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Remember humanoid bot Asimo', which could kick balls and pour beer? It survives as EV software Honda has announced it has developed an operating system for electric vehicles, using tech it first developed for a humanoid robot named Asimo"....

If it's spelled like an A.S.S, acts like an ass, maybe it's just... The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched a probe into Tesla's software that allows cars to operate autonomously over short distances, after reports of the code crashing in a physical sense....

One of ya is gonna sing like a canary, prosecutors say The US Justice Department on Tuesday expanded its antitrust lawsuit against property management software vendor RealPage, which is accused of unlawful algorithmic rent-fixing, to include six of the largest US landlords while also proposing a settlement to resolve the case against one of the defendants....

Telcos would effectively fund grants paid to protect national security The outgoing boss of the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, has called on her colleagues to "quickly" adopt rules allowing the US regulator to stage a radio spectrum auction, the proceeds of which would fund the removal from American networks of equipment made by Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE....

Make America irate again CES The Consumer Technology Association has issued some fresh predictions of how much more Americans may have to pay for their hardware if Donald Trump's hard-line import tariffs are enacted....

'We're going to catch less bad stuff,' Facebook tycoon admits, but it's worth it to get Trump off his back Updated Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a whole bunch of changes designed to "get back to our roots around free expression" that, among other things, include ditching fact-checking moderators, and loosening content policies to allow previously restricted speech to proliferate....

A successful real-estate billionaire and Donald Trump walk into a bar... At a news conference on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump said Dubai-based luxury property developer DAMAC plans to invest $20 billion over an undisclosed period to build datacenters in the US....

Lots of new ways to cut labor costs, no mention of repairability CES John Deere's vision of the future of farming, quarrying, and landscaping has emerged at CES 2025, and it's one that includes far fewer jobs for equipment operators and plenty more machine-driven independence....

Crime forum-dweller claims to have leaked 42,000 documents packed with personal info The United Nations' aviation agency is investigating "a potential information security incident" after a cybercriminal claimed they had laid hands on 42,000 of the branch's documents....

LLMs do more for developers who already know what they're doing Large language models (LLMs) will write better code if you ask them, though it takes some software development experience to do so effectively - which limits the utility of AI code help for novices....

Hopes to elbow out competition on Arm-based hardware CES Qualcomm has unveiled the latest addition to its Snapdragon X Series of Arm-based chips to power Copilot+ PCs, targeting systems in the $600 range....

It's down to users to do the fact-checking themselves Apple plans to update an AI feature that produced an alarmingly incorrect summary of a BBC news story....

Marc Rogers is 'lucky to be alive' Marc Rogers, DEF CON's head of security, faces tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills following an accident that left him with a broken neck and temporary quadriplegia....

Bezos booster finally ready for action Blue Origin has named the date for the first launch of its New Glenn rocket - January 10....

Do you really need a new PC for Microsoft's latest and greatest? From the department of "because I can" comes news of Windows 11 24H2 running in 184MB of memory....

Engineer who works on ways to prove that code is mathematically correct finds his field is suddenly much less obscure Interview A notable flaw of AI is its habit of "hallucinating," making up plausible answers that have no basis in real-world data. AWS is trying to tackle this by introducing Amazon Bedrock Automated Reasoning checks....

Leaders miffed at 'unacceptable interference' Opinion It's been a busy month in the political brain of Elon Musk. The tech, automotive, and space entrepreneur has gone from mulling a donation to the Reform UK party worth around $100 million to calling its leader unfit....

Nation's dominant broadband plumber wins ahead of altnets Updated The UK government has signed contracts with BT Group's Openreach worth upwards of 289 million ($363 million) for the further build-out of fiber infrastructure to serve more rural areas as part of Project Gigabit....

Kind old Microsoft is worried about security and compliance ... nothing to do with a free storage loophole Still keeping data in unlicensed OneDrive accounts of long-gone users? The time has come to act: The data could soon become inaccessible or even permanently deleted....

That is not dead which can eternal lie... including the grandparent of C, apparently A 37-year-old compiler is gaining support for a new language... although as that language is 57 years old, we are possibly stretching the adjective "new" more than our post-holiday waistband....

TOPS, SCHMOPS, says Chipzilla, our NPUs may be slow but that doesn't matter Intel has announced new silicon for the edge, and products for laptops that lack one....

This could be the start of a saga to rival TikTok's troubles, and embroil Tesla and Microsoft The US Department of Defense has added Chinese messaging and gaming Tencent to its list of Chinese military company", a designation that won't necessarily result in a ban but is nonetheless unpleasant....

Record quarterly revenue at contract manufacturing giant suggests strong demand for hardware of all sorts Foxconn has singled out AI servers as a reason for its record revenue, and its suppliers' share prices surged on the news....

Tuned for running chunky models on the desktop with 128GB of RAM, custom Ubuntu CES Nvidia has announced a desktop computer powered by a new GB10 Grace-Blackwell superchip and equipped with 128GB of memory to give AI developers, researchers, and students the tools they need to run large models on the desktop....

It'll all end in tiers Dell has used the annual CES extravaganza in Las Vegas this week to announce a branding shakeup that closely resembles Apple's hardware naming policy....

Worker copy-pasted wrong YouTube URL, says ChainPatrol The errant copyright takedown of a popular video explaining Bitcoin, from Grant Sanderson's smash-hit YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown, has been reversed, with human error blamed....

But Jabbar did not live stream his actions on Jan 1, FBI confirmed The man who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of people in New Orleans on New Year's Day, killing 14, wore Meta's smart glasses to scout out the location prior to the attack, according to the FBI....

But don't worry, he's 'figured out' AGI comment Even at $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro, the service is struggling to turn a profit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lamented on the platform formerly known as Twitter Sunday....

Slumping market share, unwanted features ... no, it's the consumers who are wrong! CES Microsoft is continuing its push for users to adopt its new software paradigm, declaring 2025 "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh" and reminding everyone that Windows 10's end-of-support date is just around the corner....

Slow drip of compromised telecom networks continues The list of telecommunications victims in the Salt Typhoon cyberattack continues to grow as a new report names Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream among those breached by Chinese government snoops....

If you can't beat 'em, just imitate their branding, hide yours and hope they don't notice It looks like Microsoft has come up with a new trick to keep those who accidentally end up on Bing from leaving for Google: Simply mimic the look of Google's homepage and hope no one will notice....

Once installed, it helps itself to your data like it's a free buffet Android malware dubbed FireScam tricks people into thinking they are downloading a Telegram Premium application that stealthily monitors victims' notifications, text messages, and app activity, while stealing sensitive information via Firebase services....

Leap year curse strikes satellite broadband vendor Eutelsat's OneWeb constellation suffered a date-related meltdown last week while the rest of the IT world patted itself on the back for averting the Y2K catastrophe a quarter of a century ago....

Manufacturers should have had ample time to apply the fixes MediaTek kicked off the first full working week of the new year by disclosing a bevy of security vulnerabilities, including a critical remote code execution bug affecting 51 chipsets....

With those whopping returns who could argue with the premis... oh wait The AI datacenter spending splurge looks likely to continue in 2025, with Microsoft alone saying it will invest $80 billion this year on building out infrastructure to train and deploy AI models....

Ten suborbital Starlink simulators to be flung from Musk's spacecraft SpaceX is pressing ahead with the next Starship test and has outlined the mission's goals, including deploying ten Starlink simulators....

Longer support for newer models won't save prior versions from scrapheap Google promised a decade of updates for its Chromebooks in 2023 to stop them being binned so soon after purchase, but many are still set to reach the end of the road in 2025 and over the next several years....

But investors still betting big on bit barns thanks to AI and cloud demand Datacenter operators are facing a paradoxical crisis - demand for their services is greater than ever before, just as access to power, environmental concerns, rising costs and skill shortages have begun to threaten necessary infrastructure expansion....

Legal tussle over resale of on-prem perpetual licenses kicked off four years ago The legal saga involving reseller ValueLicensing, Microsoft, and perpetual licenses continued through 2024 and is set for trial in 2026....

If 40 years of faulty building gets blown down, don't rebuild with the rubble Opinion When a typhoon devastates a land, it takes a while to understand the scale of the destruction. Disaster relief kicks in, communications rebuilt, and news flows out. Salt Typhoon is no different....

Weird syntax AND/OR a junior techie can be very bad for business Who, Me? Have you remembered it's 2025 yet? The Register asks the question because it's often the small things that make for the kind of big problems that we share each week in Who, Me?", the column that celebrates readers' escapes from their errors....

Will they make price rises palatable? Or bring more of what new Netflix lawsuit calls Broadcom's Buy. Chop up. Raise prices' business plan? Broadcom's annual report reveals two items of note for VMware customers: two planned major releases of its flagship VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite due in March and July this year....

More evidence of Beijing's liking for gray zone warfare, or a murky claim with odd African entanglements? Taiwanese authorities have asserted that a China-linked ship entered its waters and damaged a submarine cable....

PLUS: DoJ bans data sale to enemy nations; Do Kwon extradited to US; Tenable CEO passes away; and more Infosec in Brief Welcome to 2025: hopefully you enjoyed a pleasant holiday season and returned to the security operations center without incident - unlike Volkswagen, which last week admitted it exposed data describing journeys made by some of its electric vehicles, plus info about the vehicle's owners....

State masks up finally - its IP addresses, that is Florida witnessed a massive rise in VPN demand on New Year's Day after Pornhub began prohibiting people from accessing its site from within the Sunshine State, it is claimed....

Even Microsoft's lead architect misunderstood the failure Opinion The resurfacing of a 1995 Usenet post earlier this month prompted The Reg FOSS desk to re-examine a pivotal operating system flop ... and its long-term consequences....

New tool for genetic analysis promises greater insights from the extraction of ancient DNA Software developed to investigate more detailed differences between ancient DNA data has proved its worth this week after a paper describing human population movements in Europe in the first millennium AD was published in the science journal Nature....

If they're not consuming HO directly, the power plant almost certainly is Feature The explosive growth of datacenters that followed ChatGPT's debut in 2022 has shone a spotlight on the environmental impact of these power-hungry facilities....

When the FBI urges E2EE, you know it's serious business interview In the wake of the Salt Typhoon hacks, which lawmakers and privacy advocates alike have called the worst telecoms breach in America's history, the US government agencies have reversed course on encryption....

Because we're all still kids - just richer The debate as to whether Lego is a toy or not largely depends on your willingness to accept revisiting childhood excitement as an adult, especially when it's now far more likely to be you footing the bill than your parents....