The Register

Getting inferencing infrastructure into orbit may soon be cheaper than building it down here Space startup Aetherflux says it plans to put its first data center satellite into orbit during the first quarter of 2027....

Signoff for re-usable faring should help Neutron launcher get off the ground Space outfit Rocket Lab says its Hungry Hippo is ready to go into space, a fillip for the company's plans to fly its new Neutron launch vehicle....

Adapts its engines to power bit barns, and lands cash to fund its takeoff roll Boom Supersonic, the company that hopes to revive faster-than-sound air travel, has diverted into the datacenter power business....

US export controls on AI accelerators have only succeeded in forcing China to develop its own tech Half a decade of US trade policy aimed at denying China access to America's most potent semiconductor tech has only served to spur China to develop homegrown alternatives....

Plus critical critical Notepad++, Ivanti, and Fortinet updates, and one of these patches an under-attack security hole Happy December Patch Tuesday to all who celebrate. This month's patch party includes one Microsoft flaw under exploitation, plus two others listed as publicly known - but just 57 CVEs in total from Redmond....

Still, the ban has reset expectations and may reduce harm, and that's kind of enough Australia's ban on children under 16 holding active social media accounts comes into force on Wednesday. While nobody expects this world-first policy to stop every kid using their favorite online communities, its backers take solace in the mere fact it's sparked global debate....

Identity management vendors like Okta see an opening to calm CISOs worried about agents running amok The fear of AI agents running amok has thus far halted the wide deployment of these digital workhorses, Okta's president of Auth0, Shiv Ramji, told The Register....

A win for the contractors Congress has released the final version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and critics have been quick to point out that previously proposed rules giving the US military the right to repair its equipment without having to rely on contractors have gone missing....

An attempt to provide vendor-neutral oversight as the agent train barrels on The Linux Foundation on Tuesday said it has formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to provide vendor-neutral oversight for the development of AI agent infrastructure....

Satellite silence trips immobilizers, leaving owners stuck Hundreds of Porsches in Russia were rendered immobile last week, raising speculation of a hack, but the German carmaker tells The Register that its vehicles are secure....

Trixie may have gone 64-bit for installs, but WMLive still ships an i686-bootable build Window Maker Live 13.2 is stubbornly keeping 32-bit PCs alive on Debian 13 "Trixie," shipping a new release that boots on i686 hardware....

Bad for consumers, bad for the environment, 230+ groups say More than 230 organizations across America have signed a letter calling for a moratorium on the construction of datacenters, claiming the current building boom represents a huge environmental and social threat....

Brussels probes whether unpaid web and YouTube content - and rivals' lock-outs - amount to abuse of dominance The European Commission is launching an antitrust probe at Google for allegedly using web and YouTube content to train its AI algorithms while putting competitors at a disadvantage....

As Trump gives green light to ship Nvidia H200s to China and boost US Three US-based businessmen face potential prison sentences after authorities dismantled a smuggling network accused of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Nvidia GPUs to China....

Have we learned nothing from sci-fi films and TV shows? Interview Imagine botnets in physical form and you've got a pretty good idea of what could go wrong with the influx of AI-infused humanoid robots expected to integrate into society over the next few decades....

Billionaire's bid progresses while agency braces for sweeping reductions and program uncertainty Jared Isaacman has cleared another hurdle on his way to becoming the next NASA Administrator after the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation gave the billionaire SpaceX customer the nod....

Analysts say demand keeps rising despite constraints, shaky returns, and mounting investor nerves Datacenter capital expenditure is forecast to grow 17 percent annually through 2030, reaching $1.6 trillion, with supply chain constraints pushing up the price of components....

February product launch fails to register, with concerns remaining about integration SAP users admit they know very little about the vendor's data and analytics plans since the launch of the new product platform, Business Data Cloud (BDC), in February....

Foreign secretary set to address senior diplomats later today The UK's foreign secretary is calling for closer collaboration with Europe to combat the growing threat of information warfare as hybrid attacks target countries on the continent....

Younger finance pros are just as loyal to Microsoft's venerable spreadsheet app as their elders Despite its advancing years, Microsoft Excel is proving a hit with young finance professionals, many of whom reckon the aging number-cruncher has a bright future....

Digital native? Cloud native? No, we need to be AI native, says Riyadh Air IBM and Riyadh Air have upgraded their contracted agreement, meaning the Saudi operation will not be the world's first digitally native airline, but will instead be the first AI native operator....

UK data watchdog demands public sector improves subject access request processing UK public sector organizations need to improve access for those who want to see their own records of growing up in care, the Information Commissioner says....

As Portugal gives researchers a pass under cybersecurity law Portugal has become the latest country to carve out protections for researchers under its cybersecurity law....

Officials insist OBR relied on 'early estimate' and real figure won't emerge until next year The head of the department delivering the UK government's digital identity scheme has rejected the 1.8 billion cost forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), but is not willing to provide an alternative until after a delayed consultation on the plans....

Get your Hyper-V and VMware ESXi setups in order, people Researchers at security software vendor Huntress say they've noticed a huge increase in ransomware attacks on hypervisors and urged users to ensure they're as secure as can be and properly backed up....

Chipzilla doesn't need 28nm product, so maybe this is about landing another outsourced packaging partner Intel will explore manufacturing some chips in India's first fab after forming an alliance with Indian mega-corp Tata....

Blackwell and Rubin kit remain off limits US President Donald Trump has signalled he will allow Nvidia to resume sales of its H200 accelerators to China....

'User Alignment Critic' will review agentic actions so bots don't do things like emptying your bank account Google plans to add a second Gemini-based model to Chrome to address the security problems created by adding the first Gemini model to Chrome....

Startup wagers the path to sustainable AI might be found in nature's most amazing design - the brain Interview Naveen Rao founded AI businesses and sold them to Intel and Databricks. He's now turned his attention to satisfying AI's thirst for power and believes his new company, Unconventional AI, can do it by building chips inspired by nature....

The open web is closing down for unwanted automated traffic A growing number of websites are taking steps to ban AI bot traffic so that their work isn't used as training data and their servers aren't overwhelmed by non-human users. However, some companies are ignoring the bans and scraping anyway....

But the 25 announcements in the last 10 minutes included a few well worth waiting for AWS CEO Matt Garman's annual re:Invent keynote was the best kind of keynote, in that you could have slept in for nearly all of it and still been thrilled to pieces, provided you caught the last ten minutes. He concluded what was otherwise an AI-palooza chock full of boring guest speakers with an Andy Jassy style "twenty-five releases in ten minutes," complete with a basketball-style ten-minute shot clock counting down the time....

The Chocolate Factory will also put its AI to work inside one of America's biggest utilities NextEra Energy on Monday tightened its grip on hyperscaler power demand, adding 2.5 GW of new renewable projects for Meta while deepening its partnership with Google, which already covers about 3.5 GW of capacity....

Suit argues forcing Apple to remove app, and threatening dev with legal action is a First Amendment violation Does the first amendment allow citizens to track law enforcement activity? After publishing an iOS app that shows where ICE agents have deployed, ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron saw the Trump admin pressure Apple into pulling the software and threaten him with prosecution. Now he's fighting back....

Minors groomed to kill and intimidate victims Nearly 200 people, including minors accused of involvement in murder plots, have been arrested over the last six months as part of Europol's Operational Taskforce (OTF) GRIMM. The operation targets what cops call "violence-as-a-service" - crime crews recruiting kids and teens online to carry out contract killings and other real-world attacks....

Native MCP support lands in Insider Dev and Beta builds Microsoft has begun rolling out a public preview of native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the latest Windows 11 Insider builds, edging its much-touted agentic OS" vision closer to reality....

Unreleased variants that Jobs killed off found - 7.6 on a G4, anyone? As well as the Mac clones, there were PC-style PowerPC machines - and a version of classic MacOS for them has just been rediscovered, enabling previously unimagined combinations....

Analysts reckon only a handful of manufacturers will push ahead as the rest hit the brakes Only five percent of carmakers will sustain heavy AI investments by the end of the decade as most fail to meet amibitous goals....

Intelligence Center features aim to unify management across on-prem, cloud, and containerized estates IBM has topped an autumn flurry of Db2 updates with new features for its Intelligence Center console, promising to let users manage deployments of the 42-year-old database across on-prem, cloud, and containerized environments from a single place....

Big Blue's latest mega-buy hands it a real-time data-streaming powerhouse built on Kafka IBM has cracked open its wallet again, agreeing to shell out $11 billion for Confluent in a bid to glue together the data sprawl underpinning the next wave of enterprise AI....

Atlantic Bastion combines AI systems with warships to counter increased surveillance The UK government has announced enhanced protection for undersea cables using autonomous vessels alongside crewed warships and aircraft, responding to escalating Russian surveillance activities....

Warning that over-reserved capacity is blocking new connections Datacenters are preventing other energy users from connecting to the grid by reserving far more power than they need, according to a new Uptime Institute report shared with The Register....

Brussels accused of using Ad Composer quirk to post link disguised as a video X has terminated the European Commission's ad account after Brussels used it to post a video announcing the platform's 120 million Digital Services Act (DSA) fine - which was in fact just a link to the press release....

Japanese outfit aims to improve comms for aquatic drones Kyocera has demonstrated underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) technology that achieved 5.2 Gbps in lab tests, targeting video feeds and sensor data for ocean exploration and underwater robotics....

Regulator disappointed as soon-to-be-scrapped algo's problems remained a secret despite consistent engagement The UK's data protection watchdog has criticized the Home Office for failing to disclose significant biases in police facial recognition technology, despite regular engagement between the organizations....

Body confirms patient and staff details siphoned via Oracle EBS flaw as gang threatens to leak haul Barts Health NHS Trust has confirmed that patient and staff data was stolen in Clop's mass-exploitation of Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS), and says it is now taking legal action in an effort to stop the gang publishing any of the snatched information....

Kendall says Whitehall will use bulk buying to squeeze better value from cloud giants The UK tech minister has promised more whole-government deals with industry giants following its 9 billion agreement with Microsoft, and is seeking to target cloud service providers....

Nina Kalinina takes a deep dive into one of the earliest PC desktops Reverse engineering VisiCorp's pioneering GUI for commodity PCs shows how little modern GUIs get from Xerox - and how much we all owe Apple....

Can't take decades more synthetic case studies? Get those digital daggers out These are hard times, even for the biggest brands. Facing existential crises, emergency board meetings are in full swing at multinationals Contoso, a huge marketing and sales outfit, and Fabrikam, the famous name in online fashion. Both are under threat from usurper Zava, a retailer so dazzlingly disruptive it is both a chain of DIY home improvement shops and flogger of intelligent athletic apparel....

Ignorance really can be bliss Who, Me? Opinion varies about the most efficient way to commence a working week. The Register's contribution to that conversation is Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of your mistakes, and subsequent escapes....

Analysts worry lazy users could have agents complete mandatory infosec training, and attackers could do far nastier things Agentic browsers are too risky for most organizations to use, according to analyst firm Gartner....