The Register

Isaacman: 'We can never accept a gap in our capabilities again' The US must return astronauts to the Moon before China mounts its first crewed landing there, NASA administrator nominee Jared Isaacman predicted on Wednesday. He also vowed that the country will not endure another gap in its human-spaceflight capabilities as the International Space Station approaches retirement....

Major OEMs are plotting double-digit hikes as DRAM and NAND shortages bite Exclusive Server and PC prices are climbing sharply as hardware manufacturers grapple with soaring memory component costs, multiple supply chain sources have told The Register....

$200M deal brings Claude into data cloud, yet its touted 90%+' accuracy needs human oversight Anthropic and Snowflake announced a deal that will allow the deployment of AI agents capable of complex, multi-step analysis inside Snowflake's governed data environments....

Technical problems on video calls can cause uncanniness, which influences real-world decisions If you didn't get your dream job, you might be able to blame your internet provider. Technical glitches on video calls in healthcare, job interviews, and parole hearings can affect real-world decisions, a study has found. The researchers suggest new technologies may even be making the problem worse....

OpenAI and Microsoft yank their chatbots, telling millions of users to head elsewhere The European Commission has opened an antitrust probe into Meta after WhatsApp rewrote its rules to block rival AI chatbots including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot....

Nvidia is along for the ride with chips to offer, naturally Palantir has always been a company marked by ambition, and it's embarking on what might be its most ambitious project yet with Chain Reaction, a new multi-industry, AI-powered software suite designed to eliminate energy bottlenecks for datacenters....

Silent Patch Tuesday mitigation ends ability to hide malicious commands in .lnk files Microsoft has quietly closed off a critical Windows shortcut file bug long abused by espionage and cybercrime networks....

Microsoft warns Start menu, Explorer, and other XAML apps can crash or vanish on managed devices Microsoft has admitted that it might have broken Windows components including the Start menu and Explorer in the latest round of updates....

Just ignore all the ways the peripherals biz uses AI itself Logitech's CEO says that AI-powered devices are a solution looking for a problem, despite being a strong proponent of AI and her firm pushing out exactly the kind of thing she's talking about....

Cloudflare data shows 29.7 Tbps record-breaker landed amid 87% surge in network-layer attacks The internet has spent the past three months ducking for cover as the Aisuru botnet hurled record-shattering DDoS barrages from an army of up to 4 million infected machines....

3 GW is roughly three quarters of the country's peak demand, says Foxglove New datacenters planned in Scotland would collectively require 75 percent as much energy as the entire country currently consumes, according to tech campaign group Foxglove....

Pricing complexity makes justifying migrations an uphill battle UK SAP users say licensing and pricing complexity is muddying the picture for Business Suite, the vendor's new model for cloud applications....

One dev thinks this will become their second-highest cost, fears they'll have to pass it on Exclusive SaaS-y accounting outfit Xero has advised developers who integrate their products with its services that they'll soon have to pay for the privilege in a new way....

It's time to ask your bit barn provider how they'll keep the lights on, and what their plans mean for prices Availability of energy will determine the prices charged by datacenter operators, who won't be viable unless they generate some of their own juice....

Tricky tradeoffs are hard to avoid when designing systems, but the choice not to use LLMs for some tasks is clear Systems Approach As we neared the finish line for our network security book, I received a piece of feedback from Brad Karp that my explanation of forward secrecy in the chapter on TLS (Transport Layer Security) was not quite right....

Ferrous Systems achieves IEC 61508 (SIL 2) certification for systems that demand reliability Memory-safe Rust code can now be more broadly applied in devices that require electronic system safety, at least as measured by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards....

Minister wants to free drivers from dependency on private companies' India's government is set to launch a rideshare platform and app that charges no commission and is intended to make life harder for Uber and its ilk....

First AI came for our jobs. Now, our memory? The lure of AI spending was too much for Micron to ignore. On Wednesday, the US chipmaker announced it's abandoning its Crucial memory and storage lineup to bolster its supply of enterprise-focused chips, including those used in AI systems....

Gartner found only 20% of customer service leaders have cut human agents because of AI The world's smallest digital violin is playing for AI chatbots, which are having a hard time elbowing out their human counterparts for jobs in customer service, according to a Gartner study....

Rights holders had better buckle up for years of legal wrangling, IP lawyer tells The Reg You don't have to be smarter than a fifth grader (or even a first grader) to commit potential copyright infringement using AI tools. One IP attorney watched over the weekend as his young son built a bedtime story generator that used copyrighted characters without permission....

Finish reading this, then patch A maximum-severity flaw in the widely used JavaScript library React, and several React-based frameworks including Next.js allows unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable instances. The flaw is easy to abuse, and mass exploitation is "imminent," according to security researchers....

Letting AI firms train on copyrighted data will end up helping China, conservative groups argue A group of conservatives allied with President Donald Trump's MAGA movement, including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, has asked the Justice Department and the White House to stop protecting Big Tech against copyright claims....

An anomaly' meant a fireball arrived at the recovery zone instead of a spent first stage There's good news and bad news for the Chinese commercial launch industry. The good news is that LandSpace's ZhuQue-3 launched successfully on its maiden flight. The bad news is that a hoped-for recovery of the first stage ended in a fireball....

Talk about enshittification No, this isn't a joke: Kohler's poop-scanning toilet attachment, which the company claims is ... uh ... end-to-end encrypted, appears to be anything butt....

LEO communications satellites are proliferating like rabbits Nearly all images from some space telescopes in low Earth orbit could be affected by light from man-made satellites as the number of communication spacecraft surges, new research led by NASA has found....

Starting in March, Frontline Worker and Kiosk-only mailboxes lose EWS access Microsoft is getting serious about the end of Exchange Web Services (EWS) and has announced that, starting in March 2026, it will begin blocking EWS access to mailboxes without license rights....

IT giant touts unified management, stretched clusters, and AI-ready networking at Discover Barcelona HPE is laying out its enterprise stall with enhancements to its GreenLake hybrid cloud portfolio, while converging its Aruba and Juniper networking to offer customers AIOps across both, plus high-speed connectivity for AI processing....

Russian vehicles will depart soon, but Baikonur launchpad damage clouds future arrivals NASA confirmed this week that for the first time, all eight of the International Space Station's docking ports are currently occupied - four by Russian vehicles....

Statcounter shows the gap narrowing as users cling to older hardware and familiar workflows Windows 11 has not significantly widened its market share lead over Windows 10, despite support for many versions of the latter ending almost two months ago....

Awarded a 239M contract, outsourcer apologizes for any inconvenience to 1.5M members Updated Pension scheme members are facing a string of errors and malfunctions as they try to log into and retrieve account details from the UK's civil service portal the government is paying Capita 239 million ($318 million) to build and run....

Commerce Department wants equity in xLight as it backs a free-electron laser to challenge ASML The US Department of Commerce has signed a preliminary letter of intent to provide up to $150 million to xLight, a Palo Alto-based startup led by former Intel chief Pat Gelsinger, that is working on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography....

Bye-bye bcachefs, but hello there bhyve The last new kernel release of 2025 is here, and it's looking likely this will be the new LTS kernel release....

Japan's Askul still can't run all its sites, but at least the fax line held up OK Japanese e-tailer Askul has resumed online sales, 45 days after a ransomware attack....

Think tank ASPI says Beijing is even using it to steal fish from the ocean China has embraced AI to help it censor and surveil its citizens and is exporting its techniques to the world, according to a new report by think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)....

Extra infosec investments are taxiing towards the runway India's Civil Aviation Minister has revealed that local authorities have detected GPS spoofing and jamming at eight major airports....

AWS Chief Matt Garman lays out his vision bringing artificial intelligence to the enterprise Re:Invent Amazon wants to make AI meaningful to enterprises, and it's building yet another walled garden disguised as an easy button to do it....

If sovereignty or on-prem AI matters, the new AI Factories could be for you re:invent Many businesses and government agencies require that all sensitive data stay on-premises for legal or security reasons. If those orgs want to work with AI, they can't rely on regular public clouds, but now they can let AWS build and manage AI hardware and software in their datacenters....

Autonomous AI triages DevOps issues and pushes code to repositories, while checking security Re:Invent Amazon is all-in on agentic AI when it comes to software development, and it sincerely hopes you are too, based on Tuesday's AWS re:Invent keynote....

Christmas comes early for attackers this year Two high-severity Android bugs were exploited as zero-days before Google issued a fix, according to its December Android security bulletin....

Isaacman backs Texas relocation amid warnings that costs could top $150M US President Donald Trump's nominee for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, is "committed to move the Space Shuttle Discovery to Houston," according to the office of Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)....

Ivy League school warns more than 1,400 people after attackers siphon data via zero-day The University of Pennsylvania has become the latest victim of Clop's smash-and-grab spree against Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS) customers, with the Ivy League school now warning more than a thousand individuals that their personal data was siphoned from its systems....

Dreams of a virtual world linger on in Teams As of December 1, mixed reality collaboration platform Microsoft Mesh is no more, and Redmond has directed customers to immersive events in Teams....

Hardware bundle ties next-gen accelerators to an Ethernet fabric arriving in 2026 HPE is throwing its weight behind AMD's Helios rack-scale architecture and will offer this as part of its AI portfolio next year, including a purpose-built Juniper Networks scale-up switch....

Amar Subramanya spent mere months at Microsoft before replacing John Giannandrea Apple's failure to deliver advanced AI capabilities has triggered a changing of the guard. AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down in favor of a new leader to steady the Siri ship....

CEO touts win from 'super-high growth' customer that couldn't scale on rival system At the risk of protesting too much in the shifting database landscape, NoSQL-based MongoDB has attempted to trash the competition by claiming PostgreSQL systems lack scalability to keep up with the demands of AI workloads....

Lineup spans 3B to 14B parameters, from edge devices to multi-GPU rigs Mistral AI has released a suite of open source models under the Mistral 3 banner, aiming to scale from a mobile device or drone up to multi-GPU datacenter beasts....

Operation Olympia pulls Swiss servers offline and scoops up 12TB of data in latest crime infrastructure crackdown Law enforcement agencies in Germany and Switzerland have shut down cryptocurrency laundering platform Cryptomixer in Europe's latest pushback against cybercrime infrastructure....

Preview tool promises quicker reviews and faster flaw-finding for cloud apps Re:Invent AI agents are key to launching applications more quickly - and making them more secure from the start, Amazon says....

Meanwhile, Trainium3 makes its debut promising million-chip training clusters Re:Invent Amazon says that its next generation of homegrown silicon will deliver 6x higher performance thanks to a little help from its buddy Nvidia....

Borough says attackers copied 'historical' info as three-council cyber woes drag on Kensington and Chelsea Council has admitted that data was quietly lifted from its systems during last week's cyber meltdown, confirming that the outage was not just an IT faceplant but a bona fide data breach....