The Register

Lawsuit concedes the bird is still the word for many X has filed a lawsuit against a social media startup over the Twitter brand, effectively acknowledging that millions still use the Twitter domain, call Elon Musk's platform "Twitter," and their emissions "tweets."...

Follows Nick Clegg at Meta and Rishi Sunak at Anthropic in snuggling up to US tech OpenAI has hired former UK finance minister George Osborne, continuing a trend of British politicians whose careers have peaked cozying up to US tech giants....

Six months after expert testimony, no one has yet dialed into promised summit on technical solutions MPs have blasted the UK government for complacency over surging mobile thefts after a "long-delayed" summit on the issue disappeared into the New Year....

Regulator proposes strict limits on screen-based testing, cites infrastructure concerns and lack of evidence for benefits Most students taking school and college GCSE, A-level, and AS-level exams in England will continue to use pen and paper, according to proposals from the sector's regulator for a very limited expansion of screen-based assessments....

Changes to Electronic Communications Code would bypass landlord objections to fiber installations The UK government is consulting on plans to give the owners of 1.2 million flats in England and Wales a formal right to request gigabit-capable broadband....

Apparently you're about to get better advice on any identity issues lurking in your infrastructure Cisco has decided its homegrown AI models are ready to power its products, starting with its Duo Identity Intelligence offering....

No details on power consumption, lots of patriotic pride India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) on Monday revealed its most advanced processor yet and hailed it as a reliable" product and a step towards the creation of a domestic semiconductor industry that challenges current global giants....

Misconfigured servers are in, 0-days out Chinese espionage crew Ink Dragon has expanded its snooping activities into European government networks, using compromised servers to create illicit relay nodes for future operations....

The company has reportedly consulted itself and decided it needs fewer people Consultant cut thyself! Where consulting firms typically tell other companies how to make more money by trimming the fat, they are now looking inward, as advances in AI and a push for efficiency prompt layoffs, with blue-chip advisor McKinsey weighing thousands of job cuts, according to reports....

An employee of the adult site could be responsible. Analytics vendor Mixpanel says it is not the source of data stolen from Pornhub and says the info was last accessed by an employee of the adult site....

No mention of protections to stop it being used to snoop on people Want to hear just the guitar riff from a song? How about cutting out the train noise from a voice recording? Meta says its new SAM Audio model can separate and edit sounds using simple prompts, cutting down on the manual work typical of audio-editing tools....

More than 8 million people have installed extensions that eavesdrop on chatbot interactions Ad blockers and VPNs are supposed to protect your privacy, but four popular browser extensions have been doing just the opposite. According to research from Koi Security, these pernicious plug-ins have been harvesting the text of chatbot conversations from more than 8 million people and sending them back to the developers....

Amazon, meanwhile, claims its datacenters are helping ratepayers despite tons of evidence to the contrary Concerned over continually rising energy costs linked to AI datacenter construction projects, three Democratic Senators are asking leading bit barn operators to explain why their promises of not passing grid expansion costs onto consumers are falling short....

Nemotron 3 is a grab bag of 2025's top machine learning advancements For many, enterprise AI adoption depends on the availability of high-quality open-weights models. Exposing sensitive customer data or hard-fought intellectual property to APIs so you can use closed models like ChatGPT is a non-starter....

All I want for Christmas ... is all of your data A new, modular infostealer called SantaStealer, advertised on Telegram with a basic tier priced at $175 per month, promises to make criminals' Christmas dreams come true. It boasts that it can run "fully undetected" even on systems with the "strictest AntiVirus" and those belonging to governments, financial institutions, and other prime targets....

And parades its latest trio of Nemotron models Nvidia burnished its open source credentials this week after buying the company behind the veteran Slurm scheduler and announcing a slew of open source AI models....

Coalition for App Fairness warns App Store fees remain unlawful despite non-compliance ruling Six months after EU regulators found Apple's App Store rules in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), developers say Cupertino is still behaving as if compliance were optional....

Tech Prosperity Deal paused after London resists pressure on online services levy The US government has put a proposed $42 billion (31 billion) trade pact with the UK on ice because the European country has yet to budge on its Digital Services Tax (DST)....

Communities on both sides of the Atlantic push back against rapid build-outs Frenzied demand for AI development is driving a wave of datacenter construction, but new projects are facing growing public opposition over concerns about their impact on local communities and the environment....

Rising DRAM and NAND prices are squeezing handset makers and threatening a fragile market recovery AI-nflation The smartphone industry's brief bounce back now looks set to run straight into a wall, with analysts warning that rising memory costs are about to test buyers' patience....

Anthony Enzor-DeMeo picked to replace interim boss Laura Chambers Mozilla Corporation on Tuesday said it has appointed Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as Chief Executive Officer, replacing Laura Chambers, who served as interim CEO for the past two years....

But when will Chipzilla bring back will.i.am? Intel has hired a veteran Republican operator as its head of government affairs, just months after Uncle Sam became the struggling chip vendor's biggest shareholder....

Adult site, streaming platform, and Japanese retailer expose user info, but not credentials Three very different companies have now confirmed data breaches affecting millions of users - each insisting the damage stopped well short of passwords and payment details....

New spy boss says officers must master code alongside tradecraft as agency navigates 'space between peace and war' New MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli outlined her vision for technology-augmented intelligence gathering in her first public speech on December 15, warning that the UK operates "in a space between peace and war."...

Massive procurement deal for laptops and software comes after minister vows to squeeze better value from big vendors The UK government plans to tender a commercial framework for end-user hardware and software worth up to 24 billion ($32.18 billion) including tax - double the 12 billion maximum announced six months ago....

Theologians give scriptural OK to online faith communities The Bishop of Hong Kong said last week that AI was definitely not a gift from the devil at a meeting of his peers across Asia that called for sensible engagement with the technology....

Watchdog reviews if failures breached availability rules after downtime left millions unable to make calls Ofcom has opened formal investigations into BT and Three after mobile outages this summer left Britons unable to make calls - including to emergency services....

Bum note for 20 percent of users whose data leaked Music hosting and streaming service SoundCloud has admitted it suffered a cyberattack....

EV sales didn't accelerate as hoped, so it will repurpose idling factories Automotive giant Ford has decided to start a business building big batteries, in part to cash in on the datacenter construction boom....

Palantir's former IT boss just took over as CEO of Thrive-backed AI MSP platform Former Palantir CIO Jim Siders has departed the company to join Shield Technology Partners as CEO, in a bid he says is meant to bring AI to bear in the sprawling managed services landscape....

'Sustained focus on Western critical infrastructure' Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) is behind a years-long campaign targeting energy, telecommunications, and tech providers, stealing credentials and compromising misconfigured devices hosted on AWS to give the Kremlin's snoops persistent access to sensitive networks, according to Amazon's security boss....

Big Red said it had sold its stake in its long-time silicon partner last week Oracle last week announced that it had divested from Ampere Computing. But while Big Red may no longer own part of the Arm CPU maker, it's not ready to stop using the chips just yet....

Framework looks great for scenarios where a 62 percent completion rate is acceptable IBM researchers have released an open source AI agent called CUGA that aspires to automate complex enterprise workflows and get it right about half the time, depending on the task....

If the buy happens, the big question is will they integrate the codebase or keep it separate? ServiceNow is reportedly nearing a deal to buy security software company Armis for $7.1 billion to give its customers full stack visibility of their IT estate and eliminate security blindspots, according to Bloomberg....

Washington rediscovers that modern IT doesn't run itself After dissolving several federal tech modernization units and shedding large numbers of technologists, the Trump administration has launched a new talent recruitment initiative, suggesting it still needs people to help drag the government's IT into the present....

And don't sweat the debt either, we've got plenty of capital at our disposal Despite Wall Street jitters and reports to the contrary, Oracle insists its $300 billion datacenter deal with OpenAI is on track and proceeding on schedule....

Powered by the original mobile Linux OS with crowdsourced specs hands on After successful crowdfunding, the latest release of the original handheld Linux distro will power a new handset coming in mid-2026....

Mobile traffic now accounts for nearly half of requests Global internet traffic grew by 19 percent during 2025, while nearly half of traffic now comes from mobile devices. A significant and growing portion also comes from bots, many designed to train AI....

Who hasn't exploited this max-severity flaw? At least five more Chinese spy crews, Iran-linked goons, and financially motivated criminals are now attacking React2Shell, a maximum-severity flaw in the widely used React JavaScript library, according to Google....

Paris Buttfield-Addison literally wrote books on Swift Apple has blocked a long-time developer from his Apple ID after he failed to redeem what support suggested was a dodgy $500 gift card, leaving him unable to work, cut off from personal files, and barred from what he calls his "core digital identity."...

Flat-rate deals may sting now, but vendor expects payback over decades Salesforce's chief revenue officer has said that he is relaxed about the CRM giant losing money on AI agent seat-based licensing in the long term because it will have many more years to "monetize" such customers....

Watchdog highlights slate of unmet priorities A US spending watchdog has delivered another withering verdict on the Department of Veterans Affairs' efforts to drag its health records program into the 21st century....

IDC's latest tracker numbers were brought to you by the letters A and I The global server market went into overdrive in the third quarter of 2025, racking up a record $112.4 billion in revenue as AI demand pushed vendor sales up 61 percent year-on-year, according to the latest figures from IDC....

On-prem control planes, dark-site upgrades, and multicloud policies target regulated deployments Nutanix is taking a pop at VMware - again - as it unwraps features that it says allow customers to run distributed sovereign clouds....

Company vacuumed up by its own manufacturer iRobot, the company behind autonomous vacuum cleaner brand Roomba, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, telling investors that its Chinese manufacturer will assume control going forward....

Watchdog links schedule change to replanning of UK payments system overhaul The European Central Bank's (ECB) decision to delay its move to a new messaging standard in 2022 ended up costing the Bank of England 23 million as it was forced to adjust migration to a new settlement system to avoid compounding risks....

Automaker admits raid that crippled its factories in August led to the theft of sensitive info Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has reportedly told staff the cyber raid that crippled its operations in August didn't just bring production to a screeching halt - it also walked off with the personal payroll data of thousands of employees....

Both admit attackers were already exploiting the bugs, with scant detail and hints of spyware-grade abuse Apple and Google have both issued emergency patches after zero-day bugs were caught being actively exploited in what the companies describe as "sophisticated" real-world attacks....

Minister insists 'modest' bill is not an assault on privacy-preserving tech The Danish government wants the public to weigh in on its proposed laws restricting use of VPNs to access certain corners of the internet....

I'm dreaming of a white hat mass Opinion It was 40 years ago that four young British hackers set about changing the law, although they didn't know it at the time. It was a cross-platform attack including a ZX Spectrum, a BBC Micro, and a Tatung Einstein slamming British Telecom's Prestel service over dial-up modems at 75 bits per second....