@www.theregister.com.offbeat@rss-parrot.net
I'm an automated parrot! I relay a website's RSS feed to the Fediverse. Every time a new post appears in the feed, I toot about it. Follow me to get all new posts in your Mastodon timeline! Brought to you by the RSS Parrot.
---
Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis
Site URL: www.theregister.com/offbeat/
Feed URL: www.theregister.com/offbeat/headlines.atom
Posts: 28
Followers: 1
MIT boffins aim to build injectable mini-organs that can fill in for a damaged liver
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/03/need_more_liver_mit_boffins/
Published: March 3, 2026 22:32
Injected liver cells stayed viable and functional for eight weeks in mice Can’t keep waiting on the transplant list? How about an injectable “satellite liver” instead? After an MIT research project showed early success, the idea of a mini organ that could…
Brussels urged to pay 'sovereignty premium' to narrow China battery gap
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/03/eu_battery_production_costs/
Published: March 3, 2026 09:30
Analysis claims €500 per EV could secure local production and cut reliance on foreign supply chains Europe's EV battery cost gap with China – currently around 90 percent – could shrink to roughly 30 percent by 2030 if Brussels is willing to pay what…
Popular prayer program becomes propaganda pusher after reported Israeli hack
Published: March 2, 2026 20:11
Iranian worshippers got notifications saying 'help has arrived' Imagine your favorite app encouraging you to surrender during a war. That's happening right now in Iran.…
US struck Iran with copies of its own drones
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/us_iran_clone_drones/
Published: March 2, 2026 19:17
Iran's own technology reverse engineered and used against it. The Pentagon has confirmed that US forces struck Iranian targets using weapons that are copies of Iran's own Shahed 136 suicide drones.…
Fly me to the Moon: NASA reshuffles the Artemis card deck
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/nasa_artemis_reshuffle/
Published: March 2, 2026 15:06
Artemis III now to follow in Apollo 9's footsteps, 2028 landing still planned for Artemis IV NASA has reshuffled its Artemis program, pushing the first crewed lunar landing in more than half a century back to Artemis IV, with Artemis III performing a…
Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/microsoft_project_silica_opinion/
Published: March 2, 2026 10:13
Soon turned out, we had a heart of glass Opinion There is more joy in heaven over a single report of genuinely new technology than in a thousand desperate AI marketing pitches. What the angels will make of Microsoft's Project Silica, a mixture of the two,…
OpenAI’s Altman says Pentagon set ‘scary precedent’ binning Anthropic
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/open_ai_dow_anthropic_ai_ethics/
Published: March 2, 2026 05:27
Signs a deal with Washington anyway, says he’s kept control of killer robots by allowing only cloudy AI, with guardrails OpenAI has signed a deal with the United States Department of War (DoW) that allows use of its advanced AI systems in classified…
Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/27/harvard_boffins_squeaky_sneakers/
Published: February 27, 2026 17:50
Are they shoe-ins for an award? Hard to say It is a sound evocative of high school: the characteristic squeak of sneakers on a basketball court. UK readers may, however, be familiar with the same sound from their trainers while playing badminton.…
UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/27/uk_copper_struck_off_after/
Published: February 27, 2026 09:30
Typing 8x more than your peers? You better have the work to show for it Avon and Somerset Police this week confirmed a former officer was dismissed after she was found weighing her laptop keyboard down with photo frames to simulate activity.…
China’s ‘The US hacks itself to make us look bad’ theorists return with a crypto conspiracy
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/27/chinas_the_us_hacks_itself/
Published: February 27, 2026 04:10
Apparently Uncle Sam busted Binance to shore up the dollar, balance the budget, and achieve world domination The Chinese agency that has accused the USA of cyberattacks on its own infrastructure to make Beijing look bad is back with another theory:…
NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/nasa_safety_artemis/
Published: February 26, 2026 12:25
Report highlights too many firsts in Artemis III mission The latest report from NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) raises questions about the mission objectives for Artemis III.…
Moon's mighty magnetic field was a 5,000-year titanium blip
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/moon_magnetic_field/
Published: February 26, 2026 10:37
So say Oxford boffins who found 'bias' related to Apollo rock samples created false impression Scientists at the University of Oxford say they may have cracked the puzzle of the Moon's magnetic field and settled a debate that has raged since the Apollo…
Microsoft ‘cooperating’ with Japanese antitrust probe
Published: February 26, 2026 06:14
It looks like the same cloudy software licenses that offend Europe may be in play Microsoft is “fully cooperating” with a probe by Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, which wants to know if the software giant has violated the nation’s anti-monopoly laws.…
Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/hubble_orbit_decay/
Published: February 25, 2026 13:22
Orbit decay accelerates as solar activity rises, with no approved mission yet to raise the telescope's altitude A newly released plot of the Hubble Space Telescope's altitude shows just how quickly the observatory has descended in recent years.…
Gatwick shuttle screen suffers pre-flight nerves
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/airport_bork/
Published: February 25, 2026 09:30
Dude, where's my operating system? Bork!Bork!Bork! Airports and computers remain uneasy travel companions. At London Gatwick, the inter-terminal shuttle briefly demonstrated why, with one information screen declaring: "Operating System not found."…
Discord drama delays age verification debut until the second half of 2026
Published: February 24, 2026 22:37
Cofounder promises transparency and full technical explanation of plans, which aren't actually changing Discord is delaying age verification checks for a little while after its plan inspired a lot of hand-wringing among the community. But it's not backing…
Starlink speeds past terrestrial networks – and regulators
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/12/starlink_challenges/
Published: February 24, 2026 22:32
Low-earth orbit broadband is a no-brainer for remote area connectivity, but a brain teaser for lawmakers and networkers APRICOT 2026 Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in…
Anthropic accuses China's AI labs of ripping off content - just like it did
Published: February 24, 2026 00:45
Says DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax are using 'distillation' to gin up their own models Having built a business by remixing content created by others, Anthropic worries that Chinese AI labs are stealing its data.…
ICE watchers say agents used software to threaten and follow them home
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/americans_sue_homeland_security_over/
Published: February 23, 2026 22:54
'This is a warning. We know you live right here' Two US residents have sued several Homeland Security agencies and officials, including Secretary Kristi Noem, for allegedly using surveillance tools to harass them, branding them as "domestic terrorists,"…
Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums - in car crashes, that is
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/pop_album_fatal_car_accidents/
Published: February 23, 2026 21:25
What do Taylor Swift and Drake’s release days have to do with road deaths? More than you’d think Who doesn’t like streaming music while driving? Unfortunately, new research suggests that when major albums drop and streaming spikes, traffic fatalities rise…
Artemis II headed back to the bay; helium issues force another delay
Published: February 23, 2026 17:14
Sending humans around the Moon in February, er, March - now April 2026, maybe The quest to return to the Moon has hit another snag. NASA is delaying Artemis II again, as interrupted helium flow to the rocket’s upper stage forces a rollback to the Vehicle…
O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/fcc_patriotic_programming/
Published: February 23, 2026 14:26
Stations urged to mark milestone with pro-America content The head of the Federal Communications Commission has called on broadcasters to start the day with the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance to celebrate the US's 250th birthday.…
Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/bork_goes_retro_with_a/
Published: February 23, 2026 10:15
Analog curio nestled between fax and typewriter - this is a very different definition of 'legacy support' Bork!Bork!Bork! There are occasions when flicking a power switch can send a user into a world of bork-related pain, so it is sometimes worth taking a…
Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/who_me/
Published: February 23, 2026 07:30
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.…
NASA repurposes Mars Helicopter’s ancient Snapdragon SoC to help Perseverance rover navigate
Published: February 23, 2026 06:15
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…
Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/21/head/
Published: February 21, 2026 11:03
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…
SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/02/21/serpapi_google_scraping_lawsuit/
Published: February 21, 2026 00:56
'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…
SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists
Published: February 20, 2026 19:55
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…