Technology

Welcome to another instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register publishes each Friday as a cathartic service for readers who know that dealing with tech support BS can be a cow of a job.This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jason" who told us he had helped an agricultural equipment dealer with his computer issues for about 20 years."One day this guy called me to ask if I could help at a farm in Yorkshire, where he'd arranged the supply and installation of a fairly subs

Paresh Dave / Wired: How a wave of startups are betting on AI to make formal software verification practical and essential, including &Truth, which launches with a $70M seed  —  A new startup called &Truth is joining the race to automate formal verification, a painstaking process that uses math to prove software works as intended.

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has reported a security breach affecting an estimated $6.3 Bn in assets, in what appears to be the largest crypto heist on record. The exchange said it has worked with blockchain partners to freeze around $3 Bn on-chain. Binance has temporarily suspended withdrawals while it completes security checks. It has also revoked the affected address authorisation and engaged law enforcement and blockchain intelligence firms to trace and recover funds. Withdrawals are ex

TL;DR Motorola has officially confirmed that the Signature 27 will launch on November 5. The phone’s US landing page is live, showcasing its premium design and flagship hardware. A Geekbench listing reveals more performance details, but pricing remains under wraps. The original Motorola Signature had the looks and the hardware to rub shoulders with Android’s finest, but American buyers never got an invitation. Its successor is rewriting that script. It first made a cheeky appearance on Motor

For the last few months, Google has regularly rolled out biweekly updates for Gemini for Home and Google Home. You’d expect the changelog to get shorter by now, but the latest release notes are the most exhaustive yet. More importantly, Google is rolling out a bunch of improvements for its Nest and Google Home speakers, which improve streaming performance and deliver smoother audio playback.

Apple unveiled the iPad mini (2026) with an OLED screen and the A20 Pro chipset on Monday, and the first units will reach buyers on November 6. Ahead of that, one has already been run through Geekbench 7, so we now have a good idea of how it performs. The listing is for the iPad19,2, which is the Wi-Fi + Cellular model, and it shows 3,879 points in the single-core test and 9,870 in multi-core. The CPU has five cores (two performance and three efficiency ones), with the performance cores clocked

Amazon Web Services will become a trillion-dollar business in five to ten years, and thanks to the AI boom Amazon CEO Andy Jassy thinks it should be able to grow by 40 percent or more in 2027 or 2028.The cloud giant is already on track to generate $184 billion annual revenue this financial year, helped by 39.3 percent year-over-year growth that propelled Q3 revenue to a whisker short of $46 billion.“It’s important to remember that the vast majority of global IT spend, about 85 percent, is still

Less than a month after Google released the first Android 17 QPR3 beta, the company has pushed the third beta for compatible Pixel phones. Google's official release notes for the new build highlight a number of bug fixes — 26 in total! — and stability improvements, but there's more to the update than that.

Tom Westbrook / Reuters: TRM Labs attributes the Binance hack to North Korea-based TraderTraitor, which drained ~$6.36B from Binance wallets across 10 blockchains, mostly in ~20 minutes  —  North Korean hackers were behind a $6.3 billion raid on cryptocurrency exchange Binance, according to US blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs.

South China Morning Post: Binance pledges to cover all losses from a ~$6.3B hack, potentially the largest crypto theft ever, surpassing the $1.5B Bybit hack in February 2025  —  Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has pledged to cover all losses from a hack that it said drained around US$6.3 billion from its wallet.

Motorola first showed off the Signature 27 during Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit back in September, but it's been holding back the full specs and pricing ever since. Yesterday, its Indian website said the phone is "coming this November", and now the company has narrowed that down to an exact date: November 5. Here's what we already know. The Signature 27 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset, cooled by an ArcticMesh system with a vapor chamber that's 40% larger than the pre

Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR Strava subscribers can now connect their accounts to Google Gemini for personalized fitness and training insights. Gemini can analyze race performance, compare personal records, track activity streaks, and assess how weather affects workouts. The integration is read-only and rolling out in the US, with no confirmed availability date for other markets. Strava is bringing its fitness-tracking data to Google Gemini, allowing subscribers to get

Crypto exchange Binance has paused trading after discovering unknown parties cracked one of its workers’ laptops and used it to make massive tradesLate on Thursday, US time, the company used its social media feeds to report “Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating.”The exchange insisted “User funds are completely safe” and warned its customers “should remain cautious of scams and should not trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for acco

Kevin Collier / NBC News: CrowdStrike: China-linked hackers used AI tool ARTEX with a DeepSeek LLM and another model to target 200+ organizations in 11 days, compromising at least nine  —  Chinese state-linked hackers targeted more than 200 organizations in just 11 days, using AI to attack governments and businesses worldwide, according to CrowdStrike.

Redditors are sure to take this well. /s

TL;DR Reddit plans to shift to a primarily logged-in experience, potentially limiting how people browse the platform without an account. Nearly 59% of Reddit’s daily active uniques were logged out in Q3 2026, meaning the change could affect the majority of its audience. Reddit will begin testing the changes in select markets outside the US, but users are already pushing back against the idea. Reddit’s about to look and feel a lot different, and no, I’m not just talking about the new For You