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The lack of trust that leads to outsourcing can be expensive On Call Y2K December 26th is a holiday across much of the Reg-reading world, but it's also a Friday - the day on which we present a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that recounts your tales of tech support encounters and exasperation....

Investment and interest have outpaced technology and society By the time the humanoid robots arrived at the Humanoids Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on December 11, the registration line had already extended downstairs to the lobby....

Two tiny boxes, 128 GB apiece - but very different strengths Hands On Most GenAI models are trained and run in massive datacenter clusters, but the ability to build, test, and prototype AI systems locally is no less relevant today....

Alternative apps to empower older versions of macOS or Windows Part 2 There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS....

Execs say DIY OpenAI connections risked pushing CRM data past the trust boundary' Salesforce users running Agentforce with ChatGPT Enterprise or Edu can now update CRM data directly from the bot, a move aimed at curbing home-built integrations that risk spilling data outside the company's controls....

Will businesses continue to invest in something that's shown so little return? opinion It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime....

AI goes off the rails ... because of shoddy guardrails Researchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts.Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."...

ATC: 'I don't know if you can hear me but cleared to land' In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado....

Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money thefts The US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts....

Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week....

Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amused Microsoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by....

Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not alone Feature Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero measurable returns on these efforts....

A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technology Seventy years ago, a child phoned the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) looking for Santa Claus - and found him, or at least some kindly military personnel who were willing to play along by helping the youngster to track Santa's location as he zipped around the globe....

Time running out for savin' MAVEN as stricken spacecraft still silent as Mars solar conjunction nears NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is continuing to evade attempts by engineers to make contact as the solar conjunction nears, halting contact with any Mars missions until January 16, 2026....

Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026 Part 1 You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two....

Plans move to Rust, with help from AI Microsoft wants to translate its codebase to Rust, and is hiring people to make it happen....

VMware's main challenger already embraces multiple storage options Amazon Web Services has given Nutanix a lovely Christmas present: Support for its AHV hypervisor in hybrid cloud storage rigs....

President Trump previously threatened 100 percent tariffs, administration now plans something else starting in 2027 World War Fee The United States will impose tariffs on semiconductors imported from China, starting in 2027....

Customers will be able to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows. After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products....

Automaker's third security snafu in three years Thousands of Nissan customers are learning that some of their personal data was leaked after unauthorized access to a Red Hat-managed server, according to the Japanese automaker....

Spacecraft set to burn up in a few weeks, but it could have been worse As if to underscore the need to avoid the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario in which cascading debris can make some orbits difficult to use, a Starlink satellite vented propellant and released debris following an onboard "anomaly" late last week....

Redmond gets in early for the twelve whoopsies of Christmas Microsoft has hustled out an out-of-band update to address a Message Queuing issue introduced by the December 2025 update....

You'll need to be using a Windows Insider build to see it The Windows 11 Run dialog box is one of the oldest pieces of user interface still in use. It works just fine, but it has an aesthetic that harkens back to earlier versions of Microsoft's operating system. Now, that's set to change....

Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it Opinion Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage....

Airline deploys AI travel agent and it hasn't been a disaster Non-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning."...

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month....

The company that bet the farm on AI said to have made things worse with AI Oracle's new AI-powered support portal is frustrating customers and support engineers who are struggling to find the basics, such as old tickets, links to database patch programs and release schedules for current databases....

Menu.exe not found Bork!Bork!Bork! The bork desk has temporarily reopened during the festive period. The tech world might be having a nap on the sofa after one mince pie too many, but bork never sleeps....

Cab drivers protested Uber's arrival, but Westminster has rolled out the welcome mat for clanker chauffeurs Robot taxis are coming to The Register's London home in 2026....

Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fix La Poste, France's postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident....

25 percent failure rate for JAXA's space truck, with the second stage again proving perilous Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has created a Special Task Force to investigate the failed launch of its H3 rocket on Monday....

And it's especially dangerous because the code works A malicious npm package with more than 56,000 downloads masquerades as a working WhatsApp Web API library, and then it steals messages, harvests credentials and contacts, and hijacks users' WhatsApp accounts....

SEC filings show the outfit cut projected 2027 cloud purchase commitments by $114M Security vendor Palo Alto Networks is expanding its Google Cloud partnership, saying it will move "key internal workloads" onto the Chocolate Factory's infrastructure. The outfit also claims it is tightening integrations between its security tools and Google Cloud to deliver what it calls a "unified" security experience. At the same time, Palo Alto may trim its own cloud purchase commitments....

Masayoshi Son better hope he made Santa's nice list Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI....

Ah, the good old days when 0-day development took a year Interview "In my past life, it would take us 360 days to develop an amazing zero day," Zafran Security CEO Sanaz Yashar said....

Shipments still waiting on approval from Beijing Now that it can legally export them, Nvidia has reportedly informed its Chinese customers that it'll begin shipping H200s, one of its most potent graphics accelerators for AI training and inference, in time for Chinese New Year. One caveat: Beijing could spike the deal before then....

Anna's Archive's idealism doesn't quite survive its own blog post What would happen to the world's music collections if streaming services disappeared? One hacktivist group says it has a solution: scrape around 300 terabytes of music and metadata from Spotify and offer it up for free as what it calls the world's first fully open" music preservation archive....

Judge says former most-wanted fugitive Mark Acklom will likely never return to the UK The UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says a fraudster who claimed to be part of MI6 must repay 125,000 ($168,000) to a former love interest that he conned....

Wasn't 2025 the year it happened? Yes. No. Answers on a Christmas card Opinion I've run Linux desktops since the big interface question was whether to use Korn or Bash for your shell. Before that, I'd used Unix desktops such as Visix Looking Glass, Sun OpenWindows, and SCO's infamous Open Deathtrap Desktop....

Relief for those dealing with data pipelines between the two, but move has its critics The EU has extended its adequacy decision, allowing data sharing with and from the UK under the General Data Protection Regulation for at least six more years....

Even with the latest Gparted Live, it's not easy to dual boot - but it's worth the hassle Hands On It's been a long time coming but version 1.0 of the first ground-up Rust-based desktop is here... and it is shaping up very well....

On-site staff keep key systems working while all but one region battles with encrypted PCs Romania's cybersecurity agency confirms a major ransomware attack on the country's water management administration has compromised around 1,000 systems, with work to remediate them still ongoing....

Rising rack densities are driving changes from grid connection to chip-level delivery Power semiconductors are soon set to become as vital as GPUs and CPUs in datacenters, handling the rapidly increasing loads forecast for AI infrastructure....

Public bodies migrate in the bloc as hyperscalers claim sovereignty Feature Europe's quest for digital sovereignty is hampered by a 90 per cent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, claims Cristina Caffarra, a competition expert and a driving force behind the Eurostack initiative....

Something messy happens when the cat hairs of reality meet the shiny hype of smart tech Opinion Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are trumped by accountancy's First Law of Finance: you must make money. iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with its Chinese manufacturing partner-cum-creditor poised to pick over the bones....

Total operational capacity just keeps rising Hyperscale datacenter operators nearly tripled their spending on infrastructure over the past three years in response to the AI craze, while the amount of operational capacity added each quarter has increased by 170 percent, with little sign so far of any slowdown....

Mousey wouldn't work, wah-wah-wah Who, Me? Welcome to Christmas week at The Register, an occasion we'll celebrate with another installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of workplace mistakes and mischief....

SK Telecom's epic infosec fail will cost it another $1.5 billion South Korea's government on Friday announced it will require local mobile carriers to verify the identity of new customers with facial recognition scans, in the hope of reducing scams....

PLUS: Debian supports Chinese chips ; Hong Kong's Christmas Karaoke crackdown; Asahi admits it should have prevented hack; And more! APAC in Brief Google and Apple last week started to allow developers of mobile applications to distribute their wares through third-party app stores and accept payments from alternative payment providers....

PLUS: Texas sues alleged TV spies; The Cloud is full of holes; Hospital leaked its own data; And more Infosec In Brief Google will soon end its Dark Web Report", an email service that alerts users when their personal information appears on the internet's dark underbelly....