The Register Kettle

El Reg

What's a kettle, you ask? Why a group of vultures in flight, of course. News, insights, analysis, and overall chatter around what's happening in the broader world of IT from the reporters at The Register and guests.

Hosted by Brandon Vigliarolo, with regular guests EIC Matt Rosoff, US editor Avram Piltch, UK editor Paul Kunert, and reporters Tom Claburn, Jessica Lyons, Tobias Mann, and more!

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Sunday · 29 min
American datacenters might be getting dirtier, but at least they'll be efficient
Just when you thought concerns over datacenter power generation in the US couldn't get any worse, the Trump administration goes ahead and gets rid of emissions restrictions on power plants. If that wasn't bad enough, the EPA is also considering getting rid of reporting requirements on small-scale polluters (e.g., datacenters with on-site power generation), meaning all those unrestricted emissions at new bit barns might not even be mentioned to the public. But hey, at least Nvidia is riding to the rescue with some datacenter energy efficiency improvements, as self-serving as they may be for the company's bottom line. Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, Systems Editor Tobias Mann, and Reporter Dan Robinson to talk all about these developments, and why we're not so sure coal will come roaring back as a datacenter energy choice any time soon.
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September 13 · 24 min
AI is going to kill everyone, and apparently we're just going to let it
Hey, did you hear? AI is going to kill us all and no one is trying to do anything to stop it. That's what industry insiders are saying now, anyways. Whether you believe we just have to sit back and let Skynet end civilization is another matter altogether. We at The Register's Kettle desk don't think so, and that's what we're talking over this week. Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, systems editor Tobias Mann, and senior reporter Tom Claburn to hear our thoughts on how we could stop the impending AI meteor hurtling toward us by, for starters, arresting the tech bros who keep letting it do bad stuff. Someone had better do something - all those industry insiders sounding the alarm are going to be exhibit A if and when we take action after it's already too late.
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September 6 · 20 min
Jensen's purchase of a new toy could reshape the entire AI industry
AI repository Hugging Face will soon be an Nvidia property, and while everyone's promising things will remain the same we at The Register's Kettle desk aren't so sure the status quo is going to stay the status quo at the AI industry's leading open model host. Joining host Brandon Vigliarolo this week is reporter Dan Robinson, who broke the news of Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition for El Reg yesterday, weighs in on what he heard on the announcement call, while senior reporter Tom Claburn opines on what he sees coming.
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August 30 · 40 min
High tech, high schmeck: What's old is new again
Windows XP is turning 25, and with AI still causing a memory crunch we're really missing the days of low-overhead OSes from Microsoft that just worked. This week on The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by FOSS reporter Liam Proven and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to talk about why XP might have been peak Windows, but that's not the only retro thing we're chatting about in this episode. Along with reminiscing about Windows of days gone by, we're also looking at Casio's remake of its classic digital watch to add some basic smart capabilities without losing a two-year battery life, and we're reexamining the long-held belief that putting passwords on paper is a bad idea. After all, you can't hack a paper notebook.
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August 23 · 36 min
AI vendors are turning to custom hardware as Microsoft turns back the clock on Windows
This week, we learned a lot more about what’s going on inside the datacenter. GPUs may still be king but their exclusive reign on the rack is over. The taskbar's reign at the bottom of the desktop may be coming to an end too. Register Systems Editor Tobias Mann joins us to talk about why so many vendors are turning to alternate silicon from the likes of Cerebras and Marvell to help power their inference. He also explains why Waymo is designing its own custom chips in robotaxis rather than continuing to use off-the-shelf silicon from Intel. As new AI silicon moves forward, Microsoft goes back to the future by finally, after only five years of waiting, allowing users to move the taskbar in Windows 11. It also has belatedly started giving users more control over context menus and given them a closer look at what their neural processing units (NPUs) are doing in task manager. Register Microsoft Ecosystem Reporter Richard Speed weighs in.
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August 16 · 25 min
Black Hat and DEF CON are AI conferences now, too
Our cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons spent a week in Las Vegas for Black Hat and DEF CON last week, and there was only one thing on everyone's mind: AI agents and their growing threat to cybersecurity defenders. As Jess wrote this week, pretty much every discussion she had centered around AI and its potential effects on critical infrastructure, with multiple current and former government leaders expressing worry over recent events and what they mean for the future of infosec. Join Jess and host Brandon Vigliarolo for this week's episode of The Kettle, where they break down the hacker summer camp scuttlebutt and what the security world is doing to protect critical infrastructure from the emerging AI threat.
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August 9 · 31 min
Everything is crazy and, yes, you can blame AI
OpenAI's invasion of Hugging Face keeps getting worse somehow, Chinese open-weight models are nigh on to reaching parity with their closed-off American cousins, and AI crawlers are getting their own LLM-poisoning ads. Were there anything world-shaking events in AI land we missed this week? Join Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo as he chats with systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn about this trio of exciting AI stories from the week. Worried that a rogue hivemind of AI agents could come for your secrets? Want reassurance that a Chinese open-weight takeover wouldn't be that bad? Curious how LLMs are being advertised to when you're not watching? That's all on tap for the latest episode.
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August 2 · 28 min
The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet
Between eye-watering capex expenses, shrinking free cash flow, and worries about chip availability, things are starting to look tight. El Reg Editor-in-Chief Matt Rosoff and Systems Editor Tobias Mann join host Brandon Vigliarolo for this episode of The Kettle to discuss what the numbers mean and how things pan out.
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July 26 · 21 min
OpenAI's Hugging Face debacle makes great case for open models
So, an OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox last week, made its way to the internet, and then hacked its way into Hugging Face, stealing some internal data and credentials in the process. That's big news in the world of AI, but as El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons and senior reporter Tom Claburn tell Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo, it's not really the end of the world as we know it. Sure, it means there's some capable models out there, and maybe there's more risk from them than some might think, but the OpenAI/Hugging Face mess only happened because of some very specific circumstances. That, and it's actually a really good reason to prioritize more open models instead of relying on frontier labs to own the entire space.
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July 19 · 32 min
World burns as all the money flows into a multi-trillion-dollar magic 8 ball
Your host Brandon Vigliarolo has been breathing in wildfire smoke from Canada for the past few days, which really has him thinking about whether all those AI datacenters building gas turbines and contributing to climate change is really worth it. Luckily for us, CNBC technology and climate reporter Lora Kolodny, who just published a documentary on xAI's environmentally-damaging Colossus datacenters in Memphis, Tennessee, was available to chat with us as a special guest on this week's episode. Lora joins Brandon and El Reg editor-in-chief Matt Rossoff on this week's Kettle to chat about how datacenters are affecting the environment in this discussion, how they could be done right, and why they keep being done wrong.
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July 13 · 27 min
Sticker shock has execs rethinking this whole AI thing
Like a drug dealer who's hooked you and raised their prices, business leaders are simply shocked to learn the AI their organizations are becoming dependent on is suddenly a lot more expensive. Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporter Lindsay Clark and contributor Joab Jackson this week to discuss their recent stories about the rising cost of enterprise AI - and one way a popular open-source project is trying to fight tokenmaxxing with tokenminning - but the question remains whether such measure will be enough to prevent cost-benefit analyses from popping that bubble. Will the AI industry adapt to the fact it's still unprofitable, blowback from usage-based billing, and a desire to not pay AI models as much as the human devs they're supplementing or replacing? That's what's on the hob for this week's episode.
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July 5 · 26 min
From banks to hyperscalers, everyone's worried the AI bubble's fixin' to pop
From international banking worries to the market state of canary-in-the-coal-mine Oracle, the AI bubble is sure looking taut. The Bank for International Settlements, often referred to as "the central bank for central banks" said in a report at the end of June that it was worried the AI bubble was nigh on to popping and taking the global economy with it. Oracle, the hyperscaler with arguably the largest exposure to the AI bubble, has lost more than 40 percent of its share volume in the past month and recently outlined all the ways it might suffer if this whole AI thing doesn't pan out. If you ask our systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn, those factors and more sure make it seem like the AI industry could be on the verge of a massive contraction, and that's the very thing they chat about with Kettle host Brandon Vigliarolo on this week's episode.
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June 28 · 21 min
AI cybersecurity risks? Humans'll always be #1
AI commands all the headlines nowadays, but the biggest security story of the week is all about human laziness and poor password habits - just like the good old days. This week on the Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by US editor Avram Piltch and security editor Jessica Lyons to talk about the Klue breach, which was blamed on a "compromised legacy credential" that ought to probably have been deleted a while ago, which allowed cybercriminals to pivot to the SalesForce environments of hundreds of companies. The incident has caused trouble for security firm Huntress, who admitted to the breach early on, and the situation over there wasn't caused by AI either. That said, AI is playing a role in what's being described as "the summer from hell" by one security professional, but while top-tier AI models are spotting troublesome vulnerabilities, the amount of damage they've managed to cause pales in comparison to what one lazy sysadmin can cause by poorly managing passwords.
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June 21 · 18 min
Anthropic's Mythos mess just keeps getting more complicated
It's been a week since the Trump administration established a de facto ban on Anthropic's Mythos derivative, Fable 5, and the more that comes out about the move the more it seems like Anthropic employees talking amongst themselves were on to something: Is the government just picking on the company? This week on the Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo and Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons chat about what's going on with Mythos and Fable, what role Amazon may have played in justifying the government's move, how a prominent cybersecurity expert is calling the government's foul, and what this whole thing might mean for the next wave of models. After all, even if Mythos and Fable are as advanced as Anthropic claims, it's not going to take long for some open-weight model to make the same leaps, and good luck trying to stop one of those from getting in the hands of anyone who wants them.
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June 7 · 27 min
Hide your snacks: AI is eating everyone's chips
El Reg's systems editor Tobias Mann has been in Taipei for the past week getting the skinny on the hottest new chips, and what he's heard has been less about actual hardware announcements and more about how chipmakers are rushing to meet the demands of AI, other customers be damned. Tobias joins host Brandon Vigliarolo to discuss what he's noticed at Computex 2026, how AI has taken over yet another industry event, and whether the world is going to have to adjust to new, more expensive hardware that only the biggest datacenter operators and wealthiest consumers are going to be able to afford. Will things stabilize? Will prices return to normal? We're not so sure, to be honest.
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S1 · E13
May 31 · 24 min
May went out with a tech boom: Both prices and rockets exploded this week
It was explosive news week – if you're the price of a popular-but-aging piece of consumer gaming hardware or a Jeff Bezos rocket. This week on The Kettle, Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporters Richard Speed and Dan Robinson to talk about the Steam Deck's 40+ percent price hike and what it means for the ongoing memory-and-storage shortage. Sure, it's just consumer hardware, but it's the latest in a line of price hikes justified in the name of AI and geopolitics – and it could spell the beginning of a new normal for hardware prices. We couldn't ignore the standout story of late last week, though, as a Blue Origin rocket blew up spectacularly in what may be the largest space industry explosion in more than 50 years. The Blue Origin blowup is likely to delay the Artemis mission for months, if not a year or more.
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S1 · E12
May 24 · 33 min
Google's AI ventures are enshittification in action
Google I/O has ostensibly been an AI show for a few years running, but this year's announcements have taken the cake, which Google seems all to happy to let its users eat as it reshapes the web. On this week's episode of The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by El Reg senior reporter Tom Claburn and open source reporter Liam Proven to discuss how Google's bevy of AI announcements, and declaration that we're entering the era of AI search, might not play well with customers. From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google's stranglehold on the web.
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S1 · E11
May 17 · 22 min
Did your cloud AI bills go through the roof, too?
Hopefully you haven't had reason to notice yet, but there's a rising problem with AI services on Google Cloud, AWS, and other platforms sticking their customers with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars. This week's episode of the Kettle focuses on two such stories that The Register published this week, one concerning Google and another involving AWS. In both cases cloud customers using AI incurred massive bills without any prior notification from their provider and not a lot of help to resolve the matter with any sense of urgency. Tune in to this week's episode to hear host Brandon Vigliarolo chat with O'Ryan Johnson and Richard Speed chat about their stories, what's causing these massive bills, and how you can avoid a similar situation at your own organization.
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S1 · E10
May 10 · 30 min
Locally-installed AI models are getting pretty good
This week on The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn to discuss the current state of locally-installed coding assistant LLMs. After some experimentation, both Claburn and Mann have concluded they're actually getting pretty good. What does that mean for the computing power crunch? Hopefully it means cash-strapped developers will be able to get off the train of increased prices from AI vendors and actually run a useful local code assistant - just don't expect to give up on the big guys entirely - you might still need them to okay that smaller AI's work.
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S1 · E9
May 3 · 26 min
Things are messy at Microsoft: What's wrong?
Windows is a mess, Copilot's been a disaster, updates have been failing ... hey, Microsoft - everything okay? There's been a lot going wrong for the Windows maker of late, and leadership is promising improvements. Join host and El Reg Brandon Vigliarolo, US editor Avram Piltch, and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to pick apart the situation and read the entrails to see what Microsoft's future holds.
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Showing 1–20 of 26 episodes