The Register

30 years on, Microsoft engineer explains why the old OS had to babysit its flashy successor

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has answered the question of why Microsoft insisted on running up a miniature Windows 3.1 rather than a diminutive Windows 95 to install the full-fat version of the latter.…

Hundreds of thousands of workers in financial despair supported with landmark loan

The UK government is stepping in with financial support for Jaguar Land Rover, providing it with a hefty loan as it continues to battle the fallout from a cyberattack.…

If at first you don't succeed, you might be SpaceX

NASA and SpaceX have successfully raised the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) with a 15-minute burn of the Draco thrusters located in the trunk of the Dragon freighter.…

Need – or prefer – an EOL version of Windows? Don't panic!

Legacy Update is a third-party Windows Update client which can update old, unsupported versions of Windows, from Windows 10 and 11 all the way back to Windows 2000.…

Ed Miliband takes aim at social media overlord for promoting violence and disinformation

The UK government should consider the possibility of leaving social media platform X, a high-profile minister has suggested.…

Consumer org forces Redmond to expunge list of requirements for free ESU in Euro Economic Area, just need a Microsoft account

Updated  Microsoft will give consumers in the European Economic Area no-strings extended support for the soon-to be-EOL Windows 10.…

Attackers make contact but negotiations fall on deaf ears

Luxury London-based retailer Harrods is facing its second cybersecurity scandal in 2025, confirming criminals not only stole 430,000 customers' data in a fresh attack but have even made contact.…

Socio political backdrop is not what it once was....

Opinion  UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer directly addressed his new policy of mandatory digital ID in the country for 23 seconds in its effective launch speech.…

CRM giant denies security shortcomings as claims allege stolen data used for ID theft

Updated  Salesforce is facing a wave of lawsuits in the wake of a cyberattack that exposed customer data.…

A millennial does battle with Redmond's enterprise tools and comes away reeling 

Comment  Probably the single most common argument against switching to Linux is the absolute non-negotiable requirement of many organizations to have Microsoft Exchange. Here's a fascinating glimpse of the view from the other side.…

Guess how much of our direct transatlantic data capacity runs through two cables in Bude?

Feature  The first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, delivered a little over 700 messages before promptly dying a few weeks later. 167 years on, the undersea cables connecting the UK to the outside world process £220 billion in daily financial transactions. Now, the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) has told the government that it has to do a better job of protecting them.…

We’re blind to malicious AI until it hits. We can still open our eyes to stopping it

Opinion  Last year, The Register reported on AI sleeper agents. A major academic study explored how to train an LLM to hide destructive behavior from its users, and how to find it before it triggered. The answers were unambiguously asymmetric — the first is easy, the second very difficult. Not what anyone wanted to hear.…

An early career lesson in the power of documentation, and the importance of exploration

Who, Me?  The Register has very few rules, but one we always observe on a Monday morning is to present a new installment of Who, Me? – the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of breaking the rules, without breaking your career in the process.…

The Register is at the world’s biggest space gabfest and just heard the world's top 6 space agency leaders speak

IAC 2025  If the USA’s space strategy succeeds, it will run a “village” on the moon in a decade, NASA administrator Sean Duffy told the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney today.…

Alleges bias and security problems

US President Donald Trump has demanded Microsoft fire its recently appointed head of global affairs Lisa Monaco.…

PLUS: Interpol recoups $439M from crims; CISA criticizes Feds security; FIFA World Cup nets dodgy domain deluge

Infosec In Brief  Police in the Netherlands arrested two 17-year-olds last week over claims that Russian intelligence recruited them to spy on the headquarters of European law enforcement agencies.…

PLUS: US court grounds China’s DJI; India requires 2FA for most payments; Great Firewall busters launch VPN; and more!

Asia In Brief  Over 600 e-government services operated by South Korea’s government are offline after a datacenter fire disrupted operations.…

The proposed 1:1 chip rule means nothing but pain for US tech until he’s out of office

Comment  Ending America's reliance on foreign chip fabs remains a high priority for Uncle Sam, but the Trump administration's "my way or the highway" approach to the issue threatens to do more harm than good.…

Not to be confused with all the other reports of Chinese intruders on US networks that came to light this week

RedNovember, a Chinese state-sponsored cyberspy group, targeted government and critical private-sector networks around the globe between June 2024 and July 2025, exploiting buggy internet-facing appliances to deploy a Go-based backdoor called Pantegana and other offensive security tools, including Cobalt Strike and SparkRAT.…

Remember when AI was supposed to make us more productive, not hate each other?

ai-pocalypse  Workers are getting lazy about using AI to do their jobs for them, and the results are both costly and increasing distrust in the workplace.…