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Ed Miliband has been caught telling porkies again

Funds in ‘Money Safe’ accounts are only available when customers appear for face-to-face verification Hong Kong’s banks have a new weapon against scams: Accounts that require customers to visit a branch to access their funds.…

“If the universities truly believe that it takes 60-70% of a research grant to provide facilities, utilities, and other basic support, then that is easy to prove by opening the books,” said Sanjay Dhall, a research physician at the University of California, Los Angeles. “I suspect however, that opening the books would reveal that a significant chunk of these funds, or even the majority, are paying an army of unnecessary administrators.”

Pair became ALPHV affiliates to prey on US-based clients A ransomware negotiator and a security incident response manager have admitted to running ransomware attacks.…

Zohran Mamdani appears not to understand that smartphones can be used for evil New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has invited the city’s residents to join him at a block party to celebrate his inauguration but told attendees not to bring a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to the event.…

Whether this short down trend will hold depends on us. We have to keep fighting climate alarmism, calling out nonsense, be it scientific or political, when we see it.

The ITSM outfit would join Oracle, Comcast, and Netflix in installing bunk beds in the corner office ServiceNow’s amended employment contract with CEO Bill McDermott extends his time with the company into the next decade, but also provides possible next steps for the journeyman corporate leader, including the co-CEO role, a position he held at SAP in the years prior to joining the ITSM juggernaut.…

The solution? Lock up the screens and read to your kids If you're thinking of plopping your infant in front of a screen to get some peace and quiet, you might want to reconsider - higher screen exposure in infancy was linked to longer decision times later on and higher anxiety symptoms in the teenage years.…

You didn't think you'd get to enjoy your time off without a major cybersecurity incident, did you? A high-severity MongoDB Server vulnerability, for which proofs of concept emerged over Christmas week, is now under active exploitation, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.…

We have been fortunate to witness the largest climate event to occur on the planet since the advent of global satellite records, and possibly the largest event since the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. It is clearly a naturally occurring, externally forced climate event. However, mainstream climate scientists are not treating it appropriately. This is because climate science does not function like other sciences and is subject to strong confirmation bias. The first step to learning from the 2

Publication of research results, theoretical propositions and scholarly essays is not a free-for-all. As shown by the dogmatism around climate change and Covid-19, sceptics struggle to get papers in print. The gate-keeper is the peer-review system, which people take for granted as a screening process to ensure rigour in scientific literature. But it is not …

Recently released UK government stats suggest Hybrid vehicles are significantly more dangerous to vehicle occupants than gasoline vehicles.

Digital screen snafu or satirical comment on Microsoft's licensing policies? Bork!Bork!Bork!  Today's Bork comes courtesy of an exhibition dedicated to the UK street artist Banksy and demonstrates that "Limitless" does not always apply to Windows Activation.…

Want to survive the crash? Find another way to make money with GPUs Today, Nvidia’s revenues are dominated by hardware sales. But when the AI bubble inevitably pops, the GPU giant will become the single most important software company in the world.…

2026 is the year where AI must meet ROI in the enterprise, and the key to delivering it is data governance. Leaders from Dell, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake have released their 2026 predictions for AI in the workplace, and they agree that safeguards for AI agents and ROI are the top priorities for their customers.…

The singular ability of language and reasoning models to analyze huge bodies of technical information opens up new ways to understand and advance research.

Now replace the autopilot with Copilot Bork!Bork!Bork!  Bork can happen to the best of us, but flashing one's undercarriage at the boss of a compliance company is less than ideal, particularly at 35,000 feet in the air.…

If you want more money from the government, what better excuse do you need than “climate change”!

One cert, in plaintext, on thousands of devices, led to what looks like years of crime South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT has found that local carrier Korea Telecom (KT) deployed thousands of badly secured femtocells, leading to an attack that enabled micropayments fraud and snooping on customers’ communications – maybe for years.…

Anti-oil and gas advocates across the country have pursued litigation in recent years attempting to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for decades of financial damages the advocates claim were caused by climate change.

‘General agents’ to infuse Meta’s products real soon now UPDATED  Meta will acquire made-in-China AI outfit Manus and harness its “general agent” technology across its products.…

The deal negotiated in September locked Nvidia into a purchase price of $23 per share. Intel shares traded at $36 on Monday Nvidia’s $5 billion Intel stock purchase is already worth $7.58 billion, turning the recently approved bailout of its rival into a shrewd financial play.…

A New York agency going by the name NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) is leading the charge to build these energy storage facilities, including in densely populated areas like Queens. On their website, they have a page touting the new battery storage project at the Ravenswood location. Believe it or not, their sales pitch is that the new battery facility is cleaner and greener than the prior natural gas power plants on the site. Here is a quote they take from Que

There's more where that came from, CEO says Rogue insiders suspected of taking bribes to hand over Coinbase customer records to criminals are beginning to face justice, according to CEO Brian Armstrong.…

Extortion group Lovely claims to have stolen 40 million pieces of info from publisher Conde Nast A criminal group is beating Conde Nast over the head for not responding sooner to its extortion attempt by posting stolen subscribers' email and home addresses and warning the publisher of Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Teen Vogue that it has 40 million more entries.…

There’s a big salary up for grabs if you can handle a high-stress role with a track record of turnover How’d you like to earn more than half a million dollars working for one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies? The catch: the job is stressful, and the last few people tasked with it didn’t stick around. Over the weekend, OpenAI boss Sam Altman went public with a search for a new Head of Preparedness, saying rapidly improving AI models are creating new risks that nee

The commercial enterprise that controls Russians’ biometric data has introduced new ways to use your face as a form of ID, resulting in unprecedented levels of safety and convenience in the Russian Federation. Russians young and old are already reaping the benefits of their country’s “digital transformation”—including very, very young Russians. The Russian government is working on …

The auction sent a message in megawatts and dollars. The Washington left may try to spin it, but the grid will not.

Four completely non-AI-related trends that will shape the future The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There's no reason to think this will change in 2026. However, through the magic of journalism, here's a world where that's not true, a world where other things are happening that will shape the future. We like to call it the real world, and here's what's happening there and why it matters.…

The only climate conference dedicated to the examination of data rather than the propagation of dogma is back! Yours truly (Anthony) will be there as a Keynote Speaker, plus, given…

20 years, multiple delays, and millions of dollars later, FI$Cal is live – mostly Since 2005, YouTube has gone from launching its first website to serving up more than 100,000 years' worth of video content every day. During the same period, the State of California has gone from the idea of adopting a single ERP, HCM, and procurem

Quote of the Week: “The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.”— Max Planck, Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science

Countries that banded together to challenge Boeing in the air try to do the same to AWS, Microsoft, and Google on the ground Feature  More than half a century ago, a consortium of European aerospace businesses from the UK, France, Germany and Spain joined forces to take on America's Boeing. Fast forward to the 21st century and the countries are applying the same model needs to the world of cloud computing, giving the continent a fighting chance to reduce the digital

More millennial tech support tales from your fellow readers On Call Y2K  Welcome to a special festive season edition of On Call, in which we share readers' stories of working on the 31st of December 1999 – the moment the tech world held its breath and hoped years of Year 2000 bug remediation efforts would work.…

There is overwhelming evidence that the current warming cycle will eventually reverse.  This does not mean that GHG emissions are not a factor but does mean they are a tweak not the primary driver.  This combined with the fact that New York GHG emissions are so small relative to global emissions that we cannot meaningfully affect global emissions means that GHG emission reductions for the sake of the climate is a useless endeavor.

Oversaw a significant resurgence in Big Blue’s fortunes during the dotcom era IBM has announced the death of its former CEO Lou Gerstner, who passed away on Saturday, aged 83.…

Former staffer of Korean e-tailer Coupang accessed 33 million records but may have done less damage than feared Korean e-tailer Coupang claims a former employee has admitted to improperly accessing data describing 33 million of its customers, but says the accused deleted the stolen data.…

PLUS: Australia buys air-gapped Google Cloud; Huawei triples use of home-built components; JAXA blames low pressure for rocket crash; And more Asia In Brief  China’s Cyberspace Administration on Saturday posted draft rules governing the behaviour of AI companions that prohibit using them to serve as friends for the elderly.…

At this point, a reminder is useful: the issue is not what the authors claim, but what the results depend on.

"... trace toxic metals like lead and cadmium can pollute soil and water if mishandled ..."

I wanted to share this amusing but cautionary video this Sunday night. Without giving too much away, this video explores something we have discussed before – the danger AI poses, not to jobs or humanity – but to our perception of reality. And, yes, this is the kind of thing that would usually go in …

The Green on Green civil war is heating up in Australia.

The human harms of cyberattacks piled up this year, and violence expected to increase The knock-on, and often unintentional, impacts of a cyberattack are so rarely discussed. As an industry, the focus is almost always placed on the economic damage: the ransom payment; the cost of business downtime; and goodness, don't forget those poor shareholders.…

This science based reporting is refreshing, though suspicious, because one wonders if the news was bad, if the season was worse than usual, whether they would then attribute it to climate change. One wonders why the first no-landfall year in a decade (a good thing) isn’t caused by climate change, while bad weather is, at least according to much of the media.

A place for the discussion.

Hotel guests get a blast from the past courtesy of classic Windows BSOD BORK!BORK!BORK!  Today's bork belongs in the dim and distant past – a reminder of when Windows had proper crash screens.…

A wildlife charity has declared 2025 "the Year of the Blooming Octopus" after record numbers were spotted off the south-west coast of England.

After also analyzing nearly half a million flights across the North Atlantic, the research team has generated new insights.

Best not touch that screen, eh? Bork!Bork!Bork!  Today's Christmas bork comes from London's Victoria train station, just before the festive season got underway, and is an update to the old IT standby: "It isn't DNS. It can't be DNS... It was SSL."…

From the neoreactionary accelerationists of the Dark Enightenment to the AI-spun social credit web of the NEONERDS, today author and researcher Iain Davis takes us on a whirlwind tour of his new book, The Technocratic Dark State. Show notes and sources are available HERE.

The most popular desktop browser is festooned with Google AI, but you can make at least some of it go away Most of today’s desktop web browsers come with a ton of built-in AI features, but the good news is that, in most cases, no one is forcing you to use them, and you can at least hide them from view. Removing the most egregious AI tools from Chrome is pretty simple, but it requires a few steps.…

Practice makes perfect It's the most wonderful time of the year … for corporate security bosses to run tabletop exercises, simulating a hypothetical cyberattack or other emergency, running through incident processes, and practicing responses to ensure preparedness if when a digital disaster occurs.…

In supercharged AI race, defenders need to keep up interview  According to Remedio CEO Tal Kollender, the only way to beat the bad guys hacking into corporate networks is to "think like a hacker," and because not everyone is a teenage hacker turned cybersecurity startup chief executive, she built an AI to do this.…

Smarter access-point handoffs, better scheduling, fewer stalls Wi-Fi 8 will be a step change in connectivity, if Intel can be believed, and will be able to adapt intelligently to local conditions to deliver a reliable service without the slowdowns users often experience when the network is congested.…

Everything you hated about text adventure games is now being sold as a productivity tool Opinion  When Microsoft recently decided to open source the seminal text adventure game Zork, I contemplated revisiting it during the festive season... until I realized I've spent much of 2025 experiencing the worst of such games when using AI chatbots.…

The latest in our “hey, that’s kinda interesting…” season for the Christmas week is this fascinating documentary on the music industry from youtuber Barely Sociable. There’s a lot of fascinating talking points covered, but to me by far the most interesting was the notion that the charts are rigged, and the industry can create “number …

The lack of trust that leads to outsourcing can be expensive On Call Y2K  December 26th is a holiday across much of the Reg-reading world, but it's also a Friday – the day on which we present a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that recounts your tales of tech support encounters and exasperation.…

Investment and interest have outpaced technology and society By the time the humanoid robots arrived at the Humanoids Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on December 11, the registration line had already extended downstairs to the lobby.…

Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world. 1. How the EU saved Christmas It’s as predictable and as it is dull, but “bird flu” is here to increase the cost of poultry …

Two tiny boxes, 128 GB apiece – but very different strengths Hands On  Most GenAI models are trained and run in massive datacenter clusters, but the ability to build, test, and prototype AI systems locally is no less relevant today.…

Alternative apps to empower older versions of macOS or Windows Part 2  There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS.…

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 the 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 …

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.…

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.…

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.…

Plans move to Rust, with help from AI Microsoft wants to develop tech that could 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.…

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.…

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 …

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 …

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.

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.

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.