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The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content. Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, recently scrapped a title after players accused its trailer of containing AI-generated graphics. Goonswarm Games, the developer behind the canceled project, subsequently shut down entirely and cited six years of lost work alongside what it described as a flood of threats and accusations. Sandfall Interactive's "Obscur: Expedition 33" had its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year honor rescinded after the developer said it had considered AI-generated images, even though the final release contained none. Larian Studios, the developer behind Baldur's Gate 3, faced immediate backlash after CEO Swen Vincke mentioned in an interview that the company was using generative AI to "explore ideas" for an upcoming release. Vincke later clarified on X that artists use AI only for reference images the way they would use "art books or Google," and Larian executives eventually stated on Reddit that AI would play no role in final artwork.

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Probe follows outcry over use of creepy image generation tool

The European Commission has launched an investigation into X amid concerns that its GenAI model Grok offered users the ability to generate sexually explicit imagery, including sexualized images of children.…

Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how "I despise DRM...I don't want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM." (So he doesn't use Spotify or Netflix...) This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"... "I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice." Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it." After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn't mean breaking that law becomes wrong.... "Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty." And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he's opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? "The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else." "Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil."

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US sports brand launches probe after extortion crew WorldLeaks claims it stole huge dataset

Nike says it is probing a possible breach after extortion crew WorldLeaks claimed to have lifted 1.4TB of internal data from the sportswear giant and posted samples on its leak site.…

Some machines are failing to start after security updates, prompting yet another Microsoft investigation

Microsoft is investigating reports that its January 2026 security updates are leaving some Windows 11 machines stuck in a boot loop, adding another entry to this month's bumper post–Patch Tuesday borkage list.…

Autonomous agents may generate millions of lines of code, but shipping software is another matter

Opinion AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won't say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: "We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor."…

Cyber sleuths believe Sandworm up to its old tricks with a brand-new sabotage toy

Russia was probably behind the failed attempts to compromise the systems of Poland's power companies in December, cybersecurity researchers claim.…

Privacy tools are a start, but real freedom lives in the digital outskirts of the web

Opinion The Net is born free, but everywhere is in chains. This is a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract where he said the same about humans, but it's nonetheless true. The Net is built out of open, free protocols and open, free code. Yet it and we are bound by the rulemakers who build the services and set the laws of the places we go and the things that we do, not to our advantage.…

2026 is shaping up to be a bumper year for patch management

Microsoft dropped a weekend treat for administrators with yet another out-of-band update to deal with Outlook freezes and broken cloud storage.…

Big Red says 'sovereign' platform supports decision-making and operational learning at sea

Britain's Royal Navy is using Oracle Cloud edge infrastructure to operate AI-driven defenses on the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales.…

Minister dodges cost questions while promising smartphone-free access and 'robust' verification

The UK government has revealed some thinking about digital identity in response to written questions from MPs, while continuing to say next to nothing about the scheme's cost.…

Earlier this month, the media site Press Gazette reported that now Google "is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos" on its "Discover" feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage). "The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily on Discover for referral traffic. And it looks set to accelerate a global trend of declining traffic to publishers from both Google search and Discover." Xavi Beumala from website analytics platform Marfeel warned in a research update: "Google Discover is no longer a publisher-first surface. It's becoming an AI platform with YouTube and X absorbing real estate that once went to newsrooms..." [They warn later that "This is not a marginal UI experiment. It is a reallocation of feed real estate away from links and toward inline Youtube plays and generated summaries."] Google says it prioritises "helpful, reliable, people-first content". Unlike Google News, there is no requirement that Google Discover showcases bona fide publisher websites. In recent months fake news stories published by fraudulent website publishers have been promoted on Google Discover, reaping tens of millions of clicks. Google said it was working on a "fix" for this issue... Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok content may also start flowing into the Discover feed in future. When Google announced the addition of posts from X, Instagram and Youtube Shorts in September, it said there would be "more platforms to come".

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This story starts with the worst mistake of them all – loaning a tool

Who, Me? Everyone makes mistakes, but only The Register celebrates them every week in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that shares your worst workplace moments then records how you bounced back.…