News Feed

“Never mind” — the moment when an overheated argument quietly dissolves under the weight of reality.

Is the British establishment detaching from Labour's Failed Net Zero policies, while still claiming climate change is a crisis?

Execs say DIY OpenAI connections risked pushing CRM data past the ‘trust boundary’ Salesforce users running Agentforce with ChatGPT Enterprise or Edu can now update CRM data directly from the bot, a move aimed at curbing home-built integrations that risk spilling data outside the company's controls.…

Will businesses continue to invest in something that's shown so little return? opinion  It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime.…

AI goes off the rails … because of shoddy guardrails Researchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts. Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."…

In great British tradition of ghost stories at Christmas, we want to share this video on Christmas Eve. “The Doll’s Ghost” by American author F. Marion Crawford was first published in 1897. It is read by Tony Walker of the Classic Ghost Stories podcast, who is a brilliant reader with a great voice. In their …

Rationing gasoline and diesel under the Climate Act is a predictable prescription for chaos. It is the mobility these motor fuels provide that guarantees rationing to meet the 2030 emissions target will not work.

A note of why, and also thanks to the readers of Watts Up With That,

ATC: 'I don't know if you can hear me but cleared to land' In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado.…

Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money thefts The US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts.…

Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week.…

Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amused Microsoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by.…

The Christmas season is upon us, a time of year when many of us reflect on the year that is drawing to a close and on the good times, the sad times, and the challenges ahead. It’s also a time of year when we count our blessings and express gratitude for any good things that have come our way.

Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not alone Feature  Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero meas

A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technology Seventy years ago, a child phoned the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) looking for Santa Claus – and found him, or at least some kindly military personnel who were willing to play along by helping the youngster to track Santa's location as he zipped around the globe.…

Time running out for savin' MAVEN as stricken spacecraft still silent as Mars solar conjunction nears NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is continuing to evade attempts by engineers to make contact as the solar conjunction nears, halting contact with any Mars missions until January 16, 2026.…

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced on Monday that it will acquire the data center and energy infrastructure company Intersect for $4.75 billion in cash and “the assumption of debt.”

Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026 Part 1  You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two.…

For years, sensible voices outside the climate establishment warned that a future free of fossil fuels was physically impossible. As energy sources and as feedstocks, oil, natural gas and coal are the foundation of modern civilization. Hardly any product – whether the fertilizer that makes possible food for billions or the plastics for medical devices, smartphones and thousands of other items – is not dependent on hydrocarbons in some fashion.

Plans move to Rust, with help from AI Microsoft wants to translate its codebase to Rust, and is hiring people to make it happen.…

VMware's main challenger already embraces multiple storage options Amazon Web Services has given Nutanix a lovely Christmas present: Support for its AHV hypervisor in hybrid cloud storage rigs.…

"Real Science" by somebody without a clue.

President Trump previously threatened 100 percent tariffs, administration now plans something else starting in 2027 World War Fee  The United States will impose tariffs on semiconductors imported from China, starting in 2027.…

Customers will be able to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows. After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products.…

Researchers claim "Oil-field emissions reshaping regional atmospheric processes."

Hey all, and happy holiday season. Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, and even if you celebrate nothing, we hope you will have times of joy and plenty with loved ones, or at least some decent food and warmth and safety from harm. Without Patreon or any other source of revenue (since we …

Climate scientists embracing their inner eco-fascist?

Automaker's third security snafu in three years Thousands of Nissan customers are learning that some of their personal data was leaked after unauthorized access to a Red Hat-managed server, according to the Japanese automaker.…

Spacecraft set to burn up in a few weeks, but it could have been worse As if to underscore the need to avoid the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario in which cascading debris can make some orbits difficult to use, a Starlink satellite vented propellant and released debris following an onboard "anomaly" late last week.…

Redmond gets in early for the twelve whoopsies of Christmas Microsoft has hustled out an out-of-band update to address a Message Queuing issue introduced by the December 2025 update.…

You’ll need to be using a Windows Insider build to see it The Windows 11 Run dialog box is one of the oldest pieces of user interface still in use. It works just fine, but it has an aesthetic that harkens back to earlier versions of Microsoft’s operating system. Now, that’s set to change.…

Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it Opinion  Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.…

From a strict epistemological standpoint, we do not know—at high confidence—whether the total energy of the Earth’s climate system is increasing, decreasing, or remaining approximately constant.

Airline deploys AI travel agent and it hasn't been a disaster Non-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning." …

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.…

The company that bet the farm on AI said to have made things worse with AI Oracle's new AI-powered support portal is frustrating customers and support engineers who are struggling to find the basics, such as old tickets, links to database patch programs and release schedules for current databases.…

As I reported earlier this week, the EU has now formally abandoned its 2035 ban on the sale of new petrol/diesel cars.

Menu.exe not found Bork!Bork!Bork!  The bork desk has temporarily reopened during the festive period. The tech world might be having a nap on the sofa after one mince pie too many, but bork never sleeps.…

The global disruptions we have seen in recent years are frequently presented as a chaotic sequence of events: a ‘pandemic’, inflation, energy shortages and war. Little wonder that most people are confused. However, a structural analysis reveals a more deliberate controlled demolition of the 20th-century social contract. We are witnessing a transition from a productive …

To prevent local officials from caving to the politically driven energy constraints demanded by far-left activists, federal legislation must be passed defining America’s energy position and protecting our most affordable and effective resources, both for domestic use and for exporting. The Affordable, Reliable Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES) currently pending in Congress would guarantee America’s energy security and codify into law the United States’ commitment to cost-effective and dep

Cab drivers protested Uber’s arrival, but Westminster has rolled out the welcome mat for clanker chauffeurs Robot taxis are coming to The Register’s London home in 2026.…

The Trump administration took a major whack at the climate-industrial complex this week. It’s a fantastic move. But another event this week spotlights the need to do more.

Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fix La Poste, France’s postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident.…

25 percent failure rate for JAXA's space truck, with the second stage again proving perilous Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has created a Special Task Force to investigate the failed launch of its H3 rocket on Monday.…

And it's especially dangerous because the code works A malicious npm package with more than 56,000 downloads masquerades as a working WhatsApp Web API library, and then it steals messages, harvests credentials and contacts, and hijacks users' WhatsApp accounts.…

Never mind that Earth has endured far more warming than today's world without revisiting the extremes of the ancient past.

SEC filings show the outfit cut projected 2027 cloud purchase commitments by $114M Security vendor Palo Alto Networks is expanding its Google Cloud partnership, saying it will move "key internal workloads" onto the Chocolate Factory's infrastructure. The outfit also claims it is tightening integrations between its security tools and Google Cloud to deliver what it calls a "unified" security experience. At the same time, Palo Alto may trim its own cloud purchase commitments.…

Masayoshi Son better hope he made Santa's nice list Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI.…

Ah, the good old days when 0-day development took a year Interview  "In my past life, it would take us 360 days to develop an amazing zero day," Zafran Security CEO Sanaz Yashar said.…

Shipments still waiting on approval from Beijing Now that it can legally export them, Nvidia has reportedly informed its Chinese customers that it'll begin shipping H200s, one of its most potent graphics accelerators for AI training and inference, in time for Chinese New Year. One caveat: Beijing could spike the deal before then.…

Anna’s Archive’s idealism doesn’t quite survive its own blog post What would happen to the world's music collections if streaming services disappeared? One hacktivist group says it has a solution: scrape around 300 terabytes of music and metadata from Spotify and offer it up for free as what it calls the world’s first “fully open” music preservation archive.…

Judge says former most-wanted fugitive Mark Acklom will likely never return to the UK The UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says a fraudster who claimed to be part of MI6 must repay £125,000 ($168,000) to a former love interest that he conned.…

The Department of Energy in a 2024 report stated that a radar’s threshold for false alarm detection can be increased to reduce some clutter, but an increased detection threshold could cause the radar to “miss actual targets.”

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.…

Please check out my speech at the Mass Non Compliance protest rally against digital ID in London on 13th December 2025. The post Iain Davis Speaks At The Mass Non Compliance Protest Against Digital ID appeared first on Iain Davis.

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.…

A new lawsuit could finally end the secrecy surrounding wind turbines killing eagles. Wyoming’s Albany County Conservancy (ACC) is suing the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for failing to provide the mandatory eagle kill reports for three big wind facilities.

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.…

“Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.”— Max Planck

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.…

“He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, So be good for goodness’ sake.” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” For generations, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” has been treated as a playful reminder to children to be good because someone, somewhere, is …

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.…

With the tinniest bit of effort, Kahn or The New Republic’s fact-checkers and editors could have discovered these facts themselves. They evidently couldn’t let facts get in the way of a scary holiday story.

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.…

“Climate activists are in denial. A great reset is underway…. But are they willing to emotionally reject their prior thinking for cause?”

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.…

“Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Why is understanding the answer to this question so important, and why is it so hard for people to understand …

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."…

Time signals shifted by a tiny amount that only very sensitive users would find upsetting UPDATED  A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.…

We would not make good communists. We of the democratic nations. Not the proper kind. Not the disciplined, purified kind. We would try — briefly — with the awkward sincerity of people wearing borrowed clothes. We would recite the words, mispronounce the vows, trip over the rules. Even if we meant well, we would break …

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. …

Alvin Toffler, whose prophetic book Future Shock (1970) primed sociologists and politicians for radical change to society as a result of technological advances, was in a position ten years later to show how much of his vision was being realised. In The Third Wave: the Revolution that will Change Our Lives (1980) he described how the industrial economy was …

This brilliant argument from the X account of Private Joker explains why those who think digital ID is a "bogeyman" couldn't be more wrong. Read more here. The post Digital Identity Is a Force-Multiplier appeared first on Iain Davis.

The Technocratic Dark State: James Corbett and I discuss some of the major themes of my new book now available to Preorder through Papercut Publishing. The post James Corbett and Iain Davis Expose the Technocratic Dark State appeared first on Iain Davis.

What on earth are the eugenicists preparing for with the doomsday seed vault? Why does humanity need a backup of millions of seed varieties that have presumably been around (for the most part) throughout human history? What kind of environmental catastrophe could possibly contaminate the gene pool to the point where we would need to …

Fifty-four years ago, John Lennon asked us to imagine a world with no borders. But he did not foresee a world where the only thing left to colonise would be our own humanity. Today, the ‘dream’ has become a civilisation crisis, a cage of standardisation, designed to strip us of our culture and our biological …

The United Nations regime is not a trustworthy regime of any kind. Yet, we are constantly asked, by the regime itself and its compliant mainstream media propagandists, to blindly trust it. You must be joking. The post Trust The United Nations Regime? You Must Be Joking. appeared first on Iain Davis.

The Technocratic Dark State is due for publication shortly and Dr David A. Hughes has described it as one of the most important books you will read. He interviews me, and we discuss the book and why it matters. The post The Technocratic Dark State: Dr David A. Hughes Interviews Author Iain Davis appeared first on Iain Davis.

Sonia Poulton and I discuss my new book The Technocratic Dark State. We look at who is behind the digital transformation and consider their aims and objectives. The post The Technocratic Dark State appeared first on Iain Davis.

Digital ID in the UK is not the BritCard. True digital ID includes the possible BritCard but to understand what true digital ID is read here. The post The BritCard Psyop: What Is True Digital ID in the UK? appeared first on Iain Davis.

The BritCard is supposedly our introduction to digital ID in the UK. But the proposal is so bizarre, as Paul Brennan and I discuss. The post BritCard UK Digital ID – Reality Check Radio appeared first on Iain Davis.

Tom Regenauer and I discuss the loopy ideas—such as the Dark Enlightenment and gov-corp Technates—put forward by the gaggle of Silicon Valley oligarchs controlling the Trump administration. The post Tom Regenauer and Iain Davis discuss Gov-corp Technates appeared first on Iain Davis.

Paul Hellier from Fair Food Forager and I discuss the fake choice environment and how people are being deceived into accepting gov-corp Technates. Check it out! The post Paul Hellier and Iain Davis Discuss The Fake Choice Environment appeared first on Iain Davis.