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Updated 2025-12-24 00:45
ServiceNow opens $7.7B ticket titled 'Buy security company, make it Armis'
Customers will be able to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows. After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products....
21K Nissan customers' data stolen in Red Hat raid
Automaker's third security snafu in three years Thousands of Nissan customers are learning that some of their personal data was leaked after unauthorized access to a Red Hat-managed server, according to the Japanese automaker....
Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth
Spacecraft set to burn up in a few weeks, but it could have been worse As if to underscore the need to avoid the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario in which cascading debris can make some orbits difficult to use, a Starlink satellite vented propellant and released debris following an onboard "anomaly" late last week....
Microsoft rushes an out-of-band update for Message Queuing bug
Redmond gets in early for the twelve whoopsies of Christmas Microsoft has hustled out an out-of-band update to address a Message Queuing issue introduced by the December 2025 update....
Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it
You'll need to be using a Windows Insider build to see it The Windows 11 Run dialog box is one of the oldest pieces of user interface still in use. It works just fine, but it has an aesthetic that harkens back to earlier versions of Microsoft's operating system. Now, that's set to change....
Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat
Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it Opinion Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage....
Like a Virgin Airways bot, planning for the very first time
Airline deploys AI travel agent and it hasn't been a disaster Non-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning."...
UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again
Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month....
Oracle's new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming
The company that bet the farm on AI said to have made things worse with AI Oracle's new AI-powered support portal is frustrating customers and support engineers who are struggling to find the basics, such as old tickets, links to database patch programs and release schedules for current databases....
Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows
Menu.exe not found Bork!Bork!Bork! The bork desk has temporarily reopened during the festive period. The tech world might be having a nap on the sofa after one mince pie too many, but bork never sleeps....
Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year
Cab drivers protested Uber's arrival, but Westminster has rolled out the welcome mat for clanker chauffeurs Robot taxis are coming to The Register's London home in 2026....
France’s post office partly offline for over 12 hours after 'major network incident'
Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fix La Poste, France's postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident....
Japan loses another H3 launcher, plus the satnav bird it carried
25 percent failure rate for JAXA's space truck, with the second stage again proving perilous Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has created a Special Task Force to investigate the failed launch of its H3 rocket on Monday....
Poisoned WhatsApp API package steals messages and accounts
And it's especially dangerous because the code works A malicious npm package with more than 56,000 downloads masquerades as a working WhatsApp Web API library, and then it steals messages, harvests credentials and contacts, and hijacks users' WhatsApp accounts....
Palo Alto's new Google Cloud deal boosts AI integration, could save on cloud costs
SEC filings show the outfit cut projected 2027 cloud purchase commitments by $114M Security vendor Palo Alto Networks is expanding its Google Cloud partnership, saying it will move "key internal workloads" onto the Chocolate Factory's infrastructure. The outfit also claims it is tightening integrations between its security tools and Google Cloud to deliver what it calls a "unified" security experience. At the same time, Palo Alto may trim its own cloud purchase commitments....
SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year
Masayoshi Son better hope he made Santa's nice list Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI....
Spy turned startup CEO: 'The WannaCry of AI will happen'
Ah, the good old days when 0-day development took a year Interview "In my past life, it would take us 360 days to develop an amazing zero day," Zafran Security CEO Sanaz Yashar said....
Nvidia wasting no time to flog H200s in China
Shipments still waiting on approval from Beijing Now that it can legally export them, Nvidia has reportedly informed its Chinese customers that it'll begin shipping H200s, one of its most potent graphics accelerators for AI training and inference, in time for Chinese New Year. One caveat: Beijing could spike the deal before then....
Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture
Anna's Archive's idealism doesn't quite survive its own blog post What would happen to the world's music collections if streaming services disappeared? One hacktivist group says it has a solution: scrape around 300 terabytes of music and metadata from Spotify and offer it up for free as what it calls the world's first fully open" music preservation archive....
Conman and wannabe MI6 agent must repay £125k to romance scam victim
Judge says former most-wanted fugitive Mark Acklom will likely never return to the UK The UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says a fraudster who claimed to be part of MI6 must repay 125,000 ($168,000) to a former love interest that he conned....
What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows
Wasn't 2025 the year it happened? Yes. No. Answers on a Christmas card Opinion I've run Linux desktops since the big interface question was whether to use Korn or Bash for your shell. Before that, I'd used Unix desktops such as Visix Looking Glass, Sun OpenWindows, and SCO's infamous Open Deathtrap Desktop....
EU offers UK early gift: Data adequacy until 2031
Relief for those dealing with data pipelines between the two, but move has its critics The EU has extended its adequacy decision, allowing data sharing with and from the UK under the General Data Protection Regulation for at least six more years....
Vultures rake our claws over COSMIC as Pop OS 24.04 LTS with 'Epoch 1' emerges
Even with the latest Gparted Live, it's not easy to dual boot - but it's worth the hassle Hands On It's been a long time coming but version 1.0 of the first ground-up Rust-based desktop is here... and it is shaping up very well....
Around 1,000 systems compromised in ransomware attack on Romanian water agency
On-site staff keep key systems working while all but one region battles with encrypted PCs Romania's cybersecurity agency confirms a major ransomware attack on the country's water management administration has compromised around 1,000 systems, with work to remediate them still ongoing....
AI is rewriting how power flows through the datacenter
Rising rack densities are driving changes from grid connection to chip-level delivery Power semiconductors are soon set to become as vital as GPUs and CPUs in datacenters, handling the rapidly increasing loads forecast for AI infrastructure....
Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech
Public bodies migrate in the bloc as hyperscalers claim sovereignty Feature Europe's quest for digital sovereignty is hampered by a 90 per cent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, claims Cristina Caffarra, a competition expert and a driving force behind the Eurostack initiative....
The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked
Something messy happens when the cat hairs of reality meet the shiny hype of smart tech Opinion Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are trumped by accountancy's First Law of Finance: you must make money. iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with its Chinese manufacturing partner-cum-creditor poised to pick over the bones....
AI has pumped hyperscale capex, capacity – but how long can it last?
Total operational capacity just keeps rising Hyperscale datacenter operators nearly tripled their spending on infrastructure over the past three years in response to the AI craze, while the amount of operational capacity added each quarter has increased by 170 percent, with little sign so far of any slowdown....
New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good
Mousey wouldn't work, wah-wah-wah Who, Me? Welcome to Christmas week at The Register, an occasion we'll celebrate with another installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of workplace mistakes and mischief....
There’s so much stolen data in the world, South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM
SK Telecom's epic infosec fail will cost it another $1.5 billion South Korea's government on Friday announced it will require local mobile carriers to verify the identity of new customers with facial recognition scans, in the hope of reducing scams....
Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan
PLUS: Debian supports Chinese chips ; Hong Kong's Christmas Karaoke crackdown; Asahi admits it should have prevented hack; And more! APAC in Brief Google and Apple last week started to allow developers of mobile applications to distribute their wares through third-party app stores and accept payments from alternative payment providers....
Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard
PLUS: Texas sues alleged TV spies; The Cloud is full of holes; Hospital leaked its own data; And more Infosec In Brief Google will soon end its Dark Web Report", an email service that alerts users when their personal information appears on the internet's dark underbelly....
Workers should control the means of agentic production, suggests WorkBeaver boss
What if AI vendors focused on the demand side? Interview "I think everybody is adopting AI irresponsibly and I think it's going to have a net negative outcome on the socio-economic standing of the world," said Bars Juhasz. "So let's see if we can't pitch more of a win-win future."...
NIST tried to pull the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift
A rare case of deliberately trying to induce an outage UPDATED A staffer at the USA's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable backup generators powering some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors....
Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul
We haven't even hit the peak, TechInsights tells El Reg If you were hoping for some relief from stratospheric memory pricing, don't hold your breath. DRAM prices aren't expected to peak until at least 2026, TechInsights analyst James Sanders tells El Reg....
Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck
Custom-designed $10,000 scooter goes 65mph, has a 60-mile range, and runs silently hands on Infinite Machine, a New York-based electric vehicle startup, began with a stolen Vespa....
ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US
Latest charges join the mountain of indictments facing alleged Tren de Aragua members A Venezuelan gang described by US officials as "a ruthless terrorist organization" faces charges over alleged deployment of malware on ATMs across the country, illegally siphoning millions of dollars....
DOE recruits cloud, chip, and AI giants for Trump's Genesis Mission
But not Phil Collins, sadly The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a Christmas gift for the AI industry in the shape of agreements for collaboration in the Trump administration's Genesis Mission, which aims to use AI to drive scientific discoveries....
WatchGuard sounds alarm as critical Firebox flaw comes under active attack
Newly disclosed vulnerability already being abused, users urged to lock down exposed firewalls WatchGuard is in emergency patch mode after confirming that a critical remote code execution flaw in its Firebox firewalls is under active attack....
Sydney Uni data goes walkabout after criminals raid code repo
Attackers helped themselves to historical personal info on 27K people The University of Sydney is ringing around thousands of current and former staff and students after admitting attackers helped themselves to historical personal data stashed inside one of its online code repositories....
NS&I tech overhaul blows past Treasury spending limits
UK state-owned bank admits revised plan runs beyond contract end with Atos Already 1.4 billion over budget and four years late, a tech transformation project at a UK state-owned bank is outside HM Treasury spending limits and timetable under a revised plan from systems integrator Capgemini....
pearOS is a Linux that falls rather close to the Apple tree
Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheen The new pearOS distro is a Romanian project that picks up the concepts behind the original Pear Linux from 2011 and updates them. It's not going to turn the distro world upside down, but it's fun, interesting, and a showcase for the versatility and customizability of the Linux desktop....
HPE tells customers to patch fast as OneView RCE bug scores a perfect 10
Maximum-severity vuln lets unauthenticated attackers execute code on trusted infra management platform Hewlett Packard Enterprise has told customers to drop whatever they're doing and patch OneView after admitting a maximum-severity bug could let attackers run code on the management platform without so much as a login prompt....
UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires
Virgin Media the last to go as users of older mobiles warned to upgrade Britain is set to become a post-3G nation as Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) prepares to be the last of the country's mobile networks to switch off its 3G service, although it may linger for a while at a few sites....
Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
Tech exec admits not dead cert it'll find the right solution Exclusive Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud - but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider....
Ministers confirm breach at UK Foreign Office but details remain murky
Officials admit 'there certainly has been a hack,' but refuse to confirm China link or data theft The UK's Foreign Office is investigating a confirmed cyberattack it learned about in October, senior ministers say....
Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits
Ofcom survey finds 18-34s increasingly see life online as bad for society and their mental health Young Brits are souring on the internet, with increasing numbers seeing it as damaging to society and their mental health, according to latest research published by Ofcom....
GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens
Coming with added 'filters and rules' after prototype spat out inaccurate or outright wrong responses The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) will add an AI chatbot to its GOV.UK app in early 2026, before rolling it out across the GOV.UK website used by most government departments and services....
Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau
Are pasties a proxy for weight? Or a cypher for circumference? The Reg Standards Bureau was plunged into uproar this week when a reader suggested a new unit for weight, inspired by Cornwall's revamped food recycling service....
User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis
Hey, teacher, leave that cabling alone On Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your stories of tech support jobs so wrong, they're right....
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