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Microsoft has begun rolling out tweaks to the Windows 11 experience to make good on its promise to "fix" the operating system, starting with the ability to move the taskbar around. The changes are only for Windows Insiders brave enough to be in the Experimental channel, but will be welcomed by customers left baffled by Microsoft's decision to strip features from its OS with Windows 11. The update allows the taskbar to be positioned at the top, bottom, left, or right of the screen, with icon alig

Exploit attempts are already hammering a newly disclosed NGINX bug dubbed "NGINX Rift," proving once again that attackers read patch notes faster than most admins. Researchers at VulnCheck said they are seeing active exploitation tied to CVE-2026-42945, a heap buffer overflow flaw affecting both NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus that was disclosed last week after apparently sitting unnoticed for 18 years. VulnCheck's Patrick Garrity said the company observed exploitation activity on its canary sy

The Polish government is urging public officials and "entities within the National Cybersecurity System" to stop using Signal, directing them to instead use an encrypted messenger developed by a leading Polish research organization. In an announcement on Friday, the government stated that Signal comes with security risks, including social engineering attacks orchestrated by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. "National-level Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) have identified

Microsoft has admitted that the May 2026 security update might fail to install with a "Something didn't go as planned. Undoing changes" message. The problem is related to the EFI System Partition (ESP), which is usually where the device boots from. Its minimum size is 200 MB, and the operating system manages it. However, if there is 10 MB or less free space, then the update might fail with a 0x800f0922 error code and the helpful message. "On affected devices, the installation might proceed throu

Britain's F-35 fighter fleet is set to carry US-made glide bombs as an interim measure until delayed F-35 software updates from Lockheed Martin add support for the SPEAR 3 mini-cruise missile intended for the aircraft. The news comes in an official response from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which published a scathing report last year on the MoD's management of the F-35 program. That report noted that the stealth fighter force lacks essential capa

Mozilla has warned Britain not to turn VPNs into collateral damage in the government's increasingly desperate hunt for ways to stop kids dodging Online Safety Act age checks. In a submission to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology's "Growing up in the online world" consultation, Mozilla argued that VPNs are "essential privacy and security tools" used by millions of ordinary people, from those securing public Wi-Fi and remote work traffic to journalists, activists, and other vuln

Google is encouraging its database developers to lean "heavily" on AI coding tools as it ramps up contributions to open source projects such as PostgreSQL. Earlier this year, Google announced a raft of new contributions to PostgreSQL, the open source database that has become a popular RDBMS for developers building new applications in the cloud. Sailesh Krishnamurthy, VP of Databases, Google Cloud, told The Register that the company was using AI coding tools to accelerate its contributions to ope

OPINION The terms "blindingly obvious," "logical consequence," and "that is not how it works" appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation. In particular, the discovery that imposing age access controls on websites has pushed users to VPNs has come as a huge surprise to legislators in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Nobody here knows how old VPN users are, be they kids unwilling to lose access or adults unwilling to disgorge personally identifying data to who knows wh

The perennial question "Can it run Doom?" has a new answer, of sorts, after the USA's Library of Congress (LOC) added the iconic game's soundtrack to its National Recording Registry. An announcement of this year's new additions to the Registry hails Bobby Prince's 1993 soundtrack as "the perfect riff-shredding accompaniment for the game's demon-slaying journey to hell and back." "Key to Doom's popularity was the adrenaline-fueled soundtrack created by freelance video game music composer Bobby Pr

WHO, ME? Welcome to Monday morning, the time of week when The Register always asks “Who, Me?” because that’s the title of our reader-contributed column in which you confess to having made a mess, and found a way to egress without career distress. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Miller” who told us that as a whippersnapper of just 21 summers he found himself tending a mainframe that created a virtual machine, and accompanying virtual disk, for each user. Miller’s employer shut down th

Observability outfit Grafana Labs has revealed that an attacker accessed its GitHub repository and stole its codebase. In social media posts the company blamed the situation on an “unauthorized party” who was somehow able to obtain a token that offered access to its GitHub environment. The company thinks it has identified the source of the credential leak, and therefore “invalidated the compromised credentials and implemented additional security measures to further secure our environment against

ASIA IN BRIEF Samsung found itself facing down controversy in South Korea last week, when the weather app pre-installed on many of its devices incorrectly labelled an island territory named Dokdo as part of North Korea. Dokdo is a group of volcanic islets that is the subject of a territorial dispute between South Korea, North Korea, and Japan. Netizens were therefore outraged by a champion of South Korean industry handing the islands to foes in North Korea. Mislabelling the map was therefore suf

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has declared the project’s security mailing list has become “almost entirely unmanageable” due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports. Torvalds used his weekly state of the kernel post to deliver release candidate four for Linux 7.1 and report “fairly normal” progress towards a full release. He then pointed kernelistas to the project’s documentation, which he wrote “might be worth highlighting” as “the conti

KETTLE Hopefully you haven't had reason to notice yet, but there's a rising problem with AI services on Google Cloud, AWS, and other platforms sticking their customers with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars. This week's episode of the Kettle focuses on two such stories that The Register published this week, one concerning Google and another involving AWS. In both cases, cloud customers using AI incurred massive bills without any prior notification from their provider and not a lot of hel

After nearly four years and hundreds of billions burned building smarter and more capable models, folks understandably would like to see them do something more than run a chatbot. In this respect, OpenClaw served like blood in the water, demonstrating that, in spite of its seemingly endless supply of security flaws, LLMs really can be used to automate complex tasks. Since then, you've probably noticed the term "harness" coming up more frequently to describe agentic AI frameworks, and for good re

Chris Willis, chief design officer and futurist for data platform biz Domo, wonders why people aren't more annoyed with AI companies. Willis said he was in San Francisco a few weeks ago and he couldn't fathom the lack of resentment. "Why aren't people more resentful that these companies have pushed this technology upon them and now everyone is feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety," he told The Register in an interview. "I'm sure you've seen the surveys and the research. Everyone from the C-sui

For those who miss what Windows looked like in 2009, Classic 7 is a heavily modified version of Windows 10 IoT LTSC, reworked to make it look as much as possible like Windows 7, while still being in support and receiving updates. This has been accomplished thanks to a large compilation of skins, themes, add-ons, tweaks, and so on – some of which are real components from older versions of Windows, adapted and modified to run on Windows 10. We were not sure whether to cover Classic 7, because whil

England's Department for Education is advertising a role paying up to £200,000 a year to lead a new digital and infrastructure group overseeing school buildings and maintenance, as well as technology and data. Its Director General, Digital and Infrastructure, will lead the technology function of around 1,800 staff, develop a new strategy covering digital services, data, and artificial intelligence, and lead work on a unique identifier for children and other learners in England. Scotland, Wales,

INTERVIEW Enthusiasm among managers to adopt AI tools has outpaced developers' ability to learn those tools and use them effectively. Moshe Sambol, VP of customer solutions at software observability outfit Lightrun, told The Register in an interview that he speaks with a lot of companies. Some of the developers in those organizations, he said, are very comfortable with AI tools. "But the reality is that a lot of developers are much earlier in the curve," he said. "The expectations of businesses

Last year, The Register spotted Dell selling cloud-manageable wireless earbuds that feature the company’s famously stoic styling at a price higher than Apple charges for its latest AirPods. Dell eventually offered your correspondent a pair of the Pro Plus Earbuds to try so we could hear what all the fuss is about – and we accepted, on condition that the company showed us the cloudy management tools that make the buds worth the big bucks. Divya Soni, a go to market lead, showed me Dell’s cloudy D