The Register

Microsoft vet revisits the gloriously manual era of write protection

Microsoft's Raymond Chen took a delightful trip down memory lane this week, tracing how write protection for removable media has changed over the decades.…

James Frith takes reins from Josh Simons, who quit even though he was cleared over journalist vetting scandal

Labour MP James Frith has taken over the ministerial roles held by Josh Simons after he resigned over his handling of a report on journalists while running a think tank.…

Big Red's cloud that 'doesn't go down' goes down again

An Oracle outage knocked parts of TikTok offline this week. The incident affected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which trails AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in market share but counts the social media behemoth among its customers.…

Kip Meeks walked a year early with the overseer of tech markets yet to take action against AWS and Microsoft

The chair of the competition markets authority's cloud inquiry has quit, citing the slow pace of implementing recommendations outlined in a report it published in 2025 to boost market dynamics in Britain's cloud computing market.…

Slow disclosure and odd reassurance that exposing names and contact details won't be a problem isn't going down well

Gamers are ready to unleash their mightiest virtual weapons and point them at independent games studio Cloud Imperium, after it sat on news of a data breach for weeks and then announced it without fanfare.…

Raises hopes birds 40,000km away can be reprogrammed, for science or military purposes

The European Space Agency and the Institute of Optoelectronics at China’s Academy of Sciences both claim they’ve achieved gigabit links to satellites in geostationary orbit.…

Retains eight-weekly Extended Stable releases but warns fortnightly updates are the best way to stay safe

Google will halve the time between releases of its Chrome browser to two weeks, across versions of the software for desktop operating systems, Android, and iOS.…

Go outside and smell some flowers

Updated  Meta’s flagship service, Facebook, is experiencing an outage.…

Company aims to stitch tens of thousands of GPUs together for more efficient training and inference

It's a good time to be an AI chip startup, especially if you happen to specialize in silicon photonics.…

Probably not an isolated incident only as researchers have already found 2,863 live API keys exposed

A developer says their company is on the hook for more than $82,000 in unauthorized charges after a stolen Google Gemini API key racked massive usage costs up in just 48 hours.…

Injected liver cells stayed viable and functional for eight weeks in mice

Can’t keep waiting on the transplant list? How about an injectable “satellite liver” instead? After an MIT research project showed early success, the idea of a mini organ that could be injected into the body to take over for a failing liver doesn’t sound so far-fetched.…

AI conversations for sale include sensitive health and legal details

Your latest chat transcript could be bought and sold. Data brokers are selling access to sensitive personal data captured during chatbot conversations, despite claims that the data is anonymized and obtained with consent.…

No one can hide from the RAMapocalypse, not even Tim Apple

RAM shortages and faster chips have a big impact on Apple's next-gen laptops. On Tuesday, the iGiant unveiled its M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros and M5 Airs alongside steep price hikes across the lineup.…

After DHS’s $2.3M PenLink contract gets ‘shady’ label

A group of 70 US lawmakers has called on Homeland Security's inspector general to investigate whether its agencies - including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - illegally purchased Americans' location data without first obtaining warrants.…

No more hiding in the server closet: Cyber ops mentioned alongside kinetic warfare as critical to conflict

In what may be the most public acknowledgment of its cyber operations capabilities to date, the Pentagon has admitted that cyber soldiers are playing a key role in its attacks on Iran. …

The deal includes all Ookla assets including Speedtest, Ekahau, and RootMetrics

Accenture is going to get a closer look into how web traffic is moving...or not moving. The company has announced plans to buy Downdetector parent company Ookla from Ziff Davis as part of a package deal with other software for $1.2 billion.…

Release lays the groundwork for going Wayland, if that's your sort of thing

BunsenLabs Linux is a lightweight, Debian-based distro forked from CrunchBang, and seven months after Debian 13 "Trixie" arrived, the project has released its latest version, dubbed Carbon.…

Law enforcement data shows profit-driven cybercrime is dominated by 35- to 44-year-olds, not script kiddies

Contrary to what some believe, cybercrime is not a kids' game. Middle-aged adults, not teenagers, now make up the biggest chunk of people getting busted.…

Telecoms coalition wants to avoid another 5G-style vendor scramble with early security guardrails

A group of Western governments has launched a fresh bid to shape 6G before it's even standardized, unveiling a set of security and resilience principles to bake supply chain controls and cyber safeguards into the next generation of mobile networks.…

Risk management? Continuity plan if our provider disappears? We've heard of these things

AI adoption is moving too rapidly say senior tech leaders, as the pressure to deploy clashes with risk management and compliance concerns.…