TheRegister
CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more
CES 2026 From disposable electric candy to voice-activated refrigerators without physical handles, CES was crammed full of enshittified, intrusive, insecure, and wasteful technology this year – just like it is every year. …
Meta reacts to power needs by signing long-term nuke deals
Meta is writing more checks for nuclear investment, even though the new capacity tied to those deals is unlikely to come online until around 2030. The company says it will need the new power to run its hyperscale datacenters.…
Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot
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.…
Putinswap: France trades alleged ransomware crook for conflict researcher
France has released an alleged ransomware crook wanted by the US in exchange for a conflict researcher imprisoned in Russia.…
QR codes a powerful new phishing weapon in hands of Pyongyang cyberspies
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 Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info
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.…
NASA decides to bring Crew-11 home early after astronaut health scare
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.…
Copper supplies set to peak just as tech needs more
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.…
China-linked cybercrims abused VMware ESXi zero-days a year before disclosure
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 Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders
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."…
Very tough microbes may help us cement our future on Mars
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.…
Nothing to declare at border control except a Windows 7 certificate error
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.…
Grok told to cover up as UK weighs action over AI 'undressing'
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.…
Bank of England's Oracle cloud migration bill triples as project grinds on
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.…
Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem
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.…
Tech that helps people outshone overhyped AI at CES 2026
Opinion Another Consumer Electronics Show has rolled through Las Vegas, and this year vendors scrawled “AI-enabled” on all the kit they hope will find its way into your home – while airbrushing away its immaturity and downsides.…
Iran’s internet goes dark amid mass protests, reports of violent government response
The authors of a hypothetical manual containing procedures repressive governments can use to stay in power despite restive populations would surely devote its first chapter to turning off the internet, an action the government of Iran appears to have taken in the last 24 hours.…
China to probe Meta’s acquisition of AI outfit Manus
Chinese authorities have signalled they’ll likely probe Meta’s planned acquisition of made-in-China AI platform Manus.…
Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book
Machine learning models, particularly commercial ones, generally do not list the data developers used to train them. Yet what models contain and whether that material can be elicited with a particular prompt remain matters of financial and legal consequence, not to mention ethics and privacy.…
Snowflake to buy Observe to mitigate customer downtime, as it reckons with its own
Analytics outfit Snowflake is buying telemetry data platform Observe to help its customers discover and mitigate IT issues before they cause downtime. It announced the deal on the same day its own services experienced a “major outage.”…