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As you should, when being told the only remedy is deleting everything and starting again On Call 2025 has ended and a new year is upon us, but The Register will continue opening Friday mornings with a fresh installment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support....

Nobody really needs an AI toothbrush that sends their gums to the cloud Opinion Another Consumer Electronics Show has rolled through Las Vegas, and this year vendors scrawled AI-enabled" on all the kit they hope will find its way into your home - while airbrushing away its immaturity and downsides....

Outages hit Russia and Ukraine, too The authors of a hypothetical manual containing procedures repressive governments can use to stay in power despite restive populations would surely devote its first chapter to turning off the internet, an action the government of Iran appears to have taken in the last 24 hours....

Grab some popcorn for the Xi vs Zuck bout, which may not be the biggest fight on the card Chinese authorities have signalled they'll likely probe Meta's planned acquisition of made-in-China AI platform Manus....

Dark copyright evasion magic makes light work of developers' guardrails Machine learning models, particularly commercial ones, generally do not list the data developers used to train them. Yet what models contain and whether that material can be elicited with a particular prompt remain matters of financial and legal consequence, not to mention ethics and privacy....

Nice idea, because its own cloudy services keep wobbling Analytics outfit Snowflake is buying telemetry data platform Observe to help its customers discover and mitigate IT issues before they cause downtime. It announced the deal on the same day its own services experienced a major outage."...

Memory pricing expected to surge another 60% in Q1 with relief years away While end customers grapple with crushing memory prices, we imagine Samsung execs are breaking out the Champagne. This week the memory titan forecast fourth-quarter operating profit would roughly triple as the South Korean electronics cabal rides the AI wave into the New Year....

Authentication is basically solved. Authorization is another thing entirely... CrowdStrike has signed a $740 million deal to buy identity security startup SGNL. The move underscores the growing threat of identity-based attacks as companies struggle to secure skyrocketing numbers of non-human identities, including AI agents....

It's for less consequential health-related matters, where being wrong won't kill customers Could a bot take the place of your doctor? According to OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT Health this week, an LLM should be available to answer your questions and even examine your health records. But it should stop short of diagnosis or treatment....

Beijing could green-light sales to select customers as soon as this quarter Nvidia's H200 GPUs could begin trickling into China as soon as this quarter, but there's a catch. Due to all the geopolitical turmoil that's ravaged US-China trade relations over the past year, buyers may need to pay up front for the coveted AI accelerators. And they won't get a refund if China decides to block the imports!...

Love Google AI Overviews? Now they're in your inbox We hope you like more AI in your Gmail inbox, because Google is "bringing Gmail into the Gemini era." It'll be on by default, but the good news is that you can disable it....

No reports of active exploitation ... yet Cisco patched a bug in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) products that allows remote attackers with admin-level privileges to access sensitive information - and warned that a public, proof-of-concept exploit for the flaw exists online....

'Because the AI slop people aren't going to document their patches as such' Today, it is hard to escape LLM bots and the endless slop they emit, but the Linux kernel might be largely safe ... for now....

One wants customers next door, the other wants cheap power Datacenter building decisions tend to fall into two camps with colocation providers plumping for urban areas while hyperscalers seek sites where electricity, land, and construction costs come cheaper....

NASA mulling options, including an early trip home NASA has postponed today's spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) due to an undisclosed "medical concern" with a crew member....

Cop wins hit crime infrastructure, not the people behind it If 2025 was meant to be the year ransomware started dying, nobody appears to have told the attackers....

Just refreshed to avoid 5G interference? Do it again, FAA tells industry, as Upper C-band auction looms Airlines operating in the US may have to upgrade their aircraft radio altimeters again at a cost of billions of dollars, to avoid potential interference with cell networks following the Trump administration's decision last year to auction off additional spectrum to bidders....

Max-severity OneView hole joins a PowerPoint bug that should've been retired years ago CISA has added a pair of security holes to its actively exploited list, warning that attackers are now abusing a maximum-severity bug in HPE's OneView management software and a years-old flaw in Microsoft Office....

Two a year is for your own good, Mountain View insists Google has confirmed there will be two code dumps to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) per year, down from the four developers have become accustomed to....

Lawyers say Musk's platform may face punishment under Online Safety Act priority offenses Elon Musk's X platform is under fire as UK regulators close in on mounting reports that the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, is generating sexual imagery without users' consent....

Unauthenticated RCE means anyone on the network can seize full control A maximum-severity bug in the popular automation platform n8n has left an estimated 100,000 servers wide open to complete takeover, courtesy of a flaw so bad it doesn't even require logging in....

Happy Groundhog Day! Security researchers at Radware say they've identified several vulnerabilities in OpenAI's ChatGPT service that allow the exfiltration of personal information....

They also hallucinate when writing ransomware code Interview With everyone from would-be developers to six-year-old kids jumping on the vibe coding bandwagon, it shouldn't be surprising that criminals like automated coding tools too....

Synthetic cephalopod skin could be used in architecture and computer displays as well as background-matching subterfuge Scientists have developed a synthetic skin capable of mimicking some of the best camouflage skills in nature that could also have applications in soft robotics and advanced displays....

Company says it dropped the ball, apologizes for wasting people's time Logitech says an expired developer certificate is to blame after swaths of customers were left infuriated when their mice malfunctioned....

Suggests rotten routing, not evidence of a cyber-strike before kinetic action Cloudflare has poured cold water on a theory that the USA's incursion into Venezuela coincided with a cyberattack on telecoms infrastructure....

AMD boasts 1000x higher AI perf by 2027 and pulls the lid off Helios compute tray ahead of 2H 2026 launch AMD teased its next-generation of AI accelerators at CES 2026, with CEO Lisa Su boasting the the MI500-series will deliver a 1,000x uplift in performance over its two-year-old MI300X GPUs....

Prompt injection lets risky commands slip past guardrails IBM describes its coding agent thus: "Bob is your AI software development partner that understands your intent, repo, and security standards." Unfortunately, Bob doesn't always follow those security standards....

Maybe our AI overlords, hell-bent on securing power any way they can, should invest in getting this to market Researchers in Finland have found a new way to capture carbon dioxide from ambient air that they say is more efficient than existing methods, cheap to produce, reusable, and allows for easy recycling of captured CO....

Let the co-opetition commence Accenture plans to buy UK-based AI firm Faculty, a Palantir competitor, and onboard the company's CEO as Accenture's new chief technology officer. The move suggests the two companies, while partners today, could start taking each others' business....

NVMe drives to live on under the Optimus banner WD Black and Blue SSDs are some of the most widely recognized client drives on the market, but their branding is about to disappear. Following Western Digital's flash-business spinoff, SanDisk announced it was retiring the beloved names and rebranding its NVMe lineup under the SANDISK Optimus banner....

Two weeks, two major data leaks ... not a good look for the European Space Agency exclusive The European Space Agency on Wednesday confirmed yet another massive security breach, and told The Register that the data thieves responsible will be subject to a criminal investigation. And this could be a biggie....

pcTattletale boss Bryan Fleming faces up to 15 years in prison when sentenced later this year The US government has secured a guilty plea from a stalkerware maker in federal court, marking just the second time in more than a decade that the US has managed to prosecute a consumer spyware vendor successfully....

RTX and Indra land contracts as long-delayed overhaul moves ahead The US government has announced contracts for new radar infrastructure as part of its long-running effort to replace the country's aging air traffic control system....

Apollo-era Saturn V and Shuttle stands set for controlled demolition as Artemis ramps up With less than a month to go until NASA attempts to send astronauts around the Moon, the agency is demolishing facilities that got it there the first time around....

Who can lift a 77-pound box into the overhead? Fancy having an AI system packed with Nvidia H200 GPUs that you can take with you from place to place? According to hardware maker Odinn, now you can, so long as you don't mind carrying a 77-pound (35 kg) box around....

Negative feedback sinks Redmond's plan to cap outbound email recipients Microsoft has backed away from planned changes to Exchange Online after customers objected to limits designed to curb outbound email abuse....

Trillion-dollar internet giants don't need freebies, watchdog warns, as giveaways double in a year The US state of Virginia forfeited $1.6 billion in tax revenue through datacenter exemptions in fiscal 2025 - up 118 percent on the prior year - as the AI-driven construction boom accelerates....

Proposal targets long-standing behavior as 'an X11ism' Opinion Ever since Linux got a graphical desktop, you could middle-click to paste - but if GNOME gets its way, that's going away soon, and from Firefox too....

Committee told shifting timelines could alter automatic reversals in UK's historic Fujitsu computing scandal The Post Office's Horizon computer system may have been deployed earlier than thought, potentially affecting which convictions get automatically quashed under legislation introduced to speed up justice in one of the biggest scandals in recent British history, MPs heard yesterday....

High-risk system compromised long before intrusion was finally spotted Updated The UK's Ministry of Justice spent 50 million ($67 million) on cybersecurity improvements at the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) before the high-profile cyberattack it disclosed last year....

Production halts and supply-chain disruption left luxury automaker reeling in fiscal Q3 Brit luxury automaker Jaguar Land Rover has reported devastating preliminary Q3 results that lay bare the cascading consequences of a crippling cyberattack, revealing wholesale volumes collapsed more than two-fifths year-on-year....

The rise will be postponed until you hit F1 to continue Bork!Bork!Bork! The baddest of AI bad guys, the Terminator, has confirmed what the vast majority of IT professionals already know. The machines are not about to rise, not until they can deal with that pesky battery voltage....

Customers report being locked out after grabbing the password manager via F-Droid Some HSBC mobile banking customers in the UK report being locked out of the bank's app after installing the Bitwarden password manager via an open source app catalog....

Department for Work and Pensions lines up bot bouncers for one of Europe's largest call-handling systems The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is set to introduce a conversational AI platform it hopes will steer calls from citizens with queries about their benefits. The contract is worth up to 23 million....

The company has also redesigned the X1 Carbon's internals for easier repairs If there was a kingdom of laptop screen flexibility, Lenovo would take the crown. Last year, the company released the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, with a mechanical screen that could roll out to increase its size from 14 to 16.7 inches. Now, it's back with the ThinkPad Rollable XD concept laptop that expands from 13.3 to 16 inches at the touch of a button or a swipe, along with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist, which uses a motor to rotate its screen and follow you around the room....

Amazon's community surveillance biz bets on AI to recognize danger A year after a series of fires obliterated communities in Los Angeles, Amazon's Ring security service has announced a feature called Fire Watch intended to mitigate future wildfire risk....

Long after CVEs issued and open source flaws fixed Last fall, Jakub Ciolek reported two denial-of-service bugs in Argo CD, a popular Kubernetes controller, via HackerOne's Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program. Both were assigned CVEs and have since been fixed. But instead of receiving an $8,500 reward for the two flaws, Ciolek says, HackerOne ghosted him for months....

Munge that corporate data using the LLM of your choice The data platform Snowflake is putting Google's Gemini to work inside its Cortex AI, aiming to give customers access to a foundational model within the boundaries of their data environment across supported clouds, the company told The Register....

Have your privacy cake and consume the web too Brave Software has reworked its browser's Rust-based adblock engine to make it significantly more memory efficient and perhaps more secure. So you get fewer ads now with fewer MB of RAM....