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Manufacturers should have had ample time to apply the fixes MediaTek kicked off the first full working week of the new year by disclosing a bevy of security vulnerabilities, including a critical remote code execution bug affecting 51 chipsets....

With those whopping returns who could argue with the premis... oh wait The AI datacenter spending splurge looks likely to continue in 2025, with Microsoft alone saying it will invest $80 billion this year on building out infrastructure to train and deploy AI models....

Ten suborbital Starlink simulators to be flung from Musk's spacecraft SpaceX is pressing ahead with the next Starship test and has outlined the mission's goals, including deploying ten Starlink simulators....

Longer support for newer models won't save prior versions from scrapheap Google promised a decade of updates for its Chromebooks in 2023 to stop them being binned so soon after purchase, but many are still set to reach the end of the road in 2025 and over the next several years....

But investors still betting big on bit barns thanks to AI and cloud demand Datacenter operators are facing a paradoxical crisis - demand for their services is greater than ever before, just as access to power, environmental concerns, rising costs and skill shortages have begun to threaten necessary infrastructure expansion....

Legal tussle over resale of on-prem perpetual licenses kicked off four years ago The legal saga involving reseller ValueLicensing, Microsoft, and perpetual licenses continued through 2024 and is set for trial in 2026....

If 40 years of faulty building gets blown down, don't rebuild with the rubble Opinion When a typhoon devastates a land, it takes a while to understand the scale of the destruction. Disaster relief kicks in, communications rebuilt, and news flows out. Salt Typhoon is no different....

Weird syntax AND/OR a junior techie can be very bad for business Who, Me? Have you remembered it's 2025 yet? The Register asks the question because it's often the small things that make for the kind of big problems that we share each week in Who, Me?", the column that celebrates readers' escapes from their errors....

Will they make price rises palatable? Or bring more of what new Netflix lawsuit calls Broadcom's Buy. Chop up. Raise prices' business plan? Broadcom's annual report reveals two items of note for VMware customers: two planned major releases of its flagship VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite due in March and July this year....

More evidence of Beijing's liking for gray zone warfare, or a murky claim with odd African entanglements? Taiwanese authorities have asserted that a China-linked ship entered its waters and damaged a submarine cable....

PLUS: DoJ bans data sale to enemy nations; Do Kwon extradited to US; Tenable CEO passes away; and more Infosec in Brief Welcome to 2025: hopefully you enjoyed a pleasant holiday season and returned to the security operations center without incident - unlike Volkswagen, which last week admitted it exposed data describing journeys made by some of its electric vehicles, plus info about the vehicle's owners....

State masks up finally - its IP addresses, that is Florida witnessed a massive rise in VPN demand on New Year's Day after Pornhub began prohibiting people from accessing its site from within the Sunshine State, it is claimed....

Even Microsoft's lead architect misunderstood the failure Opinion The resurfacing of a 1995 Usenet post earlier this month prompted The Reg FOSS desk to re-examine a pivotal operating system flop ... and its long-term consequences....

New tool for genetic analysis promises greater insights from the extraction of ancient DNA Software developed to investigate more detailed differences between ancient DNA data has proved its worth this week after a paper describing human population movements in Europe in the first millennium AD was published in the science journal Nature....

If they're not consuming HO directly, the power plant almost certainly is Feature The explosive growth of datacenters that followed ChatGPT's debut in 2022 has shone a spotlight on the environmental impact of these power-hungry facilities....

When the FBI urges E2EE, you know it's serious business interview In the wake of the Salt Typhoon hacks, which lawmakers and privacy advocates alike have called the worst telecoms breach in America's history, the US government agencies have reversed course on encryption....

Because we're all still kids - just richer The debate as to whether Lego is a toy or not largely depends on your willingness to accept revisiting childhood excitement as an adult, especially when it's now far more likely to be you footing the bill than your parents....

Points finger at third-party infrastructure being breached French tech giant Atos today denied that Space Bears criminals breached its systems - but noted that third-party infrastructure was compromised by the ransomware crew, and that files accessed by the crooks included "data mentioning the Atos company name."...

And, magically, a repo appears on GitHub with attribution Closed-source browser extension Pie Adblock was this week accused of copying code and text from rival uBlock Origin in violation of the latter's software license - the GNU GPL version 3....

Web giant now pledges full support A warehouse worker at an Amazon facility in Mobile, Alabama, who was struck by a truck and shot in the New Orleans New Year's Day deadly terror attack, was initially denied medical leave by the internet mega-giant, possibly due to an HR mix-up....

Redmond's pause to redesign planned datacenters won't scuttle this project, say Mount Pleasant officials Count the residents of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin opposed to their town becoming a tech hub lucky: First, Foxconn abandoned its original $10 billion LCD factory plan in the town, and now Microsoft has reportedly paused construction on portions of its $3.3 billion datacenter campus, which is being built on land initially optioned for Foxconn's megaproject....

Locals demand transparency - and a refund wouldn't hurt Feature When data scientist Andrew Breza learned that the Washington, D.C. attorney general was suing Amazon for excluding his zip code from its fastest delivery service, he immediately wanted to see the proof for himself - and he found it....

Not just AWS, Microsoft et al that are betting on nuclear energy, 13 federal agencies get in on act too Constellation Energy has won contracts worth more than $1 billion from the US government to supply nuclear power to over 13 federal agencies, validating efforts by datacenter operators to secure their own atomic sources....

With Intel's foundry future in doubt, Micron takes center stage in US Chips Act push Comment The US once led the world in the development and manufacturing of semiconductors and integrated circuits. And the $280 billion US CHIPS and Science Act sought to reestablish the country as a semiconductor manufacturing superpower and alleviate reliance on foreign fabs....

A somewhat savvy hardware move may have hurt street cred of an important language Feature A generation of gray-haired IT folks learned computing using BASIC on 1980s home computers. Every pro since then holds it in disdain. What happened?...

Clears way for 'new opportunities' for collab, say pair IBM and semiconductor maker GlobalFoundries have settled all of their litigation against each other, including breach of contract, patent, and trade secret suits, the pair say....

Being more diplomatic than the politicians makes sense amid fear of upsetting the next US President A eerie quiet has descended upon elements in the tech exec community, and even the typically more vocal souls in the highest seats in corporations are scared to put the wrong foot forward ahead of a certain President Elect coming to power....

As if the bot defense measure wasn't obnoxious enough Though the same couldn't be said for most of us mere mortals, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch had a productive festive period, resulting in a CAPTCHA that requires the user to kill three monsters in Doom - on nightmare mode....

Mini-C is a subset of C that can be automatically turned to Rust without much fuss Computer scientists affiliated with France's Inria and Microsoft have devised a way to automatically turn a subset of C code into safe Rust code, in an effort to meet the growing demand for memory safety....

Runny Clegg scrambles for door The Right Honourable Sir Nick Clegg (to give him his full title) has stepped down from his job as Meta's president of global affairs....

System which went live in 2009 cannot be supported by another supplier, tax collector says The UK tax collector has handed Accenture an additional 35.2 million without competition on a 70.4 million contract which was never tendered....

South African retailer struggles with SAP implementation, says it is making improvements Readers will be familiar with the concept of return on investment (ROI) - when a tech project saves more than it costs - but less well-known is the idea that, like in particle physics, there exists an anti-ROI....

Expansion port on the back lets you add Outfits with added functions Review HMD's Fusion smartphone has a pogo-pin port on the back, allowing some nifty peripherals, including gaming controls, and its specs are open....

Homomorphic-based Enhanced Visual Search is so privacy-preserving, iPhone giant activated it without asking Apple last year deployed a mechanism for identifying landmarks and places of interest in images stored in the Photos application on its customers iOS and macOS devices and enabled it by default, seemingly without explicit consent....

Set aside the bat'leth to fix trivial problem for p'takh On Call Welcome to the year 2025, which just three days ago was in the future! Welcome, also, to a new instalment of On Call, The Register's Friday column whose ongoing mission is to take your kind contributions of tech support stories and share them with the world....

SoCal plod resort to paper logs after system that top brass was warned would 'inevitably fail' did exactly that Software on the computers in America's largest sheriff's department's patrol cars broke down on New Year's Eve due to what appears to be a date-related glitch....

OFAC, Office of the Treasury Secretary feared hit in data-snarfing swoop Chinese spies who compromised the US Treasury Department's workstations reportedly stole data belonging to a government office responsible for sanctions against organizations and individuals....

No more back-and-forth: Rosenworcel tells Congress the issue needs legislating The prolonged fight for net neutrality in America has shifted once again, with the FCC's resurrected regulations struck down by a panel of appeals court judges today....

Even the sound of a zip could be enough to start the recordings, according to claims Apple has filed a proposed settlement in California suggesting it will pay $95 million to settle claims that Siri recorded owners' conversations without consent and allowed contractors to listen in....

With today's connected tech, a similar-scale bug would be hard to squash Comment Twenty-five years ago on January 1, despite panic and fear that the world was soon to collapse into chaos, nothing much happened....

Connectivity direct to unmodified mobes looms, thanks to Starlink and co Analysis This year saw the launch of the first satellite constellations designed to provide commercial services straight to unmodified smartphones, which looks set to become the biggest satellite use case, with the US leading the way on adoption....

After lawsuits and poison pills, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards failed to resist the lure of Oracle's ambition Feature Twenty years ago next week, Oracle closed the $10.3 billion deal to buy HR and finance software specialist PeopleSoft after a fraught, drawn-out, hostile takeover....

Statcounter figures show Windows 11 losing user love Microsoft's 2025 is off to a bad start amid statistics that show users are still giving Windows 11 a wide berth as Windows 10 continues to dominate the desktop operating system market....

40% of world's servers are 6 years +, drink 66% of DC energy, provide 7% of compute. Please refresh, says HPE Four in ten of the servers currently residing in datacenters across the globe are at least six years old. Meanwhile, not only does this 40 percent slice consume 66 percent of the energy used by all bit barns - they also only provide 7 percent of the world's total compute....

That strange time between Christmas and New Year - perfect for changing production projects Microsoft left an unwelcome gift under the tree for .NET developers - an "unexpected" change to the distribution of installers and archives, which could hit production systems....

Warning of planned hikes limit forecasts to just 2% shipment growth for US market in 2025 Import tariffs proposed by the incoming Trump administration could cause PC prices in the US to jump 46 percent, stifling market growth in 2025 despite the looming Windows upgrade deadline and vendors eagerness to promote AI-based computers....

Nine in ten of our implementations are a success, CEO Carl Eschenbach tells The Reg Interview Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach insists more than 90 percent of the SaaS HR and finance application vendor's rollouts are a success, putting aside the company's high profile difficulties in Maine and Iowa state-level projects....

But other obstacles remain before developers get free choice of storage and analytics engines Analysis Last week, AWS jumped into Iceberg with both feet. S3 Buckets, the near-ubiquitous storage containers for developers, got another layer. The dominant cloud platform provider introduced S3 Tables, for storing data in Apache Iceberg, an open table format (OTF), which promises developers and data engineers the ability to bring their analytics engines of choice to their data, wherever it resides, instead of moving it....

Can it topple x86 and Arm, or is the gap too wide to close? Feature RISC-V has been talked up as a challenger to Arm and x86, offering an open royalty-free architecture that promises flexibility and innovation without licensing costs. But for all the noise, you're more likely to find it buried inside IoT gadgets and obscure embedded systems than powering anything that'll typically grab a headline....

Microsoft will stop at nothing to advertise its services BORK!BORK!BORK! A reminder today that bork -the nickname The Register gives to IoT displays gone awry - is truly international....