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Memory safety trumps retro computing: Alpha, PA-RISC, m68k, SH4 face the chop in 2026

Debian's APT package manager will have a "hard requirement" on Rust from May 2026. This move may make some rather big waves.…

Taking belief in LLMs very literally indeed

Opinion  It's not been a year since his ouster as Intel's CEO, but Pat Gelsinger is firmly back on the tech leadership pony. He's done hardware with Intel, software with VMWare. This time, it's faithware.…

Help me, HOBI-WAN, you're my only hope for lunch

The European Space Agency (ESA) has coined a tortured acronym for its project to feed astronauts on long-duration missions: HOBI-WAN (Hydrogen Oxidizing Bacteria In Weightlessness As a source of Nutrition).…

IEEE survey of senior techies in six countries finds recrutiment for data analytics, and machine learning on the up

Demand for software development skills in AI-related roles is set to fall next year as agentic AI accelerates across business markets, according to an IEEE industry survey.…

But question marks remain over the tech’s biases

London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) says the hundreds of live facial recognition (LFR) deployments across the Capital last year led to 962 arrests, according to a new report on the controversial tech's use.…

Does Discord need some stars for when Management is watching?

The maker of the Grand Theft Auto game series, Rockstar Games, has fired more than 30 coders and graphic designers in an act described by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry."…

Christmas is coming, the GNOME is getting fat… please put a penny in the old red hat?

Ubuntu Summit  System76's POP!_OS is one of the more substantially modified Ubuntu based distros out there, and so it was something of a surprise to see the company's substantial presence at the Ubuntu Summit. And its stable release along with version 1.0 of its custom desktop, COSMIC, is imminent.…

Boffins say outsourcing your homework leaves you sounding less knowledgeable, short on facts

A study of how people use ChatGPT for research has confirmed something most of us learned the hard way in school: to be a subject matter expert, you've got to spend time swotting up.…

Jon Seager, VP of Engineering, talks exclusively to The Reg

Ubuntu Summit  The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical's vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation.…

One SQL slip-up is survivable. Not learning from the first mess meant change

Who, Me?  Another Monday is upon us and The Register therefore presents a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed confessional column in which you admit to making mistakes, and explain how you made it out alive afterwards.…

It’s less bonkers than it sounds given the challenges of wiring Africa

African carrier Seacom is investigating the feasibility of building a submarine cable that would run across the heart of Africa, on land.…

When operators see danger, innocent users are dragged down along with bad actors

Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that understood its importance managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses, actions that today mean many users in the rest of the world are more likely to find their connections throttled or blocked.…

PLUS: Google's massive AI giveaway in India; Raid on Australian software company; Alleged scam camp owner's assets seized; and more!

Asia In Brief  Last week’s trade talks between the USA and China have seen the two countries ease some trade restrictions.…

PLUS: Cyber-exec admits selling secrets to Russia; LastPass isn't checking to see if you're dead; Nation-state backed Windows malware; and more

Infosec in brief  Australia’s Signals Directorate (ASD) last Friday warned that attackers are installing an implant named “BADCANDY” on unpatched Cisco IOS XE devices and can detect deletion of their wares and reinstall their malware.…

No datacenters required

Fortytwo, a Silicon Valley startup, was founded last year based on the idea that a decentralized swarm of small AI models running on personal computers offers scaling and cost advantages over centralized AI services.…

The Sunseeker Elite X5 can mow on its own, but it doesn't come cheap

The tentacles of AI seem to be reaching everywhere, even to the humble lawnmower. We tested the Sunseeker Elite X5, a robotic mower that uses machine learning to steer around your lawn, to see what happens when artificial intelligence meets whirling blades of doom.…

Satya has also delivered Sam most of the cash he promised

updated  Microsoft reported earnings for the quarter ended Sept. 30 on Wednesday after market close and buried in its financial filings were a couple of passages suggesting that OpenAI suffered a net loss of $11.5 billion or more during the quarter.…

AI promises to find bugs and gaps in your apps

After helping expand the modern software attack surface with the rise of AI services prone to data poisoning and prompt injection, OpenAI has thrown a bone to cyber defenders.…

The bit barn will run on gas power first.

Texas is set to get another nuclear-powered datacenter project thanks to Blue Energy and Crusoe, but any atomic action isn't likely until the next decade.…

You click and think you're getting a download page, but get malware instead

Imagine searching for Microsoft Teams, seeing a text link at the top of the results, visiting it, and then getting hit with malware. The Rhysida ransomware gang, an especially insidious criminal organization that has stolen millions of people's info, has been placing fake ads for Microsoft Teams in search engines and then infecting victims who make the mistake of clicking them.…