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Reports say Salt Typhoon attackers accessed handsets of senior govt folk Chinese state-linked hackers are accused of spending years inside the phones of senior Downing Street officials, exposing private communications at the heart of the UK government....

GAO urges NWS to firm up its AI language plans as policy shifts slow multilingual warnings US spending watchdogs have called on the National Weather Service (NWS) to deliver an updated plan for its AI language translation project to reduce the risk posed by extreme weather events to people not proficient in English....

Communication attempts ongoing for stricken spacecraft NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6....

French govt says state-run service 'Visio'will be more secure. Now where have we heard that name before? France has officially told Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the US videoconferencing herd to take a hike in favor of its own homegrown app....

Conclave doc outlines path to eternal releases The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?...

RIKEN links up with Argonne, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to build next-gen infrastructure Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu are working with America's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build and operate next-gen compute infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), in line with President Trump's Genesis Mission....

Austrian education ministry unaware of tracking software until campaigners launched case Updated Microsoft illegally installed cookies on a school pupil's devices without consent, according to a ruling by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB)....

Victim and Big Brother Watch will argue the Met's policies are incompatible with human rights law The High Court will hear from privacy campaigners this week who want to reshape the way the Metropolitan Police is allowed to use live facial recognition (LFR) tech....

In space, no one can hear you bork NASA has confirmed that its planet hunter, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), entered safe mode due to a command error that inadvertently left the spacecraft's solar arrays angled away from the Sun....

Developer behind it is sick with worry he might have changed software development in nasty ways Feature Open source developer Geoff Huntley wrote a script that sometimes makes him nauseous. That's becaues it uses agentic AI and coding assistants to create high-quality software at such tiny cost, he worries it will upend his profession....

Another actively abused Office bug, another emergency patch - Office 2016 and 2019 users are left with registry tweaks instead of fixes. Microsoft has issued an emergency Office patch after confirming a zero-day flaw is already being used in real world attacks....

40 years later, mission boffin recalls being told to pronounce it correctly It is 40 years since Voyager 2 performed the first and, so far, only flyby of the planet Uranus. The resulting trove of data, however, was a bonus that almost didn't happen....

Analysts say today's capped deals may become tomorrow's cost shock Gartner is warning Salesforce users that a capped enterprise agreement for its AI and data platforms will not be available when they come to renew, leaving a struggle to predict costs and understand value....

A thoroughly modern piece of public transport infrastructure deserves a thoroughly modern bork Bork!Bork!Bork! London's Elizabeth Line is the latest thing in urban development (at least as far as the UK is concerned). So it seems appropriate that its borks should be similarly up to date, and its emoticons rotated so the intent cannot be mistaken....

Researchers argue AI coding tools disrupt community and hinder returns to maintainers Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan recently blamed AI for forcing him to lay off three workers....

The cloud giant talks loudest about what scares it most. Here's what should terrify it For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't....

Atlassian, RingCentral, ZoomInfo also among tech targets ShinyHunters has targeted around 100 organizations in its latest Okta single sign-on (SSO) credential stealing campaign, according to researchers and the criminal group itself....

Robin Rowe talks about coding, programming education, and China in the age of AI feature TrapC, a memory-safe version of the C programming language, is almost ready for testing....

Inference-optimized chip 30% cheaper than any other AI silicon on the market today, Azure's Scott Guthrie claims Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new in-house AI accelerator to rival Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs....

The new US-based joint venture blamed a datacenter power outage, but hasn't elaborated TikTok's new life under majority American ownership is off to a rough start, after users complained of widespread service disruptions the company blamed on a datacenter power outage....

An official Model Context Protocol extension Anthropic's Claude can now present the interfaces of other applications within its chat window, thanks to an extension of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)....

But CEOs remain frozen in place More than 400 tech workers have urged their CEOs to "call the White House and demand ICE leave our cities" after masked federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti over the weekend and the world's richest and most powerful chief executives remained silent....

Points to a use-case problem AI adoption in the workplace stalled in the fourth quarter of 2025, but those who have already started using it are making increased use of it, according to a survey by pollster Gallup. Don't let that fool you into thinking AI is taking over work, though: frequent AI users are still a tiny minority of overall workers....

Even agents checking other agents can still get it wrong Agents may be the next big thing in AI, but they have limits beyond which they will make mistakes, so exercise extreme caution, a recent research paper says....

Latest data from Cloudflare shows cable cuts, power failures, and network faults drive steady run of internet outages The internet spent the closing months of 2025 being knocked over by cut cables, broken power grids, bad weather, military strikes, and the occasional self-inflicted technical wound, according to Cloudflare's latest global traffic data....

Bad luck, BSDs - although alternatives still work KDE Plasma 6.6 is approaching, and one of its more controversial changes is a new login screen that depends on systemd - meaning that it won't work on the non-Linux operating systems KDE still nominally supports....

Thankfully they only sufffered two outages in 2025. And now it has flown in experts to play with configurations Alaska Air's CEO says IT outages last year damaged the company on multiple fronts despite "triple redundancies" built into its disaster recovery plan....

The seminal shooter finds yet another unlikely home Not content with rendering Doom in PCB design software or playing it on an oscilloscope, engineer Mike Ayles has got the 1990s shooter running in a computer-aided design (CAD) modeler....

Researchers demonstrate fourfold improvement to LED steering results after enlisting the help of some good old-fashion AI Boffins at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs are working to develop cheap and power efficient LEDs to replace lasers. One day, they let a trio of AI assistants loose in their lab....

Probe follows outcry over use of creepy image generation tool The European Commission has launched an investigation into X amid concerns that its GenAI model Grok offered users the ability to generate sexually explicit imagery, including sexualized images of children....

US sports brand launches probe after extortion crew WorldLeaks claims it stole huge dataset Nike says it is probing a possible breach after extortion crew WorldLeaks claimed to have lifted 1.4TB of internal data from the sportswear giant and posted samples on its leak site....

Some machines are failing to start after security updates, prompting yet another Microsoft investigation Microsoft is investigating reports that its January 2026 security updates are leaving some Windows 11 machines stuck in a boot loop, adding another entry to this month's bumper post-Patch Tuesday borkage list....

Autonomous agents may generate millions of lines of code, but shipping software is another matter Opinion AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won't say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: "We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor."...

Cyber sleuths believe Sandworm up to its old tricks with a brand-new sabotage toy Russia was probably behind the failed attempts to compromise the systems of Poland's power companies in December, cybersecurity researchers claim....

Privacy tools are a start, but real freedom lives in the digital outskirts of the web Opinion The Net is born free, but everywhere is in chains. This is a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract where he said the same about humans, but it's nonetheless true. The Net is built out of open, free protocols and open, free code. Yet it and we are bound by the rulemakers who build the services and set the laws of the places we go and the things that we do, not to our advantage....

2026 is shaping up to be a bumper year for patch management Microsoft dropped a weekend treat for administrators with yet another out-of-band update to deal with Outlook freezes and broken cloud storage....

Big Red says 'sovereign' platform supports decision-making and operational learning at sea Britain's Royal Navy is using Oracle Cloud edge infrastructure to operate AI-driven defenses on the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales....

Minister dodges cost questions while promising smartphone-free access and 'robust' verification The UK government has revealed some thinking about digital identity in response to written questions from MPs, while continuing to say next to nothing about the scheme's cost....

This story starts with the worst mistake of them all - loaning a tool Who, Me? Everyone makes mistakes, but only The Register celebrates them every week in "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column that shares your worst workplace moments then records how you bounced back....

Also, cybercriminals get breached, Gemini spills the calendar beans, and more infosec in brief T'was a dark few days for automotive software systems last week, as the third annual Pwn2Own Automotive competition uncovered 76 unique zero-day vulnerabilities in targets ranging from Tesla infotainment to EV chargers....

Balancing the need to know with the need to get shovels in the ground is causing friction in communities across the country feature Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins said when his company decides on a location for a datacenter, he asks town officials to sign non-disclosure agreements to stop politicians from leaking insider information....

A distro aimed at helping people, reducing e-waste - and helping a charity, too Emmabuntus is just another Linux distro, but it's one guided by ethics more than tech. With exceptional help, documentation, beginner-friendly tooling and accessibility, there's a lot to like....

Noise and vibration keeps sending soldiers to the medics The future of the British Army's troublesome Ajax armored vehicle program has again been called into question after the official in charge was removed and use of Ajax halted over its effects on personnel....

Bernard Lambeau, the human half of a pair programming team, explains how he's using AI feature Bernard Lambeau, a Belgium-based software developer and founder of several technology companies, created a programming language called Elo with the help of Anthropic's Claude Code....

Neurophos is developing a massive optical systolic array clocked at 56GHz good for 470 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute As Moore's Law slows to a crawl and the amount of energy required to deliver generational performance gains grows, some chip designers are looking to alternative architectures for salvation....

Drone, satellite, and other data combined to monitor unwanted vessels The UK Home Office is spending up to 100 million on intelligence tech in part to tackle the so-called "small boats" issue of refugees and irregular immigrants coming across the English Channel....

But ex-CISA boss and new RSAC CEO Jen Easterly will be there exclusive The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won't attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register....

UK watchdog investigates accuracy of data handed over for SMS market review Ofcom is formally investigating whether Meta complied with legally binding information requests regarding WhatsApp's role in the UK business messaging ecosystem....

If you skipped it back then, now's a very good time You've got to keep your software updated. Some unknown miscreants are exploiting a critical VMware vCenter Server bug more than a year after Broadcom patched the flaw....

If you're serious about encryption, keep control of your encryption keys updated If you think using Microsoft's BitLocker encryption will keep your data 100 percent safe, think again. Last year, Redmond reportedly provided the FBI with encryption keys to unlock the laptops of Windows users charged in a fraud indictment....