The only good password is no password at all Passwords turn 65 this year. They became a feature of computer users' lives in 1961, with MIT's Compatible Time- Sharing System (CTSS). Before then, sysops were real sysops. All jobs went through them, one at a time, and access by others was forbidden by laws written on blocks of stone.

Rogue user showed them an excellent prank, which they put into production Who, Me? Welcome to another installment of Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column in which you confess to crises you caused, and the course corrections that cured the chaos.

Upgrade allows robot to travel potentially unlimited distances without phoning home for help NASA has revealed it repurposed the processor the Perseverance rover used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, to help the rolling robot navigate the Red Planet autonomously for potentially unlimited distances.

PLUS: Chinas sword-wielding humanoid robots; Australian court swamped by AI filings; Vietnams 25km overwater drone delivery; And more! Asia In Brief Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the advent of AI means organizations no longer have any excuse to retain their legacy systems.

Emperor Penguin releases kernel 7.0 rc1 with some numerological musings Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel.

PLUS: Unpatched Ivanti boxes under attack; 0APT might not be a scam; AI gets better at helping cyber-scum; And more Infosec In Brief An unknown attacker accessed the French governments database listing every bank account in the country and made off with 1.2 million records.

Confidential complainant details passed to local politician following debate A UK councillor has dubbed her local authority's data breach "crazy" after the personal details of individuals behind a series of complaints were revealed to her.

Electronic eyes are watching from above, ready to catch dumpers of smashed up couches in the act The UK government is pulling together an elite squad of drone operators to crack down on the scourge of fly tippers and unauthorized dumpers across this ever less green and pleasant land.

Q3 figures show the trio drawing the most broadband complaints per 100,000 customers The UK's telecoms regulator has named and shamed the companies it receives the most customer complaints about, with certain brands cropping up more than others.

'The DMCA was not designed to create walled gardens for tech giants' SerpApi, a Texas-based web scraping company, has asked a California court to dismiss Google's claim that that it bypassed digital locks to gather copyrighted content in Google Search results.

The micro-computer makers shares surged this week after an X post tied the AI agent to Pi demand opinion Beloved British single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi has achieved meme stock stardom, as its share price surged 90 percent over the course of a couple of days earlier this week. It's settled since, but its still up more than 30 percent on the week.

About 100 customers affected PayPal has notified about 100 customers that their personal information was exposed online during a code change gone awry, and in a few of these cases, people saw unauthorized transactions on their accounts.

Legal language change aims to make longstanding policy clear Anthropic this week revised its legal terms to clarify its policy forbidding the use of third-party harnesses with Claude subscriptions, as the AI biz attempts to shore up its revenue model.

4K unintended installs in very odd supply chain attack Someone compromised open source AI coding assistant Cline CLI's npm package earlier this week in an odd supply chain attack that secretly installed OpenClaw on developers' machines without their knowledge.

Good news: Team shows re-entry pollution can be measured. Bad news: There may be more of it coming The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that burned up over Europe last year left a massive lithium plume in its wake, say a group of scientists. They warn the disaster is likely a sign of things to come as Earth's atmosphere continues to become a heavily trafficked superhighway to space.

Up to 8 exaFLOPS of super sparse AI compute Nvidia rival Cerebras Systems' dinner plate-sized accelerators will power a new supercomputing cluster in India capable of 8 exaFLOPS of AI compute.

Probe says SAAQ misled government and botched rollout caused province-wide disruption A judge-led commission in Quebec has found that the state agency responsible for driver's licenses and license plates misled the Canadian government about a troubled SAP ERP project that ran more than C$245 million ($179 million/132.6 million) over budget.

What happens in Vegas Las Vegas hotel and casino giant Wynn Resorts appears to be the latest victim of data-grabbing and extortion gang ShinyHunters.

Bezos-corp blames user error for outage, 'specifically misconfigured access controls' In a cautionary tale of agentic AI, AWS reportedly suffered service outages caused by its own AI coding tools in December - though the company insists the downtime was ultimately due to human error.

Security is 'dangerously behind' though, as devs 'treat it as something to solve later' 25 years after the Agile Manifesto, a group of experts hosted by one its signatories met to consider the impact of AI on software development, concluding among other things that test-driven development has never been more important.

'Just trust us' Big Tech's hackneyed catchphrase makes an unwelcome return The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it will accept LLM generated code from contributors to its open source projects but will draw the line at non-human generated comments and documentation.

Appeals judge overrules lower tribunal in latest battle of ICO against a breached retail giant The UK's data protection watchdog has scored a small win in a lengthy legal battle against a British retail group that lost millions of data records during a 2017 breach.

Polish arrest leads to extradition and federal prison sentence Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko will spend the next five years behind bars in the US for his involvement in helping North Korean IT workers secure fraudulent employment.

Attempt to go 'Made in EU' offers big tech escapees a reality check where lower cloud bills come with higher effort Building a startup entirely on European infrastructure sounds like a nice sovereignty flex right up until you actually try it and realize the real price gets paid in time, tinkering, and slowly unlearning a decade of GitHub muscle memory.

Oh snap! The hyperscalers bought all the HDDs Hard drive manufacturers have already sold all the units they will make this year, and it looks like the AI infrastructure boom is to blame, with hyperscalers soaking up all the high- capacity storage.

Feds say trio conspired to siphon processor and cryptography IP, allegedly routing some data overseas Two former Google engineers and a third alleged accomplice are facing federal charges after prosecutors accused them of swiping sensitive chip and security technology secrets and then trying to cover their tracks when the scheme began to unravel.

Hardcoded credential flaw in RecoverPoint already abused in espionage campaign Uncle Sam's cyber defenders have given federal agencies just three days to patch a maximum-severity Dell bug that's been under active exploitation since at least mid-2024.

About half of exemption requests approved as 780,000 prepare for quarterly reporting in April The UK tax collector has exempted 661 people from moving to quarterly software-based reporting under its Making Tax Digital (MTD) scheme, about half the number who have applied.

And a very awkward introduction to workplace culture On Call By the end of the working week, it's natural to feel the walls closing in a little, which is why every Friday morning The Register frees things up a little by publishing a new installment of On Call the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.

Skill at buzzword bingo also required as company seeks innovative and disruptive visionary The CEO of code review platform provider Snyk has announced he will stand down so the company can find someone better-equipped to steer the company into the age of AI.

Reliance Jio used super-cheap plans and own-brand phones to conquer Indias top telco, Reliance Jio, has announced plans to spend $110 billion on datacenters to run AI workloads and says it will use them to deliver services with the same extreme affordability it brought to the mobile communications market.

MIT CSAIL's 2025 AI Agent Index puts opaque automated systems under the microscope AI agents are becoming more com

$300 a month buys you a backdoor that looks like legit software Researchers at Proofpoint late last month uncovered what they describe as a "weird twist" on the growing trend of criminals abusing remote monitoring and management software (RMM) as their preferred attack tools.

Plenty of blame to go around, says Isaacman NASA has released the findings from its investigation of the ill-fated crewed Boeing Starliner mission of 2024, and while it still isn't sure of the root technical causes, it's admitted that trusting Boeing to do a thorough job appears to have been a mistake.

AI model said to show improved reasoning capabilities If you want an even better AI model, there could be reason to celebrate. Google, on Thursday, announced the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro, characterizing the model's arrival as "a step forward in core reasoning."

Wants SLAs, revamped contracts for cloud ops The US Congress spending watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has pressed the National Science Foundations CIO to improve how the agency plans, manages, and procures technology.

FBI warns these cyber-physical attacks are on the rise Thieves stole more than $20 million from compromised ATMs last year using a malware-assisted technique that the FBI says is on the uptick across the United States.

From AI conflation to thin evidence, a new report calls many climate claims greenwashing Some AI advocates claim that bots hold the secret to mitigating climate change. But research shows that the reality is far different, as new datacenters cause power utilities to burn even more fossil fuels to meet their insatiable demand for energy.

IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup Job cuts at the IRS's tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday.

A hundred days a year in the air doesn't come cheap Opinion Palantir CEO Alex Karp has a singular mission to stand out among tech CEOs. Big talk on sales, profits, and tech potential is not enough. His gift for edgy one-liners takes him to places where execs of the past would have scarcely dared to go. Say hello to allusions to goose-stepping and innate Western superiority that we assume have audiences rolling in the aisles.