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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....

What if AI vendors focused on the demand side? Interview "I think everybody is adopting AI irresponsibly and I think it's going to have a net negative outcome on the socio-economic standing of the world," said Bars Juhasz. "So let's see if we can't pitch more of a win-win future."...

A rare case of deliberately trying to induce an outage UPDATED A staffer at the USA's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable backup generators powering some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors....

We haven't even hit the peak, TechInsights tells El Reg If you were hoping for some relief from stratospheric memory pricing, don't hold your breath. DRAM prices aren't expected to peak until at least 2026, TechInsights analyst James Sanders tells El Reg....

Custom-designed $10,000 scooter goes 65mph, has a 60-mile range, and runs silently hands on Infinite Machine, a New York-based electric vehicle startup, began with a stolen Vespa....

Latest charges join the mountain of indictments facing alleged Tren de Aragua members A Venezuelan gang described by US officials as "a ruthless terrorist organization" faces charges over alleged deployment of malware on ATMs across the country, illegally siphoning millions of dollars....

But not Phil Collins, sadly The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a Christmas gift for the AI industry in the shape of agreements for collaboration in the Trump administration's Genesis Mission, which aims to use AI to drive scientific discoveries....

Newly disclosed vulnerability already being abused, users urged to lock down exposed firewalls WatchGuard is in emergency patch mode after confirming that a critical remote code execution flaw in its Firebox firewalls is under active attack....

Attackers helped themselves to historical personal info on 27K people The University of Sydney is ringing around thousands of current and former staff and students after admitting attackers helped themselves to historical personal data stashed inside one of its online code repositories....

UK state-owned bank admits revised plan runs beyond contract end with Atos Already 1.4 billion over budget and four years late, a tech transformation project at a UK state-owned bank is outside HM Treasury spending limits and timetable under a revised plan from systems integrator Capgemini....

Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheen The new pearOS distro is a Romanian project that picks up the concepts behind the original Pear Linux from 2011 and updates them. It's not going to turn the distro world upside down, but it's fun, interesting, and a showcase for the versatility and customizability of the Linux desktop....

Maximum-severity vuln lets unauthenticated attackers execute code on trusted infra management platform Hewlett Packard Enterprise has told customers to drop whatever they're doing and patch OneView after admitting a maximum-severity bug could let attackers run code on the management platform without so much as a login prompt....

Virgin Media the last to go as users of older mobiles warned to upgrade Britain is set to become a post-3G nation as Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) prepares to be the last of the country's mobile networks to switch off its 3G service, although it may linger for a while at a few sites....

Tech exec admits not dead cert it'll find the right solution Exclusive Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud - but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider....

Officials admit 'there certainly has been a hack,' but refuse to confirm China link or data theft The UK's Foreign Office is investigating a confirmed cyberattack it learned about in October, senior ministers say....

Ofcom survey finds 18-34s increasingly see life online as bad for society and their mental health Young Brits are souring on the internet, with increasing numbers seeing it as damaging to society and their mental health, according to latest research published by Ofcom....

Coming with added 'filters and rules' after prototype spat out inaccurate or outright wrong responses The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) will add an AI chatbot to its GOV.UK app in early 2026, before rolling it out across the GOV.UK website used by most government departments and services....

Are pasties a proxy for weight? Or a cypher for circumference? The Reg Standards Bureau was plunged into uproar this week when a reader suggested a new unit for weight, inspired by Cornwall's revamped food recycling service....

Hey, teacher, leave that cabling alone On Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your stories of tech support jobs so wrong, they're right....

Optus gave bad instructions, staff didn't escalate their concerns Technicians working on a firewall upgrade made at least ten mistakes, contributing to two deaths, according to a report on a September incident that saw Australian telco Optus unable to route calls to emergency services....

Beijing wants to 'seize the initiative in the international competition in cyberspace' Chinese authorities on Thursday certified the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI), a vast research network that Beijing hopes will propel the country to the forefront of networking research....

Plus: Lazarus Group has a brand new BeaverTail Even Amazon isn't immune to North Korean scammers who try to score remote jobs at tech companies so they can funnel their wages to Kim Jong Un's coffers....

Even if Mozilla is going to add an AI kill switch, that may not be enough to reassure many. Waterfox, a popular fork of Firefox, is saying nay to AI. Considering how unpopular Mozilla's plan to botify its browser has become, this could win the alternative some converts....

Customers in 10 of the company's 23 regions had operations fail or take an extended amount of time to complete." Snowflake pushed an update this week that caused a major outage" worldwide, leaving many users unable to query data, experiencing failures when ingesting files, and receiving error messages for 13 hours, the company wrote in an impact statement....

Study finds built-in browsers across gadgets often ship years out of date Web browsers for desktop and mobile devices tend to receive regular security updates, but that often isn't the case for those that reside within game consoles, televisions, e-readers, cars, and other devices. These outdated, embedded browsers can leave you open to phishing and other security vulnerabilities....

'Within 10 minutes of gaining initial access, crypto miners were operational' Your AWS account could be quietly running someone else's cryptominer. Cryptocurrency thieves are using stolen Amazon account credentials to mine for coins at the expense of AWS customers, abusing their Elastic Container Service (ECS) and their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources, in an ongoing operation that started on November 2....

NGMN warns fragmented standards leave operators guessing about power use The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) alliance is calling for standardized ways to measure energy consumption, saying that the industry cannot deliver on its efficiency and sustainability goals without them....

Ambitious timelines don't bend the laws of physics Just when you thought 2025 couldn't get any weirder, Trump Media and Technology Group - best known for Truth Social - is jumping into the still-nascent but heavily funded nuclear fusion industry via a planned merger with TAE Technologies....

ByBit attack doing some seriously heavy lifting North Korea's yearly cryptocurrency thefts have accelerated, with Kim's state-backed cybercriminals plundering just over $2 billion worth of tokens in 2025....

Flaw in remote-access appliance lets attackers chain bugs for root-level takeover SonicWall has warned customers of a zero-day flaw in its SMA 1000 remote-access appliance that's being actively exploited, potentially allowing attackers to escalate privileges and take over boxes....

Justice Department claims unlicensed exchange funneled ransomware profits US feds have dismantled a crypto laundering service that they say helped cybercrooks wash tens of millions of dollars in dirty digital cash, seizing its servers and unsealing charges against an alleged Russian operator....

Billionaire space tourist inherits troubled agency facing budget chaos, workforce cuts, and a Moon race against China NASA has a new administrator. Billionaire and space tourist Jared Isaacman was confirmed by the US Senate by a vote of 67 to 30....

Around 2,000 GP practices use its products Updated An NHS tech supplier is investigating a cyberattack that affected its systems in the early hours of Sunday....

Security boffins warn flaw is now being used for ransomware attacks against live networks Microsoft says attackers have already compromised "several hundred machines across a diverse set of organizations" via the React2Shell flaw, using the access to execute code, deploy malware, and, in some cases, deliver ransomware....

Gov wants broadcaster to revive 1980s computer literacy magic - and maybe flog its archives to tech giants The UK government wants the BBC to help Brits understand AI and develop basic technology skills as part of the public broadcaster's next charter period....

18-year-old platform crumbles under 94M daily requests while resellers flog 62 tests for 500 The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has appointed a new chief exec to tackle spiraling waits for practical driving tests with bots overrunning its aging booking system....

Investigatory Powers Commissioner says reforms have failed to close oversight gaps The UK's Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) has several regulatory gaps that must be plugged in future legislative reforms, according to Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPC) Sir Brian Leveson....

MPs press minister for answers - and get few If UK readers are perplexed by the country's seemingly shambolic state of broadband and telecoms, relative to other European nations, insight can be gleaned from a one-off evidence session conducted by Parliament....

World Summit on the Information Society resolves the world needs a permanent forum to discuss how we manage the 'Net The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday reached consensus on a review of the world's internet governance arrangements and preserved the current multi-stakeholder model that means governments are just one of many voices that debate the future of the internet....