TheRegister
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.”…
While you pay through the nose for memory, Samsung expects to triple its profits in Q4
While end customers grapple with crushing memory prices, we imagine Samsung execs are breaking out the Champagne. This week the memory titan forecast fourth-quarter operating profit would roughly triple as the South Korean electronics cabal rides the AI wave into the New Year.…
As agents run amok, CrowdStrike's $740M SGNL deal aims to help get a grip on identity security
CrowdStrike has signed a $740 million deal to buy identity security startup SGNL. The move underscores the growing threat of identity-based attacks as companies struggle to secure skyrocketing numbers of non-human identities, including AI agents.…
ChatGPT Health wants your sensitive medical records so it can play doctor
Could a bot take the place of your doctor? According to OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT Health this week, an LLM should be available to answer your questions and even examine your health records. But it should stop short of diagnosis or treatment.…
Pay and pray: Nvidia reportedly wants money up front for Chinese H200 orders
Nvidia's H200 GPUs could begin trickling into China as soon as this quarter, but there's a catch. Due to all the geopolitical turmoil that's ravaged US-China trade relations over the past year, buyers may need to pay up front for the coveted AI accelerators. And they won't get a refund if China decides to block the imports!…
Google pushing Gemini into Gmail, but you can turn it off
We hope you like more AI in your Gmail inbox, because Google is "bringing Gmail into the Gemini era." It'll be on by default, but the good news is that you can disable it. …
Patch Cisco ISE bug now before attackers abuse proof-of-concept exploit
Cisco patched a bug in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) products that allows remote attackers with admin-level privileges to access sensitive information - and warned that a public, proof-of-concept exploit for the flaw exists online.…
Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind
Today, it is hard to escape LLM bots and the endless slop they emit, but the Linux kernel might be largely safe … for now.…
Why colos are city slickers and hyperscalers are country bumpkins
Datacenter building decisions tend to fall into two camps with colocation providers plumping for urban areas while hyperscalers seek sites where electricity, land, and construction costs come cheaper.…
ISS spacewalk postponed over mystery astronaut malady
NASA has postponed today's spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) due to an undisclosed "medical concern" with a crew member.…
Ransomware attacks kept climbing in 2025 as gangs refused to stay dead
If 2025 was meant to be the year ransomware started dying, nobody appears to have told the attackers.…
Trump spectrum sale leaves airlines with $4.5B bill for altimeter do-over
Airlines operating in the US may have to upgrade their aircraft radio altimeters again at a cost of billions of dollars, to avoid potential interference with cell networks following the Trump administration's decision last year to auction off additional spectrum to bidders.…
CISA flags actively exploited Office relic alongside fresh HPE flaw
CISA has added a pair of security holes to its actively exploited list, warning that attackers are now abusing a maximum-severity bug in HPE's OneView management software and a years-old flaw in Microsoft Office.…
AOSP on a diet plan as Google halves Android code drops
Google has confirmed there will be two code dumps to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) per year, down from the four developers have become accustomed to.…
UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos
Elon Musk's X platform is under fire as UK regulators close in on mounting reports that the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, is generating sexual imagery without users' consent.…