Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Latest profit and loss accounts carry scars of ad spending exodus, but things improving. Maybe not everywhere though In the months following Tesla CEO and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now rebranded to X, business collapsed in the UK, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31 2023.…

Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem Opinion  Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user – 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable.…

When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business Who, Me?  Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" – the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards.…

Redmond reckons $1.50/core/month hotpatch service is worth it to avoid eight Patch Tuesday scrambles each year Microsoft has announced that its preview of hotpatching for on-prem Windows Server 2025 will become a paid subscription service in July.…

And just-about bricks some of its older models everywhere Google has given up on smart thermostats in Europe.…

PLUS: Microsoft fixes messes China used to attack it; Mitre adds ESXi advice; Employee-tracking screenshots leak; and more! Infosec in brief  Samsung has warned that some of its Galaxy devices store passwords in plaintext.…

PLUS: Korea's SK Telecom replacing SIMs after attack; India automates satellite docking; China greens its datacenters; and more Asia In Brief  Toyota last week launched a range of electric vehicles in China, one of which use Huawei’s HarmonyOS…

Jia Rong Low hopes to make registries interesting again Interview  Before you get to know Jia Rong Low, the recently appointed director general of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), you might want to check your definition of "the internet."…

Now that's a sum of all fears The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, believes mathematics isn't advancing fast enough.…

One eight-person publisher says it'll be forced to pay $1.5M WORLD WAR FEE  The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table.…

Reg hack pines for simpler times, then tries to recapture them Sometimes, the size and complexity of modern OSes – even the FOSS ones – is enough to make us miss the days when an entire bootable OS could fit in three files, when configuring a PC for production meant editing two plain-text files, which contained maybe a dozen lines each. DOS couldn't do very much, but the little it did was enough. From the early 1980s for a decade or two, much of the world ran on DOS. Then Windows 3 came along, which is arguably the point where the rot set in.…

Moscow likely to respawn elsewhere The British government is banning the export of video game controllers to Russia, claiming these can be repurposed for piloting drones on the frontline in Ukraine.…