TheRegister
Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’
Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has argued he and others who believed immersive environments would require head-mounted hardware got it wrong.…
Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer
Many people start their work with AI by prompting the machine to imagine it is an expert at the task they want it to perform, a technique that boffins have found may be futile.…
Claude attacks were 'Rorschach test' for infosec community, scaring former NSA boss
RSAC 2026 The now-infamous Anthropic report about Chinese cyberspies abusing Claude AI to automate cyberattacks was a Rorschach test for the infosec community, according to former NSA cyber boss Rob Joyce.…
Public-private partnerships vital in disrupting China's Typhoons, says RSA panel with no government speakers
RSAC 2026 Back in the day (circa 2023) when cybercrime group Scattered Spider and its help-desk voice-phishing calls were a relatively new threat, the feds considered pulling the government's top cyber-threat hunters and their private-sector counterparts into one room to share information, in real time, about this loosely knit extortion ring that was terrorizing enterprises.…
Snowflake's ongoing pitch: bring AI to data rather than data to AI
Snowflake is putting cash and kinetic energy behind the idea that AI works best in its platform.…
Lightning-fast exploits make it essential to patch fast, ask questions later
Strengthen your MFA policies, double-down on anti-phishing training, and for Jobs' sake, patch all your vulns right away. The past year of intelligence collected by Cisco's Talos threat hunters suggests that attackers are moving faster to exploit vulns, and fooling more staff than ever into giving up their credentials. …
If you love your boss, imagine how much more you'll love their AI twin
Imagine that your boss is too busy to show up at that meeting you called so she sends a bot of herself instead. With a digital twin, even your company's CEO - the one who spends all his time on the corporate jet - could make an appearance at your powwow about the break room coffee machine. But would you want them there?…
AI agents are 'gullible' and easy to turn into your minions
RSA 2026 There's a very simple reason why just about every enterprise AI agent is vulnerable to zero-click attacks, according to Michael Bargury, CTO of AI security company Zenity.…
SoftBank to build massive AI datacenter on former US nuclear weapons site
Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it.…
Forget drones – the US Army just took delivery of a self-flying Black Hawk helicopter
The US Army just took receipt of what may be the coolest unmanned drone ever flown by the military: A full-sized Black Hawk helicopter. …
Avalonia bolts Linux and WebAssembly onto .NET MAUI
AvaloniaUI has previewed MAUI support for Linux and WebAssembly browser applications — platforms Microsoft's own cross-platform .NET framework lacks — but low adoption and persistent bugs are likely to constrain uptake.…
Google unleashes Gemini AI agents on the dark web
Google's Gemini AI agents are crawling the dark web, sifting through upward of 10 million posts a day to find a handful of threats relevant to a particular organization.…
Smooth criminals talking their way into cloud environments, Google says
Voice phishing surged last year to become the second most common method used by cybercriminals to gain initial access to their victims' IT estate – and the No. 1 tactic used when breaking into cloud environments.…
SpaceX hits back at Amazon in orbital datacenter dispute
SpaceX has fired back at Amazon with a letter to the US telecoms regulator, after Amazon objected to its plans for orbiting datacenters.…
Palantir trial plugs into UK financial watchdog's data trove
US data miner Palantir has quietly landed inside the UK's financial watchdog, plugging into a trove of sensitive data as Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency.…
Intel's Core Ultra 270K, 250K Plus are an appeal to cash-strapped PC enthusiasts
Review It's a tough time to be a PC enthusiast. Between the memory crunch and the AI boom driving up prices on storage, DDR5, and GPUs, it's gotten prohibitively expensive to build a PC.…
US chip testing firm shrugged off ransomware hit as minor - then came the data leak
Trio-Tech International initially shrugged off a ransomware attack at a Singapore subsidiary as immaterial, only to reverse course days later after discovering stolen data had been disclosed.…
RSAC 2026: Uncle Sam backs out, and AI agents are everywhere
kettle When El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons joins infosec industry colleagues in San Francisco for RSAC 2026 this week, she's expecting agentic AI to be on everyone's lips - at least those who aren't busy gossiping about the lack of presence from any representatives of the US federal government.…
Microsoft fixes broken Windows update days after vowing fewer broken updates
Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to resolve bugs introduced by a Windows patch just days after promising improved reliability.…
NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'
NASA has issued a draft Request for Proposals to move a flown space vehicle, a step some lawmakers see as progress toward relocating Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian Museum in Virginia to Houston, Texas.…