Space Station Research Informs New FDA-Approved Cancer Therapy

NASA opens the International Space Station for scientists and researchers, inviting them to use the benefits of microgravity for commercial and public research, technology demonstrations, and more. Today, a portion of the crew’s time aboard station is devoted to private industry, including medical research that addresses complex health challenges on Earth and prepares astronauts for […]

First Sky Map from NASA’s SPHEREx Observatory

NASA’s SPHEREx Observatory has mapped the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, as seen here in this image released on Dec. 18, 2025. This image features a selection of colors emitted primarily by stars (blue, green, and white), hot hydrogen gas (blue), and cosmic dust (red). While not visible to the human eye, these 102 […]

Instead of fixing Windows, Microsoft tells users how to do menial cleanup of junk files

Ever noticed your computer acting sluggish or warning you about low storage? Temporary files could be the sneaky culprit. Windows creates these files while installing apps, loading web pages, or running updates. Left unchecked, they pile up and hog valuable space. Luckily, clearing them out is easier than cleaning your kitchen junk drawer. Let’s explore Storage Sense, Disk Cleanup, manual deletion, and a few bonus performance tips to keep your PC running like new. ↫ Microsoft Windows Learning Center You may think this is one of those junk SEO articles generated by “AI” to trap Google searches, but no, this is published by Microsoft on Microsoft’s website. Instead of fixing the long-standing and well-known problems around Windows being absolutely terrible at keeping itself clean and functional over longer periods of time, the company figured it’d be a better idea to just keep shoving that responsibility unto users instead. None of the tools mentioned in this article should need to be run or set up by users manually. A computer is supposed to make life less tedious, not more so, and I already have enough cleaning up and laundry to do out here in the real world, and I don’t want to be bothered with it on my computer. Why on earth am I supposed to manually remove unnecessary Windows Update files? Why did Adobe installers leave about 15GB of old installers in some directory inside C:/Windows on my wife’s computer that I had to remove using a third party tool? In what universe is this okay? Sometimes I wonder how much of our collective time is wasted just by dealing with Windows on a day-to-day basis in our society. Imagine the time we could reclaim and spend on our loved ones, families, and hobbies instead, if only Windows was developed by people with even a modicum of competency.

StockHistory function becomes StockMystery as Microsoft Excel bugs out

New Year glitch leaves users staring at connection errors instead of market data

For many, the start of a new year is a time to take stock. For Microsoft, it was a time to stop giving it as the company kicked off 2026 with a bug that broke Excel's StockHistory function.…

No membrane in sight as Osmos diffuses into Microsoft Fabric

AI data engineering startup acquisition brings ETL and Spark automation in-house

Microsoft has bought Osmos, an AI-assisted data engineering platform, in a bid to enrich its Fabric data platform, encroaching on so-called partners' markets.…

Mem-ageddon: AI chip frenzy to wallop DRAM prices with 70% hike

Samsung and SK hynix readying another gouge as server silicon squeeze leaves PCs and phones out in the cold

Memory prices are set to spike again as chipmakers prioritize AI server production over consumer devices, with analysts warning of a high double-digit jump in Q1 2026 alone as demand outpaces supply.…

Fake Windows BSODs check in at Europe's hotels to con staff into running malware

Phishers posing as Booking.com use panic-inducing blue screens to bypass security controls

Russia-linked hackers are sneaking malware into European hotels and other hospitality outfits by tricking staff into installing it themselves through fake Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes.…

Humongous 52-inch Dell monitor will make you feel like king of the internet with four screens in one

Also: The XPS brand is back

If you like to separate your workflow onto multiple monitors but hate the gap and bezel between screens, Dell’s new display was made for you. Announced on Tuesday at CES, the Dell UltraSharp 52 (U5226KW) offers 52 inches of 6K resolution screen real estate that you can divide into up to four virtual monitors, supporting input either from up to four different devices, or one computer that creates that many desktops.…

Congress ctrl-Zs bulk of proposed cuts to NASA science

Fate of Shuttle Discovery remains conspicuously unaddressed in FY2026 agreement text

NASA's budget battle took another turn this week as the US House and Senate Appropriations Committees released text rejecting proposed cuts to the space agency.…

Crypto wallet shop Ledger confirms customer data lifted in Global-e snafu

Order and contact details accessed via ecommerce partner, and phishing has begun

Blockchain security biz Ledger says customer information was accessed in a breach at its ecommerce payment partner Global-e, and is warning that other brands using the platform may also be affected.…

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Campaigners say Britain's dependence on Big Tech leaves critical systems exposed to political pressure

The Open Rights Group is warning politicians that the UK is leaning far too heavily on US tech companies to run critical systems, and wants the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill to force a rethink.…

Researchers poison stolen data to make AI systems return wrong results

Wanted: Chief Disinformation Officer to pollute company knowledge graphs

Researchers affiliated with universities in China and Singapore have devised a technique to make stolen knowledge graph data useless if incorporated into a GraphRAG AI system without consent.…

Students bag extended Christmas break after cyber hit on school IT

Phones, email, and core systems knocked out at Higham Lane in Nuneaton

Students at a school in Warwickshire, England, have scored an extended Christmas break after a cyberattack crippled its IT systems, forcing classrooms to close and staff to summon government incident responders.…

UK injects just £210M into cyber plan to stop Whitehall getting pwnd

Central government will supposedly be as secure as energy facilities and datacenters under new proposals

The UK today launches its Government Cyber Action Plan, committing £210 million ($282 million) to strengthen defenses across digital public services and hold itself to the same cybersecurity standards it's imposing on critical infrastructure operators.…

Diving Into Human Spaceflight Safety with NASA Johnson’s Craig Shannon

Growing up in Houston, Craig Shannon was always inspired by NASA and the spirit of exploration the agency represents. Yet it was a passion for scuba diving that unexpectedly led to his more than 23-year career at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Shannon became a certified diver and scuba instructor while earning his bachelor’s degree in […]

AI's grand promise: Less drudgery, more complexity, same (or lower) pay

Workers face new mental health pressures as they shift from doing tasks to babysitting agentic AI

A report on occupational health warns that AI adoption may paradoxically increase workplace burdens rather than reduce them. As AI automates routine tasks, workers will shoulder new responsibilities: overseeing AI systems, catching their errors, and managing the resulting complexity – potentially triggering mental health pressures.…

Behold a T-Rex holotype, paleontology's "gold standard"

What happens behind the scenes of a dinosaur exhibit? Short Wave host Regina Barber got to find out … by taking a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In the museum’s basement, she talked to a paleobiologist, checked out a farmland fossil find and even touched a 67 million-year-old bone. Because, as it turns out, there’s a lot of science that can be found in a museum basement.

Learn more about the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s exhibit “ The Stories We Keep ”.

Interested in more archaeology and dino-related science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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One criminal, 50 hacked organizations, and all because MFA wasn't turned on

Crim used infostealer to get cloud credentials

If you don't say "yes way" to MFA, the consequences can be disastrous. Sensitive data belonging to about 50 global enterprises is listed for sale – and, in some cases, has already been sold – on the dark web following a major infostealer campaign, with apparent victims including American utility engineering firm Pickett and Associates; Japan's homebuilding giant Sekisui House; and Spain's largest airline Iberia.…

Reaching the Precipice in Angola

The Huíla plateau, bounded by dramatic cliffs and chasms, stands above the arid coastal plains in the country’s southwest.

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

Notebook updates and enterprise tools also inbound from IT giant

At most businesses today, the IT department gives laptops out to employees so they can easily take their work with them. But HP has a different idea: build a Windows computer into a full-size keyboard and let you carry that around, plugging into monitors and mice along the way.…

AMD clocks in with higher CPU speeds, leaves architecture untouched

New chips same as the old chips

AMD kicked off CES on Monday by unveiling a slew of desktop and mobile processors aimed at everyone from casual users and creative professionals to gamers and AI devs. But with few improvements, they're more "newish" than new.…

The late arrival of 16-bit CP/M

The way the histories of CP/M, DOS, Microsoft, and the 8086 intertwine would be worthy of an amazing film if it wasn’t for the fact it would be very hard to make it interesting screen material. Few OEMs were asking for an 8086 version of CP/M. One that did was SCP – the same company that helped Microsoft design SoftCard. They needed a disk operating system for their 8086 board released in November 1979. In April 1980, after CP/M-86 was still nowhere to be seen, they lost patience and asked their young engineer Tim Paterson to develop a “quick and dirty” OS similar to CP/M that would hopefully boost the sales of their board. That little operating system, officially named 86-DOS, was eventually purchased by Microsoft and renamed MS-DOS. Paterson has stated on multiple occasions that he would never have begun developing it had CP/M‑86 been available on time. ↫ Nemanja Trifunovic There’s a ton more in this article about CP/M-86 and its gestation period, but this tangled little knot of coincidences always entertains me. It really could’ve been CP/M, and it really could’ve not been Microsoft. This industry is filled to the brim with interesting what-if stories that we barely regard as a worthy footnote, but few are as fascinating as what the world would’ve looked like had CP/M won out over DOS. The entire world would’ve been drastically different, and while nobody can say with a straight face it would be a better world, we’d at least not have the spectres of MS-DOS haunting system administrators, developers, and users the world over. Of course, they’d be haunted by different spectres, but still.

It’s hard to justify macOS Tahoe’s icons

We’ve talked about just how bad Apple’s regular icons have become, but what about the various icons Apple now plasters all over its menus, buttons, and dialogs? They’ve gotten so, so much worse. In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster. And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves. ↫ Nikita Prokopov The number of detailed examples in this article are heartbreaking. I just don’t understand how anyone can look at even three of these and not immediately ring the alarm bells, slam the emergency brake, rush to Tim Cook’s office. It further illustrates that no, the problem at Apple is not just one man, whether he be Jonathan Ive or Alan Dye or the next unfortunate bloke on the chopping block, but the institution as a whole. I have a feeling the kind of people who care about proper UI design have all left Apple by now. The institutional knowledge is gone. And that kind of knowledge is extremely difficult to get back.

Intel unleashes Panther Lake CPUs, first built on 18A process

Company claims its Ultra Series 3 processors will offer the best battery life yet

Intel has finally let its new Panther Lake CPUs out of the cage. First detailed in October and now launching under the brand name Intel Core Ultra Series 3, these are the first chips made with Intel’s 18A process and boast improved power efficiency and performance, particularly for graphics and AI workloads.…

Nvidia says it's more than doubled the DGX Spark’s performance since launch

Just maybe not in the way you're thinking

Nvidia's DGX Spark and its GB10-based siblings are getting a major performance bump with the platform's latest software update, announced at CES on Monday. The AI mini PC is also getting access to the GPU giant's full suite of AI Enterprise apps, alongside integrations with RTX Remix and Hugging Face's Reachy robotics platform.…

CheriBSD: FreeBSD for CHERI-enabled platforms

CheriBSD is a Capability Enabled, Unix-like Operating System that extends FreeBSD to take advantage of Capability Hardware on Arm’s Morello and CHERI-RISC-V platforms. CheriBSD implements memory protection and software compartmentalization features, and is developed by SRI International and the University of Cambridge. ↫ CheriBSD website This obviously raises the question – what exactly is CHERI? The FreeBSD Foundation has an article about this from 2023 providing more details. CHERI extends existing architectures (Armv8-A, MIPS64 (retired), RISC-V, and x86_64 (in development)) with a new hardware type, the CHERI capability. In CHERI systems, all access to memory is via CHERI capabilities either explicitly via new instructions or implicitly via a Default Data Capability (DDC) and Program Counter Capability (PCC) used by instructions with integer arguments. Capabilities grant access to specific ranges of (virtual, or occasionally, physical) memory via a base and length, and can further restrict access with permissions, which are compressed into a 128-bit representation (64-bits for the address and 64-bits for the metadata). In memory and in registers, capabilities are protected by tags that are cleared when the capability data is modified by a non-capability instruction or if a capability instruction would increase the access the capability grants. Tags are stored separately from data and cannot be manipulated directly. ↫ Brooks Davis CheriBSD brings this capability to anyone with compatible hardware, providing access to about 10000 pre-built memory-safe packages alongside more than 260000 pre-built memory-unsafe packages, as well as fully memory-safe versions of the KDE desktop, bhyve, and a ton of others. You can use both types of packages alongside one another, there’s a nice installer, and it basically seems like you’re using regular FreeBSD, just with additional complications, the biggest of which is, of course, the limited hardware support. I have a feeling that if you’re the kind of person to own CHERI-enabled hardware, you’re most likely already aware of CheriBSD. Still, if this is something you’re looking for, be aware that you’re going ot need special hardware. It’s also important to note that DTrace won’t work on CheriBSD, and most optional modules, like firewall systems, don’t work either.

Every conference is an AI conference as Nvidia unpacks its Vera Rubin CPUs and GPUs at CES

Teasing the next generation earlier than usual

CES used to be all about consumer electronics, TVs, smartphones, tablets, PCs, and – over the last few years – automobiles. Now, it's just another opportunity for Nvidia to peddle its AI hardware and software — in particular its next-gen Vera Rubin architecture.…

Claude devs complain about surprise usage limits, Anthropic blames expiring bonus

Holiday hangover?

Software developers who use Anthropic's Claude Code have been sounding the alarm for the past few days about changes in the AI service's usage limits.…

NASA’s IXPE Measures White Dwarf Star for First Time

By Michael Allen  For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarization Explorer) to study a white dwarf star. Using IXPE’s unique X-ray polarization capability, astronomers examined a star called the intermediate polar EX Hydrae, unlocking the geometry of energetic binary systems.  In 2024, IXPE spent nearly one week focused on EX […]

NASA Selects Tech Proposals to Advance Search-for-Life Mission

NASA announced Monday the selection of industry proposals to advance technologies for the agency’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept – the first mission that would directly image Earth-like planets around stars like our Sun and study the chemical composition of their atmospheres for signs of life. This flagship space telescope also would enable wide-ranging studies of […]

Archaeologists Discover 'Sumptuous' Frescoes at Ancient Villa Preserved by Mount Vesuvius' Eruption

Fragments of a peahen, a comedic theatrical mask and other intriguing finds are providing new insights into the history of the Villa of Poppaea

What’s Up: January 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA

Jupiter is at its biggest and brightest all year, the Moon and Saturn pair up, and the Beehive Cluster buzzes into view.

ServiceNow snags Microsoft vet to run legal amid M&A spree

Hossein Nowbar waged antitrust battles and created new legal policies around AI for Redmond

ServiceNow has hired Hossein Nowbar as its chief legal officer and president, the company announced on Monday.…

New Fossil Analysis Suggests This Seven-Million-Year-Old Primate Walked on Two Legs, Potentially Making It the Oldest Known Human Ancestor

Fresh findings about arm and leg bones advance the debate over whether Sahelanthropus tchadensis was bipedal, but not everyone is convinced

NASA Hubble Helps Detect ‘Wake’ of Betelgeuse’s Elusive Companion Star

Using new observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, astronomers tracked the influence of a recently discovered companion star, Siwarha, on the gas around Betelgeuse. The research, from scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), reveals a trail of dense gas swirling through Betelgeuse’s vast, extended atmosphere, shedding light […]

ChatGPT is playing doctor for a lot of US residents, and OpenAI smells money

One man's failing healthcare system is another man's opportunity

About sixty percent of American adults have turned to AI like ChatGPT for health or healthcare in the past three months. Instead of seeing that as an indictment of the state of US healthcare, OpenAI sees an opportunity to shape policy. …

AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

An anomaly or the beginning of a new trend? My bet's on the latter

I've been tracking AWS for a long time, with a specific emphasis on pricing. "What happens if AWS hikes prices" has always been something of a boogeyman, trotted out as a hypothetical to urge folks to avoid taking dependencies on a given provider.…

I Am Artemis: Jacki Mahaffey

Listen to this audio excerpt from Jacki Mahaffey, Artemis II chief training officer: When the Artemis II crew travels around the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft, they will have spent countless hours training for their lunar mission, and Jacki Mahaffey will have played a role in preparing them for their journey. As the Artemis II […]

Congrats, cybercrims: You just fell into a honeypot

A subpoena has been issued, apparently

Resecurity offered its "congratulations" to the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters cybercrime crew for falling into its threat intel team's honeypot – resulting in a subpoena being issued for one of the data thieves. Meanwhile, the notorious extortionists have since removed their claims of gaining "full access" to the security shop's systems.…

NASA to Cover US Spacewalks 94, 95 at International Space Station

NASA astronauts will conduct two spacewalks Thursday, Jan. 8, and Thursday, Jan. 15, outside the International Space Station, and the agency will provide comprehensive coverage. The first spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. EST on Jan. 8 and last about six hours and 30 minutes. NASA will provide live coverage beginning at 6:30 […]

Playing Koi: Palo Alto isn't saying if it will buy security start-up

CEO Nikesh Arora's trip to Tel Aviv last month sparked rumors.

Palo Alto Networks is on shopping spree. The company is reportedly considering a \(400 million purchase of Israeli cybersecurity start up Koi, which raised \)48 million in funding last year. …

Venezuela loses president, but gains empty Starlink internet offer

With no hardware for sale and no local service agreement, SpaceX’s move looks more like politics than philanthropy

The US just invaded your country, kidnapped your president, and wants to take your oil. But good news, Venezuelans, Starlink claims you can get a month of free Internet, even though it doesn't say how that could work in a place where it doesn't offer service.…

NASA’s Hubble Examines Cloud-9, First of New Type of Object

A team using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new type of astronomical object — a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud considered a “relic” or remnant of early galaxy formation. Nicknamed “Cloud-9,” this is the first confirmed detection of such an object in the universe — a finding that furthers the understanding of galaxy formation, […]

5 Tips to Craft a Standout NASA Internship Application

A NASA internship provides a stellar opportunity to launch your future as part of America’s aerospace workforce. NASA interns take on meaningful work and contribute to exciting agency projects with the guidance of a supportive mentor. The agency’s internship program regularly ranks as the nation’s most prestigious and competition is steep: in fiscal year 2025, […]

Qualcomm is determined to cut a slice out of Intel's PC pie with latest Snapdragon chips

Enterprises have been slow to adopt Arm laptops so far

Qualcomm is trying to become a major player in the laptop processor space. Its Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips, along with a concerted effort to improve the Windows on Arm software ecosystem, have made it a credible alternative to Intel and AMD, although it's still stuck at below 1% market share. On Monday at CES in Las Vegas, the company showed the next step in this strategy: the next-gen Snapdragon X2 Plus chips, which are targeted at budget and mainstream systems.…

U.S. Military Ends Practice of Shooting Live Animals to Train Medics to Treat Battlefield Wounds

The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act bans the use of live animals in live fire training exercises and prohibits "painful" research on domestic cats and dogs

A Rare, Parasitic 'Fairy Lantern' Plant Species Was Discovered in Malaysia. It Might Be Critically Endangered

The plant was first spotted near a popular picnic site within a forest. But subsequent surveys have found fewer than 20 individuals of the species, named Thismia selangorensis

EU won't scrap tech regs just because Washington dislikes them

US trade body threatens software and services market access unless European approach changes

The EU has pledged to stand firm against US threats following fines levied against Amercian tech companies for breaching recently introduced digital laws.…

Scientific Balloon Begins Antarctic Ascent

A scientific balloon starts its ascent into the air as it prepares to launch carrying NASA’s Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) mission. The mission lifted off from Antarctica at 5:56 a.m. NZST, Saturday, Dec. 20 (11:56 a.m., Friday, Dec. 19 in U.S. Eastern Time). The PUEO mission is designed to detect radio signals created […]

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Remember when HP made its own CPUs and Unix? We wonder if it does

The final version of HPE's own flavor of Unix, HP-UX 11i v3, is now out of support. It is the end of a line that started in 1982.…

Hundreds of Mysterious Victorian-Era Shoes Are Washing Up on a Beach in Wales. Nobody Knows Where They Came From

The leading theory is that the black leather boots, which were discovered by volunteers, were traveling on a cargo ship that sank nearby roughly 150 years ago

In Quantum Mechanics, Nothingness Is the Potential To Be Anything

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation.

The post In Quantum Mechanics, Nothingness Is the Potential To Be Anything first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

It's January 2026, and Google is finding innovative new ways to make one of its services worse

Important news for Gmail power users: Google is dropping the feature whereby Gmail can collect mail from other email accounts over POP3.…

A Stunning Sculpture of the Buddha Modeled After a Destroyed Sixth-Century Statue Is Coming to New York City's High Line

Known as "The Light That Shines Through the Universe," the 27-foot-tall artwork created by Tuan Andrew Nguyen will be installed on the Plinth this spring

UK's long-delayed Emergency Services Network eyes satellites for help

Direct-to-device services from low Earth orbit floated to plug coverage gaps

Satellite phone services could play a part in Britain's troubled Emergency Services Network (ESN) project, including SpaceX's Starlink platform, to plug gaps in the coverage provided by terrestrial network tech.…

Capita tells civil servants to wait for chatbots to fix pension portal woes

Outsourcer promises customers a service with 'AI at its core.' They just want a website that works

Exclusive  Capita has told users of its ailing UK civil service pension portal to wait until new chatbots go live before contacting it again about problems.…

Microsoft quietly kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

Up until now, it’s always remained possible to activate Windows offline, by calling a phone number, going through a lengthy phase of entering digits on your phone dialpad, and carefully listening to and entering a string of numbers on the device you’re trying to activate. For a while, even, this was, as far as I can tell, one of the easiest ways to fix activation issues caused by replacing one component too many, causing Windows activation to think you had a new machine. Phone activation was always remarkably more lenient and forgiving than online activation. Well, as part of Microsoft’s crusade to make Windows progressively more shit, it seems phone activation is going away. However, that seems to no longer work on Windows 11 or 10 or Windows 7 either, as another user Ben Kleinberg has documented on his YouTube channel. Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: “Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh” ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin They’re going after your local, non-online account, they’re going after offline activation – what’s next in line on the chopping block? Are they going to actively start blocking the various debloat tools that make Windows 11 at least slightly less of a block of concrete chained around your neck? Please switch to a real operating system.

New Zealand orders review into ManageMyHealth cyberattack

Government 'incredibly' concerned about breach potentially affecting more than 100,000 patients

New Zealand health minister Simeon Brown has ordered a review into the cyberattack at ManageMyHealth, which threatens the data of hundreds of thousands of Kiwis.…

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

From buried settings to geopolitical risk, the business model is surveillance

Opinion  At the end of last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five of the largest TV companies, accusing them of excessive and deceptive surveillance of their customers.…

Did Earth’s Water Come From Space?

Choose your fighter for the origin of water on Earth! Was it always here or did it come to this planet from somewhere else in space? And, either way, what does this mean for other water worlds in our galaxy? To find out, we talk with Michael Wong, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at Carnegie Science. He gets into scientists’ strongest candidates for the ways water could have come to our planet many, many years ago – including whether it could have been made here. Buckle up: This is a hot debate in astrobiology right now.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our Space Camp series and our episode on whether life started on the ocean floor ..

Interested in more space science and more unresolved hypotheses about how the universe came to be how it is today? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Meet the ‘Mean Avenger’, the office anti-hero who steps in when managers don’t defend their team

Who, Me?  How on earth is it 2026 already? The Register will ponder that existential matter after first presenting a new instalment of “Who, Me?” – the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of things you shouldn’t do at work, and how you escape them unscathed.…

An Amphitheater of Rock at Cedar Breaks

The colorful formations found in this bowl-shaped escarpment in southwestern Utah are the centerpiece of Cedar Breaks National Monument.

Trump admin sends heart emoji to commercial spyware makers with lifted Predator sanctions

Also, Korean Air hacked, EmEditor installer hijacked, a perfect 10 router RCE vuln, and more

infosec in brief  The Trump administration has cleared a trio of individuals sanctioned by the Biden administration for involvement with the Intellexa spyware consortium behind the Predator surveillance tool, removing restrictions that had barred them from doing business with the US.…

Desktop Classic System wants to bring some classic Mac OS to MATE and Debian

Desktop Classic System is an operating system based on Debian and a customized version of the MATE Desktop Environment that hearkens back to, but is not a direct copy of, the classic Mac OS. DCS seeks to provide and sometimes even improve upon the conceptual simplicity offered by the old Macintosh. ↫ Desktop Classic System website I’m usually not particularly interested in reporting on random Linux distributions, but any one of them that defaults to a proper spatial file manager is one that I will highlight. I’m not entirely sure if this is just a supported feature of MATE’s file manager, or something more custom – there are some patches to Caja here, as mentioned – but spatial file managers are a dying breed and that’s a shame. They’re hard to implement and even harder to get right, which is probably why few people take on the challenge. Other than that, DCS isn’t particularly revolutionary or special, but I’d love for more Linux distributions to look back at what we’ve lost, and see if we can bring those things back.

KDE developer onboarding is good now

KDE developer Herz published a detailed look at the immense amount of work they’ve done cleaning up the developer onboarding documentation for KDE. All that just to say that I’m finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. That is to say, all the beginner docs fixes I wanted to add to Develop are either already there or have merge requests ready or almost ready. ↫ Herz at rabbitictranslator.com Judging by the article, KDE’s developer documentation really were in need of major work, and it’s great to see that thankless task being done. One of the areas where KDE lags behind GNOME is that the latter has a more vibrant application ecosystem, with tons of great GNOME applications under active development. Now, I’m not saying it’s the state of KDE’s documentation is the sole reason for this, but I’m sure it wasn’t helping either. Improving documentation is not a particularly glamorous task, but it’s vitally important nonetheless.

Palo Alto Networks security-intel boss calls AI agents 2026's biggest insider threat

Lock 'em down

interview  AI agents represent the new insider threat to companies in 2026, according to Palo Alto Networks Chief Security Intel Officer Wendi Whitmore, and this poses several challenges to executives tasked with securing the expected surge in autonomous agents.…

The scariest boot loader code

It shouldn’t be surprising that the HP-UX FAQ eventually grew an entry for “how can I make a 712 run headless”. It was possible, and to do it you had to change the firmware “console” path. The 712 firmware would not allow you to do this, to keep you locked to a keyboard and frame buffer console, but some of the HP-UX standalone tools could be used to change this without the firmware getting in the way, so the FAQ recipe was roughly “abort the boot sequence, at the BOOT_ADMIN> prompt, do not start the HP-UX kernel but some diagnostic tool, and then at the tools prompt, type a magic sequence without any mistake or you’ll be very, very, very sorry”. There was no exaggeration in these words: the magic sequence is conspath 2/0/4.0x283, which is everything but intuitive and easy to remember. ↫ Miod Vallat What a great story.

IceWM 4.0.0 brings alt+tab improvements

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released a new version, bumping the version number to 4.0.0. This release brings a big update to the alt+tab feature. The Alt+Tab window switcher can now handle large numbers of application windows in both horizontal and in vertical mode. Type the first letter of an application class name in Alt+Tab, to select the next instance window of that application class. Select an application by pressing one of the number keys. Select an application by mouse in Alt+Tab in horizontal mode. Support navigating the quick switch with all navigation keys. Press the menu button on Alt+Tab to open the system menu. QuickSwitchPreview is a new mode to preview applications. These previews are updated while the quick switch is active. ↫ IceWM 4.0 release notes On top of this major set of improvements to alt+tab, there’s the usual list of bug fixes and small changes, as well as a bunch if updated translations.

Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot

Rust veteran Steve Klabnik is using an LLM to explore memory safety without garbage collection

Naming a new programming language "Rue" sounds like an acknowledgment of doubt about the project's prospects, if you take "Rue" to mean "regret."…

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Repeat after me: Chatbots are not sentient and have no agency

Grok, the AI chatbot owned and operated by Elon Musk's xAI, is facing a firestorm of outrage after users prompted it to create images of naked and scantily clad people from real photographs, some of whom are underage.…

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

But how about some smart glasses instead?

Apple’s pricey Vision Pro VR headset had a tough 2025.…

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop

Exec argues we need a new metaphor focused on AI as a lever rather than a job killer

Microsoft CEO and head AI peddler Satya Nadella wants you to know that it's time for the next phase of AI acceptance, where we focus on how humans are empowered by tools and agents and how we deploy resources to support this growth.…

Bitfinex crypto thief who was serving five years thanks Trump for early release

Netflix documentary part 2 in the works?

Ilya Lichtenstein, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges tied to the 2016 theft of about 120,000 bitcoins from the Bitfinex exchange and was sentenced to five years in prison, has been released after roughly 14 months in the slammer.…

The Year's First Bright Supermoon and the Colorful Quadrantid Meteor Shower Coincide This Weekend

The dual celestial events will ring in the new year, although the luminous "wolf" supermoon may hamper skywatchers' view of the shooting stars

Cybercrook claims to be selling infrastructure info about three major US utilities

For the bargain price of 6.5 bitcoin

A cybercrook claims to have breached Pickett and Associates, a Florida-based engineering firm whose clients include major US utilities, and is selling what they claim to be about 139 GB of engineering data about Tampa Electric Company, Duke Energy Florida, and American Electric Power. The price is 6.5 bitcoin, which amounts to about $585,000.…

Finnish cops grill crew of ship suspected of undersea cable sabotage

EU 'closely monitoring' along with NATO as state action suspected but not confirmed

Finnish police have arrested and are interviewing two crew members from a class A cargo ship sailing from Russia after suspected cable sabotage in the Baltic Sea.…

Finally - a terminal solution to the browser wars

A full-featured, Sixel-capable terminal browser for those who’d rather skip AI assistants

Old-time web users will fondly remember Lynx, a text-only browser that ran from the terminal. Now, there's a Sixel-compatible web browser that runs completely from the terminal, and has all the graphics and modern features you'd expect. …

Elusive, Critically Endangered Bird—and One of the Closest Living Relatives of Dodos—Was Spotted for the First Time in Five Years

Conservationists are racing to save the manumea, a chicken-sized bird that lives only on two Samoan islands, from extinction

Google snaps up datacenter power biz Intersect while xAI plans more capacity

The AI era needs more juice

The AI-fueled datacenter boom continues apace, with Google parent Alphabet moving to acquire energy and infrastructure biz Intersect, while Elon Musk's xAI is reportedly planning to expand beyond its already huge complex in Tennessee.…

When the Bayeaux Tapestry Makes Its Historic Return to England, the British Government Will Insure It for More Than $1 Billion

Created in the 11th century, the delicate, 230-foot-long embroidered textile has been in France since 1077

Honey-Making Stingless Bees in the Peruvian Amazon Become the First Insects to Gain Legal Rights

Two local ordinances granted rights to at least 175 stingless bee species in Peru, which are culturally and spiritually significant to Indigenous peoples and help maintain a healthy rainforest ecosystem

Brit lands invite-only Aussie visa after uncovering vuln in government systems

Jacob Riggs is set to swap London for Sydney some time in the next year

A British security researcher has secured Australia's strictest, invite-only visa after discovering a critical vulnerability in a government system.…

Hubble Glimpses Galactic Gas Making a Getaway

A sideways spiral galaxy shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden), NGC 4388 is a resident of the Virgo galaxy cluster. This enormous cluster of galaxies contains more than a thousand members and is the nearest large galaxy cluster to the Milky Way. NGC […]

Starlink to lower orbits of thousands of satellites over safety concerns

Move will see spacecraft shift from 550 km to 480 km as collision risks rise

Starlink is to lower the orbits of about half its satellite constellation over the course of this year, citing safety concerns.…

LockBit takedown architect gets New Year award from King Charles

Gavin Webb orchestrated Operation Cronos as it pulled off the legendary disruption sting

A senior British crimefighter has been awarded one of the country's highest tributes for public service for his role in the 2024 LockBit ransomware takedown.…

Safe CEO: AI is an assistant, not a replacement

There is no automated substitute for experienced staff, and 'if there's one thing AI has a never-ending thirst for ... it's data'

Interview  If AI can take on the role of a junior programmer, what happens when senior staff start retiring? Industry veteran and CEO of Safe Software, Don Murray, reckons the technology is becoming indispensable, but the human can never be removed from the loop.…

The trouble of zero

What better time to contemplate the conundrum that is zero than the start of a new year? Zero is a fairly new concept in human history and even more recent as a number. It wasn't until around the 7th century that zero was used as a number. That's when it showed up in the records of Indian mathematicians. Since then, zero has, at times, been met with some fear — at one point the city of Florence, Italy banned the number.

Today, scientists seek to understand how much humans truly comprehend zero — and why it seems to be different from other numbers. That's how we ended up talking to science writer Yasemin Saplakoglu in this encore episode about the neuroscience of this number that means nothing.

Read more of Yasemin's reporting on zero for Quanta Magazine. Plus, check out our episode on why big numbers break our brains.

Interested in more math episodes? Let us know what kind of stories you want to hear from us in 2026 by emailing shortwave@npr.org !

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The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

More tales of apocalypse avoided - including in an animal testing lab - and the hard work that made that possible

ON CALL Y2K  Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s Friday column that shares your tech support stories. Over the holiday season we’re telling tales of the Y2K bug, and readers who spent December 31, 1999 on call in case the world’s computers caused calamities.…

Haiku gets accelerated NVIDIA graphics driver

The new year isn’t even a day old, and Haiku developer X512 dropped something major in Haiku users’ laps: the first alpha version of an accelerated NVIDIA graphics drivers for Haiku. Supporting at least NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs, it’s very much in alpha state, but does allow for proper GPU acceleration, with the code surely making its way to Haiku builds in the near future. Don’t expect a flawless experience – this is alpha software – but even then, this is a major milestone for Haiku.

Satellite radio transmissions are jamming telescopes and driving astronomers batty

'What do we need to do better?' El Reg talks to comms boss about the problem

Interview  Scientists and engineers have been taken aback by the amount of radio interference generated by satellite constellations, and many are calling on standards bodies to improve operator performance.…

Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk

Do you want bork with that?

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Today's example of bork-in-the-wild shows that Microsoft is not the only game in town when it comes to screens having an IT moment in public. No, there will be no orders on this Firefox-based drive-thru kiosk at Wendy's.…

How Microsoft gave customers what they wanted: An audience with Bill Gates

Well kinda... Your call will be transferred to the next available assistant

Microsoft had a special way of dealing with customers demanding to speak to its CEO. One that kept the customer happy without necessarily bothering His Billness.…

HP-UX hits end-of-life today, and I’m sad

It’s 31 December 2025 today, the last day of the year, but it also happens to mark the end of support for the last and final version of one of my favourite operating systems: HP-UX. Today is the day HPE puts the final nail in the coffin of their long-running UNIX operating system, marking the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux. HP-UX’ versioning is a bit of a convoluted mess for those not in the know, but the versions that matter are all part of the HP-UX 11i family. HP-UX 11i v1 and v2 (also known as 11.11 and 11.23, respectively) have been out of support for exactly a decade now, while HP-UX 11i v3 (also known as 11.31) is the version whose support ends today. To further complicate matters, like 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3 supports two hardware platforms: HP 9000 (PA-RISC) and HP Integrity (Intel Itanium). Support for the HP-UX 11i v3 variant for HP 9000 ended exactly four years ago, and today marks the end of support for HP-UX 11i v3 for HP Integrity. And that’s all she wrote. I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It’s a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never “leaked” from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract). The various versions of HP-UX 11i come with a variety “operating environments” you can choose from, depending on the role your installation is supposed to fulfill. In the case of my c8000, it’s running the Technical Computing Operating Environment, which is the OE intended for workstations. HP-UX 11i v1 was the last PA-RISC version of the operating system to officially support workstations, with 11i v2 only supporting Itanium workstations. There are some rumblings online that 11i v2 will still work just fine on PA-RISC workstations, but I have not yet tried this out. My c8000 also has a ton of other random software on it, of course, and only yesterday I discovered that the most recent release of sudo configures, compiles, and installs from source just fine on it. Sadly, a ton of other modern open source code does not run on it, considering the slightly outdated toolchain on HP-UX and few people willing and/or able to add special workarounds for such an obscure platform. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX’ patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn’t, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I’m deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I’ve come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn’t carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. HP-UX didn’t star in a Steven Spielberg blockbuster, it didn’t leave behind influential technologies like ZFS. Despite being supported up until today, it’s mostly forgotten – and not even HPE itself seems to care. And that makes me sad. When you raise your glasses tonight to mark the end of 2025 and welcome the new year, spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists. I know I will.

Archaeologists Discover Mysterious 7,000-Year-Old Stone Wall Beneath the Waves Off the Coast of France

The sturdy, well-built structure was likely constructed on dry land at a time when sea levels were much lower than they are today

Nvidia DMs TSMC: Please sir can I have some more? The Chinese are starved for H200s

GPUzilla has reportedly received orders for more than two million units

With the sales ban lifted, Chinese tech giants, including ByteDance, are scrambling to secure orders for Nvidia's H200 graphics accelerators while they can. But will there be enough to satisfy demand?…

US Army seeks human AI officers to manage its battle bots

What, weekend warriors from Silicon Valley not good enough?

The US Army has been all-in on becoming an AI-powered outfit for some time, and now it's creating a career path for officers to specialize in making its automation dreams come true. …

European Space Agency hit again as cybercrims claim 200 GB data up for sale

As in past incidents, ESA says the impact was limited to external systems

The European Space Agency has suffered yet another security incident and, in keeping with past practice, says the impact is limited. Meanwhile, miscreants boast that they've made off with a trove of data, including what they claim are confidential documents, credentials, and source code.…

Lewis Carroll's Personal Copy of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' Returns to its 'Spiritual Home' in Oxford

The book has been donated jointly to Christ Church and the Bodleian Library, which are both part of the University of Oxford

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

The world has passed it by in many ways, yet it remains relevant

Feature  In the early 1990s, internetworking wonks realized the world was not many years away from running out of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, the numbers needed to identify any device connected to the public internet. Noting booming interest in the internet, the internet community went looking for ways to avoid an IP address shortage that many feared would harm technology adoption and therefore the global economy.…

How Do These ADHD Medications Work in the Brain? The Mechanisms Are Different Than Once Thought, a Study Suggests

Adderall, Ritalin and other stimulants prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder seem to work on brain areas involved with wakefulness and reward, rather than attention

The Louvre Installs Metal Security Bars on Window Used During $102M Jewel Heist

The Paris institution, the busiest museum in the world, is also making other security upgrades

Everybody has a theory about why Nvidia dropped $20B on Groq - they're mostly wrong

El Reg speculates about what GPUzilla really gets out of the deal

This summer, AI chip startup Groq raised \(750 million at a valuation of \)6.9 billion. Just three months later, Nvidia celebrated the holidays by dropping nearly three times that to license its technology and squirrel away its talent.…

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

From COBOL and C to Linux and SQL, the unglamorous software that keeps the world running refuses to disappear

Opinion  COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.…

Science In 2025 Took A Hit. What Does It Mean?

Science in the United States took some big hits this year. The Trump Administration disrupted federal funding for all kinds of scientific pursuits. Administration officials say those changes were a step towards reinvigorating federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health. But many scientists disagree. NPR health and science correspondents Rob Stein and Katia Riddle chat with host Emily Kwong about what these cuts could mean for the future of science.

Interested in more stories on the future of science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.

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Hong Kong’s newest anti-scam technology is over-the-counter banking

Funds in ‘Money Safe’ accounts are only available when customers appear for face-to-face verification

Hong Kong’s banks have a new weapon against scams: Accounts that require customers to visit a branch to access their funds.…

2026 AAS Town Hall Schedule

247th American Astronomical Society (AAS) Meeting SATURDAY, JANUARY 3 8:30AM – 6:0PM  NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) 301DJosh Pepper, Dawn Gelino, Karl Stapelfeldt, Nick Siegler, Jessie Christiansen SUNDAY, JANUARY 4 8:30AM – 12:15PM  NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) 301D9:00AM – 2:00PMNASA’s Cosmic Origins Program Analysis Group (COPAG)Peter Kurczynski7:30PM – 9:30PM  NASA’s […]

Cybersecurity pros admit to moonlighting as ransomware scum

Pair became ALPHV affiliates to prey on US-based clients

A ransomware negotiator and a security incident response manager have admitted to running ransomware attacks.…

2026 AAS Hyperwall Schedule

247th American Astronomical Society (AAS) Meeting Join NASA in the Exhibit Hall (Booth #401) for Hyperwall Storytelling by NASA experts. Full Hyperwall Agenda below. SUNDAY, JANUARY 4 6:45 – 7:00 PMTechnologies to Discover Habitable WorldsDominic Benford7:00 – 7:15 PMStorytelling with NASA: Eyes on ExoplanetsAnjali Tripathi7:15 – 7:30 PMRoman Space Telescope UpdateJulie McEnery7:30 – 7:45 PMThe […]

New York’s incoming mayor bans Raspberry Pi at his inauguration party

Zohran Mamdani appears not to understand that smartphones can be used for evil

New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has invited the city’s residents to join him at a block party to celebrate his inauguration but told attendees not to bring a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to the event.…

ServiceNow lays out possible co-CEO structure, but says no change imminent

The ITSM outfit would join Oracle, Comcast, and Netflix in installing bunk beds in the corner office

ServiceNow’s amended employment contract with CEO Bill McDermott extends his time with the company into the next decade, but also provides possible next steps for the journeyman corporate leader, including the co-CEO role, a position he held at SAP in the years prior to joining the ITSM juggernaut.…

iPad kids are more anxious, less resilient, and slower decision makers

The solution? Lock up the screens and read to your kids

If you're thinking of plopping your infant in front of a screen to get some peace and quiet, you might want to reconsider - higher screen exposure in infancy was linked to longer decision times later on and higher anxiety symptoms in the teenage years.…

An early end to the holidays: 'Heartbleed of MongoDB' is now under active exploit

You didn't think you'd get to enjoy your time off without a major cybersecurity incident, did you?

A high-severity MongoDB Server vulnerability, for which proofs of concept emerged over Christmas week, is now under active exploitation, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.…

Curiosity Sends Holiday Postcard from Mars

Team members working with NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover created this “postcard” by commanding the rover to take images at two times of day on Nov. 18, 2025, spanning periods that occurred on both the 4,722nd and 4,723rd Martian days, or sols, of the mission. The panoramas were captured at 4:15 p.m. on Sol 4,722 and […]

Microbiology

Microorganisms and Spaceflight Spaceflight poses a risk of adverse health effects due to the interactions between microorganisms, their hosts, and their environment. The JSC Microbiology team addresses the benefits and risks related to microorganisms, including infectious disease, allergens, environmental and food contamination, and the impacts of changes in environmental and human microbial ecology aboard spacecraft. […]

NASA’s Chandra Rings in New Year With Champagne Cluster

Celebrate the New Year with the “Champagne Cluster,” a galaxy cluster seen in this new image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes. Astronomers discovered this galaxy cluster Dec. 31, 2020. The date, combined with the bubble-like appearance of the galaxies and the superheated gas seen with Chandra observations (represented in purple), inspired the […]

After Living Alongside Humans for Millennia, These Italian Brown Bears Have Evolved to Become Less Aggressive

Researchers found genetic differences that likely resulted from humans killing aggressive bears, leaving docile individuals to breed and pass along their genes to offspring

loss32: let’s build a Win32/Linux

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, Win32/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, loss32 Win32 plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning system made useful by WINE, the ReactOS userland, and other vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by Microsoft. ↫ The loss32 homepage Joking introduction aside, this is exactly what you think it is: a Linux kernel with the Windows user interface running on top through Wine. I’m sure quite a few of use mused about this very concept at some point in time, but hikari_no_yume went a step further and created this working concept. It’s rough around the edges and needs a ton of work, but I do think the idea is sound and could offer real benefits for certain types of users. It’s definitely a more realistic idea than ReactOS, a project that’s perpetually chasing the dragon but never coming even close to catching it. Not having to recreate the entire Windows NT kernel, drivers, and subsystems, and using Linux instead, is simply a more realistic approach that could bring results within our lifetimes. The added benefit here is that this could still run Linux applications, too, of course. hikari_no_yume is looking for help with the project, and I hope they find it. This is a great idea, with an absolutely amazing name, too.

Banksy's Limitless limited by Windows Activation

Digital screen snafu or satirical comment on Microsoft's licensing policies?

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Today's Bork comes courtesy of an exhibition dedicated to the UK street artist Banksy and demonstrates that "Limitless" does not always apply to Windows Activation.…

Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi

Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she’s ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on. I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was not IBM PC-compatible, and that there were very few programs available for it. I have been on a quest to get a modern-ish word processor and spreadsheet program for it ever since. Which eventually made me “port” Windows 2 on it. In this post, I will tell you the story of this port. ↫ Nina Kalinina To get Windows 2 working on the Apricot, Kalinina had to create basic video, keyboard, and mouse drivers, allowing Windows 2 to boot into text mode. I wasn’t aware of this, but Windows 2 in text mode is funky: it’s rendering all the text you would see in a full Windows 2 user interface, just without any of the user interface elements. Further developing the video driver from scratch turned out to be too big of an undertaking for now, so she opted to extract the video driver from Windows 1 instead – which required a whole other unique approach. The keyboard and mouse drivers were extracted from Windows 1 in the same way. The end result is a fully working copy of Windows 2, including things like Word and Excel, which was the original goal in the first place. There aren’t many people around doing stuff like this, and it’s great to see such very peculiar, unique itches being scratched. Even if this is only relevant for exactly one person, it’s still been worth it.

What an unprocessed photo looks like

I knew digital cameras and phones had to do a lot of processing and other types of magic to output anything human eyes can work with, but I had no idea just how much. This is wild.

This Wild Cat Is Considered 'Possibly Extinct' in Thailand. Researchers Just Caught It on Camera for the First Time in About 30 Years

Findings from the largest-ever survey of endangered flat-headed cats may help change the species’ official conservation status in Thailand

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Want to survive the crash? Find another way to make money with GPUs

Today, Nvidia’s revenues are dominated by hardware sales. But when the AI bubble inevitably pops, the GPU giant will become the single most important software company in the world.…

Tis the season when tech leaders rub their crystal balls

2026 is the year where AI must meet ROI in the enterprise, and the key to delivering it is data governance.

Leaders from Dell, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake have released their 2026 predictions for AI in the workplace, and they agree that safeguards for AI agents and ROI are the top priorities for their customers.…

We will be cruising at 35,000 feet and failing to update our Apache HTTP Server

Now replace the autopilot with Copilot

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Bork can happen to the best of us, but flashing one's undercarriage at the boss of a compliance company is less than ideal, particularly at 35,000 feet in the air.…

Climate Anxiety Is Altering Family Planning

Gen Z and younger millennials are generally the most climate literate generations. As an age cohort that started learning about climate change in school, they're worried about how to plan for their future jobs, houses and, yes, kids. With climate-related disasters and global warming likely to worsen, climate anxiety is giving way to reproductive anxiety. So, what do experts say about how to navigate the kid question?

On this encore episode of Nature Quest, Short Wave speaks to Alessandra Ram, a journalist covering climate change, who just had a kid. We get into the future she sees for her newborn daughter and ask, how do we raise the next generation in a way that's good for the planet?

Here are the resources recommended by the experts we interviewed for this story:

Action Tools and Community Resources

• The High-Impact Climate Action Guide by Kimberly A. Nicholas
• The Climate Mental Health Network and Climate Emotions Wheel
• The Climate Café® Hub- for finding a local group

Books and Research Papers

• Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future, by Jade S. Sasser
• Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for cultivating resilience, taking action, and practicing hope in the face of climate change, by Elizabeth Bechard
• Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World, by Kimberly A. Nicholas
• The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions, Nielsen, K.S., Nicholas, K.A., Creutzig, F. et al.

Got a question about changes in your local environment? Send a voice memo to shortwave@npr.org with your name, where you live and your question. You might make it into our next Nature Quest episode!

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

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Korean telco failed at femtocell security, exposed customers to snooping and fraud

One cert, in plaintext, on thousands of devices, led to what looks like years of crime

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT has found that local carrier Korea Telecom (KT) deployed thousands of badly secured femtocells, leading to an attack that enabled micropayments fraud and snooping on customers’ communications – maybe for years.…

Zuck buys Chinese AI company Manus that claims it deals in actions, not words

‘General agents’ to infuse Meta’s products real soon now

UPDATED  Meta will acquire made-in-China AI outfit Manus and harness its “general agent” technology across its products.…

The Earth Observer: Offering Perspectives from Space through Time

An Intertwined History: The Earth Observer and EOS The Earth Observer, a newsletter issued for nearly 37 years, will release its last online content at the close of 2025. This newsletter evolved in parallel with NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS). It is almost impossible to speak of this newsletter without mentioning EOS. As The Earth Observer prepares […]

Nvidia spends $5B on Intel bailout, instantly gets $2.5B richer

The deal negotiated in September locked Nvidia into a purchase price of \(23 per share. Intel shares traded at \)36 on Monday

Nvidia’s \(5 billion Intel stock purchase is already worth \)7.58 billion, turning the recently approved bailout of its rival into a shrewd financial play.…

Terra: The End of An Era

Introduction Launched into the night sky more than 26 years ago, on Dec. 19, 1999, from Vandenberg Air Force Base (now Space Force Base), Terra was NASA’s first Earth Observing System (EOS) flagship mission to study Earth’s land surface from space via a coordinated series of polar-orbiting and low-inclination satellites that produce long-term global observations […]

The Final Earth Observer Editor’s Corner: October–December 2025

It is with a heavy heart that I announce that NASA Earth Science Communications has directed The Earth Observer to conduct an orderly shutdown of the publication. No new content will be published after Dec. 31, 2025. While the sunset of The Earth Observer is bittersweet for our team, the good news is that all […]

The State of CERES: Updates and Highlights

Introduction The Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) was initially designed in the late-1980s and early-1990s as a facility instrument for NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS). Since its inception, NASA’s Langley Research Center (LaRC) has led this effort. CERES has a long history with seven different instruments flying on five different missions since […]

Indian cops cuff ex-Coinbase rep over selling customer info to crims

There's more where that came from, CEO says

Rogue insiders suspected of taking bribes to hand over Coinbase customer records to criminals are beginning to face justice, according to CEO Brian Armstrong.…

These Urban Birds Evolved Longer Beaks During Covid-19 Lockdowns. Then, They Changed Back

Researchers suspect that dark-eyed juncos living in Los Angeles adapted based on the availability of food scraps tossed by humans

Crims disconnect Wired subscribers from their privacy, publish deets online

Extortion group Lovely claims to have stolen 40 million pieces of info from publisher Conde Nast

A criminal group is beating Conde Nast over the head for not responding sooner to its extortion attempt by posting stolen subscribers' email and home addresses and warning the publisher of Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Teen Vogue that it has 40 million more entries.…

2025 Space Station Science Snapshots

2025 marks another year pushing the boundaries of scientific research aboard the International Space Station. This past year, over 750 investigations were conducted aboard the space station, supported by crewed missions and resupply vehicles delivering essential cargo and experiments to the orbiting laboratory. This year’s research included testing DNA’s ability to store data, producing vital […]

Archaeologists Are Using Lasers to Clean Decades of Grime Off a Towering 1,800-Year-Old Marble Column in Rome

Standing 154 feet tall, the column of Marcus Aurelius is located in the Piazza Colonna and intricately decorated with gruesome scenes of warfare

Sam Altman is willing to pay somebody $555,000 a year to keep ChatGPT in line

There’s a big salary up for grabs if you can handle a high-stress role with a track record of turnover

How’d you like to earn more than half a million dollars working for one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies? The catch: the job is stressful, and the last few people tasked with it didn’t stick around. Over the weekend, OpenAI boss Sam Altman went public with a search for a new Head of Preparedness, saying rapidly improving AI models are creating new risks that need closer oversight.…

NASA to Preview US Spacewalks at Space Station in January

NASA astronauts will conduct a pair of spacewalks in January outside of the International Space Station to prepare for the installation of a roll-out solar array and complete other tasks. Experts from NASA will preview the spacewalks in a briefing at 2 p.m. EST Tuesday, Jan. 6, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Watch […]

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try

Four completely non-AI-related trends that will shape the future

The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There's no reason to think this will change in 2026. However, through the magic of journalism, here's a world where that's not true, a world where other things are happening that will shape the future. We like to call it the real world, and here's what's happening there and why it matters.…

Some Ants Sacrifice Stronger Exoskeletons for Larger Colonies, Which May Help Them Take Over New Environments

Species with thinner protective barriers may need fewer resources and tend to have a greater ability to adapt to new habitats, a study suggests

A Galactic Embrace

Mid-infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (in white, gray, and red) and X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (in blue) come together in this photo of colliding spiral galaxies released on Dec. 1, 2025. The pair grazed one another millions of years ago; billions of years in the future, they will merge […]

I Am Artemis: Jen Madsen and Trey Perryman

Listen to this audio excerpt from Jen Madsen and Trey Perryman, leads of the Orion Mission Evaluation Room for the Artemis II mission: During NASA’s Artemis II mission, Jen Madsen and Trey Perryman will be leading a team monitoring the Orion spacecraft as it carries four astronauts around the Moon. The team works in the […]

How California built one of the world's biggest public-sector IT systems

20 years, multiple delays, and millions of dollars later, FI$Cal is live – mostly

Since 2005, YouTube has gone from launching its first website to serving up more than 100,000 years' worth of video content every day. During the same period, the State of California has gone from the idea of adopting a single ERP, HCM, and procurement platform to getting nearly all of its departments on board – although there are still a few stragglers.…

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

Countries that banded together to challenge Boeing in the air try to do the same to AWS, Microsoft, and Google on the ground

Feature  More than half a century ago, a consortium of European aerospace businesses from the UK, France, Germany and Spain joined forces to take on America's Boeing. Fast forward to the 21st century and the countries are applying the same model needs to the world of cloud computing, giving the continent a fighting chance to reduce the digital domination of Big Tech.…

Why Kratom Is At The Heart Of A Big Public Health Debate

Kratom and 7-OH products are available in many smoke shops. But earlier this year, the FDA recommended certain 7-OH products be scheduled alongside opioids. This isn’t the first time kratom has come under scrutiny. Nearly a decade ago, the DEA wanted to make certain active ingredients in kratom controlled substances. Meaning products would go from being widely available to highly restricted. After a massive wave of protest, the DEA decided not to move forward. Producer Rachel Carlson joins host Emily Kwong to talk about what could happen this time around, and what scientists know – and don’t know – about kratom and 7-OH.

Interested in more of the science behind drugs and supplements? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

More millennial tech support tales from your fellow readers

On Call Y2K  Welcome to a special festive season edition of On Call, in which we share readers' stories of working on the 31st of December 1999 – the moment the tech world held its breath and hoped years of Year 2000 bug remediation efforts would work.…

Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner passes, aged 83

Oversaw a significant resurgence in Big Blue’s fortunes during the dotcom era

IBM has announced the death of its former CEO Lou Gerstner, who passed away on Saturday, aged 83.…

Accused data thief threw MacBook into a river to destroy evidence

Former staffer of Korean e-tailer Coupang accessed 33 million records but may have done less damage than feared

Korean e-tailer Coupang claims a former employee has admitted to improperly accessing data describing 33 million of its customers, but says the accused deleted the stolen data.…

China wants to ban making yourself into an AI to keep aged relatives company

PLUS: Australia buys air-gapped Google Cloud; Huawei triples use of home-built components; JAXA blames low pressure for rocket crash; And more

Asia In Brief  China’s Cyberspace Administration on Saturday posted draft rules governing the behaviour of AI companions that prohibit using them to serve as friends for the elderly.…

Death, torture, and amputation: How cybercrime shook the world in 2025

The human harms of cyberattacks piled up this year, and violence expected to increase

The knock-on, and often unintentional, impacts of a cyberattack are so rarely discussed. As an industry, the focus is almost always placed on the economic damage: the ransom payment; the cost of business downtime; and goodness, don't forget those poor shareholders.…

Apple’s terrible UI design is not the fault of just one fall guy

There’s been endless talk online about just how bad Apple’s graphical user interface design has become over the years, culminating in the introduction of Liquid Glass across all of the company’s operating systems this year. Despite all the gnawing of teeth and scathing think pieces before the final rollout, it seems the average Apple user simply doesn’t care as much about GUI design as Apple bloggers thought they did, as there hasn’t been any uproar or stories in local media about how you should hold off on updating your iPhone. The examples of just how bad Apple’s GUI design has become keep on coming, though. This time it’s Howard Oakley showing once again how baffling the macOS UI is these days. If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to the interface changes brought in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed. When 26.1 followed on 3 November it had only regressed, and 26.2 has done nothing. Here I summarise my opinions on where Tahoe’s overhaul has gone wrong. ↫ Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company Apple bloggers and podcasters are hell-bent on blaming Apple’s terrible GUI design over the past 10 years on one man. Their first target was Jony Ive, who was handed control over not just hardware design, but also software design in 2012. When he left Apple, GUI design at Apple would finally surely improve again, and the Apple bloggers and podcasters let out a sigh of relief. History would turn out different, though – under Ive’s successor, Alan Dye, Apple’s downward trajectory in this area would continue unabated, culminating in the Liquid Glass abomination. Now that Alan Dye has left Apple, history is repeating itself: the very same Apple bloggers and podcasters are repeating themselves – surely now that Alan Dye is gone, GUI design at Apple will finally surely improve again. The possibility that GUI design at Apple does not hinge on the whims of just one person, but that instead the entire company has lost all sense of taste and craftmanship in this area does not cross their minds. Everyone around Jony Ive and Alan Dye, both below, alongside, and above them, had to sign off on Apple’s recent direction in GUI design, and the idea that the entire company would blindly follow whatever one person says, quality be damned, would have me far more worried as an Apple fan. At this point, it’s clear that Apple’s inability to design and build quality user interfaces is not the fault of just one fall guy, but an institutional problem. Anyone expecting a turnaround just because Ive Dye is gone isn’t seeing the burning forest through the trees.

The HTML elements time forgot

We’re all familiar with things like marquee and blink, relics of HTML of the past, but there are far more weird and obscure HTML tags you may not be aware of. Luckily, Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell details a few of them so we can all scratch shake our heads in disbelief. But there are far more obscure tags which are perhaps less visually dazzling but equally or even more interesting. If you’re younger, this might very well be your introduction to them. If you’re older, this still might be an introduction, but also possibly a trip down memory lane or a flashback to the horrors of the first browser war. It depends. ↫ Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell I think my favourite is the dir tag, intended to be used to display lists of files and directories. We’re supposed to use list tags now to achieve the same result, but I do kind of like the idea of having a dedicated tag to indicate files, and perhaps have browsers render these lists in the same way the file manager of the platform it’s running on does. I don’t know if that was possible, but it seems like the logical continuation of a hypothetical dir tag. Anyway, should we implement bgsound on OSNews?

Seville: Famed for blue skies and now Blue Screens of Death

Hotel guests get a blast from the past courtesy of classic Windows BSOD

BORK!BORK!BORK!  Today's bork belongs in the dim and distant past – a reminder of when Windows had proper crash screens.…

Package managers keep using git as a database, it never works out

If you’re building a package manager and git-as-index seems appealing, look at Cargo, Homebrew, CocoaPods, vcpkg, Go. They all had to build workarounds as they grew, causing pain for users and maintainers. The pull request workflow is nice. The version history is nice. You will hit the same walls they did. ↫ Andrew Nesbitt It’s wild to read some of these stories. I can’t believe CocoaPods had 16000 directories contained in a single directory, which is absolutely bananas when you know how git actually works. Then there’s the issue that git is case-sensitive, as any proper file system should be, which causes major headaches on Windows and macOS, which are dumb and are case-insensitive. Even Windows’ path length limits, inherited from DOS, cause problems with git. There just so many problems with using git for a package managers’ database. The basic gist is that git is not a database, and shouldn’t be used as such. It’s incredulous to me that seasoned developers would opt for “solutions” like this.

SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update

Best not touch that screen, eh?

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Today's Christmas bork comes from London's Victoria train station, just before the festive season got underway, and is an update to the old IT standby: "It isn't DNS. It can't be DNS... It was SSL."…

QNX releases new desktop-focused image: QNX 8.0 with Xfce on Wayland

Christmas is already behind us, but since this is an announcement from 11 December – that I missed – I’m calling this a very interesting and surprising Christmas present. The team and I are beyond excited to share what we’ve been cooking up over the last little while: a full desktop environment running on QNX 8.0, with support for self-hosted compilation! This environment both makes it easier for newly-minted QNX developers to get started with building for QNX, but it also vastly simplifies the process of porting Linux applications and libraries to QNX 8.0. ↫ John Hanam at the QNX Developer Blog What we have here is QNX 8.0 running the Xfce desktop environment on Wayland, a whole slew of build and development tools like clang, gcc, git, etc.), a ton of popular code editors and IDEs, a web browser (looks like GNOME Web?), access to all the ports on the QNX Open-Source Dashboard, and more. For now, it’s only available as a Qemu image to run on top of Ubuntu, but the plan is to also release an x86 image in the coming months so you can run this directly on real hardware. This isn’t quite the same as the QNX of old with its unique Photon microGUI, but it’s been known for a while now that Photon hasn’t been actively developed in a long time and is basically abandoned. Running Xfce on Wayland is obviously a much more sensible solution, and one that’s quite future-proof, too. As a certified QNX desktop enthusiast of yore, I can’t wait for the x86 image to arrive so I can try this out properly. There are downsides. This image, too, is encumbered by annoying non-commercial license requirements and sign-ups, and this also wouldn’t be the first time QNX starts an enthusiast effort, only to abandon it shortly after. Buyer beware, then, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

The most popular desktop browser is festooned with Google AI, but you can make at least some of it go away

Most of today’s desktop web browsers come with a ton of built-in AI features, but the good news is that, in most cases, no one is forcing you to use them, and you can at least hide them from view. Removing the most egregious AI tools from Chrome is pretty simple, but it requires a few steps.…

From AI to analog, cybersecurity tabletop exercises look a little different this year

Practice makes perfect

It's the most wonderful time of the year … for corporate security bosses to run tabletop exercises, simulating a hypothetical cyberattack or other emergency, running through incident processes, and practicing responses to ensure preparedness if when a digital disaster occurs.…

Studying Physics in Microgravity

In this Oct. 20, 2025, photo, tiny ball bearings surround a larger central bearing during the Fluid Particles experiment, conducted inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) aboard the International Space Station’s Destiny laboratory module. A bulk container installed in the MSG, filled with viscous fluid and embedded particles, is subjected to oscillating frequencies to observe […]

From video games to cyber defense: If you don't think like a hacker, you won't win

In supercharged AI race, defenders need to keep up

interview  According to Remedio CEO Tal Kollender, the only way to beat the bad guys hacking into corporate networks is to "think like a hacker," and because not everyone is a teenage hacker turned cybersecurity startup chief executive, she built an AI to do this.…

Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed

Smarter access-point handoffs, better scheduling, fewer stalls

Wi-Fi 8 will be a step change in connectivity, if Intel can be believed, and will be able to adapt intelligently to local conditions to deliver a reliable service without the slowdowns users often experience when the network is congested.…

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

Everything you hated about text adventure games is now being sold as a productivity tool

Opinion  When Microsoft recently decided to open source the seminal text adventure game Zork, I contemplated revisiting it during the festive season... until I realized I've spent much of 2025 experiencing the worst of such games when using AI chatbots.…

Why Drones Are Catching Whale Breaths

Scientists in the Arctic are catching the exhaled breaths of whales to better understand their health. How? Drones. Whales breathe through their blowholes, which are the equivalent of nostrils on their heads. By studying the microbes in exhaled whale breaths, scientists are piecing together how deadly diseases spread in whale populations. Host Emily Kwong and producer Berly McCoy talk to All Things Considered host Juana Summers about what scientists can do with this information, from reducing stress on whales and monitoring ocean health to warning people who could be in close proximity to whales carrying zoonotic diseases.

Interested in more science on charismatic megafauna? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

The lack of trust that leads to outsourcing can be expensive

On Call Y2K  December 26th is a holiday across much of the Reg-reading world, but it's also a Friday – the day on which we present a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that recounts your tales of tech support encounters and exasperation.…

Phoenix: a modern X server written in Zig

We’ve got more X11-related news this day, the day of Xmas. Phoenix is a new X server, written from scratch in Zig (not a fork of Xorg server). This X server is designed to be a modern alternative to the Xorg server. ↫ Phoenix’ readme page Phoenix will only support a modern subset of the X11 protocol, focusing on making sure modern applications from roughly the last 20 years or so work. It also takes quite a few pages out of the Wayland playbook by not having a server driver interface and by having a compositor included. On top of that, it will isolate applications from each other, and won’t have a single framebuffer for all displays, instead allowing different refresh rates for individual displays. The project also intends to develop new standards to support things like per-monitor DPI, among many other features. That’s a lot of features and capabilities to promise for an X server, and much like Wayland, the way they aim to get there is by effectively gutting traditional X and leaving a ton of cruft behind. The use of Zig is also interesting, as it can catch some issues before they affect any users thanks to Zig’s runtime safety option. At least it’s not yet another thing written in Rust like every other project competing with an established project. I think this look like an incredibly interesting project to keep an eye on, and I hope more people join the effort. Competition and fresh, new ideas are good, especially now that everything is gravitating towards Wayland – we need alternatives to promote the sharing of ideas.

Humanoid robots are still novelty acts, but investment is surging to make them real tomorrow

Investment and interest have outpaced technology and society

By the time the humanoid robots arrived at the Humanoids Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on December 11, the registration line had already extended downstairs to the lobby.…

AMD Strix Halo vs Nvidia DGX Spark: Which AI workstation comes out on top?

Two tiny boxes, 128 GB apiece – but very different strengths

Hands On  Most GenAI models are trained and run in massive datacenter clusters, but the ability to build, test, and prototype AI systems locally is no less relevant today.…

Wayback 0.3 released

Wayback, the tool that will allow you to run a legacy X11 desktop environment on top of Wayland, released a new version just before the Christmas. Wayback 0.3 overhauls its custom command line option parser to allow for more X.org options to be supported, and its manual pages have been cleaned up. Other fixes merely include fixing some small typos and similar small changes. Wayback is now also part of Alpine Linux’ stable releases, and has been made available in Fedora 42 and 43. Wayback remains alpha software and is still under major development – it’s not yet ready for primetime.

GateMate Personal Computer, inspired by IBM PC

Can you use a cheap FPGA board as a base for a new computer inspired by the original IBM PC? Well, yes, of course, so that’s what Yuri Zaporozhets has set out to do just that. Based on the GateMateA1-EVB, the project’s got some of the basics worked out already – video output, keyboard support, etc. – and work is underway on a DOS-like operating system. A ton of work is still ahead, of course, but it’s definitely an interesting project.

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Alternative apps to empower older versions of macOS or Windows

Part 2  There's a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS.…

Salesforce’s ChatGPT integration is really about stopping customers from leaking their own data

Execs say DIY OpenAI connections risked pushing CRM data past the ‘trust boundary’

Salesforce users running Agentforce with ChatGPT Enterprise or Edu can now update CRM data directly from the bot, a move aimed at curbing home-built integrations that risk spilling data outside the company's controls.…

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Will businesses continue to invest in something that's shown so little return?

opinion  It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime.…

Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws

AI goes off the rails … because of shoddy guardrails

Researchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts. Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."…

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

ATC: 'I don't know if you can hear me but cleared to land'

In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado.…

US shuts down phisherfolk’s $14.6M password-hoarding platform

Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money thefts

The US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts.…

Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0

Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area

Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week.…

Sight of Clippy, Internet Explorer scares baby

Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amused

Microsoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by.…

Santa Visits Artemis II Rocket

Santa Claus (NASA engineer Guy Naylor) poses with NASA’s Artemis II Orion spacecraft and SLS (Space Launch System) rocket in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 11, 2025. The Orion spacecraft was stacked atop the SLS in October 2025. Set to launch in early 2026, the Artemis II […]

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not alone

Feature  Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero measurable returns on these efforts.…

Banksy Unveils Two New Murals of Children Gazing Up at the Sky Days Before Christmas

Some onlookers are interpreting the identical artworks, which appeared on the streets of London, as a commentary on homelessness in the city

North American air defense troops ready for 70th year of Santa tracking

A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technology

Seventy years ago, a child phoned the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) looking for Santa Claus – and found him, or at least some kindly military personnel who were willing to play along by helping the youngster to track Santa's location as he zipped around the globe.…

NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be

Time running out for savin' MAVEN as stricken spacecraft still silent as Mars solar conjunction nears

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is continuing to evade attempts by engineers to make contact as the solar conjunction nears, halting contact with any Mars missions until January 16, 2026.…

Drinking Turns Some Red With Asian Glow—And May Fight Tuberculosis

Ever gotten a scarlet, hot face after drinking alcohol or know someone who has? Many people felt it as they celebrate the holidays with loved ones, sipping mulled wine, cocktails or champagne. That's because this condition, commonly called "Asian flush" or "Asian glow," affects an estimated half a billion people, who can't break down aldehyde toxins that build up in their bodies. But what if there's a benefit to having Asian glow? Katie Wu, a staff writer for The Atlantic, has looked into the research as to why the condition might have been a powerful tool for some of our ancestors to survive disease. (encore episode)

Questions about other potential tradeoffs for our genetics? Email us at shortwave@npr.org. We've love to hear from you and we might cover it in a future episode! Read Katie's article to learn more. Questions about other potential tradeoffs for our genetics? Email us at shortwave@npr.org . We've love to hear from you and we might cover it in a future episode! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Berly McCoy and fact-checked by Brit Hanson. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer.

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Women Are More Likely to Have Irritable Bowel Syndrome. This Newfound Gut Pain Pathway Might Explain Why

The hormone estrogen—which female animals typically have more of than males—triggers a molecular cascade in the gut that leads to pain signals, a study in mice suggests

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026

Part 1  You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two.…

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Plans move to Rust, with help from AI

Microsoft wants to develop tech that could translate its codebase to Rust, and is hiring people to make it happen.…

AWS adds hybrid cloud storage support for Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor

VMware's main challenger already embraces multiple storage options

Amazon Web Services has given Nutanix a lovely Christmas present: Support for its AHV hypervisor in hybrid cloud storage rigs.…

US punishes China’s ‘dominance’ of legacy chips with zero percent tariffs

President Trump previously threatened 100 percent tariffs, administration now plans something else starting in 2027

World War Fee  The United States will impose tariffs on semiconductors imported from China, starting in 2027.…

ServiceNow opens $7.7B ticket titled 'Buy security company, make it Armis'

Customers will be able to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows.

After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products.…

The Mysterious Hjortspring Boat That Sank in Denmark 2,400 Years Ago Is Still Revealing Its Secrets

New research suggests indicates that Scandinavia's oldest known example of a wooden plank boat may have sailed to attack the island of Als from the east, indicating a planned effort

OPERA: Addressing Societal Needs with Satellite Data

Introduction The Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project represents a strategic initiative designed to address critical satellite data needs identified by federal agencies. Established in 2021 by the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), OPERA responds to priorities identified by the Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG), an interagency body convened by the White […]

Get In, We’re Going Moonbound: Meet NASA’s Artemis Closeout Crew

For most, getting into a car is a task that can be done without assistance. Yet for those whose destination is the Moon, the process of getting inside and secured – in this case, in NASA’s Orion spacecraft – requires help. That’s the role of the Artemis closeout crew. Trained to support Artemis II and […]

21K Nissan customers' data stolen in Red Hat raid

Automaker's third security snafu in three years

Thousands of Nissan customers are learning that some of their personal data was leaked after unauthorized access to a Red Hat-managed server, according to the Japanese automaker.…

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

Spacecraft set to burn up in a few weeks, but it could have been worse

As if to underscore the need to avoid the Kessler Syndrome, a scenario in which cascading debris can make some orbits difficult to use, a Starlink satellite vented propellant and released debris following an onboard "anomaly" late last week.…

Microsoft rushes an out-of-band update for Message Queuing bug

Redmond gets in early for the twelve whoopsies of Christmas

Microsoft has hustled out an out-of-band update to address a Message Queuing issue introduced by the December 2025 update.…

In a First, Astronomers May Have Witnessed a Rare Double Explosion of a Star Called a Superkilonova

A massive star may have burst, leaving behind two dense, dead cores, which then collided and caused another explosion

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

You’ll need to be using a Windows Insider build to see it

The Windows 11 Run dialog box is one of the oldest pieces of user interface still in use. It works just fine, but it has an aesthetic that harkens back to earlier versions of Microsoft’s operating system. Now, that’s set to change.…

Artemis II Crew Launch Day Rehearsal

From left to right, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman stand outside before boarding their Orion spacecraft inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as part of the Artemis II countdown demonstration test, Saturday, Dec. 20, 2025. Because the […]

Artemis II Flight Crew, Teams Conduct Demonstration Ahead of Launch

NASA’s launch and mission teams, along with the Artemis II crew, completed a key test Dec. 20, a countdown demonstration test, ahead of the Artemis II flight around the Moon early next year. The astronauts, supported by launch and flight control teams, dressed in their launch and entry suits, boarded their spacecraft on top of […]

Denmark's Postal Service Is About to Stop Delivering Physical Letters After 400 Years

As the volume of letters plummets, PostNord, the government-owned postal service of Denmark and Sweden, will stop transporting letters in Denmark on December 30, though it will continue distributing packages

NASA Astronaut Nick Hague Retires

NASA astronaut Brig. Gen. Nick Hague has retired from the agency, concluding a distinguished career that included two spaceflight missions, 374 days in space, and multiple spacewalks in support of the International Space Station. Hague continues service in the U.S. Space Force. Hague launched aboard the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft in March 2019 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in […]

Need a Quick Boost in Physical Strength? Try Blurting Out Some Curse Words, a Study Suggests

When repeating four-letter words, participants held a challenging physical task for longer than when they said neutral words. Cursing seemed to help them feel more focused, more confident and less distracted

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Maybe the answer to soaring RAM prices is to use less of it

Opinion Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.…

NASA’s Hubble Reveals Largest Found Chaotic Birthplace of Planets

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have imaged the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed circling a young star. For the first time in visible light, Hubble has revealed the disk is unexpectedly chaotic and turbulent, with wisps of material stretching much farther above and below the disk than astronomers have seen in any similar system. […]

I Am Artemis: Grace Lauderdale

Listen to this audio excerpt from Grace Lauderdale, exploration project manager for the Training Systems Office at NASA Johnson: In preparation for their mission around the Moon inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft, the Artemis II crew will spend countless hours training inside the Orion Mission Simulator. The simulator replicates what the crew will experience inside the spacecraft and […]

Like a Virgin Airways bot, planning for the very first time

Airline deploys AI travel agent and it hasn't been a disaster

Non-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning." …

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.…

Oracle's new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming

The company that bet the farm on AI said to have made things worse with AI

Oracle's new AI-powered support portal is frustrating customers and support engineers who are struggling to find the basics, such as old tickets, links to database patch programs and release schedules for current databases.…

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Menu.exe not found

Bork!Bork!Bork!  The bork desk has temporarily reopened during the festive period. The tech world might be having a nap on the sofa after one mince pie too many, but bork never sleeps.…

Why Suicide Prevention is 'Everyone's Business'

Written by Jo Lambert, ‘Hold The Hope’ is now being used as suicide prevention training material by the UK’s National Health Service Mental Health Trust. Emily Kwong speaks with Rhitu Chatterjee about the inner strength of those who live with suicidality, how a song is opening up new conversations for mental health care, and how caregivers can help a person choose life, despite having persistent thoughts of death.

If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact the 988 National & Suicide Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

Listen to the full version of the ‘Hold The Hope’ song here

Read more of Rhitu’s reporting on ‘Hold the Hope’ here

Listen to Rhitu and Emily’s previous conversation about practical ways to help someone at risk of suicide here

Interested in more stories about mental health care? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year

Cab drivers protested Uber’s arrival, but Westminster has rolled out the welcome mat for clanker chauffeurs

Robot taxis are coming to The Register’s London home in 2026.…

France’s post office partly offline for over 12 hours after 'major network incident'

Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fix

La Poste, France’s postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident.…

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4750-4762: See You on the Other Side of the Sun

Written by Lucy Thompson, Planetary Scientist and APXS team member, University of New Brunswick, Canada Earth planning date: Monday, Dec. 22, 2025 As we all prepare for the holiday season here on Earth, we have been planning a few last activities before Curiosity and the team of scientists and engineers take a well-deserved, extended break. […]

Japan loses another H3 launcher, plus the satnav bird it carried

25 percent failure rate for JAXA's space truck, with the second stage again proving perilous

Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has created a Special Task Force to investigate the failed launch of its H3 rocket on Monday.…

Holidays in Space: 25 Years of Space Station Celebrations

In the quarter century that humans have lived and worked aboard the International Space Station, astronauts and visitors from around the world have celebrated countless holidays more than 250 miles above Earth while traveling 17,500 miles per hour. Crews have marked Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah, New Year’s, birthdays, and national holidays as they circle the […]

Poisoned WhatsApp API package steals messages and accounts

And it's especially dangerous because the code works

A malicious npm package with more than 56,000 downloads masquerades as a working WhatsApp Web API library, and then it steals messages, harvests credentials and contacts, and hijacks users' WhatsApp accounts.…

Palo Alto's new Google Cloud deal boosts AI integration, could save on cloud costs

SEC filings show the outfit cut projected 2027 cloud purchase commitments by $114M

Security vendor Palo Alto Networks is expanding its Google Cloud partnership, saying it will move "key internal workloads" onto the Chocolate Factory's infrastructure. The outfit also claims it is tightening integrations between its security tools and Google Cloud to deliver what it calls a "unified" security experience. At the same time, Palo Alto may trim its own cloud purchase commitments.…

This Aerospace Engineer Just Became the First Wheelchair User to Travel to Space

A brief commercial flight with space tourism company Blue Origin made Michaela "Michi" Benthaus' childhood dream come true

Sentinels in the Sky: 50 Years of GOES Satellite Observations

the development and evolution of NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) has been a major achievement for weather forecasting. For 50 years, GOES have kept a constant vigil over the Western Hemisphere and monitored the Sun and the near-Earth environment.

SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year

Masayoshi Son better hope he made Santa's nice list

Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI.…

Two Towering Statues of an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Have Been Restored at the Entrance of His Temple After 3,000 Years

Known as the Colossi of Memnon, the statues of Amenhotep III both stand at more than 40 feet tall. Experts have been working for two decades to reassemble them

Keeping Up with PACE: Summary of the 2025 PAC3 Meeting

Introduction Launched in Feb. 2024, NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission is a cornerstone of Earth system science designed to deepen our understanding of how these environmental and biological components come together to influence our climate, carbon cycle, and ecosystems. PACE has funded three supporting components: the PACE Postlaunch Airborne eXperiment (PACE–PAX), the […]

Spy turned startup CEO: 'The WannaCry of AI will happen'

Ah, the good old days when 0-day development took a year

Interview  "In my past life, it would take us 360 days to develop an amazing zero day," Zafran Security CEO Sanaz Yashar said.…

Sentinel-6B Extends Global Ocean Height Record

Introduction On November 16, 2025, the Sentinel-6B satellite launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) in California. The mission is a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and several European partners – the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), the French Centre National […]

Elementary OS 8.1 released

Elementary OS, the user-friendly Linux distribution with its own unique desktop environment and applications, just released elementary OS 8.1. Its minor version number belies just how big of a punch this update packs, so don’t be fooled here. We released elementary OS 8 last November with a new Secure Session—powered by Wayland—that ensures applications respect your privacy and consent, a brand new Dock with productive multitasking and window management features, expanded access to cross-platform apps, a revamped updates experience, and new features and settings that empower our diverse community through Inclusive Design. Over the last year we’ve continued to build upon that work to deliver new features and fix issues based on your feedback, plus we’ve improved support for a range of devices including HiDPI and Multi-touch devices. ↫ Danielle Foré at the elementary OS blog The biggest change from a lower-level perspective is that elementary OS 8.1 changes the default session to Wayland, leaving the X11 session as a fallback in case of issues. Since the release of elementary OS 8, a ton of progress has been made in improving the Wayland session, fixing remaining issues, and so on, and the team now feels it’s ready to serve as the default session. Related to this is a new security feature in the Wayland session where the rest of the screen gets dimmed when a password dialog pops up, and other windows can’t steal focus. The switch to Wayland also allowed the team to bring fractional scaling to elementary OS with 8.1. Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, and this new release brings an updated Hardware Enablement stack, which brings things like Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25. This is also the first release with support for ARM64 devices that can use UEFI, which includes quite a few popular ARM devices. Of course, the ARM64 version comes as a separate ISO. Furthermore, there’s a ton of improvements to the dock – which was released with 8 as a brand-new replacement for the venerable Plank – including bringing back some features that were lost in the transition from Plank to the new dock. Animations are smoother, elementary OS’ application store has seen a slew of improvements from clearer licensing information, to a controller icon for games that support them, to a label identifying applications that offer in-app purchases, and more. There’s a lot more here, like the accessibility improvements we talked about a few months ago, and tons more.

A New Way to Boost the Powerhouses of the Cell Might Combat Aging and Degenerative Diseases, Lab Study Suggests

Creating mini mitochondria factories helped recharge damaged cells in a dish, providing proof-of-concept work that could pave the way to new regenerative medicine therapies

One of the George Washington Portraits That Inspired the Image on the $1 Bill Could Sell for Up to $1 Million

Artist Gilbert Stuart made numerous paintings of the first president. The copy that's up for sale was commissioned by James Madison in 1804

NASA Kennedy Top 20 Stories of 2025

Teams at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida spent 2025 preparing the launch vehicle and its powerhouse SLS (Space Launch System) rocket to launch four astronauts around the Moon for Artemis II in early 2026. The center also celebrated milestones by conducting science experiments at the International Space Station to studying the Sun’s solar wind […]

Nvidia wasting no time to flog H200s in China

Shipments still waiting on approval from Beijing

Now that it can legally export them, Nvidia has reportedly informed its Chinese customers that it'll begin shipping H200s, one of its most potent graphics accelerators for AI training and inference, in time for Chinese New Year. One caveat: Beijing could spike the deal before then.…

Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture

Anna’s Archive’s idealism doesn’t quite survive its own blog post

What would happen to the world's music collections if streaming services disappeared? One hacktivist group says it has a solution: scrape around 300 terabytes of music and metadata from Spotify and offer it up for free as what it calls the world’s first “fully open” music preservation archive.…

This Lemon-Shaped Planet Has an Atmosphere Unlike Anything Astronomers Have Ever Seen

The James Webb Space Telescope detected an atmosphere rich with carbon and helium, which is unexpected on this hot planet roughly 2,000 light-years from Earth

Conman and wannabe MI6 agent must repay £125k to romance scam victim

Judge says former most-wanted fugitive Mark Acklom will likely never return to the UK

The UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says a fraudster who claimed to be part of MI6 must repay £125,000 ($168,000) to a former love interest that he conned.…

A Dance of Galaxies

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured two nearby dwarf galaxies interacting with each other in this image released on Dec. 2, 2025. Dwarf galaxies can give us insights into galaxies in the early universe, which were thought to have less mass than galaxies like the Milky Way, and also contain a lot of gas, relatively […]

NASA Armstrong Advances Flight Research and Innovation in 2025

In 2025, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, advanced work across aeronautics, Earth science, exploration technologies, and emerging aviation systems, reinforcing its role as one of the agency’s primary test sites for aeronautics research. From early concept evaluations to full flight test campaigns, teams enhanced measurement tools, refined safety systems, and generated data […]

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Wasn't 2025 the year it happened? Yes. No. Answers on a Christmas card

Opinion  I've run Linux desktops since the big interface question was whether to use Korn or Bash for your shell. Before that, I'd used Unix desktops such as Visix Looking Glass, Sun OpenWindows, and SCO's infamous Open Deathtrap Desktop.…

Amifuse: native Amiga filesystems on macOS and Linux with FUSE

Mount Amiga filesystem images on macOS/Linux using native AmigaOS filesystem handlers via FUSE. amifuse runs actual Amiga filesystem drivers (like PFS3) through m68k CPU emulation, allowing you to read Amiga hard disk images without relying on reverse-engineered implementations. ↫ Amifuse GitHub page Absolutely wild.

This Mama Polar Bear Adopted a Young Cub—and You Can Track the Family as They Wander Around the Hudson Bay

The rare event marks the 13th known instance of adoption within this well-studied group of polar bears living in the western Hudson Bay area

EU offers UK early gift: Data adequacy until 2031

Relief for those dealing with data pipelines between the two, but move has its critics

The EU has extended its adequacy decision, allowing data sharing with and from the UK under the General Data Protection Regulation for at least six more years.…

UNIX v4 tape successfully recovered

Almost two months ago, a tape containing UNIX v4 was found. It was sent off to the Computer History Museum where bitsavers.org would handle the further handling of the tape, and this process has now completed. You can download the contents of the tape from Archive.org – which is sadly down at the moment – while squoze.net has a readme with instructions on how to actually run the copy of UNIX v4 recovered from the tape.

How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA

Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore.

The post How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Vultures rake our claws over COSMIC as Pop OS 24.04 LTS with 'Epoch 1' emerges

Even with the latest Gparted Live, it's not easy to dual boot – but it's worth the hassle

Hands On  It's been a long time coming but version 1.0 of the first ground-up Rust-based desktop is here… and it is shaping up very well.…

She Protested School Segregation as a Teenager. Now She's Being Honored With a Statue at the U.S. Capitol

Lawmakers gathered in the Capitol for the unveiling of a bronze statue honoring teenage civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns

Around 1,000 systems compromised in ransomware attack on Romanian water agency

On-site staff keep key systems working while all but one region battles with encrypted PCs

Romania's cybersecurity agency confirms a major ransomware attack on the country's water management administration has compromised around 1,000 systems, with work to remediate them still ongoing.…

AI is rewriting how power flows through the datacenter

Rising rack densities are driving changes from grid connection to chip-level delivery

Power semiconductors are soon set to become as vital as GPUs and CPUs in datacenters, handling the rapidly increasing loads forecast for AI infrastructure.…

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Public bodies migrate in the bloc as hyperscalers claim sovereignty

Feature  Europe’s quest for digital sovereignty is hampered by a 90 per cent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, claims Cristina Caffarra, a competition expert and a driving force behind the Eurostack initiative.…

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Something messy happens when the cat hairs of reality meet the shiny hype of smart tech

Opinion  Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are trumped by accountancy's First Law of Finance: you must make money. iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with its Chinese manufacturing partner-cum-creditor poised to pick over the bones.…

AI has pumped hyperscale capex, capacity – but how long can it last?

Total operational capacity just keeps rising

Hyperscale datacenter operators nearly tripled their spending on infrastructure over the past three years in response to the AI craze, while the amount of operational capacity added each quarter has increased by 170 percent, with little sign so far of any slowdown.…

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Mousey wouldn’t work, wah-wah-wah

Who, Me?  Welcome to Christmas week at The Register, an occasion we’ll celebrate with another installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of workplace mistakes and mischief.…

No, Raccoons Aren’t Pet-Ready (Yet)

Dogs are man’s best friend. And it’s no secret that we at Short Wave love cats (Regina has four)! Both of these iconic pets have been domesticated – evolved and adapted to live alongside humans – for millennia. And a recent study suggests that the common raccoon may be on its first steps towards joining them.

So how do scientists look for signs of domestication and what do those signs mean? And could you have a litter box trained raccoon in your lifetime? We talk to the study’s lead author, Raffaela Lesch, to find out.

Interested in more animal science stories? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

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There’s so much stolen data in the world, South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM

SK Telecom's epic infosec fail will cost it another $1.5 billion

South Korea's government on Friday announced it will require local mobile carriers to verify the identity of new customers with facial recognition scans, in the hope of reducing scams.…

Through gritted teeth, Apple and Google allow alternative app stores in Japan

PLUS: Debian supports Chinese chips ; Hong Kong’s Christmas Karaoke crackdown; Asahi admits it should have prevented hack; And more!

APAC in Brief  Google and Apple last week started to allow developers of mobile applications to distribute their wares through third-party app stores and accept payments from alternative payment providers.…

Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard

PLUS: Texas sues alleged TV spies; The Cloud is full of holes; Hospital leaked its own data; And more

Infosec In Brief  Google will soon end its “Dark Web Report”, an email service that alerts users when their personal information appears on the internet’s dark underbelly.…

FreeBSD made major gains in laptop support this year

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note – 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation’s ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware.  The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states. 2025 has been its first full year, and with a financial commitment of over $750k to date there has been substantial progress. ↫ Alice Sowerby for the FreeBSD Foundation I think that’s an understatement. As part of this effort, FreeBSD introduced support for Wi-Fi 4 and 5 in 2025, with 6 being worked on, and sound support has been greatly improved as well, with new tools and better support for automatic sound redirection for HDA cards. Another major area of improvement is support for various forms of sleep and wake, with modern standby coming in FreeBSD 15.1, and possibly hibernate in 15.2. On top of all this, there’s the usual graphics drivers updates, as well as changes to the installer to make it a bit more friendly to desktop use cases. The FreeBSD project is clearly taking desktop and especially laptop seriously lately, and they’re putting their money and developers where their mouth is. Add in the fact that FreeBSD already has pretty decent Wayland support, and it the platform will be able to continue to offer the latest KDE releases (and GNOME, if they figure out replacements for its systemd dependencies). With progress like this, we’re definitely going to see more and more people making the move to FreeBSD for desktop and laptop use over the coming years.

The AI Competition Is Now a High-Stakes Construction Race

For years, the AI race was defined by a fierce competition to hire and retain a small group of elite

The post The AI Competition Is Now a High-Stakes Construction Race appeared first on The New Stack.

Apple UX Pioneer on Reviving Computer Desktop Design

Scott Jenson is sad over the stagnation of computer desktop design, a field with still-untapped potential for making humans way

The post Apple UX Pioneer on Reviving Computer Desktop Design appeared first on The New Stack.

ObsidianOS, a Challenging but Reliable Linux Distribution

Before we get into the review of ObsidianOS, let’s talk about A/B partitioning. It is essential to everything about ObsidianOS.

The post ObsidianOS, a Challenging but Reliable Linux Distribution appeared first on The New Stack.

GitHub vs. Amazon: 2025’s Gifts for Programmers and Sysadmins

For this year’s holiday celebrations, Hallmark made a special Christmas tree ornament, a tiny monitor displaying screens from the classic

The post GitHub vs. Amazon: 2025’s Gifts for Programmers and Sysadmins appeared first on The New Stack.

Workers should control the means of agentic production, suggests WorkBeaver boss

What if AI vendors focused on the demand side?

Interview  "I think everybody is adopting AI irresponsibly and I think it's going to have a net negative outcome on the socio-economic standing of the world," said Bars Juhasz. "So let's see if we can't pitch more of a win-win future."…

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Time signals shifted by a tiny amount that only very sensitive users would find upsetting

UPDATED  A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.…

Artemis II Crew Rehearse Launch Day Demonstration

The four astronauts set to fly around the Moon during NASA’s Artemis II test flight depart the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, during a dress rehearsal for launch day on Dec. 20, 2025. From left are CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, […]

From Prompt to Production: A Guide to AI-Generated Design Systems

For any development team, the design system is the bedrock of a scalable, consistent, and high-quality application. It’s the single

The post From Prompt to Production: A Guide to AI-Generated Design Systems appeared first on The New Stack.

Your New AI Workforce Requires a ‘Digital HR’ Department

AI agents are beginning to permeate enterprises, driving the need for new teams and processes to help manage this growing workforce

The post Your New AI Workforce Requires a ‘Digital HR’ Department appeared first on The New Stack.

TanStack Adds Framework-Agnostic AI Toolkit

The TanStack team has added yet another piece to its stack: This time, it’s the alpha release of a new

The post TanStack Adds Framework-Agnostic AI Toolkit appeared first on The New Stack.

When Should JavaScript Devs Use the Power of WebAssembly?

JavaScript was created thirty years ago for simple web interactions. While it still basically runs the web, applications are far

The post When Should JavaScript Devs Use the Power of WebAssembly? appeared first on The New Stack.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

We haven't even hit the peak, TechInsights tells El Reg

If you were hoping for some relief from stratospheric memory pricing, don't hold your breath. DRAM prices aren't expected to peak until at least 2026, TechInsights analyst James Sanders tells El Reg.…

A Quarter Century After Cyberselfish, Big Tech Proves Borsook Right

In her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of Silicon Valley, published in 2000, Borsook who is based in Palo Alto, California and has previously written for Wired and a host of other industry publications, took aim at what she saw as disturbing trends among the tech industry.

The post A Quarter Century After Cyberselfish, Big Tech Proves Borsook Right appeared first on Purism.

Wind-Sculpted Landscapes: Investigating the Martian Megaripple ‘Hazyview’

Written by Noah Martin, Ph.D. student and Candice Bedford, Research Scientist at Purdue University While much of Perseverance’s work focuses on ancient rocks that record Mars’ long-lost rivers and lakes, megaripples offer a rare opportunity to examine processes that are still shaping the surface today. Megaripples are sand ripples up to 2 meters (about 6.5 […]

These Linguists Are Creating a New Dictionary of Ancient Celtic Languages—With Help From 'Curse Tablets' and Roman Records

The project aims to produce a record of the Celtic languages spoken in Britain and Ireland, though the majority of these words have already been lost to history

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Custom-designed $10,000 scooter goes 65mph, has a 60-mile range, and runs silently

hands on  Infinite Machine, a New York-based electric vehicle startup, began with a stolen Vespa. …

Kubernetes Auditing and Events: Monitoring Cluster Activity

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of the Manning Book, “Fluent Bit with Kubernetes,” a guide

The post Kubernetes Auditing and Events: Monitoring Cluster Activity appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA Shares SpaceX Crew-12 Assignments for Space Station Mission

As part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission, four crew members from three space agencies will launch no earlier than Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026, to the International Space Station for a long-duration science expedition. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway will serve as spacecraft commander and pilot, respectively, and will be accompanied by ESA (European […]

ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US

Latest charges join the mountain of indictments facing alleged Tren de Aragua members

A Venezuelan gang described by US officials as "a ruthless terrorist organization" faces charges over alleged deployment of malware on ATMs across the country, illegally siphoning millions of dollars.…

From ETL to Autonomy: Data Engineering in 2026

Data engineering is being reinvented. The discipline that once centered on building and maintaining pipelines is becoming a more strategic

The post From ETL to Autonomy: Data Engineering in 2026 appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA Johnson’s 2025 Milestones

NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston closed 2025 with major progress across human spaceflight, research, and exploration. From Artemis II mission preparations to science aboard the International Space Station, teams at Johnson helped prepare for future missions to the Moon and, ultimately, Mars. Orion Stacked for Artemis II, Orion Mission Evaluation Room Unveiled  As NASA […]

NASA’s Wideband Technology Demo Proves Space Missions are Free to Roam

Just like your cellphone stays connected by roaming between networks, NASA’s Polylingual Experimental Terminal, or PExT, technology demonstration is proving space missions can do the same by switching seamlessly between government and commercial communications networks.

DOE recruits cloud, chip, and AI giants for Trump's Genesis Mission

But not Phil Collins, sadly

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a Christmas gift for the AI industry in the shape of agreements for collaboration in the Trump administration's Genesis Mission, which aims to use AI to drive scientific discoveries.…

Mysterious Shipwreck Discovered in 'Pristine' Condition in Lake Ontario—With Its Masts Still Standing

Divers found the well-preserved vessel while searching for a different wreck called the "Rapid City," which sank near Toronto in 1917

How Many Glaciers Will Survive Until the End of the Century? These Four Scenarios Show It's Not Looking Good

Researchers calculated every glacier’s lifespan and found that even at the most ambitious Paris Agreement goal, the planet would lose around half of its 200,000 glaciers by 2100

WatchGuard sounds alarm as critical Firebox flaw comes under active attack

Newly disclosed vulnerability already being abused, users urged to lock down exposed firewalls

WatchGuard is in emergency patch mode after confirming that a critical remote code execution flaw in its Firebox firewalls is under active attack.…

Lessons From Building a Global Platform for Seamless Payments

A few years ago, I led a product team at a global payments wallet company, where we launched a first-of-its-kind

The post Lessons From Building a Global Platform for Seamless Payments appeared first on The New Stack.

Water Droplet Science

NASA astronaut Don Pettit demonstrates electrostatic forces using charged water droplets and a knitting needle made of Teflon. This series of overlapping frames from Feb. 19, 2025, displays the unique attraction-repulsion properties of Teflon and charged droplets, similar to how charged particles from the Sun behave when they come in contact with Earth’s magnetic field. […]

Sydney Uni data goes walkabout after criminals raid code repo

Attackers helped themselves to historical personal info on 27K people

The University of Sydney is ringing around thousands of current and former staff and students after admitting attackers helped themselves to historical personal data stashed inside one of its online code repositories.…

If You Need a Documentation Manager, Paperless-Ngx Is the Way To Go

You’re a company with a developer or a team of developers. Those developers have created several in-house applications and services

The post If You Need a Documentation Manager, Paperless-Ngx Is the Way To Go appeared first on The New Stack.

NS&I tech overhaul blows past Treasury spending limits

UK state-owned bank admits revised plan runs beyond contract end with Atos

Already £1.4 billion over budget and four years late, a tech transformation project at a UK state-owned bank is outside HM Treasury spending limits and timetable under a revised plan from systems integrator Capgemini.…

Agent UI Standards Multiply: MCP Apps and Google’s A2UI

This week, launched A2UI, an open source project to help developers build “agentic user interfaces.” It’s the latest in what’s

The post Agent UI Standards Multiply: MCP Apps and Google’s A2UI appeared first on The New Stack.

pearOS is a Linux that falls rather close to the Apple tree

Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheen

The new pearOS distro is a Romanian project that picks up the concepts behind the original Pear Linux from 2011 and updates them. It's not going to turn the distro world upside down, but it's fun, interesting, and a showcase for the versatility and customizability of the Linux desktop.…

5 Incident Management Lessons To Carry Into 2026

2025 felt like the year incident management finally got the respect it deserves. Not just as something IT teams deal

The post 5 Incident Management Lessons To Carry Into 2026 appeared first on The New Stack.

Thousands of Couples Gather Under the Mistletoe in Washington, D.C. to Kiss Their Way Into a New World Record

A total of 1,435 couples almost tripled the Guinness World Record for the largest number of people kissing beneath the mistletoe

Metrics

Services Catalog Click here to view the FY25 Services Catalog The catalogs provide service description, chargeback rate, unit of measure, and service level indicators for each NSSC service. Service Level Agreement (SLA) Click here to view the Service Level Agreement The SLA provides information about roles, responsibilities, rates, and service level indicators for all NASA […]

Flesh-Eating Screwworms Are Creeping Closer to a Comeback in the United States

Eradicated since 1966, the pests have recently been detected in Mexico within 70 miles of the U.S. border

Saturn’s Moon Titan May Not Have an Underground Ocean After All

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft may upend Titan’s status as an ocean world. But it might still have pockets of water within a slushy ice layer

Tutorial: Add TLS to Nginx Gateway Fabric

In the previous tutorial, we deployed Nginx Gateway Fabric and configured HTTP routing to expose internal services through the Kubernetes

The post Tutorial: Add TLS to Nginx Gateway Fabric appeared first on The New Stack.

HPE tells customers to patch fast as OneView RCE bug scores a perfect 10

Maximum-severity vuln lets unauthenticated attackers execute code on trusted infra management platform

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has told customers to drop whatever they're doing and patch OneView after admitting a maximum-severity bug could let attackers run code on the management platform without so much as a login prompt.…

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Virgin Media the last to go as users of older mobiles warned to upgrade

Britain is set to become a post-3G nation as Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) prepares to be the last of the country's mobile networks to switch off its 3G service, although it may linger for a while at a few sites.…

Hubble Glimpses Galactic Gas Making a Getaway

A sideways spiral galaxy shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden), NGC 4388 is a resident of the Virgo galaxy cluster. This enormous cluster of galaxies contains more than a thousand members and is the nearest large galaxy cluster to the Milky […]

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Tech exec admits not dead cert it'll find the right solution

Exclusive  Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider.…

Ministers confirm breach at UK Foreign Office but details remain murky

Officials admit 'there certainly has been a hack,' but refuse to confirm China link or data theft

The UK's Foreign Office is investigating a confirmed cyberattack it learned about in October, senior ministers say.…

Betelgeuse and the Crab Nebula: Stellar Death and Rebirth

In 2019, Betelgeuse dimmed in brightness, sparking speculation that it may soon explode as a supernova. While it likely won’t explode quite yet, we can preview its fate by observing the nearby Crab Nebula.

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

Ofcom survey finds 18-34s increasingly see life online as bad for society and their mental health

Young Brits are souring on the internet, with increasing numbers seeing it as damaging to society and their mental health, according to latest research published by Ofcom.…

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Coming with added 'filters and rules' after prototype spat out inaccurate or outright wrong responses

The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) will add an AI chatbot to its GOV.UK app in early 2026, before rolling it out across the GOV.UK website used by most government departments and services.…

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Are pasties a proxy for weight? Or a cypher for circumference?

The Reg Standards Bureau was plunged into uproar this week when a reader suggested a new unit for weight, inspired by Cornwall's revamped food recycling service.…

GLP-1 Pills Are On The Way. Here's What To Know

You may have heard of Ozempic, and other GLP-1 drugs. They’re everywhere. And they typically involve weekly injections — which can have a sticker price of over a thousand dollars a month. And insurance coverage has been tricky to navigate for a lot of people. That’s why there’s a lot of excitement around a new pill form of the drug. NPR Pharmaceuticals Correspondent Sydney Lupkin chats about these experimental pills with host Emily Kwong.

Check out more of NPR’s coverage about GLP-1s.

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User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Hey, teacher, leave that cabling alone

On Call  Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your stories of tech support jobs so wrong, they're right.…

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco, contributing to two deaths

Optus gave bad instructions, staff didn’t escalate their concerns

Technicians working on a firewall upgrade made at least ten mistakes, contributing to two deaths, according to a report on a September incident that saw Australian telco Optus unable to route calls to emergency services.…

Space Station Research Supports New FDA-Approved Cancer Therapy

NASA opens the International Space Station for scientists and researchers, inviting them to use the benefits of microgravity for private industry research, technology demonstrations, and more. Today, half of the crew’s time aboard station is devoted to these aims, including medical research that addresses complex health challenges on Earth and prepares astronauts for future deep […]

China turns on a vast experimental network it says is an heir to ARPANET

Beijing wants to 'seize the initiative in the international competition in cyberspace'

Chinese authorities on Thursday certified the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI), a vast research network that Beijing hopes will propel the country to the forefront of networking research.…

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4743-4749:  Polygons in the Hollow

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Planning Date: Friday, Dec. 12, 2025 The weekend drive starting from the “Nevado Sajama” drill site brought Curiosity back into the “Monte Grande” boxwork hollow. We’ve been in this hollow before for the “Valle de la Luna” drill campaign, but now that […]

Amazon blocked 1,800 suspected North Korean scammers seeking jobs

Plus: Lazarus Group has a brand new BeaverTail

Even Amazon isn't immune to North Korean scammers who try to score remote jobs at tech companies so they can funnel their wages to Kim Jong Un's coffers.…

On the immortality of Microsoft Word

If Excel rules the world, Word rules the legal profession. Jordan Bryan published a great article explaining why this is the case, and why this is unlikely to change any time soon, no matter how many people from the technology world think they can change this reality. Microsoft Word can never be replaced. OpenAI could build superintelligence surpassing human cognition in every conceivable dimension, rendering all human labor obsolete, and Microsoft Word will survive. Future contracts defining the land rights to distant galaxies will undoubtedly be drafted in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is immortal. ↫ Jordan Bryan at The Redline by Version Story Bryan cites two main reasons underpinning Microsoft Word’s immortality in the legal profession. First, lawyers need the various formatting options Word provides, and alternatives often suggested by outsiders, like Markdown, don’t come close to offering even 5% of the various formatting features lawyers and other writers of legal documents require. By the time you add all those features back to Markdown, you’ve recreated Word, but infinitely worse and more obtuse. Also, and this is entirely my personal opinion, Markdown sucks. Second, and this one you’ve surely heard before: Word’s .docx format is effectively a network protocol. Everyone in the legal profession uses it, can read it, work with it, mark it up, apply corrections, and so on – from judges to lawyers to clients. If you try to work with, say, Google Docs, instead, you create a ton of friction in every interaction you have with other people in the legal profession. I vividly remember this from my 15 years as a translator – every single document you ever worked with was a Microsoft Office document. Sure, the translation agency standing between the end client and the translator might have abstracted the document into a computer-aided translation tool like Trados, but you’re still working with .docx, and the translated document sent to the client is still .docx, and needs to look identical to the source, just in a different language. In the technology world, there’s a lot of people who come barging into some other profession or field, claiming to know everything, and suggest to “just do x”, without any deference to how said profession or field actually operates. “Just use Markdown and git” even if the people involved have no clue what a markup language even is let alone what git is; “just use LibreOffice” even if the people involved will skewer you for altering the formatting of a document even ever so slightly; we all know examples of this. An industry tends to work a certain way not because they’re stupid or haven’t seen the light – it tends to work that way because there’s a thousand little reasons you’re not aware of that make that way the best way.

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Even if Mozilla is going to add an AI kill switch, that may not be enough to reassure many.

Waterfox, a popular fork of Firefox, is saying nay to AI. Considering how unpopular Mozilla's plan to botify its browser has become, this could win the alternative some converts.…

A look back: LANPAR, the first spreadsheet

In 1979, VisiCalc was released for the Apple II, and to this day, many consider it the very first spreadsheet program. Considering just how important spreadsheets have become since then – Excel rules the world – the first spreadsheet program is definitely an interesting topic to dive into. It turns out that while VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for home computers, it’s not actually the first spreadsheet program, period. That honour goes to LANPAR, created ten years before VisiCalc. Ten years before VisiCalc, two engineers at Bell Canada came up with a pretty neat idea. At the time, organizational budgets were created using a program that ran on a mainframe system. If a manager wanted to make a change to the budget model, that might take programmers months to create an updated version. Rene Pardo and Remy Landau discussed the problem and asked “what if the managers could make their own budget forms as they would normally write them?” And with that, a new idea was created: the spreadsheet program. The new spreadsheet was called LANPAR, for “LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random” (but really it was a mash-up of their last names: LANdau and PARdo). ↫ Jim Hall at Technically We Write While there wasn’t a graphical user interface on the screen with a grid and icons and everything else we associate with a spreadsheet today, it was still very much a spreadsheet. Individual cells were delinianated with semicolons, you could write down formulas to manipulate these cells, and the program could do forward referencing. The idea was to make it so easy to use, managers at Dell Canada could make budgeting changes overnight, instead of having programmers take weeks or months to do so. I’m not particularly well-versed in Excel and spreadsheets in general, but I can definitely imagine advanced users no longer really seeing the grids and numbers as individual entities, instead visualising everything much more closely to what LANPAR did. Like Neo when he finally peers through the Matrix.

How Nutanix Is Taming Operational Complexity

Chances are, it’s not the infrastructure, singular, your organization is running your workloads on — it’s the infrastructures, plural. Sixty percent

The post How Nutanix Is Taming Operational Complexity appeared first on The New Stack.

Moon Mascot: NASA Artemis II ZGI Design Challenge

Whose Moon Mascot design will join the Artemis II astronauts on their historic voyage around the Moon in early 2026? Between March 7 and Jun. 16, 2025, NASA worked with crowdsourcing company Freelancer to seek design ideas from global creators for a zero gravity indicator that will fly aboard the agency’s Artemis II test flight. Zero gravity […]

The original Mozilla “dinosaur” logo artwork

Jamie Zawinski, one of the founders of Netscape and later Mozilla, has dug up the original versions of the iconic Mozilla dinosaur logos, and posted them online in all their glory. While he strongly believes Mozilla owned these logos outright, and that they were released as open source in 1998 or 1999, he can’t technically prove that. It has come to my attention that the artwork for the original mozilla.org “dinosaur” logo is not widely available online. So, here it is. As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article “They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo”, I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998. ↫ Jamie Zawinski The original Mozilla dinosaur logos are works of pure art. They sure don’t make logos like this anymore.

Fourteen Years After Gaddafi's Fall, Libya Reopens Its National Museum to Much Fanfare

Among the museum’s artifacts, which were hidden during the long closure, are a 5,400-year-old mummy and remnants from the Roman Empire’s North African cities

Do All Your AI Workloads Actually Require Expensive GPUs?

GPUs have become the must-have compute of the dawning Age of AI. But maybe not every organization, or every job,

The post Do All Your AI Workloads Actually Require Expensive GPUs? appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA Announces 2025 International Space Apps Challenge Global Winners

NASA Space Apps announced Thursday 10 winners of the 2025 NASA Space Apps Challenge. During this two-day hackathon, participants gathered at 551 local events across 167 countries and territories to showcase their STEM skills and proposed ways to transform NASA’s open data into actionable tools. More than 114,000 participants came together to address challenges created […]

Snowflake update caused a blizzard of failures worldwide

Customers in 10 of the company’s 23 regions had “operations fail or take an extended amount of time to complete.”

Snowflake pushed an update this week that caused a “major outage” worldwide, leaving many users unable to query data, experiencing failures when ingesting files, and receiving error messages for 13 hours, the company wrote in an impact statement.…

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Study finds built-in browsers across gadgets often ship years out of date

Web browsers for desktop and mobile devices tend to receive regular security updates, but that often isn't the case for those that reside within game consoles, televisions, e-readers, cars, and other devices. These outdated, embedded browsers can leave you open to phishing and other security vulnerabilities.…

Fossils Suggest That Some Ancient Burrowing Bees Made Their Homes in Rodent Skulls

While cleaning fossils retrieved from a cave on a Caribbean island, a researcher noticed something strange in the hollow tooth socket of a small skull

NASA Lab Completes Engine Checks on New Aircraft

Justin Hall, left, controls a subscale aircraft as Justin Link holds the aircraft in place during preliminary engine tests on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, at NASA’s Armstong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Hall, chief pilot at the center’s Dale Reed Subscale Flight Research Laboratory, and Link, a pilot for small uncrewed aircraft systems, are […]

You Can Now See 2,000-Year-Old Thermal Baths and Military Barracks Without Ever Leaving Rome's New Subway Stations

Two recently opened stops by the Colosseum double as museums, showcasing the ancient artifacts and ruins unearthed during their construction

The Smart Path to MISRA C++:2023 Compliance

The systems we rely on are inherently complex. Everything from advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and sophisticated medical devices to

The post The Smart Path to MISRA C++:2023 Compliance appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA’s Hubble Sees Asteroids Colliding at Nearby Star for First Time

Like a game of cosmic bumper cars, scientists think the early days of our solar system were a time of violent turmoil, with planetesimals, asteroids, and comets smashing together and pelting the Earth, Moon, and the other inner planets with debris. Now, in a historical milestone, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has directly imaged similar catastrophic […]

NASA, Boeing Test How to Improve Performance of Longer, Narrower Aircraft Wings

The airliner you board in the future could look a lot different from today’s, with longer, thinner wings that provide a smoother ride while saving fuel. Those wings would be a revolutionary design for commercial aircraft, but like any breakthrough technology, they come with their own development challenges – which experts from NASA and Boeing […]

Crypto crooks co-opt stolen AWS creds to mine coins

'Within 10 minutes of gaining initial access, crypto miners were operational'

Your AWS account could be quietly running someone else's cryptominer. Cryptocurrency thieves are using stolen Amazon account credentials to mine for coins at the expense of AWS customers, abusing their Elastic Container Service (ECS) and their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources, in an ongoing operation that started on November 2.…

Mobile industry says energy targets are meaningless without common metrics

NGMN warns fragmented standards leave operators guessing about power use

The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) alliance is calling for standardized ways to measure energy consumption, saying that the industry cannot deliver on its efficiency and sustainability goals without them.…

Trump Media jumps aboard the speculative nuclear fusion bandwagon

Ambitious timelines don’t bend the laws of physics

Just when you thought 2025 couldn't get any weirder, Trump Media and Technology Group - best known for Truth Social - is jumping into the still-nascent but heavily funded nuclear fusion industry via a planned merger with TAE Technologies.…

4 Data Architecture Decisions That Make or Break Agentic Systems

Data teams that thrived in the last wave of Software as a Service (SaaS) platform scale weren’t the ones that

The post 4 Data Architecture Decisions That Make or Break Agentic Systems appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA’s SPHEREx Observatory Completes First Cosmic Map Like No Other

Launched in March, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors. While not visible to the human eye, these 102 infrared wavelengths of light are prevalent in the cosmos, and observing the entire sky this way enables scientists to answer big questions, including how a dramatic […]

NASA Welcomes 15th Administrator Jared Isaacman

Jared Isaacman was sworn in Thursday as NASA’s 15th administrator by District Judge Timothy J. Kelly. The oath was taken during a ceremony held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington.  As NASA administrator, Isaacman will lead the agency in bold pursuit of exploration, innovation, and scientific discovery.  “I am deeply honored to be sworn […]

Kim's crypto thieving reached a record $2B in 2025

ByBit attack doing some seriously heavy lifting

North Korea's yearly cryptocurrency thefts have accelerated, with Kim's state-backed cybercriminals plundering just over $2 billion worth of tokens in 2025.…

A Look Back at NASA Stennis in 2025

In 2025, NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, marked a year of progress by supporting NASA’s Artemis campaign, celebrating historic milestones, and continuing its role as a trusted propulsion test partner at America’s largest rocket propulsion test site. “For more than six decades, NASA Stennis has proudly represented the Gulf Coast region […]

Agent Skills: Anthropic’s Next Bid to Define AI Standards

In October, Anthropic launched Agent Skills as a way to teach its Claude service repeatable workflows. Building those skills involved,

The post Agent Skills: Anthropic’s Next Bid to Define AI Standards appeared first on The New Stack.

These Male Hummingbirds Evolved Straighter, Sharper Bills So They Could Better Joust for Mates

While female green hermit hummingbirds have curved bills, males’ straighter mouthparts are built for stabbing one another, a new study suggests

2025 Science Activation Opportunity

NASA Science encourages all people to actively participate in science through activities and resources developed by a collaborative network of project teams drawing on NASA SMD assets (science content, experts, data, etc.). Your team can apply to be part of this program. Opportunity NASA SMD seeks a portfolio of projects that together : Projects NASA seeks a […]

Payroll

The NASA Shared Services Center (NSSC) Payroll Office (NPO) reviews, validates, and delivers time and attendance data to the Department of the Interior (DOI) Interior Business Center (IBC) for NASA Centers.  NPO acts as liaison between Centers, employees and IBC for other payroll related activities such as supplemental payments, prior pay period adjustments  (PPPA) and […]

2025 in Review: Highlights from NASA in Silicon Valley

NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley continued to make strides in research, technology, engineering, science, and innovation this past year. Join us as we take a look back at some of the highlights from 2025. From Supercomputers to Wind Tunnels: NASA’s Road to Artemis II By combining the technologies of the NASA Advanced […]

NASA’s DiskSat Technology Demo Launches to Low Earth Orbit

NASA’s DiskSat technology demonstration mission will test the performance of a new small spacecraft platform designed to expand the capabilities of current small spacecraft. By demonstrating the advantages of a flat, disk-shaped architecture over the conventional CubeSat design, DiskSat aims to enable lower-cost space missions, broaden scientific opportunities, and increase overall access to space. At […]

An End-to-End Cloud Native Observability Framework

It has been established that observability is essential to understand how our systems are performing and when something goes wrong

The post An End-to-End Cloud Native Observability Framework appeared first on The New Stack.

Pumas Are Snacking on Penguins in Argentina—and the Abundant Birds Are Changing the Prowling Cats' Behavior

Mountain lions are adapting to their defenseless, predictable prey, which return to Patagonia seasonally to nest and breed, new research suggests

The Year in Mathematics

Explore a shape that can’t pass through itself, a teenage prodigy, and two new kinds of infinity.

The post The Year in Mathematics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

If Mount Vesuvius Erupted in August, Why Were Pompeii Victims Wearing Heavy Wool Garments?

New research finds that at least four individuals who died in the eruption were wearing woolen tunics and cloaks, which raises questions about the presumed date of the famous catastrophe

Another bad week for SonicWall as SMA 1000 zero-day under active exploit

Flaw in remote-access appliance lets attackers chain bugs for root-level takeover

SonicWall has warned customers of a zero-day flaw in its SMA 1000 remote-access appliance that's being actively exploited, potentially allowing attackers to escalate privileges and take over boxes.…

FBI dismantles alleged $70M crypto laundering operation

Justice Department claims unlicensed exchange funneled ransomware profits

US feds have dismantled a crypto laundering service that they say helped cybercrooks wash tens of millions of dollars in dirty digital cash, seizing its servers and unsealing charges against an alleged Russian operator.…

Isaacman finally confirmed as NASA boss after Trump derailed first attempt

Billionaire space tourist inherits troubled agency facing budget chaos, workforce cuts, and a Moon race against China

NASA has a new administrator. Billionaire and space tourist Jared Isaacman was confirmed by the US Senate by a vote of 67 to 30.…

NHS tech supplier probes cyberattack on internal systems

Around 2,000 GP practices use its products

Updated  An NHS tech supplier is investigating a cyberattack that affected its systems in the early hours of Sunday.…

Mary, Queen of Scots, Wrote This Letter Hours Before She Was Executed. Her Words Are Going on Display for the First Time in Years

The deposed Scottish queen wrote the four-page missive to her brother-in-law just a few hours before her execution in 1587

Thunderbird 2025 Review: Building Stronger for the Future

2025 was an exciting year for Thunderbird. Many improvements were shipped throughout the year, from faster updates with a new release cadence, to a modernized codebase for the desktop app. We made big strides on our mobile apps and introduced the upcoming Thunderbird Pro to the world. As we wrap up the year, a huge […]

The post Thunderbird 2025 Review: Building Stronger for the Future appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

React2Shell exploitation spreads as Microsoft counts hundreds of hacked machines

Security boffins warn flaw is now being used for ransomware attacks against live networks

Microsoft says attackers have already compromised "several hundred machines across a diverse set of organizations" via the React2Shell flaw, using the access to execute code, deploy malware, and, in some cases, deliver ransomware.…

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Gov wants broadcaster to revive 1980s computer literacy magic – and maybe flog its archives to tech giants

The UK government wants the BBC to help Brits understand AI and develop basic technology skills as part of the public broadcaster's next charter period.…

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

18-year-old platform crumbles under 94M daily requests while resellers flog £62 tests for £500

The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has appointed a new chief exec to tackle spiraling waits for practical driving tests with bots overrunning its aging booking system.…

UK surveillance law still full of holes, watchdog warns

Investigatory Powers Commissioner says reforms have failed to close oversight gaps

The UK's Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) has several regulatory gaps that must be plugged in future legislative reforms, according to Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPC) Sir Brian Leveson.…

Brit broadband grilling descends into farce over targets and definitions

MPs press minister for answers – and get few

If UK readers are perplexed by the country's seemingly shambolic state of broadband and telecoms, relative to other European nations, insight can be gleaned from a one-off evidence session conducted by Parliament.…

The Indicator: Take A Penny, Leave A Penny, Get Rid Of The Penny

In November, the U.S. stopped production of the humble penny after 232 years in circulation. On today’s show, Darian Woods and Wailin Wong from NPR's daily economics podcast The Indicator unpack the fiscal math that doomed the penny, and an artist pay tribute to this American icon.

Follow the Indicator on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

View more of Robert Wechsler’s artwork here.

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United Nations agrees to persist with multi-stakeholder internet governance

World Summit on the Information Society resolves the world needs a permanent forum to discuss how we manage the 'Net

The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday reached consensus on a review of the world’s internet governance arrangements and preserved the current multi-stakeholder model that means governments are just one of many voices that debate the future of the internet.…

Micron says memory shortages are here for the foreseeable future

Even with its new fabs coming online, demand will exceed supply

Memory-maker Micron Technology has predicted that RAM shortages are here to stay, meaning higher prices for servers probably are, too.…

Hi ya! Hyha

Written by Margaret Deahn, Ph.D. student at Purdue University  NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is currently trekking towards exciting new terrain. After roughly four months of climbing up and over the rim of Jezero crater, the rover is taking a charming tour of the plains just beyond the western crater rim, fittingly named “Lac de Charmes.” […]

ServiceNow unworried by Salesforce firing shots across its bow

Believes it can translate workflow smarts into AI ROI

In October, Salesforce debuted Agentforce IT in a direct challenge to ServiceNow’s ITSM product, and analyst firm Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst Charles Betz rated it the “most credible threat” ServiceNow has ever faced.…

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

GPT-before-GPA plan has faculty and students scratching their heads

Purdue University last week said it will require incoming undergraduate students to meet an "AI working competency" requirement in order to graduate.…

Attacks pummeling Cisco AsyncOS 0-day since late November

No timeline for a patch

Suspected Chinese-government-linked threat actors have been battering a maximum-severity Cisco AsyncOS zero-day vulnerability in some Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and Secure Email and Web Manager (SEWM) appliances for nearly a month, and there's no timeline for a fix.…

CEO spills the Tea about massive token farming campaigns

Plus: automated SBOMs, $250,000 bounties ahead

interview  No good idea - like rewarding open source software developers and maintainers for their contributions - goes unabused by cybercriminals, and this was the case with the Tea Protocol and two token farming campaigns.…

Breaking Data Team Silos Is the Key To Getting AI to Production

Enterprises are experiencing FOMO and rushing to deploy AI-based services and AI agents, but for the teams that are responsible

The post Breaking Data Team Silos Is the Key To Getting AI to Production appeared first on The New Stack.

Jassy taps 27-year Amazon veteran to run AGI org, which is now definitely a thing that exists

Amazon bets that by making AI its own group, it can outpace Microsoft and Google

In today's episode of "Amazon Kremlinology," AWS has put out a press release that shows a significant shuffle of one of AWS's most storied leaders.…

Computers should not act like human beings

Mark Weiser has written a really interesting article about just how desirable new computing environments, like VR, “AI” agents, and so on, really are. On the topic of “AI” agents, he writes: Take intelligent agents. The idea, as near as I can tell, is that the ideal computer should be like a human being, only more obedient. Anything so insidiously appealing should immediately give pause. Why should a computer be anything like a human being? Are airplanes like birds, typewriters like pens, alphabets like mouths, cars like horses? Are human interactions so free of trouble, misunderstandings, and ambiguity that they represent a desirable computer interface goal? Further, it takes a lot of time and attention to build and maintain a smoothly running team of people, even a pair of people. A computer that I must talk to, give commands to, or have a relationship with (much less be intimate with), is a computer that is too much the center of attention. ↫ Mark Weiser That’s one hell of a laser-focused takedown of “AI” tools in modern computing. When it comes to voice input, he argues that it’s too intrusive, too attention-grabbing, and a good tool is supposed to be the exact opposite of that. Voice input, especially when there’s other people around, puts the interface at the center of everyone‘s attention, and that’s not what you should want. With regards to virtual reality, he notes that it replaces your entire perception with nothing but interface, all around you, making it as much the center of attention as it could be. What’s most fascinating about this article and its focus on “AI” agents, virtual reality, and more, is that it was published in January 1994. All the same questions, worries, and problems in computing we deal with today, were just as much topics of debate over thirty years ago. It’s remarkable how you could copy and paste many of the paragraphs written by Weiser in 1994 into the modern day, and they’d be just applicable now as they were then. I bet many of you had no idea the quoted paragraph was over thirty years old. Mark Weiser was a visionary computer scientist, and had a long career at Xerox PARC, eventually landing him the role of Chief Technology Officer at PARC in 1996. He coined the term “ubiquitous computing” in 1988, the idea that computers are everywhere, in the form of wearables, handhelds, and larger displays – very prescient for 1988. He argued that computers should be unobtrusive, get out of your way, help you get things done that aren’t managing and shepherding the computer itself, and most of all, that computers should make users feel calm. Sadly, he passed away in 1999, at the age of 46, clearly way too early for someone with such astonishing forward-looking insight into computing. Looking at what computers have become today, and what kinds of interfaces the major technology companies are trying to shove down our throats, we clearly strayed far from Weiser’s vision. Modern computers and interfaces are the exact opposite of unobtrusive and calming, and often hinder the things you’re trying to get done more than they should. I wonder what Weiser would think about computing in 2025.

Datacenters feel the Bern as Senator Sanders pushes bit barn building pause

Vermont lawmaker proposes DC moratorium to give Congress time to rein in the AI boom

US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is calling for a nationwide moratorium on datacenter construction, saying it would "give democracy a chance to catch up … and make sure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people on Earth."…

Have $117 to Spend? You Could Win a Picasso Painting Worth More Than $1 Million

A moody 1941 portrait of a woman by the Spanish artist will be given to the winner of a charity raffle that's being staged to fund Alzheimer's research

Run AI Agents in the Browser With the Hashbrown Framework

Like most of us from the U.S. South, Alabama-born developer Mike Ryan has a deep reverence for Waffle House. That’s

The post Run AI Agents in the Browser With the Hashbrown Framework appeared first on The New Stack.

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Is About to Make Its Closest Approach to Earth. Here's How to View It With Binoculars or a Telescope

On December 19, avid skywatchers can catch a glimpse of the mysterious visitor through powerful binoculars or a telescope when it’s around 170 million miles from our home planet

Kubernetes 1.35 “Timbernetes” Introduces Vertical Scaling

As any good home gardener knows, a healthy plant can outgrow its planter. And so it is with Kubernetes jobs,

The post Kubernetes 1.35 “Timbernetes” Introduces Vertical Scaling appeared first on The New Stack.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2025 Is 'Slop,' the A.I.-Generated Junk That Fills Our Social Media Feeds

The word describes the onslaught of "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence"

All aglow about DCs, investors launch $300M at microreactor startup

Startup expects its first Kaleidos reactor to power on at Idaho National Lab next year

Amid the AI boom, nuclear power is in vogue, with venture capitalists lining up to plow hundreds of millions into small modular reactor (SMR) startups to make their datacenter energy headaches go away.…

NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Ready to Roll for Miles in Years Ahead

After nearly five years on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has traveled almost 25 miles (40 kilometers), and the mission team has been busy testing the rover’s durability and gathering new science findings on the way to a new region nicknamed “Lac de Charmes,” where it will be searching for rocks to sample in the coming […]

Let’s Make Hardened Images the Seatbelts of Software

No automaker asks you to pay extra for a seatbelt. The cost is baked into the price of every car

The post Let’s Make Hardened Images the Seatbelts of Software appeared first on The New Stack.

Massive Stars Make Their Mark in Hubble Image

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a glittering blue dwarf galaxy called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). The galaxy, which is substantially smaller than our own Milky Way, lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Mrk 178 is one of more than 1,500 Markarian galaxies. These galaxies get their name from […]

GitHub walks back plan to charge for self-hosted runners

Engineers cried foul over plan to charge $0.002/min.

updated  Following publication of our original article, GitHub reversed its decision. The Microsoft-owned developer site has taken to X to admit it might have made a mistake by unilaterally announcing plans to charge people for using their own hardware to host runners.…

NASA’s Two-in-One Satellite Propulsion Demo Begins In-Space Test

NASA is working with commercial partners to create high-performing, reliable propulsion systems that will help small spacecraft safely maneuver in orbit, reach intended destinations across the solar system, and accomplish mission operations.    Two new micropropulsion technologies are being tested in space onboard a CubeSat called DUPLEX (Dual Propulsion Experiment) that deployed into low Earth orbit […]

Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: November/December 2025

Hello again from the Thunderbird development team as we start to wind down for the holidays! Over the past several weeks, our sprints have been focused on delivery and consolidation to clear our plates for a fresh start in the New Year.  Following our successful in-person work-week to discuss all things protocol, we’ve brought Exchange […]

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: November/December 2025 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Async Programming in Rust: Understanding Futures and Tokio

As modern software demands ever-increasing performance and responsiveness, traditional synchronous programming can become a bottleneck. In server applications, network requests,

The post Async Programming in Rust: Understanding Futures and Tokio appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA tries savin' MAVEN as Mars probe loses contact with Earth

Spacecraft was 'rotating in an unexpected manner' and might have shifted orbit

NASA is still trying to recontact the MAVEN Mars orbiter after it stopped responding earlier this month, with fragmentary tracking data hinting the craft may be tumbling and off its predicted trajectory.…

NASA’s Push Toward Commercial Space Communications Gains Momentum

NASA’s commercial partners are actively demonstrating next-generation satellite relay capabilities for spaceflight missions, marking a significant step toward retiring the agency’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system and adopting commercial services. The demonstrations – ranging from real-time spacecraft tracking during launch to transmitting mission commands and scientific data – are part of NASA’s Communications […]

Blockchain company Nomad to repay users under FTC deal after $186M cyberattack

Regulator makes various additional demands over alleged cybersecurity failings

In proposing a settlement agreement, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says that Illusory Systems must repay users funds lost in a 2022 cyberattack.…

NASA Study Suggests Saturn’s Moon Titan May Not Have Global Ocean

A key discovery from NASA’s Cassini mission in 2008 was that Saturn’s largest moon Titan may have a vast water ocean below its hydrocarbon-rich surface. But reanalysis of mission data suggests a more complicated picture: Titan’s interior is more likely composed of ice, with layers of slush and small pockets of warm water that form […]

Google’s New Gemini 3 Flash Rivals Frontier Models at a Fraction of the Cost

There’s no end in sight for the current LLM release cycle. Within the last 30 days, we’ve seen the launches

The post Google’s New Gemini 3 Flash Rivals Frontier Models at a Fraction of the Cost appeared first on The New Stack.

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

CodeRabbit review of pull requests shows meatbags beat clankers

Generating code using AI increases the number of issues that need to be reviewed and the severity of those issues.…

New Landsat Science Team Announced

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with NASA, has named the new Landsat Science Team that will support the world’s longest-running Earth observation mission for a planned 2026-2030 term.

How to Run OLAP and OLTP Together Without Resource Contention

Analytics (OLAP) and real-time (OLTP) workloads serve distinctly different purposes. OLAP (online analytical processing) is optimized for data analysis and

The post How to Run OLAP and OLTP Together Without Resource Contention appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA Langley Research Center: 2025 Year in Review

The future of flight, space exploration, and science starts at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where we have been advancing innovation for more than 100 years. Join us as we look back at NASA Langley’s achievements in 2025 that continued our storied legacy of pushing the boundaries of what is possible.  Langley Researchers […]

NATO's battle for cloud sovereignty: Speed is existential

Build a digital backbone faster than adversaries can evolve or lose the information war

NATO is in an existential race to develop sovereign cloud-based technologies to underpin its mission, the alliance's Assistant Secretary General for Cyber and Digital Transformation told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) last week.…

Archaeologists Unearth Cache of Aboriginal Stone Tools Buried in Australia 170 Years Ago

Known as "tulas," the 60 artifacts are only the second discovery of this size to be found in Australia. Researchers think they may have been created for trade

The Year in Physics

Physicists spotted a “terribly exciting” new black hole, doubled down on weakening dark energy, and debated the meaning of quantum mechanics.

The post The Year in Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Docker Sets Free the Hardened Container Images

With a sprawling cloud native ecosystem, security needs to be as scalable as everything else. Hence, the rise of the

The post Docker Sets Free the Hardened Container Images appeared first on The New Stack.

California DMV tells Tesla to ease off on those Autopilot claims

Full Self-Driving Capability marketing deemed a 'violation of state law'

The California DMV says Tesla's use of the term Autopilot is misleading and violated state law, but has hit the brakes on a proposed 30-day suspension of the car maker's manufacturing and dealer licenses.…

Mysteriously Young 'Mammoth' Fossils Discovered in Alaska Turned Out to Be Whale Bones

When researchers learned the fossils were merely 1,900 to 2,700 years old—which would be the youngest woolly mammoth fossils ever found—they suspected something was amiss

AI Coding Tools in 2025: Welcome to the Agentic CLI Era

From a software development perspective, there is little doubt what 2025 will be known for when looking back. In fact,

The post AI Coding Tools in 2025: Welcome to the Agentic CLI Era appeared first on The New Stack.

Microsoft security update breaks MSMQ on older Win systems

Folder permission changes cause queue failures and misleading error messages, no real fix yet

Microsoft has good news for administrators: while some organizations now pay for security updates on older Windows versions, the inconsistent quality remains free.…

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Lawsuit concedes the bird is still the word for many

X has filed a lawsuit against a social media startup over the Twitter brand, effectively acknowledging that millions still use the Twitter domain, call Elon Musk's platform "Twitter," and their emissions "tweets."…

These Owls Took a Free Vacation on a Cruise Ship—but Soon They'll Be Heading Home

A pair of burrowing owls made themselves at home aboard Royal Caribbean International's Allure of the Seas in February, joining a trans-Atlantic sailing to Spain. They'll return to the United States next month

Former UK chancellor George Osborne finds something to do at OpenAI

Follows Nick Clegg at Meta and Rishi Sunak at Anthropic in snuggling up to US tech

OpenAI has hired former UK finance minister George Osborne, continuing a trend of British politicians whose careers have peaked cozying up to US tech giants.…

UK.gov accused of Grinching Christmas by ignoring phone theft scourge

Six months after expert testimony, no one has yet dialed into promised summit on technical solutions

MPs have blasted the UK government for complacency over surging mobile thefts after a "long-delayed" summit on the issue disappeared into the New Year.…

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Regulator proposes strict limits on screen-based testing, cites infrastructure concerns and lack of evidence for benefits

Most students taking school and college GCSE, A-level, and AS-level exams in England will continue to use pen and paper, according to proposals from the sector's regulator for a very limited expansion of screen-based assessments.…

UK plans right for flat owners to demand gigabit broadband

Changes to Electronic Communications Code would bypass landlord objections to fiber installations

The UK government is consulting on plans to give the owners of 1.2 million flats in England and Wales a formal right to request gigabit-capable broadband.…

Cisco decides its homegrown AI model is ready to power its products

Apparently you’re about to get better advice on any identity issues lurking in your infrastructure

Cisco has decided its homegrown AI models are ready to power its products, starting with its Duo Identity Intelligence offering.…

A Siberian Snowman in Billings

Winds, waves, and ice near a remote town on the Chukchi Peninsula have sculpted a series of coastal inshore lagoons that resemble an icon of winter.

"A Very, Very Big Deal." Countries Take On Fossil Fuels

Many countries are frustrated with U.N. climate conferences. While some countries urgently want to transition away from fossil fuels — the main driver of global warming — others are blocking that language from climate agreements. Today on the show, Emily talks with Julia Simon from NPR’s climate desk. She takes us to Brazil and introduces us to a group of countries that are trying something new.

Interested in more science and climate related news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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India unveils a homegrown dual-core 1GHz RISC-V processor, the DHRUV64

No details on power consumption, lots of patriotic pride

India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) on Monday revealed its most advanced processor yet and hailed it as a “reliable” product and a step towards the creation of a domestic semiconductor industry that challenges current global giants.…

From Playbooks to Gamebooks: Why Static Security Response Is Giving Attackers the Advantage

A decade ago, SOAR playbooks were revolutionary. They codified knowledge, accelerated response times, and freed analysts from repetitive tasks. But

The post From Playbooks to Gamebooks: Why Static Security Response Is Giving Attackers the Advantage appeared first on The New Stack.

China's Ink Dragon hides out in European government networks

Misconfigured servers are in, 0-days out

Chinese espionage crew Ink Dragon has expanded its snooping activities into European government networks, using compromised servers to create illicit relay nodes for future operations.…

Mozilla’s new CEO: Firefox will become an “AI browser”

In recent years, things have not been going well for Mozilla. Firefox’s market share is a rounding error, and financially, the company is effectively entirely dependent on free money from Google for making it the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla’s tried to stem the bleeding with deeply unpopular efforts like focusing on online advertising and cramming more and more “AI” into Firefox, but so far, nothing has worked, and more and more of the remaining small group of Firefox users are moving to modded versions of Firefox without the “AI” nonsense and other anti-features. The task of turning the tide is now up to Mozilla’s new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who took up the role starting today. In his first message to the public in his new role as CEO of Mozilla, he lays out his vision for the future of the company. What are his plans for Mozilla’s most important product, the Firefox web browser? Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions. ↫ Anthony Enzor-DeMeo So far, the “AI” additions to Firefox have not exactly been met with thunderous applause – to put it mildly – and I don’t see how increasing these efforts is going to magically turn that sentiment around. I’d hazard a guess that Firefox users, in particular, are probably quite averse to “AI” and what it stands for, further strengthening the feeling that the people leading Mozilla seem a little bit out of touch with their own users. Add to this the obvious fact that “AI” is a bubble waiting to pop, and I’m left wondering how investing in “AI” now is going to do anything but make Mozilla waste even more money. I don’t want Firefox to fail, as it is currently the only browser that isn’t Chrome, Chrome in a trench coat, or Safari, but it seems Mozilla is trying to do everything to chase away what few users Firefox had left. In the short term, we can at least use modified versions of Firefox that have the “AI” nonsense and other anti-features removed, but for the long term, we’re going to need something else if Mozilla keeps going down the same path it’s been going in recent years. The only viable long-term alternative is Servo, but that’s still a long way off from being a usable day-to-day browser. The browser landscape ain’t looking so hot, and this new Mozilla CEO is not making me feel any better.

A Frontier Model Built Like a Brain with Python and Rust

The team from Pathway believes that the transformer architecture developed eight years ago has reached its limits, which no amount

The post A Frontier Model Built Like a Brain with Python and Rust appeared first on The New Stack.

Hot for its bot, McKinsey may cut thousands of jobs

The company has reportedly consulted itself and decided it needs fewer people

Consultant cut thyself! Where consulting firms typically tell other companies how to make more money by trimming the fat, they are now looking inward, as advances in AI and a push for efficiency prompt layoffs, with blue-chip advisor McKinsey weighing thousands of job cuts, according to reports.…

Break the AI Gridlock at the Intersection of Velocity and Trust

“Our AI prototypes are brilliant, but getting them to production takes six months — if we’re lucky.” Sound familiar? Teams

The post Break the AI Gridlock at the Intersection of Velocity and Trust appeared first on The New Stack.

Why AI Parallelization Will Be One of the Biggest Challenges of 2026

During the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, the people who benefited most were not those who came West to

The post Why AI Parallelization Will Be One of the Biggest Challenges of 2026 appeared first on The New Stack.

Analytics provider: We didn't expose smut site data to crims

An employee of the adult site could be responsible.

Analytics vendor Mixpanel says it is not the source of data stolen from Pornhub and says the info was last accessed by an employee of the adult site.…

Louvre Robbers Escaped With Less Than a Minute to Spare Due to Major Security Fumbles

An investigation ordered by France's culture ministry highlighted a number of security failures that made October's brazen heist possible

Meta's SAM bot keeps 'em separated as it isolates voices and instruments from audio clips

No mention of protections to stop it being used to snoop on people

Want to hear just the guitar riff from a song? How about cutting out the train noise from a voice recording? Meta says its new SAM Audio model can separate and edit sounds using simple prompts, cutting down on the manual work typical of audio-editing tools.…

How a Component-First Approach Fixes Figma-to-Code

You’ve probably tried one of the Figma-to-code tools that promise to turn your designs into working React or HTML with

The post How a Component-First Approach Fixes Figma-to-Code appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA IXPE’s Longest Observation Solves Black Hole Jets Mystery

Written by Michael Allen An international team of astronomers using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) has identified the origin of X-rays in a supermassive black hole’s jet, answering a question that has been unresolved since the earliest days of X-ray astronomy. Their findings are described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, […]

2025 Year-End Sale

Announcing Purism's Year End Sale. Offering 15% off your purchases through the end of the year. Just use YEAREND as your coupon code for hardware purchases through December 31, 2025!

Please note that orders placed after December 17th will not ship until January.

The post 2025 Year-End Sale appeared first on Purism.

Browser 'privacy' extensions have eye on your AI, log all your chats

More than 8 million people have installed extensions that eavesdrop on chatbot interactions

Ad blockers and VPNs are supposed to protect your privacy, but four popular browser extensions have been doing just the opposite. According to research from Koi Security, these pernicious plug-ins have been harvesting the text of chatbot conversations from more than 8 million people and sending them back to the developers.…

NASA Launches Research Program for Students to Explore Big Ideas

NASA is now accepting concepts for a new research challenge. The Opportunities in Research, Business, Innovation, and Technology (ORBIT) challenge is a multi-phase innovation competition designed to empower university and college students to develop next-generation solutions that benefit life on Earth and deep-space exploration. With up to $380,000 in total prize funding, NASA’s ORBIT challenges […]

The Bare Metal Myth: Why VMs Now Win for Containers

There are strong opinions about the best way to deploy containers. The purist wants to run containerized applications on pure

The post The Bare Metal Myth: Why VMs Now Win for Containers appeared first on The New Stack.

Through Astronaut Eyes: 25 Years of Life in Orbit

After 25 years of continuous human presence in space, the International Space Station remains a training and proving ground for deep space missions, enabling NASA to focus on Artemis missions to the Moon and Mars. The orbiting laboratory is also a living archive of human experience, culture, and connection.   Creating community With 290 visitors from […]

When Vibe Coding Goes Rogue: Debugging Your Own Brain

Every developer has felt it: that inexplicable flow where code writes itself, where logic feels like jazz. Some might call

The post When Vibe Coding Goes Rogue: Debugging Your Own Brain appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA Ignites New Golden Age of Exploration, Innovation in 2025

With a second Trump Administration at the helm in 2025, NASA marked significant progress toward the Artemis II test flight early next year, which is the first crewed mission around the Moon in more than 50 years, as well as built upon its momentum toward a human return to the lunar surface in preparation to […]

How Small Is Too Small? Volunteers Help NASA Test Lake Monitoring From Space

Volunteers participating in the Lake Observations by Citizen Scientists and Satellites (LOCSS) project have been collecting water level data in lakes since 2017. Now, the LOCSS team has used these data to examine the accuracy of water level measurements made from space.

Why do bit barns keep bumping up our bills, Senators ask DC operators

Amazon, meanwhile, claims its datacenters are helping ratepayers despite tons of evidence to the contrary

Concerned over continually rising energy costs linked to AI datacenter construction projects, three Democratic Senators are asking leading bit barn operators to explain why their promises of not passing grid expansion costs onto consumers are falling short. …

NASA JPL Shakes Things Up Testing Future Commercial Lunar Spacecraft

The same historic facilities that some 50 years ago prepared NASA’s twin Voyager probes for their ongoing interstellar odyssey are helping to ready a towering commercial spacecraft for a journey to the Moon. Launches involve brutal shaking and astonishingly loud noises, and testing in these facilities mimics those conditions to help ensure mission hardware can […]

Nvidia fills the void of American open-weights models with some of its own

Nemotron 3 is a grab bag of 2025's top machine learning advancements

For many, enterprise AI adoption depends on the availability of high-quality open-weights models. Exposing sensitive customer data or hard-fought intellectual property to APIs so you can use closed models like ChatGPT is a non-starter.…

The Iconic 'Rocky' Statue at the Philadelphia Art Museum Steps Is Still Stirring Up Strong Feelings

Actor Sylvester Stallone initially told officials he wanted the sculpture back—but after public outcry, he changed his mind and agreed to let the city keep it

Why a ‘Boring’ Database Is Your Secret AI Superpower

The AI race isn’t just about bigger models or better algorithms — it’s about speed. The teams that win are

The post Why a ‘Boring’ Database Is Your Secret AI Superpower appeared first on The New Stack.

SantaStealer stuffs credentials, crypto wallets into a brand new bag

All I want for Christmas … is all of your data

A new, modular infostealer called SantaStealer, advertised on Telegram with a basic tier priced at $175 per month, promises to make criminals' Christmas dreams come true. It boasts that it can run "fully undetected" even on systems with the "strictest AntiVirus" and those belonging to governments, financial institutions, and other prime targets.…

Scientists Engineered Cancer-Fighting Cells Inside Patients' Bodies—and Two Early Trials Show Promise

Two recent studies show the novel therapy works in people with multiple myeloma, but researchers are trying to minimize side effects

KubeVirt Planning: Storage, Network and Security Considerations

This is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of “Running Virtual Machines on Kubernetes: A Practical Roadmap for Enterprise Migrations,” a

The post KubeVirt Planning: Storage, Network and Security Considerations appeared first on The New Stack.

Put a Fork in It: The Future of Open Source That’s ‘Done’

Working in open source software (OSS) sometimes feels like running on a treadmill that never stops. The projects you depend

The post Put a Fork in It: The Future of Open Source That’s ‘Done’ appeared first on The New Stack.

Peekaboo!

Clockwise from left, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui and NASA astronauts Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman, and Mike Fincke pose for a playful portrait through a circular opening in a hatch thermal cover aboard the International Space Station on Sept. 18, 2025. The cover provides micrometeoroid and orbital debris protection while maintaining cleanliness […]

From AGI Hype to Engineering Reality: The Future of LLMs

If we wonder how Large Language Model (LLM) providers will try to improve their services in the next few years,

The post From AGI Hype to Engineering Reality: The Future of LLMs appeared first on The New Stack.

This Landscape Inspired Some of Georgia O'Keeffe's Best-Known Works. Now, It's Receiving New Protections

A conservation plan will help preserve 6,000 acres of land in northern New Mexico, a region that frequently appears in the 20th-century artist's paintings

Toxicology and Environmental Chemistry

Ensuring Astronaut Safety Achieving safe exploration of space in vehicles that rely upon closed environmental systems to recycle air and water to sustain life and are operated in extremely remote locations is a major challenge. The Toxicology and Environmental Chemistry (TEC) group at Johnson Space Center (JSC) is made up of 2 interrelated groups: Toxicology […]

Statistics and Data Science

Enabling Successful Research A major aim of biomedical research at NASA is to acquire data to evaluate, understand, and assess the biomedical hazards of spaceflight and to develop effective countermeasures. Data Science (S&DS) personnel provide statistical support to groups within the NASA JSC Human Health and Performance Directorate and other NASA communities. They have expertise […]

Nvidia pledges more openness as it slurps up Slurm

And parades its latest trio of Nemotron models

Nvidia burnished its open source credentials this week after buying the company behind the veteran Slurm scheduler and announcing a slew of open source AI models.…

CSS Layout: How To ‘Center a Div,’ the Old School Way

In the early days of the internet, centering something on a webpage was easy: Just put a tag on

The post CSS Layout: How To ‘Center a Div,’ the Old School Way appeared first on The New Stack.

One of NASA’s Key Cameras Orbiting Mars Takes 100,000th Image

Mesas and dunes stand out in the view snapped by HiRISE, one of the imagers aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. After nearly 20 years at the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has snapped its 100,000th image of the surface with its HiRISE camera. Short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, HiRISE is […]

Maintaining the Gold Standard: The Future of Landsat Calibration and Validation

The NASA CalVal team spent 2025 improving their calibration techniques, strengthening collaboration, and sharing their work with the remote sensing community. Looking ahead, they’re applying lessons learned to prepare for future Landsat missions.

Immunology and Virology

Does Spaceflight Alter the Human Immune System? Getting sick on Earth is nothing to sneeze at, but for astronauts on deep space exploration missions, the risk for contracting diseases may be elevated due to altered immunity. The Human Health and Performance Directorate’s Immunology/Virology Laboratory is ideally suited to study the effects of spaceflight on the […]

Exposure Guidelines (SMACs and SWEGs)

The JSC toxicologists establish guidelines for safe and acceptable levels of individual chemical contaminants in spacecraft air (SMACs) and drinking water (SWEGs) in collaboration with the National Research Council’s Committee on Toxicology (NRC COT) and through peer-reviewed publication.  The framework for establishing these levels is documented for SMACs and SWEGs, and recent refinements to the Methods reflect current risk assessment […]

Closures as Win32 window procedures

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces, to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I’ve learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent article had me thinking about it again, and how I could do better than before. In this article I will enhance Win32 window procedure callbacks with a fifth argument, allowing us to more directly pass extra context. I’m using w64devkit on x64, but the everything here should work out-of-the-box with any x64 toolchain that speaks GNU assembly. ↫ Chris Wellons Sometimes, people get upset when I mention something is out of my wheelhouse, so just for those people, here’s an article well outside of my wheelhouse. I choose honesty over faking confidence.

QuillOS: Alpine-based Linux distribution optimised for Kobo e-readers

Any computing device will inevitably get a custom operating system – whether based on an existing operating system or something entirely custom – and of course, Kobo e-readers are no exception. QuillOS is an Alpine Linux-based distribution specifically developed for the unique challenges of e-readers, and comes with a custom Qt-based user interface, support for a whole slew of e-book formats, NetSurf as a web browser, encrypted storage, a VNC viewer, and a ton more. Basic hardware capabilities like Wi-Fi and power management are also supported, and it has online update support, too. The current release is already two years old, sadly, so I’m not sure how active the project is at this point. I wanted to highlight it here since something like this is a great way to liberate your Kobo device if, for some reason, Kobo ever started making their devices worse through updates, or the company shutters its services. You know, something that seems rather relevant today. Sadly, my own Kobo does not seem to be supported.

Devs say Apple still flouting EU's Digital Markets Act six months on

Coalition for App Fairness warns App Store fees remain unlawful despite non-compliance ruling

Six months after EU regulators found Apple's App Store rules in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), developers say Cupertino is still behaving as if compliance were optional.…

Merging To Test Is Killing Your Microservices Velocity

If you are a platform engineer or an engineering leader, look at your current development pipeline. Is everything treated equally?

The post Merging To Test Is Killing Your Microservices Velocity appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA’s Webb Observes Exoplanet Whose Composition Defies Explanation

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have observed a rare type of exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, whose atmospheric composition challenges our understanding of how it formed.  Officially named PSR J2322-2650b, this Jupiter-mass object appears to have an exotic helium-and-carbon-dominated atmosphere unlike any ever seen before. Soot clouds likely float through the […]

NASA ORBIT Challenge 2026

The NASA ORBIT (Opportunities in Research, Business, Innovation, and Technology for the Workforce) Challenge is a multi-phase, student-focused challenge designed to inspire and empower the next generation of innovators, engineers, entrepreneurs, and researchers. Compete for cash prizes, receive mentorship from NASA experts, and present your work at an in-person showcase. Finalists gain access to an […]

US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row

Tech Prosperity Deal paused after London resists pressure on online services levy

The US government has put a proposed $42 billion (£31 billion) trade pact with the UK on ice because the European country has yet to budge on its Digital Services Tax (DST).…

NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory Reveals ‘First Light’ Images

NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory has captured its first images from space, revealing rare views of Earth and the Moon in ultraviolet light. Taken on Nov. 17 — still months before the mission’s science phase begins — these “first light” images confirm the spacecraft is healthy while hinting at the incredible views to come. The initial […]

NASA’s IMAP Mission Captures ‘First Light,’ Looks Back at Earth

All 10 instruments aboard NASA’s newly launched IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) mission have successfully recorded their first measurements in space. With these “first light” observations, the spacecraft is now collecting preliminary science data as it journeys to its observational post at Lagrange point 1 (L1), about 1 million miles from Earth toward the […]

The Year in Computer Science

Explore the year’s most surprising computational revelations, including a new fundamental relationship between time and space, an undergraduate who overthrew a 40-year-old conjecture, and the unexpectedly effortless triggers that can turn AI evil.

The post The Year in Computer Science first appeared on Quanta Magazine

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

Communities on both sides of the Atlantic push back against rapid build-outs

Frenzied demand for AI development is driving a wave of datacenter construction, but new projects are facing growing public opposition over concerns about their impact on local communities and the environment.…

Chainguard Takes Over Maintenance of Aging OSS Projects

today announced Chainguard EmeritOSS, its new model for supporting mature open source projects and long-term open source software (OSS) sustainability

The post Chainguard Takes Over Maintenance of Aging OSS Projects appeared first on The New Stack.

NASA, Partners Share First Data From New US-European Sea Satellite

Launched in November, Sentinel-6B will track ocean height with ultraprecision to advance marine forecasting, national security, and more. Sentinel-6B, a joint mission by NASA and its U.S. and European partners to survey 90% of the world’s oceans for the benefit of communities and commerce, has started sending back its first measurements since launching in November. […]

Trail Cameras in Vermont Captured Something Strange: Moths Sipping a Moose's Tears

Tear-drinking, known as lachryphagy, has mostly been observed in the tropics, so scientists were somewhat surprised to find the unusual behavior so far north

Smartphones face a memory cost crunch – and buyers aren't in the mood

Rising DRAM and NAND prices are squeezing handset makers and threatening a fragile market recovery

AI-nflation  The smartphone industry's brief bounce back now looks set to run straight into a wall, with analysts warning that rising memory costs are about to test buyers' patience.…

Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot

Anthony Enzor-DeMeo picked to replace interim boss Laura Chambers

Mozilla Corporation on Tuesday said it has appointed Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as Chief Executive Officer, replacing Laura Chambers, who served as interim CEO for the past two years.…

Intel hires ex-Trump fixer as Washington whisperer

But when will Chipzilla bring back will.i.am?

Intel has hired a veteran Republican operator as its head of government affairs, just months after Uncle Sam became the struggling chip vendor's biggest shareholder.…

Open Source: Inside 2025’s 4 Biggest Trends

AI was big in 2025, but so were many other developments and worries. The biggest open source stories in 2025

The post Open Source: Inside 2025’s 4 Biggest Trends appeared first on The New Stack.

From pr0n to playlists and paperclips, trio of breaches spills data of millions

Adult site, streaming platform, and Japanese retailer expose user info, but not credentials

Three very different companies have now confirmed data breaches affecting millions of users – each insisting the damage stopped well short of passwords and payment details.…

MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

New spy boss says officers must master code alongside tradecraft as agency navigates 'space between peace and war'

New MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli outlined her vision for technology-augmented intelligence gathering in her first public speech on December 15, warning that the UK operates "in a space between peace and war."…

UK.gov doubles hardware spending framework to £24B in 6 months

Massive procurement deal for laptops and software comes after minister vows to squeeze better value from big vendors

The UK government plans to tender a commercial framework for end-user hardware and software worth up to £24 billion ($32.18 billion) including tax - double the £12 billion maximum announced six months ago.…

Bishop of Hong Kong tells peers AI is not the devil's work

Theologians give scriptural OK to online faith communities

The Bishop of Hong Kong said last week that AI was definitely not a gift from the devil at a meeting of his peers across Asia that called for sensible engagement with the technology.…

Ofcom comes knocking after BT, Three mobile outages cut 999 access

Watchdog reviews if failures breached availability rules after downtime left millions unable to make calls

Ofcom has opened formal investigations into BT and Three after mobile outages this summer left Britons unable to make calls – including to emergency services.…

Could Architecture In Space Make A Greener Earth?

Humankind has the technology to go to space. Space architect Ariel Ekblaw says the bottleneck now is real estate: getting larger volumes of space stations in orbit. Her company is working on the equivalent of giant, magnetic space Legos—hexagons that could self-assemble in space into livable, workable structures. This episode, host Regina G. Barber talks to her about this space architecture and why she says that the goal isn’t to abandon Earth–but to off-world industries like agriculture and manufacturing in order to build a better Earth.

If you liked this episode, check out our Space Camp series .

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No, SoundCloud hasn’t started tuning out VPNs. It’s mopping up after a cyberattack

Bum note for 20 percent of users whose data leaked

Music hosting and streaming service SoundCloud has admitted it suffered a cyberattack.…

A Subtle Return of La Niña

A weak La Niña emerged in the equatorial Pacific in late 2025, and scientists are watching how it may help shape weather and climate in the months ahead.

Ford shifts gears to build batteries for datacenters

EV sales didn’t accelerate as hoped, so it will repurpose idling factories

Automotive giant Ford has decided to start a business building big batteries, in part to cash in on the datacenter construction boom.…

Repent ye inefficient – the ‘Palantir-ization’ of IT services is upon us

Palantir's former IT boss just took over as CEO of Thrive-backed AI MSP platform

Former Palantir CIO Jim Siders has departed the company to join Shield Technology Partners as CEO, in a bid he says is meant to bring AI to bear in the sprawling managed services landscape.…