Rupert Goodwins

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion The universe ended unexpectedly on a March Monday in 2025. To the relief of many, it came back a few days later much as before, but with one very significant change. One that may herald significant changes for all of us, inside its sphere or not. This universe, in particular, is Universe Today, a space news website a good quarter-century old published by Fraser Cain. Over that time, it has sprouted podcasts and a YouTube channel with nearly half a million subscribers.

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion High energy neutrinos are the coolest particles in astrophysics. Born in distant cosmic cataclysms, they speed through the universe almost as if it wasn't there. With no charge and a truly tiny rest mass – perhaps a million times lighter than an electron, but who knows – they interact with virtually nothing. Which makes them virtually impossible to detect, and simultaneously highly desirable to questing humans.

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion With Apple pulling the plug on at-rest end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for UK users, and Signal threatening to pull out of Sweden if that government demands E2EE backdoors, it's looking bleak. There's no answer to the objection that you can't protect deliberate flaws in encryption from themselves being abused. The strength of E2EE is the underlying mathematical proof that can no more be overturned by law than pi can be made exactly 3. The implementation has to be deliberately crippled.

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Windows File Explorer doesn't get much love, poor thing. It gets sworn at if a sought file cannot be found, or if some setting is hiding that needs to be shown. Mostly, it's the caretaker that lets you ride hard on that most essential data exchange component, the Downloads directory, or that part of the workflow where stuff is moved, tidied, or swept away. It's in the class of utilities that most Windows users barely notice, but if deleted would at some point stop play.

2 months ago | lxer.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Nobody likes The Man. When a traffic cop tells you to straighten up and slow down or else, profound thanks are rarely the first words on your lips. Then you drive past a car embedded in a tree, surrounded by blue lights and cutting equipment. Perhaps Officer Dibble had a point. There's no perhaps about the FBI and CISA getting snippy at buffer overflows. These people worry about exploits that threaten car-crash incidents in enterprise IT, and they've seen enough to get angry.