The Register

D-Wave, Rigetti, others plummet nearly 50% after Huang says the obvious CES The quantum computing industry seems to be just as delicate as the qubits it relies on. Shares in some publicly traded QC companies saw steep declines today, following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's CES rather reasonable remark that practical quantum systems may still be 20 years away....

RUN/STOP Fitness app Garmin Connect got knocked down but got up again, after an unexplained outage that left fitness extroverts flummoxed....

Peach State already home to more than 50 bit barns Amazon's datacenter footprint in the US state of Georgia is set to swell, with an $11 billion investment proposed....

JPL's sky crane tech or private vendor to get $5-7B contract, before hitching lift back to Earth with ESA NASA says it needs until 2026 before making a final decision on how the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission will work....

Salt Typhoon? Unpatched network kit? Sorry, I think you're breaking up Never mind that whole Salt Typhoon hiccup - Verizon's reputation hit hasn't stopped it from securing a deal to upgrade the networks on 35 US Air Force bases with new 4G and 5G kit....

Devices on six-year-old firmware vulnerable to takeover and destruction Updated Argentine cybersecurity shop Eclypsium claims security issues affecting leading DNA sequencing devices could lead to disruptions in crucial clinical research....

Carefully crafted wooden box, LignoSat, is on its own Japan's wooden satellite, LignoSat, has been deployed into orbit from the International Space Station (ISS)....

Various data points compromised but no risk to flight security The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the United Nations' aviation agency, has confirmed to The Register that a cyber crim did indeed steal 42,000 records from its recruitment database....

GPUs and generative AI systems so hot right now... yet 'long-term trend remains,' says analyst Bets on the future demand for AI drove a 48 percent jump in spending on public cloud infrastructure last year, as cloud providers and enterprises both rushed to invest in servers and GPUs to support generative AI workloads....

'For 30 years you thought you were business geniuses,' veteran analyst tells resellers and distributors Opinion The tech hardware industry may be facing something of an existential crisis if one veteran analyst is correct - the days of shifting boxes are going to be limited to mere replacement cycles....

Maureen Costello hopes to 'empower' businesses with AI Google has hired Maureen Costello, a Microsoft and Accenture veteran, to the role of Vice President for UK, Ireland, and Sub-Saharan Africa regions as the UK's Competition Markets Authority (CMA) prepares to publish a provisional decision on its cloud services market investigation....

Here's what $20 gets you these days More than 4,000 unique backdoors are using expired domains and/or abandoned infrastructure, and many of these expose government and academia-owned hosts - thus setting these hosts up for hijacking by criminals who likely have less altruistic intentions than the security researchers who uncovered the backdoors....

HashiCorp co-founder's side project reaches 1.0 - er, 1.0.1 Ghostty is more interesting than it sounds, for several reasons: who wrote it, what it does, and the language it was written in are all more unusual than the ostensibly simple task it performs....

Regulator will see a 'participative' approach before imposing fines The UK market regulator said it would take a participative" approach to exercising its new powers under the legislation designed to curb the market power of tech giants and promote growth....

Plus: A peek at Nvidia's latest hype CES AMD unleashed a flood of CPUs at the annual CES super-conference this week in Las Vegas - chips that span the gamut from high-end desktop processors to those aimed at gaming notebooks, handhelds and, yes, so-called AI PCs....

Third-gen Xiangshan may be close to performance of Arm's made-for-HPC Neoverse 2 A key figure in in China's drive to develop processors based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture has said the project will deliver in 2025, perhaps with a design that could be a datacenter contender....

Security and cloud compute have so much more upside than the boring business of shifting bits Akamai has decided to end its content delivery network services in China, but not because it's finding it hard to do business in the Middle Kingdom....

Remember humanoid bot Asimo', which could kick balls and pour beer? It survives as EV software Honda has announced it has developed an operating system for electric vehicles, using tech it first developed for a humanoid robot named Asimo"....

If it's spelled like an A.S.S, acts like an ass, maybe it's just... The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched a probe into Tesla's software that allows cars to operate autonomously over short distances, after reports of the code crashing in a physical sense....

One of ya is gonna sing like a canary, prosecutors say The US Justice Department on Tuesday expanded its antitrust lawsuit against property management software vendor RealPage, which is accused of unlawful algorithmic rent-fixing, to include six of the largest US landlords while also proposing a settlement to resolve the case against one of the defendants....

Telcos would effectively fund grants paid to protect national security The outgoing boss of the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, has called on her colleagues to "quickly" adopt rules allowing the US regulator to stage a radio spectrum auction, the proceeds of which would fund the removal from American networks of equipment made by Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE....

Make America irate again CES The Consumer Technology Association has issued some fresh predictions of how much more Americans may have to pay for their hardware if Donald Trump's hard-line import tariffs are enacted....

'We're going to catch less bad stuff,' Facebook tycoon admits, but it's worth it to get Trump off his back Updated Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a whole bunch of changes designed to "get back to our roots around free expression" that, among other things, include ditching fact-checking moderators, and loosening content policies to allow previously restricted speech to proliferate....

A successful real-estate billionaire and Donald Trump walk into a bar... At a news conference on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump said Dubai-based luxury property developer DAMAC plans to invest $20 billion over an undisclosed period to build datacenters in the US....

Lots of new ways to cut labor costs, no mention of repairability CES John Deere's vision of the future of farming, quarrying, and landscaping has emerged at CES 2025, and it's one that includes far fewer jobs for equipment operators and plenty more machine-driven independence....

Crime forum-dweller claims to have leaked 42,000 documents packed with personal info The United Nations' aviation agency is investigating "a potential information security incident" after a cybercriminal claimed they had laid hands on 42,000 of the branch's documents....

LLMs do more for developers who already know what they're doing Large language models (LLMs) will write better code if you ask them, though it takes some software development experience to do so effectively - which limits the utility of AI code help for novices....

Hopes to elbow out competition on Arm-based hardware CES Qualcomm has unveiled the latest addition to its Snapdragon X Series of Arm-based chips to power Copilot+ PCs, targeting systems in the $600 range....

It's down to users to do the fact-checking themselves Apple plans to update an AI feature that produced an alarmingly incorrect summary of a BBC news story....

Marc Rogers is 'lucky to be alive' Marc Rogers, DEF CON's head of security, faces tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills following an accident that left him with a broken neck and temporary quadriplegia....

Bezos booster finally ready for action Blue Origin has named the date for the first launch of its New Glenn rocket - January 10....

Do you really need a new PC for Microsoft's latest and greatest? From the department of "because I can" comes news of Windows 11 24H2 running in 184MB of memory....

Engineer who works on ways to prove that code is mathematically correct finds his field is suddenly much less obscure Interview A notable flaw of AI is its habit of "hallucinating," making up plausible answers that have no basis in real-world data. AWS is trying to tackle this by introducing Amazon Bedrock Automated Reasoning checks....

Leaders miffed at 'unacceptable interference' Opinion It's been a busy month in the political brain of Elon Musk. The tech, automotive, and space entrepreneur has gone from mulling a donation to the Reform UK party worth around $100 million to calling its leader unfit....

Nation's dominant broadband plumber wins ahead of altnets Updated The UK government has signed contracts with BT Group's Openreach worth upwards of 289 million ($363 million) for the further build-out of fiber infrastructure to serve more rural areas as part of Project Gigabit....

Kind old Microsoft is worried about security and compliance ... nothing to do with a free storage loophole Still keeping data in unlicensed OneDrive accounts of long-gone users? The time has come to act: The data could soon become inaccessible or even permanently deleted....

That is not dead which can eternal lie... including the grandparent of C, apparently A 37-year-old compiler is gaining support for a new language... although as that language is 57 years old, we are possibly stretching the adjective "new" more than our post-holiday waistband....

TOPS, SCHMOPS, says Chipzilla, our NPUs may be slow but that doesn't matter Intel has announced new silicon for the edge, and products for laptops that lack one....

This could be the start of a saga to rival TikTok's troubles, and embroil Tesla and Microsoft The US Department of Defense has added Chinese messaging and gaming Tencent to its list of Chinese military company", a designation that won't necessarily result in a ban but is nonetheless unpleasant....

Record quarterly revenue at contract manufacturing giant suggests strong demand for hardware of all sorts Foxconn has singled out AI servers as a reason for its record revenue, and its suppliers' share prices surged on the news....

Tuned for running chunky models on the desktop with 128GB of RAM, custom Ubuntu CES Nvidia has announced a desktop computer powered by a new GB10 Grace-Blackwell superchip and equipped with 128GB of memory to give AI developers, researchers, and students the tools they need to run large models on the desktop....

It'll all end in tiers Dell has used the annual CES extravaganza in Las Vegas this week to announce a branding shakeup that closely resembles Apple's hardware naming policy....

Worker copy-pasted wrong YouTube URL, says ChainPatrol The errant copyright takedown of a popular video explaining Bitcoin, from Grant Sanderson's smash-hit YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown, has been reversed, with human error blamed....

But Jabbar did not live stream his actions on Jan 1, FBI confirmed The man who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of people in New Orleans on New Year's Day, killing 14, wore Meta's smart glasses to scout out the location prior to the attack, according to the FBI....

But don't worry, he's 'figured out' AGI comment Even at $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro, the service is struggling to turn a profit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lamented on the platform formerly known as Twitter Sunday....

Slumping market share, unwanted features ... no, it's the consumers who are wrong! CES Microsoft is continuing its push for users to adopt its new software paradigm, declaring 2025 "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh" and reminding everyone that Windows 10's end-of-support date is just around the corner....

Slow drip of compromised telecom networks continues The list of telecommunications victims in the Salt Typhoon cyberattack continues to grow as a new report names Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream among those breached by Chinese government snoops....

If you can't beat 'em, just imitate their branding, hide yours and hope they don't notice It looks like Microsoft has come up with a new trick to keep those who accidentally end up on Bing from leaving for Google: Simply mimic the look of Google's homepage and hope no one will notice....

Once installed, it helps itself to your data like it's a free buffet Android malware dubbed FireScam tricks people into thinking they are downloading a Telegram Premium application that stealthily monitors victims' notifications, text messages, and app activity, while stealing sensitive information via Firebase services....

Leap year curse strikes satellite broadband vendor Eutelsat's OneWeb constellation suffered a date-related meltdown last week while the rest of the IT world patted itself on the back for averting the Y2K catastrophe a quarter of a century ago....