The Register

Pair became ALPHV affiliates to prey on US-based clients A ransomware negotiator and a security incident response manager have admitted to running ransomware attacks....

Zohran Mamdani appears not to understand that smartphones can be used for evil New York's mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has invited the city's residents to join him at a block party to celebrate his inauguration but told attendees not to bring a Raspberry Pi to the event....

The ITSM outfit would join Oracle, Comcast, and Netflix in installing bunk beds in the corner office ServiceNow's amended employment contract with CEO Bill McDermott extends his time with the company into the next decade, but also provides possible next steps for the journeyman corporate leader, including the co-CEO role, a position he held at SAP in the years prior to joining the ITSM juggernaut....

The solution? Lock up the screens and read to your kids If you're thinking of plopping your infant in front of a screen to get some peace and quiet, you might want to reconsider - higher screen exposure in infancy was linked to longer decision times later on and higher anxiety symptoms in the teenage years....

You didn't think you'd get to enjoy your time off without a major cybersecurity incident, did you? A high-severity MongoDB Server vulnerability, for which proofs of concept emerged over Christmas week, is now under active exploitation, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency....

Digital screen snafu or satirical comment on Microsoft's licensing policies? Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's Bork comes courtesy of an exhibition dedicated to the UK street artist Banksy and demonstrates that "Limitless" does not always apply to Windows Activation....

Want to survive the crash? Find another way to make money with GPUs Today, Nvidia's revenues are dominated by hardware sales. But when the AI bubble inevitably pops, the GPU giant will become the single most important software company in the world....

2026 is the year where AI must meet ROI in the enterprise, and the key to delivering it is data governance. Leaders from Dell, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake have released their 2026 predictions for AI in the workplace, and they agree that safeguards for AI agents and ROI are the top priorities for their customers....

Now replace the autopilot with Copilot Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork can happen to the best of us, but flashing one's undercarriage at the boss of a compliance company is less than ideal, particularly at 35,000 feet in the air....

One cert, in plaintext, on thousands of devices, led to what looks like years of crime South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT has found that local carrier Korea Telecom (KT) deployed thousands of badly secured femtocells, leading to an attack that enabled micropayments fraud and snooping on customers' communications - maybe for years....

General agents' to infuse Meta's products real soon now UPDATED Meta will acquire made-in-China AI outfit Manus and harness its general agent" technology across its products....

The deal negotiated in September locked Nvidia into a purchase price of $23 per share. Intel shares traded at $36 on Monday Nvidia's $5 billion Intel stock purchase is already worth $7.58 billion, turning the recently approved bailout of its rival into a shrewd financial play....

There's more where that came from, CEO says Rogue insiders suspected of taking bribes to hand over Coinbase customer records to criminals are beginning to face justice, according to CEO Brian Armstrong....

Extortion group Lovely claims to have stolen 40 million pieces of info from publisher Conde Nast A criminal group is beating Conde Nast over the head for not responding sooner to its extortion attempt by posting stolen subscribers' email and home addresses and warning the publisher of Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Teen Vogue that it has 40 million more entries....

There's a big salary up for grabs if you can handle a high-stress role with a track record of turnover How'd you like to earn more than half a million dollars working for one of the world's fastest-growing tech companies? The catch: the job is stressful, and the last few people tasked with it didn't stick around. Over the weekend, OpenAI boss Sam Altman went public with a search for a new Head of Preparedness, saying rapidly improving AI models are creating new risks that need closer oversight....

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try Opinion The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There's no reason to think this will change in 2026. However, through the magic of journalism, here's a world where that's not true, a world where other things are happening that will shape the future. We like to call it the real world, and here's what's happening there and why it matters....

20 years, multiple delays, and millions of dollars later, FI$Cal is live - mostly Since 2005, YouTube has gone from launching its first website to serving up more than 100,000 years' worth of video content every day. During the same period, the State of California has gone from the idea of adopting a single ERP, HCM, and procurement platform to getting nearly all of its departments on board - although there are still a few stragglers....

Countries that banded together to challenge Boeing in the air try to do the same to AWS, Microsoft, and Google on the ground Feature More than half a century ago, a consortium of European aerospace businesses from the UK, France, Germany and Spain joined forces to take on America's Boeing. Fast forward to the 21st century and the countries are applying the same model needs to the world of cloud computing, giving the continent a fighting chance to reduce the digital domination of Big Tech....

More millennial tech support tales from your fellow readers On Call Y2K Welcome to a special festive season edition of On Call, in which we share readers' stories of working on the 31st of December 1999 - the moment the tech world held its breath and hoped years of Year 2000 bug remediation efforts would work....

Oversaw a significant resurgence in Big Blue's fortunes during the dotcom era IBM has announced the death of its former CEO Lou Gerstner, who passed away on Saturday, aged 83....

Former staffer of Korean e-tailer Coupang accessed 33 million records but may have done less damage than feared Korean e-tailer Coupang claims a former employee has admitted to improperly accessing data describing 33 million of its customers, but says the accused deleted the stolen data....

PLUS: Australia buys air-gapped Google Cloud; Huawei triples use of home-built components; JAXA blames low pressure for rocket crash; And more Asia In Brief China's Cyberspace Administration on Saturday posted draft rules governing the behaviour of AI companions that prohibit using them to serve as friends for the elderly....

The human harms of cyberattacks piled up this year, and violence expected to increase The knock-on, and often unintentional, impacts of a cyberattack are so rarely discussed. As an industry, the focus is almost always placed on the economic damage: the ransom payment; the cost of business downtime; and goodness, don't forget those poor shareholders....

Hotel guests get a blast from the past courtesy of classic Windows BSOD BORK!BORK!BORK! Today's bork belongs in the dim and distant past - a reminder of when Windows had proper crash screens....

Best not touch that screen, eh? Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's Christmas bork comes from London's Victoria train station, just before the festive season got underway, and is an update to the old IT standby: "It isn't DNS. It can't be DNS... It was SSL."...

The most popular desktop browser is festooned with Google AI, but you can make at least some of it go away Most of today's desktop web browsers come with a ton of built-in AI features, but the good news is that, in most cases, no one is forcing you to use them, and you can at least hide them from view. Removing the most egregious AI tools from Chrome is pretty simple, but it requires a few steps....

Practice makes perfect It's the most wonderful time of the year ... for corporate security bosses to run tabletop exercises, simulating a hypothetical cyberattack or other emergency, running through incident processes, and practicing responses to ensure preparedness if when a digital disaster occurs....

In supercharged AI race, defenders need to keep up interview According to Remedio CEO Tal Kollender, the only way to beat the bad guys hacking into corporate networks is to "think like a hacker," and because not everyone is a teenage hacker turned cybersecurity startup chief executive, she built an AI to do this....

Smarter access-point handoffs, better scheduling, fewer stalls Wi-Fi 8 will be a step change in connectivity, if Intel can be believed, and will be able to adapt intelligently to local conditions to deliver a reliable service without the slowdowns users often experience when the network is congested....

Everything you hated about text adventure games is now being sold as a productivity tool Opinion When Microsoft recently decided to open source the seminal text adventure game Zork, I contemplated revisiting it during the festive season... until I realized I've spent much of 2025 experiencing the worst of such games when using AI chatbots....

The lack of trust that leads to outsourcing can be expensive On Call Y2K December 26th is a holiday across much of the Reg-reading world, but it's also a Friday - the day on which we present a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that recounts your tales of tech support encounters and exasperation....

Investment and interest have outpaced technology and society By the time the humanoid robots arrived at the Humanoids Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on December 11, the registration line had already extended downstairs to the lobby....

Two tiny boxes, 128 GB apiece - but very different strengths Hands On Most GenAI models are trained and run in massive datacenter clusters, but the ability to build, test, and prototype AI systems locally is no less relevant today....

Alternative apps to empower older versions of macOS or Windows Part 2 There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS....

Execs say DIY OpenAI connections risked pushing CRM data past the trust boundary' Salesforce users running Agentforce with ChatGPT Enterprise or Edu can now update CRM data directly from the bot, a move aimed at curbing home-built integrations that risk spilling data outside the company's controls....

Will businesses continue to invest in something that's shown so little return? opinion It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime....

AI goes off the rails ... because of shoddy guardrails Researchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts.Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."...

ATC: 'I don't know if you can hear me but cleared to land' In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado....

Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money thefts The US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts....

Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week....

Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amused Microsoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by....

Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not alone Feature Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero measurable returns on these efforts....

A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technology Seventy years ago, a child phoned the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) looking for Santa Claus - and found him, or at least some kindly military personnel who were willing to play along by helping the youngster to track Santa's location as he zipped around the globe....

Time running out for savin' MAVEN as stricken spacecraft still silent as Mars solar conjunction nears NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is continuing to evade attempts by engineers to make contact as the solar conjunction nears, halting contact with any Mars missions until January 16, 2026....

Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026 Part 1 You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two....

Plans move to Rust, with help from AI Microsoft wants to translate its codebase to Rust, and is hiring people to make it happen....

VMware's main challenger already embraces multiple storage options Amazon Web Services has given Nutanix a lovely Christmas present: Support for its AHV hypervisor in hybrid cloud storage rigs....

President Trump previously threatened 100 percent tariffs, administration now plans something else starting in 2027 World War Fee The United States will impose tariffs on semiconductors imported from China, starting in 2027....

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....

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....