The Register

That strange time between Christmas and New Year - perfect for changing production projects Microsoft left an unwelcome gift under the tree for .NET developers - an "unexpected" change to the distribution of installers and archives, which could hit production systems....

Warning of planned hikes limit forecasts to just 2% shipment growth for US market in 2025 Import tariffs proposed by the incoming Trump administration could cause PC prices in the US to jump 46 percent, stifling market growth in 2025 despite the looming Windows upgrade deadline and vendors eagerness to promote AI-based computers....

Nine in ten of our implementations are a success, CEO Carl Eschenbach tells The Reg Interview Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach insists more than 90 percent of the SaaS HR and finance application vendor's rollouts are a success, putting aside the company's high profile difficulties in Maine and Iowa state-level projects....

But other obstacles remain before developers get free choice of storage and analytics engines Analysis Last week, AWS jumped into Iceberg with both feet. S3 Buckets, the near-ubiquitous storage containers for developers, got another layer. The dominant cloud platform provider introduced S3 Tables, for storing data in Apache Iceberg, an open table format (OTF), which promises developers and data engineers the ability to bring their analytics engines of choice to their data, wherever it resides, instead of moving it....

Can it topple x86 and Arm, or is the gap too wide to close? Feature RISC-V has been talked up as a challenger to Arm and x86, offering an open royalty-free architecture that promises flexibility and innovation without licensing costs. But for all the noise, you're more likely to find it buried inside IoT gadgets and obscure embedded systems than powering anything that'll typically grab a headline....

Microsoft will stop at nothing to advertise its services BORK!BORK!BORK! A reminder today that bork -the nickname The Register gives to IoT displays gone awry - is truly international....

Canon confirms multifunction devices struggling with Windows 11 24H2 Windows 11 24H2 is still causing problems with multifunction devices despite Microsoft marking an issue with the eSCL scan protocol as resolved....

Report charts four scenarios from 'Sustainable AI' to 'Who Turned Out The Lights?' Policymakers need to carefully guide the future consumption of electricity by AI datacenters, according to a report that considers four potential scenarios and suggests a number of guiding principles to prevent it from spiraling out of control....

Eighth generation of the standard is all about ultra reliability Wi-Fi 8 is coming, but it looks set to focus on greater reliability rather than on pushing the bandwidth ever higher, as the most recent updates to the venerable wireless local network technology have done....

The developer of the Puffin Browser thinks so - and has a million users to show for it It's hard to get excited about feature phones with 320 x 240 resolution, but Shioupyn Shen thinks precisely such devices are about to bring millions of people to the web in a new way....

You may not need that high-bandwidth brain-computer interface Caltech researchers have estimated the speed of human thought to be a mere 10 bits per second, a data rate so leisurely that it underscores the need for further research into brain function and calls into question claims about brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence....

2024's Tech Fail Roll Of Dishonor Opinion Happy new year! Tradition says that this is when we boldly look forward to what may happen in the 12 months to come. Do you really want to know that? Didn't think so....

Brings the arrest count related to the Snowflake hacks to 3 A US Army soldier has been arrested in Texas after being indicted on two counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records information....

Cell towers not required when messaging on Musk's finest Ukraine mobile operator Kyivstar will roll out direct-to-cell satellite connectivity via Starlink....

Boeing ends abysmal year on an even lower note The disastrous crash of a Boeing 737-800 in South Korea over the weekend, which killed 179 of the 181 people onboard, was followed by a second incident involving Jeju Air. On Monday, the flight was forced to return to its origin due to a reportedly similar landing gear issue....

Data pilfered as miscreants roamed affected workstations The US Department of the Treasury has admitted that miscreants were in its systems, accessing documents in what has been called a "major incident."...

Officials beg to differ, claiming the author misinterpreted Congressional reports analysis Concerned about the state of aviation safety? You might be onto something, as the Federal Aviation Administration allegedly dismisses or closes most whistleblower reports without finding violations....

From targeted espionage to pre-positioning - not that they are mutually exclusive The Chinese government's intrusions into America's telecommunications and other critical infrastructure networks this year appears to signal a shift from cyberspying as usual to prepping for destructive attacks....

To the surprise of no one, a multi-billion dollar deal comes under CMA scrutiny The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a merger inquiry into IBM's acquisition of HashiCorp....

The intrusions allowed Beijing to 'geolocate millions of individuals' AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies confirmed that Chinese government-backed snoops accessed portions of their systems earlier this year, while the White House added another, yet-unnamed telecommunications company to the list of those breached by Salt Typhoon....

The former president, passed at 100 this week, was also an early email adopter obituary American flags throughout the United States are flying at half-mast to honor the life of Jimmy Carter, the 39th and longest-lived US president, who died Sunday, December 29, at the age of 100....

Final big tests done and engines fired up for a few seconds. Next stop ... space? Blue Origin has successfully performed a hotfire of its New Glenn rocket, paving the way for the vehicle's first launch in the coming days....

'The greatest concern is with spear phishing and social engineering' Interview Now that criminals have realized there's no need to train their own LLMs for any nefarious purposes - it's much cheaper and easier to steal credentials and then jailbreak existing ones - the threat of a large-scale supply chain attack using generative AI becomes more real....

Cut off one head, two more grow back in its place RansomHub, the ransomware collective that emerged earlier this year, quickly gained momentum, outpacing its criminal colleagues and hitting its victims especially hard. The group named and shamed hundreds of organizations on its leak site, while demanding exorbitant payments across various industries....

Saturation point, and Nintendo and Sega, were just around the corner Feature Remember the excitement of leafing through a catalog for home computer bargains? Or perhaps gazing longingly at festive tech displays in Britain's WH Smith (or ComputerLand if you lived Stateside)? Take a step back to 1984 and the last great hurrah of the home computer....

We have altered the deal, pray we don't alter it any further Amid growing competition and skyrocketing compute requirements necessary to support the next generation of AI models, OpenAI is shaking up its corporate structure - again....

Santa Satya pops one more issue into his sack just in time for Christmas The trickle of known issues with Windows 11 24H2 has continued with a new one just in time for festive season: installed the operating system using removable media? There's a chance it might stop receiving security updates....

This was a triumph There is good news for Sun botherers: the Parker Solar Probe appears to have survived its close encounter with our nearest star....

Reg-reading heroes snacked on their woes and solved problems with extreme speed On Call The biggest days of the festive season may be behind us, but demand for tech support never stops. That's why each Friday, even this one, The Register shares stories of fixers forced to help flummoxed fools in On Call - the reader-contributed column that celebrates your successes....

One man's plan to ruin his holiday for the better Comment It was only recently I started reveling in the Black Friday feeling. My first foray into the e-commerce extravaganza came last year when I bought a PS5 and in the same spirit, I finally pulled the trigger on an Apple Watch Ultra 2 the other week after pining for one since launch. Not because I needed the impetus to get off my butt and start working out, the reason behind so many purchases, as I understand it....

Rob Joyce explains how it's done Video In 2018, Rob Joyce, then Donald Trump's White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, gave a surprise talk at the legendary hacking conference Shmoocon about his hobby....

Register readers have spoken The Register readership has spoken - a "winner" is set to be punished with the horrible Windows XP Christmas sweater. And Copilot? Headed to where the sun doesn't shine, judging by the vast majority of comments....

Unspecified "vendor technology" to blame for hour-long stop order A technical snafu briefly grounded American Airlines flights across the US on Christmas Eve....

Botnet's operators 'driven by similar interests as that of the Chinese state' After the Mozi botnet mysteriously disappeared last year, a new and seemingly more powerful botnet, Androxgh0st, rose from its ashes and has quickly become a major threat to critical infrastructure....

Lots of big numbers, but market share wasn't one of them Microsoft has published a year in review for its Edge browser and talked up AI-powered chats while lightly skipping over the software's stagnating market share....

35 years since AIDS first borked a PC and we're still no closer to a solution Feature Your Christmas holidays looked quite different in the '80s to how they do today. While some will remember what it was like to wake up on the 25th back then, some of you won't even have been born. The food hasn't changed much. Turkey, stuffing, Brussels sprouts... that's all been around for some time....

Easier to let those old phones gather dust in a drawer, survey finds The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has warned that many adults don't know how to wipe their old devices, and a worrying number of young people just don't care....

Tech vendors start saying the quiet part out loud - do enterprises really need all that headcount? Comment AI vendors are starting to say the quiet part out loud. As technology advances, it seems more about controlling costs and headcount....

Mummy, where do zero days come from? Opinion One of the charms of coding is that malice can be indistinguishable from incompetence. Last week's Who, Me? story about financial transfer test software running amok is a case in point....

The victory may be short lived as the chip designer gears up for second round Analysis Qualcomm's push into the PC arena is safe, at least for the moment, after a jury found its mobile processor designs had not violated Arm Holdings' licenses as the British chip designer had claimed....

A #DOScember surprise: fits on a single floppy, but has a network-capable package manager With its recent switch to a different kernel, SvarDOS moves from being a distro of FreeDOS to greater independence....

Analyst estimates show growing apetite for alternative infrastructure Nvidia dominated the AI arena in 2024, with shipments of its Hopper GPUs more than tripling to over two million among its 12 largest customers, according to estimates from Omdia....

Ho-ho-holy heatshield! NASA's Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to make its closest approach yet to the Sun, approximately 3.8 million miles from the star's surface, on Christmas Eve....

Dual Russian-Israeli national arrested in August An alleged LockBit ransomware developer is in custody in Israel and awaiting extradition to the United States....

Inexpensive over-ear gear, but active noise cancelling won't block out the carol singers Review OneOdio has released a set of over-ear noise-cancelling headphones for an apparent bargain price of 59 ($69). However, they are also a prime example of the axiom "you get what you pay for," or perhaps even a bit less....

Also, Ascension notifies 5.6M victims, Krispy Kreme bandits come forward, LockBit 4.0 released, and more in brief Google has announced plans to allow its business customers to begin "fingerprinting" users next year, and the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) isn't happy about it....

It's all made from our data, anyway, so it should be ours to use as we want Opinion Last year, I wrote a piece here on El Reg about being murdered by ChatGPT as an illustration of the potential harms through the misuse of large language models and other forms of AI....

Lina Khan's tenure may end, but the regulatory hurdles she help built aren't going anywhere Analysis When Donald Trump takes office for his second term on January 20, many expect sweeping changes across the board. But among tech players, when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, those hoping for looser regulations might be disappointed....

'Facts can't be decided by a roll of the dice' Press freedom advocates are urging Apple to ditch an "immature" generative AI system that incorrectly summarized a BBC news notification that incorrectly related that suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione had killed himself....

Says it's not sure what the issue is but points at admins tweaking licensing options It's not just you, there is indeed an activation problem in Microsoft 365 Office triggered by administrators making changes at the licensing level....