The Register

'Even the most prominent collections are struggling to maintain demand' Just a couple of years ago you'd have no trouble finding some celebrity hawking a non-fungible token (NFT) project. But how quickly times change, as now, even websites dedicated to gambling with cryptocurrency are warning people to stay away from NFTs....

Hoping to bridge the dreaded 'lab-to-fab' gap where R&D dreams go to die The US Department of Defense is investing $238 million in 8 Microelectronics Commons regional innovation hubs as part of Washington's efforts to boost semiconductor production across the country, and in particular to bridge the so-called lab to fab" gap....

Makers won't be able to pull wool over consumers' eyes, though critics say it hasn't gone far enough Negotiators from the European Parliament and Council this week began the process of updating EU rules to ensure consumers are better informed about the lifespan and repairability of products before they buy them....

$157/share cash deal is the largest acquisition in networking titan's history Cisco is making its most expensive acquisition ever - by far - with an announcement it's buying data crunching software firm Splunk for $157 per share, or approximately $28 billion (22.8b)....

Ren Zhengfei says he still takes lessons from American rival An Apple fanboi has emerged in the most unlikely of places - Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO at Huawei, the China HQ'd giant whose latest flagship handset is going head to head at home with its US rival....

Watchdog claims it abused market position to leverage 'unfavorable' long-term parts supply contract Updated South Korea's Federal Trade Commision (FTC) has issued a $14.3 million fine to US chipmaker Broadcom for "unfair" practices against Samsung Electronics....

The roaming charges must be out of this world Vodafone is claiming to have made the world's first space-based 5G call placed using an unmodified handset, thanks to a test satellite operated by AST SpaceMobile....

Database service vendor based on open source DuckDB fattens up to $400M valuation Database service company MotherDuck has secured $52.5 million in VC funding and removed the waiting list from its platform....

Company accused of gross negligence by not updating app despite complaints A lawsuit was this week filed against Google in North Carolina following the death of a 47-year-old father of two who drove off a collapsed bridge....

Five businesses facing half a million in collective penalties for illegally phoning folk registered with TPS The UK data watchdog has penalized five businesses it says collectively made 1.9 million cold calls to members of the public, illegally, as those people had opted out of being menaced at home by marketeers....

Sure to lure in a few in the WFH crowd ... but no pricing yet UK network operator EE has hooked up with telecoms silicon supplier Qualcomm on a next-gen home Smart Hub that will bring Wi-Fi 7 support to its broadband customers....

This is about ending Nvidia's vendor lock-in, insists Greg Lavender Saddled with a bunch of legacy code written for Nvidia's CUDA platform? Intel CTO Greg Lavender suggests building a large language model (LLM) to convert it to something that works on other AI accelerators - like maybe its own Gaudi2 or GPU Max hardware....

Class action alleges pirated novels were fed into binary brainbox The Authors Guild, a trade association for published writers, and 17 authors have unleashed the dragons on OpenAI over its alleged use of their works to train its chatbots....

Global tech companies' Bharat offices attract the wrong sort of interest India is grappling with a three-and-a-half year surge in cyber crime, with analysis suggesting cities like Bengaluru and Gurgaon - centers of India's tech development - are also hubs of evil activity....

Pizza Hut Australia warns 190,000 customers' data - including order history - has been accessed Pizza Hut's Australian outpost has suffered a data breach....

WhatsApp gets better at taking money and so does Meta with verified accounts for biz Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has used a trip to India to announce more transactional features for his social networks....

Acquiring entity Japan Industrial Partners hasn't said what it plans for the sprawling conglomerate Troubled Japanese tech concern Toshiba has announced [PDF] the completion of a tender offer that will see it move into private ownership....

You can't not do GenAI in 2023, and 'Vancouver' release has gone there - but its detours may be more worthy Artificial intelligence might just cause IT departments to reconsider their success metrics - according to ServiceNow circa 2017. That's when the SaaS-y workflow specialist promised it would put AI to work automatically routing jobs to the most appropriate person in the "Kingston" release of its platform....

Dark patterns 'knowingly duped millions of consumers' The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has named three senior Amazon.com staffers accused of approving tactics designed to confuse people into signing up for the online souk's Prime loyalty scheme, then making it hard for them to unsubscribe....

Big G wheels out its old argument that its products are better - and look, there they are, pre-installed and in your face The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has used the first week of its much-anticipated competition case against Google to argue that the search ads giant violated antitrust law and stifled competition to maintain its market leadership....

Invasion of the data snatchers The Snatch ransomware crew has listed on its dark-web site the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs as one of its latest victims - as the Feds warn organizations to be on the lookout for indicators of compromise linked to the extortionist gang....

X3DH readied for retirement as PQXDH is rolled out Signal has adopted a new key agreement protocol in an effort to keep encrypted Signal chat messages protected from any future quantum computers....

Right as judges issued warrants against Putin The International Criminal Court said crooks breached its IT systems last week, and that attack isn't over yet, with the ICC saying the "cybersecurity incident" is still ongoing....

Services said to be returning to normal from downtime though Tableau Cloud still MIA Updated If you noticed something funky going on with Salesforce and its software-as-a-service empire today, it's not you: it's recovering from an hours-long outage....

And they're all tailored for efficiency Intel now says its "Sierra Forest" Xeons will actually offer 288 cores, twice as many as previously disclosed, when it launches in the first half of 2024....

Musk company gets FDA's OK for six-year assessment of its brain implants That was fast: Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain-computer interface implant company, only received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for human tests in late May, but it's already looking for participants in its first six-year trial program....

Beijing accuses US of breaking into Huawei servers in 2009 The ongoing face-off between Washington and Beijing over technology and security issues has taken a new twist, with China accusing the US of hacking into the servers of Huawei in 2009 and conducting other cyber-attacks to steal critical data....

It turned the software industry upside down regardless Happy birthday to GNU. On September 27, there will be events in both the US and Switzerland to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GNU Project....

iFixit demotes iPhone 14 from 7/10 to 4 after reality of software locks hit home As you were. It would appear that Apple's overtures to the tech repairability movement and associated legislation like California's SB 244 were just leading us all on, at least according to repair gurus at iFixit....

Admits it's 'not technically feasible' ... but with no promise not to invoke it UK Parliament has passed an Online Safety Bill offering the government powers to introduce online child protection laws, one that includes clause 122, the infamous "spy clause," albeit with some caveats....

Part of network of crims who used 'trickery and threats' to target elderly, says US Attorney Two Indian nationals each received 41-month prison sentences for their involvement in $1.2 million worth of robocall scams targeting the elderly, according to the district of New Jersey's attorney's office on Tuesday....

Could spend 20 years in prison after selling $88M in ADI software keys A sysadmin and his partner pleaded guilty this week to being part of a "massive" international ring that sold software licenses worth $88 million for "significantly below the wholesale price."...

Plus: DeepMind trained model to predict genetically mutated DNA strings The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, is to build one of the world's largest GPU clusters, so that it can throw AI at biomedical research....

Not leaving home for work cuts an individual's carbon footprint by 54%, says research As TikTok becomes the latest tech biz to demand employees return to the office, deploying an app to monitor this, research indicates that working from home is good for the planet, in addition to staff morale....

Douglas Adams was right! Mice may hold key to exploring the universe One of the foremost health risks for astronauts may have a cure en route. A specially-formulated medication has been shown to prevent bone loss in mice, and perhaps humans, aboard the International Space Station....

Andy Jassy's rent-a-Macs have no love for the vanilla M2, and the Max and Ultra aren't used in the Mini Amazon Web Services has flipped the switch on a virtual Mac offering in its Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), now renting Mac Minis powered by Apple's M2 Pro system-on-chip....

Open wide! OpenTF - the fork of HashiCorp's Terraform infrastructure management project - is no more. The software has been renamed OpenTofu and placed under the oversight of The Linux Foundation....

Won't someone please think of the banks? Singapore officials announced on Monday that next month they will deliver a consultation paper detailing a split liability scheme that will mean both consumers and banks are on the hook for financial losses flowing from scams....

Special Adminstrative Region aspires to be a crypto hub, is making an example of allegedly unlicensed operator Hong Kong police on Monday arrested six people connected to cryptocurrency trading platform JPEX....

Southeast Asia, China spearheading factory capacity growth for foreseeable future There are plenty of reasons to pay close attention to the development and building of 200mm-wafer semiconductor fabs. They give some clear signals about the future of tech supply chains and potential trends in technologies as wide ranging as EVs, computer monitors, consumer devices, sensors, and even large datacenters....

Web giant promises personal info and files won't be used to train this chatbot Google Bard can now retrieve and process information from your Gmail, Docs, and Drive as well as other applications, on top of searching the internet....

Or so says US Commerce Secretary Further escalating the rivalry between the US and China, America's Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo earlier today voiced open dismay over Huawei putting out a smartphone powered by a sophisticated 7nm homegrown processor during her visit to the Middle Kingdom....

People try to put us down, talkin' 'bout ML generation Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger used his keynote at the chip giant's Innovation conference in San Jose on Tuesday to repeatedly hammer home the idea of running large language models and other machine-learning workloads, like Llama 2 or Stable Diffusion, locally, privately, and securely on users' own PCs....

NetChoice 'likely to prevail' in First Amendment argument, court rules A federal judge in California has blocked the state's online kids' safety law from going into effect while a lawsuit brought by Meta, Google, and other tech giants moves through the courts....

And less than half the cost of a single F-35 - bargain! The Department of Defense has become the latest US government body to push for next-gen battery manufacturing in America, with a $30 million (24m) investment in an energy storage systems campus in the Lone Star State....

Allegations date back a decade to leaked Snowden docs Cavium, a maker of semiconductors acquired in 2018 by Marvell, was allegedly identified in documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden as a vendor of semiconductors backdoored for US intelligence. Marvell denies it or Cavium placed backdoors in products at the behest of the US government....

Feds claim sniper scope displays sold in sanctions-busting move A Russian national helped smuggle, via shell companies in Hong Kong, more than $1.6 million in microelectronics to Moscow potentially to support its war against Ukraine, it is claimed....

Download rates stabilize after influx of users dragged on service SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband service has become the provider to beat on speed, according to network intelligence outfit Ookla, although the company faces competition coming soon from a rash of rivals....

A look at America's next top (climate) model ... in fine resolution The Bell will toll for some of the more interesting climate research projects on one of the world's most powerful supercomputers starting this year....

Database company, which went through an IPO in December last year, was still in search of credit facility as of August Venture capital firm Runa Capital has made a bid for MariaDB, the database company which endured a disappointing IPO last year and is still in discussions for additional funding....