The Register

Comms harmonization plan already drawing fire from operators and Big Tech alike The European Commission's proposed Digital Networks Act (DNA) to harmonize telecoms regulation is drawing criticism from industry bodies who either say it oversteps the mark or doesn't go far enough to galvanize the sector....

Veteran text editor gets more AI enhancements while Paint will be able to generate coloring books Microsoft is meddling with Notepad again, this time adding a "What's New" screen so users know the latest indignities heaped on the once-humble text editor....

Regulators logged over 400 personal data breach notifications a day for first time since law came into force GDPR fines pushed past the 1 billion (1.2 billion) mark in 2025 as Europe's regulators were deluged with more than 400data breach notifications a day, according to a new survey that suggests the post-plateau era of enforcement has well and truly arrived....

Mind the cyber gap - similar flaws highlighted multiple years in a row Concerned about the orgs that safeguard your money? The UK's annual cybersecurity review for 2025 suggests you should be. Despite years of regulation, financial organizations continue to miss basic cybersecurity safeguards....

Critical vuln flew under the radar for a decade A recently disclosed critical vulnerability in the GNU InetUtils telnet daemon (telnetd) is "trivial" to exploit, experts say....

As public consultation kicks off, members of UK Parliament's second chamber highlight damage to children UK government is edging closer to following Australia in blocking under-16s from social media accounts after the House of Lords voted in favor of a ban....

Professor Mark Girolami keeps seat warm after Jean Innes bailed following ministerial arm-twisting The Alan Turing Institute's Chief Scientist has temporarily stepped into the hot seat at the UK's flagship AI research organization after the long-flagged departure of CEO Jean Innes....

Launch vehicle due to make maiden flight this year, company promises update in February earnings call Rocket Lab suffered a setback after a Neutron Stage 1 tank ruptured overnight while the company was performing a hydrostatic pressure trial at its Space Structures Complex in Middle River, Maryland....

The critical-rated flaw leaves unpatched systems open to full takeover Cisco has finally shipped a fix for a critical-rated zero-day in its Unified Communications gear, a flaw that's already being weaponized in the wild, and which CISA previously flagged as an emergency priority....

There are other home server, NAS, and media-streaming distros, but this aspires to much more Hands On Want to get off someone else's cloud, especially if it's hosted in a country you don't trust? FreedomBox is an off-ramp, and it's included in Debian in the form of a Blend....

System handling 800B must be SaaS and sovereign. Only German vendor fits the bill, says HMRC The UK tax collector has awarded SAP a 275 million ($370 million) contract to move the system, which handles over 800 billion (c $1 trillion) in tax revenue and payments annually, off an aging legacy platform and onto its latest software....

Program will train just 20 people per year The UK government is investing in a defense-focused degree course to train both civilian students and soldiers to become drone technology specialists. However, it's only targeting a small number of people....

When the operating system is older than the transport network Bork!Bork!Bork! There's no keeping an obsolete operating system down, although keeping it operational can sometimes be a challenge, if public terminals are any indication. Today's bork uses an OS that dates back 26 years, but is still serving up train tickets....

Describes its LLMs as an entity' that probably has something like emotions The Constitution of the United States of America is about 7,500 words long, a factoid The Register mentions because on Wednesday AI company Anthropic delivered an updated 23,000-word constitution for its Claude family of AI models....

This establishment does not serve agents, says digital tat bazaar eBay has decided to ban agentic shopping bots from its digital tat bazaar....

Jensen Huang and Alex Karp talk up trade skills as AI datacenters multiply, while Satya Nadella says the real test comes later The leaders of the AI world descended on Davos, Switzerland, this week for the World Economic Forum, where they took turns lobbing their best guesses about what the next phase of AI would mean for jobs, as well as whether the AI bubble was real and when it may pop....

Plans to swing SkyHammer silicon into UALink switches later this year AI networking startup Upscale AI on Wednesday announced it has raised $200 million in Series A funding to challenge Nvidia's dominance of switches for rack-scale AI systems, putting it in competition with the likes of Cisco and AMD....

Where the shiny new FOMO object collides with insider-threat reality AI agents arrived in Davos this week with the question of how to secure them - and prevent agents from becoming the ultimate insider threat - taking center stage during a panel discussion on cyber threats....

Business transformation, but not much remuneration Making money isn't everything ... at least not when it comes to AI. Research from professional services firm Deloitte shows that, for most companies, adopting AI tools hasn't helped the bottom line at all. But researchers still sing the technology's praises....

From adaptive wearables to light-based signaling ideas, researchers are exploring what comes next The feathers of a hummingbird, the wings of a butterfly, and the sparkle of an opal are all examples of nature's ability to produce structural, iridescent colors that typically require lab-grade materials and techniques to replicate. An MIT team says it has found a way to make that process far more accessible....

Bill still needs to pass the House and Senate before the president can sign or veto it President Trump's decision to green-light the sale of Nvidia H200 GPUs to China isn't sitting well with some of his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives. These GOP politicians have proposed a bill that would give Congress final say over the export of AI chips to China and other countries of concern....

Phishing campaign tries to reel in master passwords Password managers make great targets for attackers because they can hold many of the keys to your kingdom. Now, LastPass has warned customers about phishing emails claiming that action is required ahead of scheduled maintenance and told them not to fall for the scam....

Also at Davos, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang pitches AI five-layer cake Donald Trump and Jensen Huang both took the stage at Davos today, giving attendees a myriad of reasons to feel assured or panic stricken about humanity's future, depending on your point of view....

Encrypted files, Cloudflare sharing, and political outreach surface in DOJ filings DOGE's mucking around at the Social Security Administration (SSA) has been heavily scrutinized, but now the SSA itself is admitting it slightly underreported the unofficial agency's improper activities within its systems. DOGE employees may have been asked to assist a political advocacy group using SSA data, prompting Hatch Act referrals....

After Russia drama and NASA's on-again-off-again romance, rover shows it still has legs... four of them The European Space Agency (ESA) has unveiled a full-scale structural mock-up of the landing platform for its long-delayed ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover....

AI darling on neighborly charm offensive amid datacenter backlash OpenAI wants every Stargate datacenter campus to come with its own community plan reflecting "local concerns," including a commitment not to cause a hike in electricity prices, minimizing water use, and protecting local ecosystems....

Alex Karp can sniff out a hot potato topic, but what comes next in the act? Opinion Palantir CEO Alex Karp has an inimitable aptitude for sniffing out the politically sensitive topic about which, by his own admission, he should not be speaking, but which will also win him the most attention....

Have I Been Pwned reckons 72.7M customer accounts affected, sportswear firm remains silent Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) says 72.7 million accounts registered with Under Armour were affected by an alleged ransomware attack in November....

Supersonic passenger flight worked technically - but never added up commercially It is 50 years since Concorde began scheduled passenger flights, with British Airways operating a London-Bahrain service and Air France flying from Paris to Rio de Janeiro....

Still dominant in Germany's networks, among others The European Commission (EC) wants a revised Cybersecurity Act to address any threats posed by IT and telecoms kit from third-country sources, potentially forcing member states to confront the thorny issue of suppliers such Huawei in their national networks....

Artist formerly known as Facebook can't escape the legal-verse The Federal Trade Commission has doubled down on its belief that Meta maintained a monopoly of social networking by anticompetitive conduct, appealing last year's district court victory for Zuck and co....

Its very own Snooper's Charter comes a month after proposed biometric tech expansion The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use....

January update is the gift that keeps on giving Microsoft's January Windows update has delivered another blow for unsuspecting users - apps including Outlook might freeze when saving files to cloud storage services such as OneDrive or Dropbox....

Minister unwraps ambassadors of the Software Security Code of Practice Britain's digital economy minister has sent forth a raft of companies as "ambassadors" to help organizations across the land embrace the UK's Software Security Code of Practice....

Ownership of models, embedded corporate knowledge matters more than server location, Nadella says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says datacenter location is "the least important thing" for AI sovereignty....

Dislike systemd but occasionally need it for something? MX can help MX Linux 25.1 restores the ability to switch init systems - the killer feature of MX Linux of old....

Open Rights Group says plans would create serious privacy risks The UK government's proposed ban on under-16s using social media would amount to building a mass age-verification system for the entire internet, creating "serious risks to privacy, data protection, and freedom of expression," digital rights advocates have warned....

Behold the cardboard ENIAC Students at an Arizona school have built a full-scale replica of ENIAC, marking 80 years since the dedication of the computer at the University of Pennsylvania....

But who is paying to keep the lights on? Bork!Bork!Bork! Sometimes technology is made of sterner stuff than we give credit for, such as this ATM, which has clung on to life - and power - despite the indignities heaped upon it....

Maintainer hopes hackers send bug reports anyway, will keep shaming silly' ones The maintainer of popular open-source data transfer tool cURL has ended the project's bug bounty program after maintainers struggled to assess a flood of AI-generated contributions....

Hasn't said why, but low share in a slow-growing market suggests it can't be bothered Sony wants to stop making televisions....

Think of the children...and the monetization options available where they're not allowed OpenAI says it has begun deploying an age prediction model to determine whether ChatGPT users are old enough to view "sensitive or potentially harmful content."...

ACME validation had a challenge-request hole Cloudflare has fixed a flaw in its web application firewall (WAF) that allowed attackers to bypass security rules and directly access origin servers, which could lead to data theft or full server takeover....

This is totally not because China is giving away its best models away for free, right? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei isn't happy about the US allowing Nvidia to sell GPUs to Chinese companies, and likened the decision to giving nuclear weapons to an adversary....

Sure it's a bubble and the deals are circular - that doesn't mean Amazon's not going to try to extract value from it Could one of the most prominent tech company leaders be less-than-enthused about the AI economy? In an interview, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy didn't dismiss the idea that the AI bubble could pop, despite his company's massive investments in the technology....

Keeping models on the Assistant Axis improves AI safety Researchers from Anthropic and other orgs have observed situations in which LLMs act like a helpful personal assistant, and are trying to study the phenomenon further to make sure chatbots don't go off the rails and cause harm....

More packaging options for the leading all-FOSS browser If you can't wait to get the bleeding-edge version of Firefox, we have good news. Mozilla is offering native RPM packages of Firefox Nightly for Linux distros in the greater Red Hat and SUSE families....

AI + skilled malware developers = security threat VoidLink, the newly spotted Linux malware that targets victims' clouds with 37 evil plugins, was generated "almost entirely by artificial intelligence" and likely developed by just one person, according to the research team that discovered the do-it-all implant....

Still or sparkling? Either way, the problem of scale remains Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, and recycling them cleanly and safely at scale is still hard. Now, a Chinese research team claims to have discovered a way to recycle Li-ion batteries using carbon dioxide and water. Just don't expect it to revolutionize the market overnight....

Plus, one in three bit barns expected to exceed 1 GW by 2035 Everything's bigger in Texas, including the amount of available power. That's why the Lone Star State is set to become the leading bit barn market within a few years, and why hyperscalers and colocation providers now expect roughly a third of datacenter campuses to rely entirely on onsite power by 2030....