Rupert Goodwins

Ämbra

Journalist at Freelance

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

Featured in: Favicon

medium.com Favicon

businessinsider.com Favicon

arstechnica.com Favicon

zdnet.com

popsci.com Favicon

theregister.com Favicon

substack.com Favicon

raconteur.net Favicon

storagenewsletter.com Favicon

idgconnect.com + 6 more

Articles

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the illness

3 days 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 week 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 weeks 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

3 weeks 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

1 month 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

1 month 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.
Big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Since it is currently fashionable to make laws by whim and decree, here are three that should apply immediately across techdom. The following are banned: DoNotReply messages, updates that reset your configuration choices to default, and forced incomprehensible choices. All infuriate, all are lazy insults to users, and all should have no more place in 2025 than cassette tape data storage.
Microsoft tastes the consequences of tariffs on time

1 month ago | theregister.com | Rupert Goodwins

Opinion Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. This works well in sane times, less so when "but it's both" is the default. Apply it to Microsoft's decision to make bug reports include not only a working example but a video of the same, and the meter oscillates wildly. What were they thinking? What did they expect? Happily, and to nobody's surprise but their own, Microsoft's bug response team got pwned.
This one weird trick can make online publishing better

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.
Things looking down for cutting-edge cosmic observatories

2 months 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.