Rupert Goodwins

Ämbra

Journalist at Freelance

Columnist at The Register

Writes, talks, does tech+people. Creative tech etc @civicdigits. Columns @theregister. SVI.. @[email protected]

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Articles

How to help a big AI vendor making awful business decisions

3 weeks ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Congratulations! As CEO of a giant tech company, head of a sovereign wealth fund, or a VC bored with megayacht leapfrog, you have billions of dollars of other people's cash to spend. You want to make a difference. You want to be a success. Most of all, you want to look good doing it. Right now, nothing looks better than AI to do all three. This columnist understands your needs. Nothing says forward-thinking, innovation-minded builder of the future than a big splash in artificial intelligence.
AI's energy appetite can be curbed through lateral thinking

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion How much harm does AI cause the environment? As a report from the MIT Technology Review just confirmed, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares enough to try and find out. Even if lots of people did care a lot, it wouldn’t change things. The driver of AI’s insane energy addiction is no more amenable to argument than a labrador in possession of an entire roast chicken. There’s an arms race on, and arms races only end in three ways.
Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

1 month ago | lxer.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Linus Torvalds is the global hero most of the world doesn't even know exists. There are no big movies about him, no best-selling biographies, no ardent Torvaldian cultists with home altars and gilded icons. At least, we hope not. To those who know, he led the digital world out from the imperial serfdom that had seemed its inexorable fate.
Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Linus Torvalds is the global hero most of the world doesn't even know exists. There are no big movies about him, no best-selling biographies, no ardent Torvaldian cultists with home altars and gilded icons. At least, we hope not. To those who know, he led the digital world out from the imperial serfdom that had seemed its inexorable fate.
Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the illness

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion It's been a devastating few weeks for UK retail giants. Marks and Spencer, the Co-Op, and now uber-posh Harrods have had massive disruptions due to ransomware attacks taking systems down for prolonged periods.
Cybersecurity's on the front line in the culture wars

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion It is a nation's first duty to protect its citizens from harm. A fine maxim, and one we can all agree on, even in these disagreeable times. Sadly, that's as far as it goes. What the harm is and how to protect against it is where light turns to heat. North Korea protects its citizens from harm by total control of what they can do, see, and think. They may starve, but they're protected from a hostile world by an ideological ditch a light-year wide.
Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit bordering on addiction

2 months ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user – 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable. It gets worse.
Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to hit back

2 months ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion 6:56 PM. April 11, 2025. Write it down. That's the precise moment the tech-bro-niverse imploded due to the gravitational force of irony at its core. That was the moment Jack Dorsey posted "Delete all IP law" on X. A little later, Elon Musk added his approval with "I agree."Is this a considered intellectual stance born from a closely argued radical reassessment of the legal, economic, and cultural framework of modern times, or a petulant outburst from an entitled billionaire?
Official abuse of state security hits code red

2 months ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion The UK government's attempts to worm into Apple's core end-to-end encryption were set back last week when the country's Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds. Or so we think: the whole business has been massively obfuscated by that special blend of state secrecy and legal gaggery that characterizes an official attempt to do something we really need to know about without telling us.
Please sir, may we have some Moore? No

2 months ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Nvidia has just shown off its vision of the near future in the shape of its Blackwell Ultra. Aptly for a company that helps gamers explore dystopian science-fiction hellscapes, Nvidia's actual future involves vast, heat-soaked stacks of silicon, guzzling energy by the half-gigawatt.