TheRegister
Brussels eyes crowbar for Meta's WhatsApp AI lockout
Brussels has accused Meta of breaking EU competition rules by locking rival AI chatbots out of WhatsApp, opening the door to emergency action that could force the tech giant to let competitors back onto the platform.…
How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography
FOSDEM 2026 The creators of security software have encountered an unlikely foe in their attempts to protect us: modern compilers.…
Follow the money: Switzerland remains Europe's top destination for tech pay
European techies looking for the biggest payday are far better off in Switzerland than anywhere else, with average salaries eclipsing all other countries on the continent.…
BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers
Brits will soon pay more to legally watch the BBC's output than to subscribe to some of the world's biggest streaming services, after the UK government confirmed the TV license fee will climb to £180 a year from April.…
European Commission probes intrusion into staff mobile management backend
Brussels is digging into a cyber break-in that targeted the European Commission's mobile device management systems, potentially giving intruders a peek inside the official phones carried by EU staff.…
Matrix is quietly becoming the chat layer for governments chasing digital sovereignty
FOSDEM 2026 Amid growing interest in digital sovereignty and getting data out of the corporate cloud and into organizations' ownership, the Matrix open communication protocol is thriving.…
The Linux mid-life crisis that's an opportunity for Tux-led transformation
Opinion Thirty years is a big ol' chunk of anyone's life. It can take you from new parent to new grandparent, from bright young thing to mid-life crisis, and from shaver to graybeard. In the case of Todd C Miller, one thing hasn't changed. He's been the sole maintainer of the Linux sudo utility. He's not giving up just yet, but he needs help and no help has come.…
Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office
Who, Me? You can fool some of the people some of the time, but The Register tries to entertain all of its readers most of the time and especially early on Monday mornings, when we present a new installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace mayhem and mischief.…
Cache is king and DIMMS are bling as memory prices soar
The rising price of memory has produced an interesting phenomenon: technologists wondering if the memory they have installed in home labs, or bottom drawers, might make them rich.…
Indian police commissioner wants ID cards for AI agents
Asia In Brief The Commissioner of Police in the Indian city of Hyderabad, population 11 million, has called for AI agents to be issued with identity cards – or at least their digital equivalent.…
Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0
Penguin emperor Linus Torvalds has announced the next version of the Linux kernel will be version 7.0, a matter of some small interest, because it continues his convention of not using version numbers he can’t count on his fingers and toes, and perhaps cements a numbering convention that sees kernel series end with version 19.…
Telcos aren't saying how they fought back against China's Salt Typhoon attacks
Infosec In Brief So-hot-right-now AI assistant OpenClaw, which is very much not secure right now, has teamed up with security scanning service VirusTotal.…
Three AI engines walk into a bar in single file...
Developers looking to gain a better understanding of machine learning inference on local hardware can fire up a new llama engine.…
Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter
Opinion The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits.…
Machine learning could yield faster, cheaper lithium-ion battery development
Scientists have developed a machine learning method that could dramatically slash the cost and energy required to develop new lithium-ion batteries that the modern world is becoming increasingly reliant.…
Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend
interview Don't trust; verify. According to AI researcher Vishal Sikka, LLMs alone are limited by computational boundaries and will start to hallucinate when they push those boundaries. One solution? Companion bots that check their work.…
Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm
A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees.…
Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines
Openreach is warning British businesses that the old phone network shuts down in less than a year - with half a million commercial lines still unmigrated.…
AI video company arouses fury by boasting about replacing creative jobs
The first rule of AI-generated job loss is you don't talk about AI-generated job loss ... if you're the company that caused it. Higgsfield.ai, a startup offering AI video creation tools, recently generated outrage when it claimed it had caused artists to hit the unemployment line.…
Let there be light! DARPA seeking physics-defying photonic computers to supercharge AI
It's no lightweight matter. DARPA is putting about $35 million in total funding on the table in the hope that it will spur researchers to work around fundamental physical constraints and build much larger-scale photonic circuits that do more of the computing with light, not electronics.…