as part of an overhauled performance review process, according to Business Insider, which cites internal documents. The company's internal Forte review system previously asked employees softer questions like "When you're at your best, how do you contribute?" but the new standards place greater emphasis on individual productivity and specific deliverables. Amazon's roughly 350,000 corporate employees must also outline actions they plan to take to continue growing at the company.

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State-backed attackers are using QR codes to slip past enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins, the FBI says

North Korean government hackers are turning QR codes into credential-stealing weapons, the FBI has warned, as Pyongyang's spies find new ways to duck enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins.…

Microsoft is discontinuing its Send to Kindle integration in Word, ending a feature that allowed Microsoft 365 subscribers to send documents directly to their Kindle e-readers and preserve complex formatting through fixed layouts. The company updated its documentation to announce that beginning February 9th, 2026, the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work across Web, Win32, and Mac platforms. Microsoft has not disclosed why it's killing the integration but recommends users switch to Amazon's official Send to Kindle app. The feature launched in 2023 and was particularly valued by Kindle Scribe owners who could annotate the transferred documents.

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No naming that tune and no album covers

Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service.…

Abstract of a paper on NBER: We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators show either no clear trend or a declining pattern over recent decades. We argue for the development of stronger theoretical foundations for the measures employed in the literature, suggesting that, without such grounding, assertions about debt (un)sustainability may be premature.

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Medical issue forces mission curtailment and leaves station short-handed

NASA is bringing the Crew-11 astronauts back to Earth early after one encountered a medical issue that could not be dealt with aboard the orbiting outpost.…

Analysts say production will top out this decade while global electrification keeps ramping

Concerns are mounting over copper supplies, with a fresh study warning that demand will likely outstrip production within a decade, threatening to constrain global technological advancement.…

The world's oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity's carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of the climate crisis's trajectory. The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, drew on temperature data collected across the oceans and collated by three independent research teams. The measurements cover the top 2,000 meters of ocean depth, where most heat absorption occurs. The amount of heat absorbed is equivalent to more than 200 times the total electricity used by humans worldwide. This extra thermal energy intensifies hurricanes and typhoons, produces heavier rainfall and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves that decimate ocean life. The oceans are likely at their hottest in at least 1,000 years and heating faster than at any point in the past 2,000 years.

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Huntress analysis suggests VM escape bugs were already weaponized in the wild

Chinese-linked cybercriminals were sitting on a working VMware ESXi hypervisor escape kit more than a year before the bugs it relied on were made public.…

The software wasn't actually renamed, but you couldn't be blamed for being confused

Opinion Wait? What? I was just cruising along the information superhighway – yes, I'm old, deal with it – when I spotted a Y Combinator story announcing, "Microsoft Office renamed to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app'." Excuse me!? I looked closer and found that, sure enough, it certainly looked like Microsoft had renamed Office to the God-awful "Microsoft 365 Copilot."…

Extremophile bacteria could help turn Martian dirt into building material for human habitats

Tough microbes able to survive extreme environments on Earth could be the key to constructing buildings to allow humans to survive on Mars, according to a research paper.…

The queue might move on, but the software never did

Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's bork - on a UK border control wait-time screen - is doubly unfortunate. Tired passengers get no clue how long until someone checks their passport, and of all organizations that should keep security certs current, the one responsible for keeping out criminals tops the list.…

Image generation paywalled on X after ministers and regulators start asking awkward questions

Grok has yanked its image-generation toy out of the hands of most X users after the UK government openly weighed a ban over the AI feature that "undressed" people on command.…

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components. For a long time, the Greenwald limit was accepted as a given and incorporated into fusion reactor engineering. The new work shows that precise control over how the plasma is created and interacts with the reactor walls can push it beyond this limit into what physicists call a 'density-free' regime. [...] A team led by physicists Ping Zhu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Ning Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences designed an experiment to take this theory further, based on a simple premise: that the density limit is strongly influenced by the initial plasma-wall interactions as the reactor starts up. In their experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could deliberately steer the outcome of this interaction. They carefully controlled the pressure of the fuel gas during tokamak startup and added a burst of heating called electron cyclotron resonance heating. These changes altered how the plasma interacts with the tokamak walls through a cooler plasma boundary, which dramatically reduced the degree to which wall impurities entered the plasma. Under this regime, the researchers were able to reach densities up to about 65 percent higher than the tokamak's Greenwald limit. This doesn't mean that magnetically confined plasmas can now operate with no density limits whatsoever. However, it does show that the Greenwald limit is not a fundamental barrier and that tweaking operational processes could lead to more effective fusion reactors. The findings have been published in Science Advances.

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Initial £7M estimate proves optimistic after multiple contract uplifts

The Bank of England has trebled the amount it is spending on its Oracle systems integrator amid efforts to migrate business applications to the cloud.…

As you should, when being told the only remedy is deleting everything and starting again

On Call 2025 has ended and a new year is upon us, but The Register will continue opening Friday mornings with a fresh installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support.…

Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic "skin" that can independently change color and texture, "a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom," reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to water, the film swells to reveal texture and colors independently, depending on which side of the material is exposed, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Nature this week. In an accompanying article, University of Stuttgart's Benjamin Renz and Na Liu said the researchers' "most striking achievement was a photonic skin in which color and texture could be independently controlled, mirroring the separate regulation... in octopuses." The research team used the polymer PEDOT:PSS, which can swell in water, as the basis for their material. Its reaction to water can be controlled by irradiating it with electrons, creating textures and patterns in the film. By adding thin layers of gold, the researchers turned surface texture into tunable optical effects. A single layer could be used to scatter light, giving the shiny metal a matte, textured appearance. To control color, a polymer film was sandwiched between two layers of gold, forming an optical cavity, which selectively reflects light.

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