The Register

Pro tip: Don't use your new work email to phish your old firm An ex-Motorola technician in the US has admitted he tried to fraudulently obtain a passport while awaiting trial for a cyberattack on his former employer....

A misbehaving Li-ion on your noggin - what could possibly go wrong? Meta has paused shipments of the wearable battery-slash-head strap accessory for its Quest 3 VR goggles amid reports the device bricks itself when charged....

Facebook titan vows to protect two billion voters ... but US gets more protection than India, Indonesia, Mexico, EU Meta will require advertisers to disclose whether their political ads on its platforms contain any AI-generated or digitally altered content....

Don't be too shocked: Financial giant has been fleeing normie banking lately after failing to find footing The future of Apple's credit card offering has been thrown into limbo, as the iPhone giant apparently wants out of its collaboration with Goldman Sachs, issuer of the Apple Card....

No one's buying these things. Just, uh, ignore the massive markups Nearly 4,000 US auto dealers have signed an open letter urging the Biden administration to slow its plan to push electric vehicles (EVs) onto the populace - because demand is apparently low and the darn things just aren't selling that well....

CISA calls for stronger IT defenses as Texas district also hit by ransomware crew CISA is investigating a cyberattack against a Pennsylvania water authority by suspected Iranian miscreants. The intrusion forced operators to switch a pumping station to manual control....

You should've received an email if you're affected, but here's a reminder just in case Consider this your final warning: Google is going to start wiping inactive accounts on Friday, December 1....

Titan trip postponed while NASA awaits the FY 2025 budget request The future of NASA's Dragonfly trip to Saturn's moon Titan is looking uncertain after the agency gave the go-ahead for work to proceed on the final design and fabrication but kicked formal confirmation of the mission into mid-2024....

Users on the mainframe will have to wait for their system to become available in the cloud service, though Cloud giant AWS has announced the inclusion of IBM's Db2 database - among the first relational databases on the market - as one of the systems available on its Relational Database Service....

All customer support users told their info was accessed after analysis oversight Okta has admitted that the number of customers affected by its October customer support system data breach is far greater than previously thought....

Forget Martian dust devils, it's the peril of the blue smoke you have to worry about Engineer and astro-futurist Chris Lewicki wrote an essay this week - that would not be out of place in our Who, Me? archives - about a testing mistake that nearly transformed half a billion dollars worth of Mars Rover into spacecraft scrap....

Firefox 121, freshly in beta test, will default to the protocol too Red Hat reckons Wayland is now mature enough to take over as the only display server in the forthcoming RHEL 10....

Customers still 'digesting' shipments bought in 2022, says exec in mixed fiscal year for hardware biz Hewlett Packard Enterprise has reported a dramatic decline in server revenues as corporate customers cut back on spending amid a more cautious outlook....

New features are great and all, but maybe fix some of the issues too? The developers are revolting - at least, it seems that way if an increasingly fractious thread regarding Microsoft's .NET MAUI is anything to go by....

Is divine intervention next on the tech to-do list? God bless this mess. The UK's Department for Education has crunched the numbers and found that the country's clergy of all things is among the professions most at risk from AI....

CRM databases were accessed and library users are advised to change passwords The Rhysida ransomware group has published most of the data it claimed to have stolen from the British Library a month after the attack was disclosed....

Search giant exploring more locations to squeeze watts from rocks Google has added a novel form of geothermal power to the list of carbon-free energy sources fueling its data-crunching empire....

Acts under the guise of protecting the public from fraud, yet history suggests Home Office has other motives The UK government plans to introduce new legislation to ban SIM farms, which it views as a widely abused means for carrying out cyber fraud....

Competition Markets Authority claims merger will reduce innovation for designers and other creative types Adobe's $20 billion buy of web-first design collaboration start-up Figma will harm software developers if it goes ahead as proposed, according to a provisional ruling on the merger by Britain's competition regulator....

Planning portal back online with a more secure connection Reading Borough Council has securely restored its planning portal after facing criticism for recommending questionable tech security practices to users....

In the US, however, folks are ready and willing to bin you for a bot Concern over AI coming for our jobs appears to be unfounded, though it's not clear what effect this newest wave of automation will have on wages, the European Central Bank (ECB) concludes in a research report....

'We looked very hard for a smoking gun linking technology and well-being and we didn't find it' Increased use of the internet has not had a notably negative effect on mental health, according to a study combining data from millions of people across 168 countries....

JAXA is having a tough time in cyberspace and outer space, the latter thanks to an electrical glitch Japan's Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) has reported a cyber incident....

Almost nobody has used it, or knows it well, so beware of consultants bearing cred If you want to implement Microsoft's Copilot AI assistants, don't expect the software giant's channel to be much help - they've scarcely had a chance to use it, never mind develop meaningful expertise in the tool. That's coming from Loryan Strant, product and innovation lead at Dutch Microsoft-centric consultancy Rapid Circle and a longtime holder of Redmond's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) accreditation....

Take that, Elon Amazon's Project Kuiper space internet project has gained a notable notch in its belt, with Japanese telecom company NTT signing up for the service....

Amid accounts of wider layoffs and Broadcom doing a 'strategic review' of end-user compute and Carbon Black products VMware president Sumit Dhawan has left the newly-acquired org to join security software vendor Proofpoint as its CEO....

His job is to modernise Japan but Googling electoral trivia to ensure accurate answers is not allowed Japan's digital minister, Taro Kono, faced a backlash on Monday after he attempted to use his smartphone to look up info during a meeting of the Budget Committee of the House of Councilors, contravening meeting rules....

'Meta knows what it is doing is bad for children ... it is now there in black and white' Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of vetoing a proposed ban of Instagram and Facebook image filters that simulate the effects of plastic surgery, despite being told that such software may cause mental harm for children....

Back to plan A, then, eh? Some US lawmakers have tabled alternative legislation to reauthorize the Feds' favorite snooping tool, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, before it expires at the end of the year....

Advertisers may be surprised to find where their banners appear Google Search ads paid for by US and EU government agencies and legislators, and by major companies, have been spotted in embarrassing and legally dubious places, including sexually explicit websites, plus sites in Iran and Russia in possible contravention of economic sanctions....

Anthropic CEO also rocks up on stage for reasons Re:Invent AWS CEO Adam Selipsky previewed Amazon Q to 50,000 re:Invent attendees in Las Vegas on Tuesday, touting it as a chat-based generative AI assistant whose scope includes suggesting cloud infrastructure to suit business needs, outputting blog posts, helping with application code, and searching and analyzing enterprise data....

Grandma is watching what?! A Plex "feature" has infuriated some users after sharing with others what they are watching on the streaming service - and it appears this functionality is on by default....

Also hedging its bets with a healthy dose of Nvidia chips too Re:Invent On Tuesday Amazon Web Services has unveiled its next-gen Graviton4 CPUs and Trainium2 AI accelerators at its Re:Invent shindig, which it claims will deliver a healthy boost in performance and efficiency in machine learning....

Will timber tech take root or just go up in flames? Datacenter infrastructure biz Vertiv is offering a wooden version of its prefabricated modular structures, claiming these have a reduced carbon footprint compared to steel alternatives....

The legacy lives on, but best not mention that landing, eh? This week marks the 40th anniversary of the first launch of the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Spacelab module aboard astronaut John Young's final Space Shuttle mission....

Google's AI offshoot finds copy-cat robots capable of aping human mentors A team of machine learning researchers from Google's DeepMind claim to have demonstrated that AI can acquire skills in a process analogous to social learning in humans and other animals....

Urges US cell tower giant to reverse 'value-destructive strategy' Elliott Investment Management is taking a close interest in US wireless cell tower provider Crown Castle, disclosing a $2 billion stake in the company and pushing for a change of leadership to counter a "value-destructive strategy."...

Scrolling through endless humblebrags without targeted ads is a fundamental right, according to privacy expert Privacy activist group noyb (None Of Your Business) has filed a data protection complaint against Meta over the "Pay or Okay" subscription model, one it reckons is now being considered by many of Meta's rivals....

A few low-level stragglers remain on the loose, but biggest fish have been hooked International law enforcement investigators have made a number of high-profile arrests after tracking a major cybercrime group for more than four years....

Bing grows but Google remains top dog, according to Ofcom report There was good news for Microsoft and bad news for Musk in the 2023 Online Nation report by the UK's data regulator. It seems Brits are falling out of love with X - formerly Twitter....

DBaaS update aimed at customers looking for live analytics on apps Document database Couchbase is adding a columnar side-car to boost analytics performance for users who want more insight into their real-time data....

The 'Azure RTOS' used in millions of Raspberry Pis is now FOSS Microsoft is open sourcing the realtime operating system that it acquired with Express Logic, donating it to the Eclipse Foundation....

OpenAI led by the Swedish Chef? Musk aims for Mars and hits Venus instead? What are your predictions? Competition Another year has passed, and another of Microsoft's Christmas sweaters is seeking a new home. Come up with a suggestion for OpenAI's next CEO, and our retro Paint-themed monstrosity could be yours....

Or your wallet Review Logitech's latest take on ergonomic keyboards is a divisive device. It will delight users seeking palm rests but annoy key bashers more accustomed to chiclet or mechanical models....

Aeroflot fleet still has a smoking section, but not for tobacco Ukrainian government cyber snoops claim they've infiltrated the computer systems of Russia's federal air transport agency Rosaviatsiya, and stolen data that shows the invading nation's civil aviation sector is on the "verge of collapse."...

Exec who led memory and battery businesses to global dominance gets the job of defining Chaebol's future Samsung Electronics has established a "Future Business Planning Group" to figure out what's next for the manufacturing giant....

What was it they say about folks in silicon houses? After lambasting Nvidia's efforts to limbo-dance under US export restrictions against China, the CEO of chips-for-AI outfit Cerebras, Andrew Feldman, is back in the spotlight amid revelations one of his largest customers, G42, may be aiding the Middle Kingdom, to the ire of Uncle Sam....

Activists worry investigations may stay secret, and then there's those odd incident reporting requirements India's government has granted its Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-In, immunity from Right To Information (RTI) requests - the nation's equivalent of the freedom of information queries in the US, UK, or Australia....

Park user data in Amazon's servers for ML-generated insights and actions - yea or nay for you? Re:Invent AWS has previewed AppFabric for productivity, which promises to use generative AI to "provide personalized insights and recommended actions generated from context across a user's other applications."...

Ghosted authorities after complaint during hotly contested referendum Australia's Digital Industry Group (DIGI), the industry association for organizations that invest in online safety, privacy, and cyber security, has decided to withdraw X's place in the voluntary code that oversees efforts to stop the spread of misinformation....