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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

The lawsuit brought against Google by netizens upset Incognito Mode in Chrome did not fully anonymize their activities looks set to settle before going to trial.…

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is back on sale in China – in a less capable configuration version designed to comply with US restrictions on exports into the Middle Kingdom.…

NASA's Juno mission is to close out 2023 with a low pass over Io, one of Jupiter's many moons.…

Feature  The same cybercrime crew broke into two high-profile Las Vegas casino networks over the summer, infected both with ransomware, and stole data belonging to tens of thousands of customers from the mega-resort chains.…

Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) has exposed a previously unknown "feature" in Apple iPhones that allowed malware to bypass hardware-based memory protection.…

Broadcom has told VMware partners the virtualization champion’s channel program will end in early 2024.…