The Register

Lays out ambition to set standards, as a $12 not-quite feature phone emerges to get millions connected India yesterday laid out its ambitions to become a big 6G player - on the same day its biggest carrier tried to lift millions from 2G to 4G....

That's a vulnerability that's under attack, fix available ... cancel those July 4th plans, perhaps? More than 338,000 FortiGate firewalls are still unpatched and vulnerable to CVE-2023-27997, a critical bug Fortinet fixed last month that's being exploited in the wild....

Digital rights folks, as you can imagine, want the tech grounded America's Transportation Security Agency (TSA) intends to expand its facial-recognition program used to screen US air travel passengers to 430 domestic airports in under a decade....

Hey, Zuck - still want your own meme factory? After months of speculation about its future, GIF hosting platform Gfycat is being put down by its parent Snap....

Don't panic but beware the blowback effect China is imposing export restrictions on two elements used in semiconductors and other electronic components, a move likely to be viewed as a calculated response to Western restrictions on sales of chips and their production tech to the Middle Kingdom....

Hey Elon - here's an idea for your next poll: 'Should I step down as CTO of Twitter?' It's been a few weeks since the chaos at Twitter rose to a level worth noting, but that changed this weekend when owner and CTO Elon Musk announced the imposition of limits on how many tweets users can see each day....

Will you choose Salty Sally or Whitey Whitebeard? It doesn't matter; they're both intolerable Every week there seems to be another cynical implementation of AI that devalues the human experience so it is with a breath of fresh air that we report on a bedroom venture that uses GPT-4 technology to frustrate telemarketers....

Attackers accessed it via third-party services provider, says management group It's an awkward Monday for Dublin Airport after pay and benefits details for some 2,000 staff were apparently "compromised" following a recent attack on professional service provider Aon....

Also: OpenAI to open a new office in London, and why the FTC has its eye on the generative AI market AI in brief A researcher is under fire for collecting course materials from lecturers without consent to train a chatbot, which he claimed could solve problems in assignments and exams for a computer science degree at MIT....

Will someone please think of the poor shareholders? Oh, they already have Following a wave of layoffs and stagnating pay, dissent among some of Microsoft's workforce is breaking out against CEO Satya Nadella after he thanked them for their contribution to the "landmark" fiscal '23....

Openreach rival promises first live connections by next summer The UK government has said it will stump up 318 million ($403 million) in funding for network provider CityFibre to link around 218,000 premises in three English counties with fiber internet access as part of its plans to get more of the country connected....

Firefox-maker presses pause on generative AI assistant as complaints mount Mozilla Developer Network, a widely used technical resource for web developers, this week introduced an assistive service called AI Help, perhaps unaware that its robo-helper gives incorrect advice....

When the world's on fire, what number do you call? Opinion It all began on 10th November 1935, when five women burned to death in a house fire in central London. A neighbor had tried to call the fire brigade on his home telephone, but had to wait in a queue for his local exchange. By the time he got through to the operator, it was too late....

The national strategy was released in May - but execs say it's not nearly enough A group of British chip company execs has called on the government to do more to support industry, a month after officials published the nation's Semiconductor Strategy laying out policy initiatives for this vital technology sector....

Such a blatant offside the manager couldn't see a funny side Who, Me? Greetings once again, gentle reader, to the confessional booth known as Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with tales of things they shouldn't have done - or that they should have done, and didn't....

Almost anything you download from China could be considered spying, but at least one analyst isn't worried The United States' National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) has warned that China's updated Counter-Espionage law - which came into effect on July 1 - is dangerously ambiguous and could pose a risk to global business....

ALSO: Ransomware hit on Mancunian Uni spills NHS patient deets, USPTO leaks inventor info, and this week's crit vulns Infosec in brief A Russian satellite communication provider has been knocked offline by hackers, and more than one party - including hackers who say they're associated with mutinous mercenary outfit Wagner Group - has claimed responsibility....

Who is behind this lobby group calling for a stock market of network resources? Special report Two of the world's five regional internet registries - which among other things manage the allocation of IP addresses - are in the sights of a secretive lobby group: the Number Resource Society....

If Japanese space boffins have their way, it could be joined by a robotic hummingbird NASAs Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has phoned home, more than 60 days after last establishing contact....

PLUS: Philippines cyber-slave raid; South Korea's crypto crackdown; AWS boosts Chinese exports; and more Asia In Brief Japan's government last Friday rebuked Fujitsu for shabby cloud security....

We speak to project scientist on effort to build 3D map of space going back ten billion years Interview Euclid, an advanced telescope built by the European Space Agency to study the nature of dark energy and dark matter, blasted off into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday....

How do you solve a problem like a visa? How do you catch a fraud and bring it down? In depth H-1B visa fraud is rampant and growing, and the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) has yet to demonstrate that it can deal with the situation....

Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express is on the rails Analysis As Moore's so-called Law continues to slow, many chipmakers are turning to advanced packaging and chiplet techniques to drive greater efficiencies and performance than what's possible with process shrinks alone....

And so far, they might succeed: Where's the smoking gun? Microsoft and GitHub have tried again to get rid of a lawsuit over alleged code copying by GitHub's Copilot programming suggestion service, arguing that generating similar code isn't the same as reproducing it verbatim....

So, uh, who's gonna pay that $70M ransom? Following claims by ransomware gang LockBit that it has stolen data belonging to TSMC, the chip-making giant has said it was in fact one of its equipment suppliers, Kinmax, that was compromised by the crew, and not TSMC itself....

Big $50,000 fines for misleading posts... unless it's political, natch America's consumer fraud watchdog is revising its rules for online reviews and testimonials in advertising, raising the possibility of greater legal risk for those deceptively endorsing - or disparaging - products or services online in exchange for payment....

The original bus network continues to run rings around all its rivals Everything goes round in cycles, including computer networking... but not always in rings. The most important networking system so far has vanquished all its loopy rivals for 50 years....

20 years of searching for spider holes has given Russia, China lots of time to secure the skies for themselves The US Space Force is apparently anything but, according to a think tank report that concludes the newest American military branch is woefully unprepared to defend space operations from Chinese or Russian aggression....

Privacy: It's a Jersey Thing New Jersey cops must apply for a wiretap order - not just a warrant - for near-continual snooping on suspects' Facebook accounts, according to a unanimous ruling by that US state's Supreme Court....

Just in case you blurt out that L***x is better than Windows? (That was a joke, PR friends) Slinging the occasional expletive in casual conversations isn't so unusual these days - and online chinwags are no exception....

Working with industry 'critical' for boosting adoption, say chipmakers VMware has joined AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V community to work on an open and cross-platform framework for the development and operation of applications using confidential computing hardware....

Vendors have days to answer cost and innovation concerns, may face potential delay to merger... or worse Adobe's aim to complete its $20 billion purchase of web-first collaboration design startup Figma by the end of the year is less certain after Britain's competition regulator referred the deal for a deeper probe on concerns it'll reduce innovation....

The art world is up to shenanigans again A trendy Louis Vuitton handbag will set you back nearly $3,000 these days, but a scaled-down version has been sold for more than 20 times as much....

Chipzilla's not saying much other than 'commercial software' not affected Intel's 4th generation Xeon Scalable processors arrived behind schedule when the silicon, codenamed Sapphire Rapids, debuted in January 2023. Now the x86 giant has paused shipments of some chips in that family due to a fault with the components....

$940m agreement with one of world's largest employers is value for money, we are assured England's National Health Service has inked a 774.5 million ($940 million) contract with Microsoft to license its Office 365 and security software....

The skillful handiwork of merging bits from different kernels into one, and keeping it secure at the same time devconf.cz Maintaining the kernel of an enterprise distro is not only hard work, it also involves conflicting goals....

Conservative peer admits he can't tell between dogs and cats either Experts in technology law and software clashed with the UK House of Lords this week over whether it was technically possible to hand responsibility for battlefield decisions to AI-driven weapons....

Quelle tragedie - techie had to visit the city of lights twice to sort this one out On Call Hard-coded into The Register's week is that each Friday morning you'll find a new instalment of On Call, our reader contributed tales of tech support troubles....

Nobody else is using that nomenclature for planned updates to 5G Huawei has claimed it will offer everything a carrier needs to run a 5.5G network next year. Which sounds great - even if 5.5G is a little mysterious....

Overrules decision that Cambodian leader Hun Sen's threats of political violence were newsworthy Meta's Oversight Board - the quasi-independent body the social networking giant established to review content moderation decisions - has recommended a national leader be banned from Facebook and Instagram for six months for promoting political violence. It has overridden a decision not to take down videos in which Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen threatened his political opponents....

Yet another snafu for digital services push Fujitsu Japan is in the spotlight again for all the wrong reasons, after fumbling its attempt to fix the nation's troubled ID card scheme....

Claims he wants to stay in the music biz after time in a Sing Sing One of the two men who admitted stealing more than $23 million in royalty payments for songs played on YouTube has been sentenced to nearly six years behind bars for his role in what prosecutors called "one of the largest music-royalty frauds ever."...

Also: No comment on that choice of name for a wee leccy chopper America's Federal Aviation Administration has granted limited flight licenses to not one but two companies working on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) craft, one of which could even be considered an actual flying car....

It only took nearly 20 years and one death to get there Video Virgin Galactic today sent six people to the edge of space in its first-ever commercial flight....

Web giant also hits back ... right as YouTube steps up war on advert blockers Analysis Google is accused of misrepresenting the placement of YouTube video ads by playing them on low-quality third-party websites where they may never have been viewed. If so, that means Google has been taking millions if not billions of dollars from advertisers for video ads that perhaps no one actually watched....

Cough, cough, use Rust. Plus: Eight more exploited bugs added to CISA's must-patch list The most dangerous type of software bug is the out-of-bounds write, according to MITRE this week. This type of flaw is responsible for 70 CVE-tagged holes in the US government's list of known vulnerabilities that are under active attack and need to be patched, we note....

Malwarebytes and Trellix upgrades to the rescue Some Windows users are still feeling the fallout from apparent conflicts between recent OS updates and certain antimalware and antivirus software....

Blasted from the sky in February, device never transmitted photos, videos, or radar data it collected, officials say It's been months since "spy balloon" fever gripped the United States, but the headline-grabbing flying object -alleged to have been deployed by China - is back in the news. Preliminary findings from the US inspection of its wreckage show a whole bunch of commercially available hardware made in the States....

Enterprises want a single data platform for data lakes and warehouse, but tech's not there yet, say analysts Analysis With confirmation of support for table formats Apache Iceberg and Hudi this week, Databricks is striving to broaden the appeal of its approach to data lakes, strengthening its dominance in machine learning to branch out to data warehouse-type workloads....

Bizarrely, there's been no suggestion that the bout won't happen How many CEOs in their 50s require their parents to step in when they're being a little shit?...