The Register

Direct-to-device services from low Earth orbit floated to plug coverage gaps Satellite phone services could play a part in Britain's troubled Emergency Services Network (ESN) project, including SpaceX's Starlink platform, to plug gaps in the coverage provided by terrestrial network tech....

Outsourcer promises customers a service with 'AI at its core.' They just want a website that works Exclusive Capita has told users of its ailing UK civil service pension portal to wait until new chatbots go live before contacting it again about problems....

Government 'incredibly' concerned about breach potentially affecting more than 100,000 patients New Zealand health minister Simeon Brown has ordered a review into the cyberattack at ManageMyHealth, which threatens the data of hundreds of thousands of Kiwis....

From buried settings to geopolitical risk, the business model is surveillance Opinion At the end of last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five of the largest TV companies, accusing them of excessive and deceptive surveillance of their customers....

Meet the Mean Avenger', the office anti-hero who steps in when managers don't defend their team Who, Me? How on earth is it 2026 already? The Register will ponder that existential matter after first presenting a new instalment of Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of things you shouldn't do at work, and how you escape them unscathed....

Also, Korean Air hacked, EmEditor installer hijacked, a perfect 10 router RCE vuln, and more infosec in brief The Trump administration has cleared a trio of individuals sanctioned by the Biden administration for involvement with the Intellexa spyware consortium behind the Predator surveillance tool, removing restrictions that had barred them from doing business with the US....

Lock 'em down interview AI agents represent the new insider threat to companies in 2026, according to Palo Alto Networks Chief Security Intel Officer Wendi Whitmore, and this poses several challenges to executives tasked with securing the expected surge in autonomous agents....

Rust veteran Steve Klabnik is using an LLM to explore memory safety without garbage collection Naming a new programming language "Rue" sounds like an acknowledgment of doubt about the project's prospects, if you take "Rue" to mean "regret."...

Repeat after me: Chatbots are not sentient and have no agency Grok, the AI chatbot owned and operated by Elon Musk's xAI, is facing a firestorm of outrage after users prompted it to create images of naked and scantily clad people from real photographs, some of whom are underage....

But how about some smart glasses instead? Apple's pricey Vision Pro VR headset had a tough 2025....

Exec argues we need a new metaphor focused on AI as a lever rather than a job killer Microsoft CEO and head AI peddler Satya Nadella wants you to know that it's time for the next phase of AI acceptance, where we focus on how humans are empowered by tools and agents and how we deploy resources to support this growth....

Netflix documentary part 2 in the works? Ilya Lichtenstein, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges tied to the 2016 theft of about 120,000 bitcoins from the Bitfinex exchange and was sentenced to five years in prison, has been released after roughly 14 months in the slammer....

For the bargain price of 6.5 bitcoin A cybercrook claims to have breached Pickett and Associates, a Florida-based engineering firm whose clients include major US utilities, and is selling what they claim to be about 139 GB of engineering data about Tampa Electric Company, Duke Energy Florida, and American Electric Power.The price is 6.5 bitcoin, which amounts to about $585,000....

EU 'closely monitoring' along with NATO as state action suspected but not confirmed Finnish police have arrested and are interviewing two crew members from a class A cargo ship sailing from Russia after suspected cable sabotage in the Baltic Sea....

A full-featured, Sixel-capable terminal browser for those who'd rather skip AI assistants Old-time web users will fondly remember Lynx, a text-only browser that ran from the terminal. Now, there's a Sixel-compatible web browser that runs completely from the terminal, and has all the graphics and modern features you'd expect....

The AI era needs more juice The AI-fueled datacenter boom continues apace, with Google parent Alphabet moving to acquire energy and infrastructure biz Intersect, while Elon Musk's xAI is reportedly planning to expand beyond its already huge complex in Tennessee....

Jacob Riggs is set to swap London for Sydney some time in the next year A British security researcher has secured Australia's strictest, invite-only visa after discovering a critical vulnerability in a government system....

Move will see spacecraft shift from 550 km to 480 km as collision risks rise Starlink is to lower the orbits of about half its satellite constellation over the course of this year, citing safety concerns....

Gavin Webb orchestrated Operation Cronos as it pulled off the legendary disruption sting A senior British crimefighter has been awarded one of the country's highest tributes for public service for his role in the 2024 LockBit ransomware takedown....

There is no automated substitute for experienced staff, and 'if there's one thing AI has a never-ending thirst for ... it's data' Interview If AI can take on the role of a junior programmer, what happens when senior staff start retiring? Industry veteran and CEO of Safe Software, Don Murray, reckons the technology is becoming indispensable, but the human can never be removed from the loop....

More tales of apocalypse avoided - including in an animal testing lab - and the hard work that made that possible ON CALL Y2K Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your tech support stories. Over the holiday season we're telling tales of the Y2K bug, and readers who spent December 31, 1999 on call in case the world's computers caused calamities....

'What do we need to do better?' El Reg talks to comms boss about the problem Interview Scientists and engineers have been taken aback by the amount of radio interference generated by satellite constellations, and many are calling on standards bodies to improve operator performance....

Do you want bork with that? Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's example of bork-in-the-wild shows that Microsoft is not the only game in town when it comes to screens having an IT moment in public. No, there will be no orders on this Firefox-based drive-thru kiosk at Wendy's....

Well kinda... Your call will be transferred to the next available assistant Microsoft had a special way of dealing with customers demanding to speak to its CEO. One that kept the customer happy without necessarily bothering His Billness....

GPUzilla has reportedly received orders for more than two million units With the sales ban lifted, Chinese tech giants, including ByteDance, are scrambling to secure orders for Nvidia's H200 graphics accelerators while they can. But will there be enough to satisfy demand?...

What, weekend warriors from Silicon Valley not good enough? The US Army has been all-in on becoming an AI-powered outfit for some time, and now it's creating a career path for officers to specialize in making its automation dreams come true....

As in past incidents, ESA says the impact was limited to external systems The European Space Agency has suffered yet another security incident and, in keeping with past practice, says the impact is limited. Meanwhile, miscreants boast that they've made off with a trove of data, including what they claim are confidential documents, credentials, and source code....

The world has passed it by in many ways, yet it remains relevant Feature In the early 1990s, internetworking wonks realized the world was not many years away from running out of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, the numbers needed to identify any device connected to the public internet. Noting booming interest in the internet, the internet community went looking for ways to avoid an IP address shortage that many feared would harm technology adoption and therefore the global economy....

El Reg speculates about what GPUzilla really gets out of the deal This summer, AI chip startup Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of $6.9 billion. Just three months later, Nvidia celebrated the holidays by dropping nearly three times that to license its technology and squirrel away its talent....

From COBOL and C to Linux and SQL, the unglamorous software that keeps the world running refuses to disappear Opinion COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for highvolume, highreliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes....

Funds in Money Safe' accounts are only available when customers appear for face-to-face verification Hong Kong's banks have a new weapon against scams: Accounts that require customers to visit a branch to access their funds....

Pair became ALPHV affiliates to prey on US-based clients A ransomware negotiator and a security incident response manager have admitted to running ransomware attacks....

Zohran Mamdani appears not to understand that smartphones can be used for evil New York's mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has invited the city's residents to join him at a block party to celebrate his inauguration but told attendees not to bring a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to the event....

The ITSM outfit would join Oracle, Comcast, and Netflix in installing bunk beds in the corner office ServiceNow's amended employment contract with CEO Bill McDermott extends his time with the company into the next decade, but also provides possible next steps for the journeyman corporate leader, including the co-CEO role, a position he held at SAP in the years prior to joining the ITSM juggernaut....

The solution? Lock up the screens and read to your kids If you're thinking of plopping your infant in front of a screen to get some peace and quiet, you might want to reconsider - higher screen exposure in infancy was linked to longer decision times later on and higher anxiety symptoms in the teenage years....

You didn't think you'd get to enjoy your time off without a major cybersecurity incident, did you? A high-severity MongoDB Server vulnerability, for which proofs of concept emerged over Christmas week, is now under active exploitation, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency....

Digital screen snafu or satirical comment on Microsoft's licensing policies? Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's Bork comes courtesy of an exhibition dedicated to the UK street artist Banksy and demonstrates that "Limitless" does not always apply to Windows Activation....

Want to survive the crash? Find another way to make money with GPUs Today, Nvidia's revenues are dominated by hardware sales. But when the AI bubble inevitably pops, the GPU giant will become the single most important software company in the world....

2026 is the year where AI must meet ROI in the enterprise, and the key to delivering it is data governance. Leaders from Dell, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake have released their 2026 predictions for AI in the workplace, and they agree that safeguards for AI agents and ROI are the top priorities for their customers....

Now replace the autopilot with Copilot Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork can happen to the best of us, but flashing one's undercarriage at the boss of a compliance company is less than ideal, particularly at 35,000 feet in the air....

One cert, in plaintext, on thousands of devices, led to what looks like years of crime South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT has found that local carrier Korea Telecom (KT) deployed thousands of badly secured femtocells, leading to an attack that enabled micropayments fraud and snooping on customers' communications - maybe for years....

General agents' to infuse Meta's products real soon now UPDATED Meta will acquire made-in-China AI outfit Manus and harness its general agent" technology across its products....

The deal negotiated in September locked Nvidia into a purchase price of $23 per share. Intel shares traded at $36 on Monday Nvidia's $5 billion Intel stock purchase is already worth $7.58 billion, turning the recently approved bailout of its rival into a shrewd financial play....

There's more where that came from, CEO says Rogue insiders suspected of taking bribes to hand over Coinbase customer records to criminals are beginning to face justice, according to CEO Brian Armstrong....

Extortion group Lovely claims to have stolen 40 million pieces of info from publisher Conde Nast A criminal group is beating Conde Nast over the head for not responding sooner to its extortion attempt by posting stolen subscribers' email and home addresses and warning the publisher of Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Teen Vogue that it has 40 million more entries....

There's a big salary up for grabs if you can handle a high-stress role with a track record of turnover How'd you like to earn more than half a million dollars working for one of the world's fastest-growing tech companies? The catch: the job is stressful, and the last few people tasked with it didn't stick around. Over the weekend, OpenAI boss Sam Altman went public with a search for a new Head of Preparedness, saying rapidly improving AI models are creating new risks that need closer oversight....

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try Opinion The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There's no reason to think this will change in 2026. However, through the magic of journalism, here's a world where that's not true, a world where other things are happening that will shape the future. We like to call it the real world, and here's what's happening there and why it matters....

20 years, multiple delays, and millions of dollars later, FI$Cal is live - mostly Since 2005, YouTube has gone from launching its first website to serving up more than 100,000 years' worth of video content every day. During the same period, the State of California has gone from the idea of adopting a single ERP, HCM, and procurement platform to getting nearly all of its departments on board - although there are still a few stragglers....

Countries that banded together to challenge Boeing in the air try to do the same to AWS, Microsoft, and Google on the ground Feature More than half a century ago, a consortium of European aerospace businesses from the UK, France, Germany and Spain joined forces to take on America's Boeing. Fast forward to the 21st century and the countries are applying the same model needs to the world of cloud computing, giving the continent a fighting chance to reduce the digital domination of Big Tech....

More millennial tech support tales from your fellow readers On Call Y2K Welcome to a special festive season edition of On Call, in which we share readers' stories of working on the 31st of December 1999 - the moment the tech world held its breath and hoped years of Year 2000 bug remediation efforts would work....