Columnists | The Register

REG AD

COLUMNISTS

The Register brings you commentary from some of tech's most seasoned – and opinionated – experts.

Bad review or complaint

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

If you can't bother to keep GitHub running, why should we bother with you?

Swiss cheese

Anthropic's magic code-sniffer: More Swiss cheese than cheddar, for now

AI vuln-hunter finds what humans taught it to find. Funny that

Farmer raking land

AI quota inflation is no token effort. It's baked in

We've been here before. This time, we may not get out

Progress from TCP to QUIC

QUIC will soon be as important as TCP – but it's vastly different

Deciphering the third transport protocol's four RFCs is a task to rival the proverbial blind man trying to understand an elephant

REG AD

Justice Statue, blind folded

What happened when AI ran into the cold hard reality of the legal profession

Hallucinations don't fly in a court of law

Apple security

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

Walled gardens make more sense when it's an AI-lligator infested swamp outside

bbc

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Canny planning or dangerous compromise? Matt Brittin takes the hotseat at a pivotal moment

corporate speak. Pic credit: AJR Photo/ Shutterstock

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Your instinctive revulsion is spot on. Follow your nose

project silica

Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

Soon turned out, we had a heart of glass

ab global network

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

Researchers have found a new approach to finding shortest paths, but it's complex

TLS - Transport Layer Security

TLS 1.3 includes welcome improvements, but still allows long-lived secrets

Tricky tradeoffs are hard to avoid when designing systems, but the choice not to use LLMs for some tasks is clear

copilot

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

The tech is impressive. Shoehorning it into absolutely everything is not

REG AD

AI hallucination illustrative

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Top of the slops signposts the undiscovered country for an industry

fed up uni students looking at failing laptop

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

Networks have changed profoundly, except for the parts that haven’t

high voltage illustration

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

Even if you never use it, you'll be paying for it thanks to datacenters' never-ending hunger for electricity

windows

How Windows 11 is breaking from its bedrock and moving away

The once mighty Wintel supercontinent is cracking in more ways than you might think

Network cables connected to a router

BGP’s security problems are notorious. Attempts to fix that are a work in progress

Securing internet infrastructure remains a challenging endeavour

hot air balloon decrease ressure

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Are tech giants getting nervous? They should be

Young man without mouth

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

US policymakers should take heed, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Illustration of DNS in flux

DNS security is important but DNSSEC may be a failed experiment

Nobody thinks of running a website without HTTPs. Safer DNS still seems optional

device check at customs border uSA

I just deleted my entire social media presence before visiting the US – and I'm a citizen

In 2025, social media has moved from self-expression to self-entrapment

identify people in crowd

Selling your digital soul to use Bluesky's DMs isn't just a bad idea, it's the law*

Getting carded is one thing. A full strip search? Welcome to Britain

Trendy graphic illustrating communications skills

To progress as an engineer career-wise, become a great communicator

It'll even help you develop technical skills

access security

Culture comes first in cybersecurity. That puts cybersecurity on the front line in the culture wars

'Trust us, we're from Trumpland' may not help Microsoft as much as it hopes

road

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

We're on a roadmap to nowhere. Come on inside

windows

Microsoft's Euro-mandated File Explorer surgery shows 'less is more' is still a thing

Humble but with a huge history, the utility's privacy pare-back points to a productive possible future

Illustration of two people talking securely to each other from their laptops

What does it mean to build in security from the ground up?

As if secure design is the only bullet point in a list of software engineering best practices

Abstract illustration of data streaming across a cityscape-like network

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Gather around the fire for another retelling of computer networking history

REG AD

Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon

Haven't we heard this story before?

Illustration of someone plucking at some passwords

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Here's why they really should

android in court

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

HarmonyOS NEXT sounds dissonant until you get the theme

Computer tech as portrayed on TV

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

Allowing pretenders to co-opt the term is bad for everyone

Looking down

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Chipzilla taking some punches but could it stay down?

A burning dumpster

The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world

Malware is often described as biology. It should be the other way around

Illustration of a robot managing a datacenter

Um, what ever did happen with network automation?

Is it lingering somewhere between fusion power and self-driving cars?

REG AD

A friendly robot working with someone on a laptop at home

Forget the AI doom and hype, let's make computers useful

Machine learning has its place, just not in ways that suits today's hypesters

Illustration of people working together as a team to build a system

Security is hard because it has to be right all the time? Yeah, like everything else

It takes only one bottleneck or single point of failure to ruin your week

Illustration of someone thinking about cybersecurity

How not to write about network security – and I'm speaking from experience

At least it's no longer an afterthought

Someone peering at a crystal ball

NAT, ATM, decentralized search – and other outrageous opinions from the 1990s

The predictions that turned out correct ... and the ones we wished were right

A QA engineer works through a project on a large screen in an office

Open source work makes me appreciate software testing. It's not an academic exercise

Literally...

Busy freeway filled with cars bumper to bumper

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

We guess it's OK it did

A traditional compass placed on top of a map

Why securing East-West network traffic is so important – and how it can be done

You don't want to hand your datacenter over to an intruder quite so easily

Composition image of someone working on a PDP-15 in the 1970s and someone today in a modern datacenter

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

As we yearn for a return to a truly decentralized internet

Someone standing by some 5G towers

Building your own private 5G is as easy as Wi-Fi

YMMV. Hold onto your hats, we're diving into network technicals today

A vintage mainframe in action

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Look back in wonder

A phone showing two apps: Mastodon and Twitter

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

ActivityPub isn't just what we've been doing over the Christmas break

tALL PINE TREES IN FOREST

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

Imagine there's no printer drivers. It's easy if you can...

PDF

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

The ghosts of dead trees haunt us still

Illustration of someone on a laptop in a computer universe being pushed along by digital signals

If you need a TCP replacement, you won't find a QUIC one

But we can say what this upcoming protocol is good for

rust ship fix

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

Language wars, huh, what are they good for?

iss

The International Space Station will deorbit in glory. How's your legacy tech doing?

Your past projects may be a pain, but can they rain fiery death from above?

REG AD

Illustration of someone standing on the edge of a precipice

The internet's edge routers are all so different. What if we unified them with software?

Wouldn't it be nice to have the features you want, rather than accept whatever's bundled by suppliers

vvr

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

No country for old menus

Infinite smartphone notifications

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Not to mention the severely disadvantageous subscription model

Dell XPS 13

Dell and Ubuntu certify latest model of XPS 13 ultrabook

Computer giant's Project Sputnik extends to the 2022 model series