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You can check out anytime you like, but please don't ever leave Google is aiming to turn Gemini into a one-stop personal shopper with what it hopes will become a global standard for agentic AI commerce, and it's already persuaded major retailers to let Google handle transactions without sending users to their websites....

Two new Linux GUIs - plus Phoenix, an experimental new X server in Zig The new year brings releases from opposite ends of the Linux GUI spectrum: IceWM, an X11 window manager from the late 1990s, and Budgie, a newer full desktop environment that has gone Wayland-native....

Agents must be 'safer and better than humans,' James Nettesheim tells The Reg exclusive When it comes to security, AI agents are like self-driving cars, according to Block Chief Information Security Officer James Nettesheim....

Immediate retirement for freebie automation platform Microsoft has abruptly pulled the plug on the venerable Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), sending any administrators still clinging to the platform scrambling for alternatives....

AI firm promises HIPAA-compliant integrations as chatbot moves into hospital admin Fresh from watching rival OpenAI stick its nose into patient records, Anthropic has decided now is the perfect moment to march Claude into US healthcare too, promising to fix medicine with yet more AI, APIs, and carefully-worded reassurances about privacy....

Sick astronaut back on Earth by Thursday, nature of ailment remains undisclosed NASA astronaut Mike Fincke has handed command of the ISS to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov as Fincke and the rest of Crew-11 are scheduled to head back to Earth on Wednesday....

Yes, you can get rid of it - assuming nobody's looked at it in 28 days Microsoft's latest Windows Insider release introduces a policy allowing admins to remove the Copilot app from managed devices. But there's a catch - actually, several....

Website built around buying and selling stolen data has lost control of its own Updated BreachForums, the serially resurrected cybercrime marketplace, has tripped over itself after a data breach spilled details tied to about 324,000 user accounts....

Venezuela today, Taiwan tomorrow? This might be the last good year for buying hardware Opinion For a world economy driven by consumerism, it's become markedly unkind to consumers. This goes double - literally - for digital tech, where memory prices have increased by between 100 and 250 percent in six months. If you think GPUs are pricey now, you'll only have to wait six weeks, during which both AMD and Nvidia are expected to demonstrate supply-side economics much as the Road Runner demonstrated gravity to Wile E Coyote....

Tech minister Liz Kendall says the government will back a robust regulatory response Ofcom is investigating X over potential violations of the Online Safety Act, Britian's comms watchdog has confirmed....

A late operating system, a stopgap deal, and the accident that made DOS dominant A blog post by programmer Nemanja Trifunovic, The Late Arrival of 16-bit CP/M, is on the face of it an interesting little excursion into the late delivery of a long-forgotten bit of software - one that turned out to be pivotal for the entire computer industry....

'Unsupported' doesn't mean 'unused' Bork!Bork!Bork! It isn't only a computer's software underbelly exposed during a bork. Sometimes the poor thing's innards are on show as engineers attempt to wring a little more life from long-expired systems....

Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch pitches age limits and classroom curbs as fixes for behavior and mental health The Tories have pledged to kick under-16s off social media, betting that banning teens from TikTok and Instagram will fix what they see as a growing crisis in kids' mental health and classroom behavior....

A busy year of end-of-support dates awaits unwary admins 2026 has begun with the familiar sound of Microsoft's software Grim Reaper sharpening a blade as administrators peer glumly at the calendar of carnage ahead....

UPSes don't work without power, or well-designed electricals Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another instalment of Who, Me?" - the weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of what not to do at work, and how to get away with it....

Labels Rome's comms regulator a quasi-judicial body' that works on behalf of shadowy, European media cabal' Cloudflare's CEO has threatened to pull the company out of Italy, and to withdraw free services it intends to provide to the Winter Olympic games, after the nation's communications regulator slugged it with a fine equal to one percent of its annual revenue for violating anti-piracy regulations....

Says ongoing talks about security are about understanding best practice, not strong-arming vendors India's government has denied that it is working on rules that would require smartphone manufacturers to provide access to their source code....

PLUS: Cambodia arrests alleged scam camp boss; Baidu spins out chip biz; Panasonic's noodle shop plan; And more! Asia in Brief The governments of Malaysia and Indonesia have suspended access to social network X, on grounds that it allows users to produce sexual imagery without users' consent....

PLUS: Veeam patches critical vuln; Crims bribing dark web insiders; UK school takedown; And more infosec in brief Meta has fixed a flaw in its Instagram service that allowed third parties to generate password reset emails, but denied the problem led to theft of users' personal information....

Poison Fountain project seeks allies to fight the power Alarmed by what companies are building with artificial intelligence models, a handful of industry insiders are calling for those opposed to the current state of affairs to undertake a mass data poisoning effort to undermine the technology....

Call for Evidence casts FOSS as a way to break US dependence The European Commission has launched a fresh consultation into open source, setting out its ambitions for Europe's developer communities to go beyond propping up US tech giants' platforms....

Ministers promise equivalent standards just without the legal obligation ANALYSIS From May's cyberattack on the Legal Aid Agency to the Foreign Office breach months later, cyber incidents have become increasingly common in UK government....

Sandia National Labs cajole Intel's neurochips into solving partial differential equations New research from Sandia National Laboratories suggests that brain-inspired neuromorphic computers are just as adept at solving complex mathematical equations as they are at speeding up neural networks and could eventually pave the way to ultra-efficient supercomputers....

Let the bots figure out what to sell for how much Accenture is betting that the future of retail will run through AI with an investment in Profitmind, an agent-based platform that automates pricing decisions, inventory management, and planning....

Remember when government agents didn't wear masks? While watching us now seems like the least of its sins, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was once best known (and despised) for its multi-billion-dollar surveillance tech budget....

Developer survey from Sonar finds AI tool adoption has created a verification bottleneck Talk about letting things go! Ninety-six percent of software developers believe AI-generated code isn't functionally correct, yet only 48 percent say they always check code generated with AI assistance before committing it....

There's a lot of bad ideas set to create literal waste and be a waste of money From disposable electric candy to voice-activated refrigerators without physical handles, CES was crammed full of enshittified, intrusive, insecure, and wasteful technology this year - just like it is every year....

New nuclear capacity won't show up until around 2030 Meta is writing more checks for nuclear investment, even though the new capacity tied to those deals is unlikely to come online until around 2030. The company says it will need the new power to run its hyperscale datacenters....

Trixie plus a carefully configured MATE setup, and absolutely nothing else The Desktop Classic System is a rather unusual hand-built flavor of Debian featuring a meticulously configured spatial desktop layout and a pleasingly 20th-century look and feel....

Basketball player accused of aiding cybercrime gang extradition blocked in exchange for Swiss NGO consultant France has released an alleged ransomware crook wanted by the US in exchange for a conflict researcher imprisoned in Russia....

State-backed attackers are using QR codes to slip past enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins, the FBI says North Korean government hackers are turning QR codes into credential-stealing weapons, the FBI has warned, as Pyongyang's spies find new ways to duck enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins....

No naming that tune and no album covers Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how... by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service....

Medical issue forces mission curtailment and leaves station short-handed NASA is bringing the Crew-11 astronauts back to Earth early after one encountered a medical issue that could not be dealt with aboard the orbiting outpost....

Analysts say production will top out this decade while global electrification keeps ramping Concerns are mounting over copper supplies, with a fresh study warning that demand will likely outstrip production within a decade, threatening to constrain global technological advancement....

Huntress analysis suggests VM escape bugs were already weaponized in the wild Chinese-linked cybercriminals were sitting on a working VMware ESXi hypervisor escape kit more than a year before the bugs it relied on were made public....

The software wasn't actually renamed, but you couldn't be blamed for being confused Opinion Wait? What? I was just cruising along the information superhighway - yes, I'm old, deal with it - when I spotted a Y Combinator story announcing, "Microsoft Office renamed to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app'." Excuse me!? I looked closer and found that, sure enough, it certainly looked like Microsoft had renamed Office to the God-awful "Microsoft 365 Copilot."...

Extremophile bacteria could help turn Martian dirt into building material for human habitats Tough microbes able to survive extreme environments on Earth could be the key to constructing buildings to allow humans to survive on Mars, according to a research paper....

The queue might move on, but the software never did Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's bork - on a UK border control wait-time screen - is doubly unfortunate. Tired passengers get no clue how long until someone checks their passport, and of all organizations that should keep security certs current, the one responsible for keeping out criminals tops the list....

Image generation paywalled on X after ministers and regulators start asking awkward questions Grok has yanked its image-generation toy out of the hands of most X users after the UK government openly weighed a ban over the AI feature that "undressed" people on command....

Initial 7M estimate proves optimistic after multiple contract uplifts The Bank of England has trebled the amount it is spending on its Oracle systems integrator amid efforts to migrate business applications to the cloud....

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!...