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Recognizing what's unique about AI will give us the tools to keep it in check

Opinion  All the worries and fears about AI boil down to one. How do we know how well it's working?…

Right to repair meets right to recycle

The UK government hopes to make it easier for folks to reuse and recycle electrical goods rather than consign old gear to the landfill.…

Eighth charge related to campaign contributions would just take too dang long

US prosecutors do not plan to proceed with a second trial of convicted and imprisoned crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), according to a Southern District of New York court letter filed on December 29.…

Redmond's AI assistant bounds onto Android and iOS without Bing branding

First Look  While many readers enjoyed holiday downtime, Microsoft was busy bringing its Copilot AI to Android and iOS.…

Compute, networking and storage are key, and global sales are still possible – despite, y'know, controversy

Huawei chair Hu Houkun has prepared the Chinese tech giant for 2024 by suggesting its datacenter offerings are the key to success in the new year.…

Less than you might imagine, thankfully

The US Coast Guard has advised that a ship carrying around 800 tonnes of Lithium-Ion batteries – some of which caught fire – is out of danger after its crew handled the situation admirably.…

And don’t get us started on what it’s like to work around high explosives

On Call: Dirt File  All good things must end, even the holidays - and with them On Call’s Dirt File, a special festive edition of our reader-contributed tech support trauma tales dedicated to the filthiest places techies have been asked to toil.…

Artist Agnieszka Pilat tells The Register how she gets Spot to paint, not pant

Boston Dynamics' "Spot" robot dog has been deployed as a tour guide, a police officer, and a warehouse worker. At the National Gallery Of Victoria's Triennial in Melbourne, Australia, it's now doing duty as an artist.…

As we argue over freeing ourselves from fossil fuels, can SRM buy us time to develop green energy we need?

In-depth  At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting (AGU23) in San Francisco the other week, the 25,000-plus science folks in attendance pretty much all agreed on one unequivocal fact: the Earth is warming and it's warming quickly. Discussions centered not on "if" — that's been settled — but on how to best measure that rise, how to best model it, and what best to do about it.…

The predictions that turned out correct ... and the ones we wished were right

Systems Approach  The end of the year is often a time for people in tech to make predictions, but rather than making our own, today we’ll look back on some of the bold predictions of the past – specifically the inaugural Outrageous Opinion session held at SIGCOMM in 1995.…

5G networks won't have the capacity to cope by end of the decade

Comment  If you think 5G networks have failed to live up to their promise, you're not alone. But the tech is still early on in implementation, although some in the mobile industry are already looking to what might come next.…

Cleaning up after hackers is easy compared to surviving the politics of consultancy

On Call  It’s the last Friday of 2023, but because the need for tech support never goes away neither does On Call, The Register’s Friday column in which readers share their tales of being asked to fix the unfeasible, in circumstances that are often indefensible.…

E-tail giant seeks profitability for its vid-streaming service and a classic Big Tech dominance play

Analysis  Amazon.com has emailed subscribers to its Prime Video service, in America at least, to advise them ads will start to appear in their movie and TV streams as of January 29 – unless they pay more.…