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Original spacecraft deemed unsafe after cracks spotted in window The Shenzhou-20 astronauts have returned to Earth on the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft after engineers deemed the Shenzhou-20 vehicle unsafe following a debris strike while it was docked to the Tiangong space station....

Linux-powered PC, Arm VR headset, and refreshed controller all land on pre-order for next year The holiday season is almost upon us, but the new gear on gamers' wish lists won't arrive until next year....

Brussels reviewing proposal as Mountain View insists it will appeal antitrust ruling Google has proposed a plan to the European Commission aimed at addressing antitrust concerns following a 2.95 billion fine imposed on the company for its online advertising practices....

AI, cybersecurity, and geopolitical jitters forecast to push market to $1.4T next year IT spending in Europe will grow 11 percent next year to hit $1.4 trillion amid a desire for cloud sovereignty, according to Gartner....

Exploring the evolving relationship between human engineers and their algorithmic assistants Feature Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the way software gets built, tested, and maintained - but not in the simplistic, headline-grabbing sense of "AI replacing developers."...

Public Accounts Committee tears into department responsible for the most dangerous breach in British history The UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has failed to appropriately improve its data protection mechanisms, three years after the infamous 2022 Afghan data breach....

Why Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout Opinion At Tesla's annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, more than 75 percent of voting shares backed a compensation deal for CEO Elon Musk that would make him history's first trillionaire....

Windows giant disagrees and plans to appeal Microsoft's attempt to claim that its software can't be resold has hit a wall at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, which decided that Office having clipart does not mean customers can't sell their licenses on....

Watchdog says program buckled under procurement failures and technical complexity Updated The UK's state-owned savings bank has blown past its budget by 1.3 billion on a digital transformation program beset by delays, according to the National Audit Office....

Cybercrime crew has ravaged multiple private organizations using Oracle EBS zero-day for months The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is investigating claims of a cyberattack by extortion crew Clop....

FOMO trumps corporate governance when it comes to AI More than two-thirds of corporate executives say they've violated their own AI usage policies in the past three months, and over half of the leaders also ranked security and compliance as the greatest AI implementation challenge....

Org chart games were more important than speed and accuracy On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of tech support troubles and other workplace woes....

Getting by with a meager $2 billion quarterly capex - vastly less than rivals, but still cashing in on AI Chinese web giant Tencent's capital expenditure is slowing and the company expects it will decelerate further due to its inability to buy all the GPUs it wants....

Maintenance to end next year after helpful options' became serious security flaws' Kubernetes maintainers have decided it's not worth trying to save Ingress NGINX and will instead stop work on the project and retire it in March 2026....

Anthropic dubs this the first AI-orchestrated cyber snooping campaign Chinese cyber spies used Anthropic's Claude Code AI tool to attempt digital break-ins at about 30 high-profile companies and government organizations - and the government-backed snoops "succeeded in a small number of cases," according to a Thursday report from the AI company....

Consumer advocacy researchers at PIRG tested four AI toys, and none of them passed muster Picture the scene: It's Christmas morning and your child is happily chatting with the AI-enabled teddy bear you got them when you hear it telling them about sexual kinks, where to find the knives, and how to light matches. This is not a hypothetical scenario....

Browser maker scolds AI objectors, "The web is changing, and sitting it out doesn't help anyone" Mozilla is apparently a lot more excited about adding AI features to Firefox than its community. The org has decided that AI deserves its own new environment in the browser, a move its fans met with withering criticism....

Checkout.com will instead donate the amount to fund cybercrime research Digitial extortion is a huge business, because affected orgs keep forking over money to get their data back. However, instead of paying a ransom demand after getting hit by extortionists last week, payment services provider Checkout.com donated the demanded amount to fund cybercrime research....

Chinese search giant plans to bring custom silicon to the rack scale in 2026 with 256- and 512-chip systems Chinese search giant Baidu unveiled two new AI accelerators this week amid a national push to end reliance on Western chips....

Lawmakers warn of information gap' lets immigration agents sidestep states' data safeguards Democratic lawmakers say some states that don't want to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may be unintentionally allowing the agency access to residents' driver and criminal records through a law-enforcement data network....

Under a third of PoCs make it past testing, but those that do often boost productivity It is the best of AI times; it is the worst of AI times, depending on whom you ask. Nearly a third of firms are seeing almost total failure of their AI proof-of-concept (PoC) projects, while 46 percent are successfully moving more than 10 percent of theirs into operational use....

The goal of 'oxidizing' the Linux distro hits another bump Two vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 25.10's new "sudo-rs" command have been found, disclosed, and fixed in short order....

Third-party framework builds alternative backend using its own renderer and WebAssembly Microsoft's MAUI (Multi-platform App UI), the official .NET solution for cross-platform desktop and mobile apps, will get Linux and browser support via Avalonia, a third-party framework....

Lack of executive backing, unrealistic plans, and muddled goals remain recipe for failure In Barcelona this week, consultancy Gartner once again tried to answer one of the perennial questions in IT: what is it about ERP projects that makes them so likely to fail?...

Bezos booster blasted by solar emissions A blast from the Sun kept Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the pad as the Northern Lights forced NASA to halt the launch....

Promised for 2027 racks, mixing Nvidia and AMD silicon in one liquid-cooled box HPE's next-gen Cray supercomputing platform will offer a choice of compute nodes with Nvidia's Vera Rubin or AMD's upcoming Venice Epyc CPUs - or a mix of both....

Nearly 10,000 staff and contractors warned after attackers raided newspaper's Oracle EBS setup The Washington Post has confirmed that nearly 10,000 employees and contractors had sensitive personal data stolen in the Clop-linked Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) attacks....

Long before automatic updates, the Windows 95 team tweaked third-party software to keep it running How to get that all-important piece of software working on Windows has vexed Microsoft since the beginning of the operating system. Compatibility was king....

Government picks Wylfa on Anglesey for initial trio of units, but power unlikely before mid-2030s The UK will build its first small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear plant at Wylfa on Anglesey, an island off northwest Wales - but it won't generate power until the mid-2030s....

Majority of customers plan to favor domestic providers as sovereignty fears rise A survey of CIOs and tech leaders in Western Europe has found 61 percent want to increase their use of local cloud providers amid global geopolitical uncertainty....

Operation Endgame also takes down Elysium and VenomRAT infrastructure International cops have pulled apart the Rhadamanthys infostealer operation, seizing 1,025 servers tied to the malware in coordinated raids between November 10-13....

Broadband provider says damaged fiber and dormant failover path knocked customers offline for nearly 24 hours UK broadband provider Hyperoptic learned the importance of testing backup systems this week after the service went dark for customers in London....

Synnovis's 18-month forensic review of Qilin intrusion completed, now affected patients to be notified Synnovis has finally wrapped up its investigation into the 2024 ransomware attack that crippled pathology services across London, ending an 18-month effort to untangle what the NHS supplier describes as one of the most complex data reconstruction jobs it has ever faced....

Systemd-free option still available if you choose that download MX Linux 25 "Infinity" is now available, and the new version has some significant differences from the 2023 release, with things that used to be boot-time choices now more loaded pre-install decisions....

Networks have changed profoundly, except for the parts that haven't Systems Approach When my colleague and co-author Bruce Davie delivered his keynote at the SIGCOMM conference, he was asked a thought-provoking question: How should we think about educating the next generation of students about networking, given how different and more complex the internet is today?...

Go home, comrade clanker, you look drunk - and worryingly angry A semi-autonomous humanoid robot said to be Russia's first such machine has fallen over within seconds of facing the public for the first time....

Promises some easing of rules that knobble indie devs, eventually Google has decided to loosen some of its recently introduced rules regarding registration of Android developers and their apps, but isn't rushing to deliver the modest changes it plans....

Bills fell 10 percent after granular tests suggested JVM tweaks that improved performance Atlassian twice marked Amazon Web Services' Graviton CPUs off-limits for production purposes, but recently relented and now uses the processors to power thousands of server instances that run its Jira and Confluence products. So what changed?...

The 100 trillion-parameter models of the near future can't be built in one place Microsoft believes the next generation of AI models will use hundreds of trillions of parameters. To train them, it's not just building bigger, more efficient datacenters - it's started connecting distant facilities using high-speed networks spanning hundreds or thousands of miles....

Updated model may deliver a bit more unwanted content, but will be polite about it OpenAI on Wednesday introduced GPT-5.1, an AI model update that's "warmer," more conversational, and slightly more willing to blurt out unwelcome observations about sex, violence, and mental health in a way that invites emotional dependence....

But only a few states plus Puerto Rico will accept it Need to fly domestically, but want to leave your passport or driver's license at home? Apple has you covered, as long as you're using an iOS device and traveling between or within one of the dozen or so states that support digital IDs and Apple Wallet. Unfortunately, it's not clear which states those are, and the TSA's web site is not up to date thanks to the ongoing government shutdown....

600+ phishing websites and 116 of these use a Google logo Google has filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed China-based scammers, which it claims have stolen more than 115 million credit card numbers in the US as part of the Lighthouse phishing operation....

Microsoft internal financials also suggest AI flag bearer is nowhere close to $13 billion in revenues OpenAI may be burning far more capital serving its GPT-family of models than previously thought. Leaked documents show the company paying more than $12 billion to Microsoft for compute power since 2024 and suggest much weaker revenue than it needs to pay for all those expenses....

We take your privacy, seriously Google, perhaps not the first name you'd associate with privacy, has taken a page from Apple's playbook and now claims that its cloud AI services will safeguard sensitive personal data handled by its Gemini model family....

Red dwarf hurls plasma at speeds rarely seen from Sun, potentially stripping atmospheres from orbiting planets Astronomers have made the first definitive observation of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) on a nearby star....

Vendors (still) keep mum An "advanced" attacker exploited CitrixBleed 2 and a max-severity Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) bug as zero-days to deploy custom malware, according to Amazon Chief Information Security Officer CJ Moses....

Fashion house behind Jobs' turtleneck helps with pricey new accessory line Apple, the reassuringly expensive US technology brand, is selling a sock in which iPhone owners can house their gadget....

Jean-Baptiste Kempf lauded for keeping the media player free of crapware If you don't know what app will open a random media file (or URL), VLC is the answer. It runs on everything, plays anything, and it's free - thanks to Jean-Baptiste Kempf....

End of support? Not quite Microsoft released an emergency out-of-band update on November 11 to fix a malfunctioning enrollment wizard that prevented eligible Windows 10 users from accessing Extended Security Updates (ESU)....

Faster and easier to use but adopting the dev stack not without risks Microsoft has released C# 14 and .NET 10, a long-term support version, along with a bunch of related products including Visual Studio 2026 and Aspire 13. Copilot Free is included but devs will soon hit its limits....