The Register

The predictions that turned out correct ... and the ones we wished were right Systems Approach The end of the year is often a time for people in tech to make predictions, but rather than making our own, today we'll look back on some of the bold predictions of the past - specifically the inaugural Outrageous Opinion session held at SIGCOMM in 1995....

5G networks won't have the capacity to cope by end of the decade Comment If you think 5G networks have failed to live up to their promise, you're not alone. But the tech is still early on in implementation, although some in the mobile industry are already looking to what might come next....

Cleaning up after hackers is easy compared to surviving the politics of consultancy On Call It's the last Friday of 2023, but because the need for tech support never goes away neither does On Call, The Register's Friday column in which readers share their tales of being asked to fix the unfeasible, in circumstances that are often indefensible....

E-tail giant seeks profitability for its vid-streaming service and a classic Big Tech dominance play Analysis Amazon.com has emailed subscribers to its Prime Video service, in America at least, to advise them ads will start to appear in their movie and TV streams as of January 29 - unless they pay more....

Google accused of tracking you even when you think it won't The lawsuit brought against Google by netizens upset Incognito Mode in Chrome did not fully anonymize their activities looks set to settle before going to trial....

For now Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is back on sale in China - in a less capable configuration version designed to comply with US restrictions on exports into the Middle Kingdom....

Io, Io, it's off to work we go NASA's Juno mission is to close out 2023 with a low pass over Io, one of Jupiter's many moons....

What can be learned from MGM's and Caesars' infosec moves Feature The same cybercrime crew broke into two high-profile Las Vegas casino networks over the summer, infected both with ransomware, and stole data belonging to tens of thousands of customers from the mega-resort chains....

'This is no ordinary vulnerability' sec pros explain Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) has exposed a previously unknown "feature" in Apple iPhones that allowed malware to bypass hardware-based memory protection....

Suppliers don't know much about what's going on. Which leaves users in limbo, too Broadcom has told VMware partners the virtualization champion's channel program will end in early 2024....

Readers share more filthy tales of cruddy computers, including a potentially explosive airport issue ON CALL: DIRT FILE The On Call mailbag is bulging with contributions from readers who want to add to The Register's Dirt File, a seasonal spin-off of our weekly On Call column about tech support nightmares that focuses on the dirtiest, nastiest, grottiest, and filthiest environments in which readers have been asked to work....

Home of the .asia gTLD has had a challenging year Special report DotAsia, the organization that runs the .asia registry, has reconstituted its board after its most recent election was disputed, then conducted anew....

Foundry site due to open in 2028 ... assuming it's not, y'know, delayed or cancelled The government of Israel has agreed to contribute $3.2 billion in grants to support the construction of a $25 billion fab at Intel's Kiryat Gat site in the country....

Stick WMR next to 3D TVs, Segways, and maybe soon generative AI Microsoft has admitted what the rest of the tech world has long suspected: Windows Mixed Reality has no future at the IT giant, and the platform will be yanked from a future release of the operating system....

'A business model based on mass copyright infringement' The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming the duo infringed the newspaper's copyright by using its articles without permission to build ChatGPT and similar models. It is the first major American media outfit to drag the tech pair to court over the use of stories in training data....

'Our licenses aren't working anymore,' says free software pioneer Interview Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement....

Leftover Christmas dollars burning a hole in your pocket? Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches vanish from shelves Updated The game of patent ping-pong over the Apple Watch and Ultra 2 has continued as the phone maker filed an appeal over an import ban of the devices into the US....

Large language models one day may automate your day-to-day work chores - without getting you fired, we hope Comment Large language models seem poised to evolve from AI chatbots generating synthetic content on your screen to virtual agents that are capable of performing actions on your PC right at your desk....

PLUS: Fujitsu Japan spins out servers, storage, and PCs; Japan's moonshot on track; Samsung reportedly delays Arizona fab opening Asia In Brief Infosys has lost a ten-year, $1.5 billion deal it announced just three months ago in September 2023....

Turing Award winner whose research and startups broke ground for five decades, tells The Reg he has more up his sleeve Interview What if we built the operating system on top of the database instead of the other way around? It sounds like an idea from an undergraduate student after one microdose too many, except it's not. It's a serious idea from someone who has already upended the computing industry and whose influence has spread into familiar products from Microsoft and Oracle....

From the cutting edge of physics research to a valuable monitoring tool Space Extenders II SOHO, a joint ESA and NASA mission, is still going strong after almost thirty years since launch and at this point the craft is an essential part of space infrastructure....

Air cooling holdouts take notice, the fun stuff is all liquid Analysis As Moore's Law slowed to a crawl, chips, particularly those used in AI and high-performance computing (HPC), have steadily gotten hotter. In 2023 we saw accelerators enter the kilowatt range with the arrival of Nvidia's GH200 Superchips....

The MIT and New Jersey schools of software design, and how big lies turned into holy truths Feature Digging into stories of 1980s OSes, a forgotten war for the future of computing emerges. It was won by the lowest bidders, and then the poor users and programmers forgot it ever happened....

Bell Labs made it bulge then Gordon Moore made it deflate Opinion It is, as the more observant may have noticed, Christmas time again. In all decent households, this marks the traditional giving and receiving of tech toys, many millions of which will have been hauled around the world by Santa and his reindeer....

Another chunk of science, another mission extension. But probe is running on fumes Space Extenders II The Mars Express recorded the highest clouds ever seen above the surface of a planet, as well as water ice on Mars' polar caps. And although the veteran spacecraft is now seemingly entering the final phase of its journey, this good thing isn't coming to an end just yet....

Also: International cops crackdown on credit card stealers and patch these critical vulns Infosec in brief Iranian cyberspies are targeting defense industrial base organizations with a new backdoor called FalseFont, according to Microsoft....

Looking into our crystal ball we can see the end of 2024 will be filled with ... AI. So much AI Analysis Microsoft is betting the farm on AI apathy not hitting before it makes a return on its investments. This is positive and negative news for PC makers and points to what might be Microsoft's next major Windows release....

How do you break into the bad guys' ranks? Master the lingo and research, research, research Feature When AlphV/BlackCat's website went dark this month, it was like Chrimbo came early for cybersecurity defenders, some of whom seemingly believed law enforcement had busted one of the most menacing cyber criminal crews....

From ebooks, to videos and software, the answer is increasingly no Opinion What do Amazon, Sony, and Broadcom all have in common? Give up? Each, in their own way, has made it clear that when you buy something from them, you don't actually own it....

It was only a matter of time until enthusiasm alone wasn't enough On Call As Christmas approaches, The Register wants to thank readers for the gift of On Call - the weekly column you make possible by sharing stories of your most torrid tech support encounters. On Call appears every Friday morning, UK time, and based on the volume of traffic and comments it generates appears to be a reader favorite....

Switchzilla likes what eBPF does for multicloud networking and security Cisco has bought itself a Christmas present: Isovalent, the startup that originated Cilium, an open source networking, observability, and security tool recently graduated to full project status by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation....

Beijing also wants its human gene-editing kit - and LiDAR- to stay at home China has added a host of technologies related to rare earth production to its list of restricted exports....

Governments may dictate where or when you use it, but it's not a gift card Interview As the tide of enthusiasm for cryptocurrency ebbs, new forms of digital currency are emerging, including something called purpose bound money (PBM) - digibucks that can only be spent in certain ways coded into them by their issuers, or would only change hands under certain conditions....

Arion Kurtaj will remain hospitalized until a mental health tribunal says he can leave Two British teens who were members of the Lapsus$ gang have been sentenced for their roles in a cyber-crime spree that included compromising Uber, Nvidia, and fintech firm Revolut, and also blackmailing Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games....

Rapid unscheduled disassembly not exactly a desirable quality for medical imaging equipment Philips is recalling hundreds of MRI machines around the globe over concerns the medical imaging equipment could explode during normal operation - something a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bulletin states has already happened once before....

COPPA changes on the horizon. Meta, Amazon and friends must be thrilled It will soon be more difficult for corporations to collect and monetize kids' data in the US if the FTC goes ahead with several changes to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)....

Merry Xmas! Now get out For 311 workers in Santa Clara and Folsom, California, it wasn't the Grinch who stole Christmas: it was Intel....

Seriously, people - please check the stuff you fetch more carefully Security vendor Sonatype believes developers are failing to address the critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the Apache Struts 2 framework, based on recent downloads of the code....

Automating people out of business processes will not go well at all, mark our words Comment Artificial intelligence, meaning large foundational models that predict text and can categorize images and speech, looks more like a liability than an asset....

DOM-XSS attacks have become scarce on Google websites since TT debuted Mozilla last week revised its position on a web security technology called Trusted Types, which it has decided to implement in its Firefox browser....

Take an M1 or M2-powered Mac and turn it into a fast ARM64 PC, if that's what you fancy The Asahi Linux team has released the first version of its Fedora 39 remix for Apple Silicon Macs - at least the first couple of generations....

My card could beat up your card Analysis Any time we write about vendor supplied benchmarks and performance claims they're accompanied by a warning to take them with a grain of salt....

We asked you to share the dirtiest places you've been asked to work. Here are some of your filthy answers On Call: Dirt File Each Friday, The Register shares another instalment of On Call, our weekly tale of epic tech support efforts....

Very Large Online Platforms status means NSFW sites must clean up their acts The European Commission has designated three websites that host sexually explicit material as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) under the Digital Services Act - status that means the trio will be more highly regulated than other online services....

Privacy review finds breach response plan is a mess, training could be better, but protection regime mostly holds up NASA's Office of Inspector General has run its eye over the aerospace agency's privacy regime and found plenty to like - but improvements are needed....

Like Uber, but with drivers overseen by cab companies ... for now Japan will open its transport market to rideshare companies for the first time in 2024....

Small rack to lift off in 2027 - we reckon it might be 10U or 12U, which can pack a lot of power Axiom Space says it plans to build and launch an orbital datacenter to support missions aboard its upcoming commercial space station....

Why keeping your PC secure and free of malware remains paramount IBM Security has dissected some JavaScript code that was injected into people's online banking pages to steal their login credentials, saying 50,000 user sessions with more than 40 banks worldwide were compromised by the malicious software in 2023....

Research highlights how major attacks like those exploiting Booking.com are executed Cybercriminals are preying on the inherent helpfulness of hotel staff during the sector's busy holiday season....

Sure, bogus blood tests are bad, but have you considered tricking doctors into embedded useless tubes? The CEO of a now-bankrupt medical technology supplier has been charged for a second time with crimes connected to the development of a "non-functional piece of plastic" implanted in patients to keep up the appearance of profitability....