TheRegister
Death, torture, and amputation: How cybercrime shook the world in 2025
The knock-on, and often unintentional, impacts of a cyberattack are so rarely discussed. As an industry, the focus is almost always placed on the economic damage: the ransom payment; the cost of business downtime; and goodness, don't forget those poor shareholders.…
Sevile: Famed for blue skies and now Blue Screens of Death
BORK!BORK!BORK! Today's bork belongs in the dim and distant past – a reminder of when Windows had proper crash screens.…
SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update
Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's Christmas bork comes from London's Victoria train station, just before the festive season got underway, and is an update to the old IT standby: "It isn't DNS. It can't be DNS... It was SSL."…
Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome
Most of today’s desktop web browsers come with a ton of built-in AI features, but the good news is that, in most cases, no one is forcing you to use them, and you can at least hide them from view. Removing the most egregious AI tools from Chrome is pretty simple, but it requires a few steps.…
From AI to analog, cybersecurity tabletop exercises look a little different this year
It's the most wonderful time of the year … for corporate security bosses to run tabletop exercises, simulating a hypothetical cyberattack or other emergency, running through incident processes, and practicing responses to ensure preparedness if when a digital disaster occurs.…
From video games to cyber defense: If you don't think like a hacker, you won't win
interview According to Remedio CEO Tal Kollender, the only way to beat the bad guys hacking into corporate networks is to "think like a hacker," and because not everyone is a teenage hacker turned cybersecurity startup chief executive, she built an AI to do this.…
Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed
Wi-Fi 8 will be a step change in connectivity, if Intel can be believed, and will be able to adapt intelligently to local conditions to deliver a reliable service without the slowdowns users often experience when the network is congested.…
'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work
Opinion When Microsoft recently decided to open source the seminal text adventure game Zork, I contemplated revisiting it during the festive season... until I realized I've spent much of 2025 experiencing the worst of such games when using AI chatbots.…
IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project
On Call Y2K December 26th is a holiday across much of the Reg-reading world, but it's also a Friday – the day on which we present a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that recounts your tales of tech support encounters and exasperation.…
Humanoid robots are still novelty acts, but investment is surging to make them real tomorrow
By the time the humanoid robots arrived at the Humanoids Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on December 11, the registration line had already extended downstairs to the lobby.…
AMD Strix Halo vs Nvidia DGX Spark: Which AI workstation comes out on top?
Hands On Most GenAI models are trained and run in massive datacenter clusters, but the ability to build, test, and prototype AI systems locally is no less relevant today.…
You don't need Linux to run free and open source software
Part 2 There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS.…
Salesforce’s ChatGPT integration is really about stopping customers from leaking their own data
Salesforce users running Agentforce with ChatGPT Enterprise or Edu can now update CRM data directly from the bot, a move aimed at curbing home-built integrations that risk spilling data outside the company's controls.…
AI faces closing time at the cash buffet
opinion It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime.…
Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws
Researchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts. Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."…
Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance
In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado.…
US shuts down phisherfolk’s $14.6M password-hoarding platform
The US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts.…
Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0
Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week.…
Sight of Clippy, Internet Explorer scares baby
Microsoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by.…
One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement
Feature Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero measurable returns on these efforts.…