The Register

As the customers lined up with pitchforks and burning brands, the question in the cleanup meeting was 'Who, me?' Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle readerfolk, to the comforting haven that is Who, Me? – in which Reg readers share tales that show we're all just human underneath.…

Digital Competition Conf wants rift in markets to allow new app-slingers to spawn Japan has joined the list of nations determined to bust the dominance of Apple and Google over app stores on their respective mobile operating systems.…

Plans expanded fabs in boost to beleaguered PM and blow to protestors Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that Intel will invest $25 billion on semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the country.…

PLUS: Nuance voice AI startup hit with privacy lawsuit in California, and why OpenAI urged Microsoft to hold off releasing Bing AI in brief Google has warned its own employees not to disclose confidential information or use the code generated by its AI chatbot, Bard.…

PLUS: Crypto just isn't cricket in India; China's budget smartphone surge; Jack Ma is back, again; and more Asia In Brief US-based memory-maker Micron on Friday informed investors it's still unsure how China intends to act after warning its products had failed a security review.…

Previous claims its own software updates were the issue remain almost, kinda, plausible In the murky world of political and corporate spin, announcing bad news on Friday afternoon – a time when few media outlets are watching, and audiences are at a low ebb – is called "taking out the trash." And that’s what Microsoft appears to have done last Friday.…

Deal involving millions of domain names reportedly hits $180 million Google has sold off Google Domains – its side hustle selling and managing web domains – to Squarespace in a deal reportedly worth $180 million. The transfer means about ten million customer domain names will be looked after by Squarespace.…

$23 million set aside to compensate for leaking queries to websites Between October 25, 2006, and September 30, 2013, Google allegedly revealed searchers' personal information to third parties in violation of privacy promises.…

But police are allowed to fly them for 'public safety' missions Illinois Governor JB Pritzker on Friday signed HB 3902, which allows the US state's law enforcement agencies to use drones at some public events – but prohibits equipping them with facial recognition software or weaponry, with some exceptions.…

Millions of people's personal info swiped, Clop leaks begin with 'Shell's stolen data' Progress Software on Friday issued a fix for a third critical bug in its MOVEit file transfer suite, a vulnerability that had just been disclosed the day earlier.…

Germany negotiations reportedly back on track for Magdeburg fab too Intel will spend up to $4.6 billion building an assembly and testing facility located outside Wroclaw, Poland.…

The AI tentacles grab supply chain management, projects, and finance Microsoft plans to spread AI through more of its 365 ERP portfolio, including supply chain management, project operations, and finance.…

Plus: Accused is innocent until proven guilty, but is known to be an Apple fan FBI agents have arrested a Russian man suspected of being part of the Lockbit ransomware gang. An unsealed complaint alleges the 20-year-old was an Apple fanboy, an online gambler, and scored 80 percent of at least one ransom payment given to the criminals.…

It's not very nice being blacklisted for no apparent reason, is it? US memory maker Micron is set to invest millions of dollars into a factory in China, despite its products being recently sanctioned as a security risk by the Chinese authorities.…

Health acquisition freezes recruitment after $10 billion contract put on hold Oracle has launched a round of job cuts at its acquired Cerner health tech biz after one of its mega projects stalled.…

Customers also warned to look out for audits following M&As Inflationary pressures mean businesses have faced price increases of up to 24 percent from tech vendors attempting to claw back margins.…

As next-gen storage gets hotter, designs are getting wacky Feature As the latest generation of M.2 SSDs have trickled out to consumer platforms we've seen some wild and wacky cooling solutions strapped to them: heat pipes, 20,000 rpm fans, even tiny liquid coolers.…

Phone-hugging code can record calls, read messages, track geolocation, access camera, other snooping The Android Predator spyware has more surveillance capabilities than previously suspected, according to analysis by Cisco Talos, with an assist from non-profit Citizen Lab in Canada.…

Python package pile prefers protecting programmer privacy PyPI, the Python Package Index, began evaluating ways to reduce the amount of identifying information that it stores even before the US Justice Department came asking for data on suspect users.…

Hopefully this tech works better than his self-driving cars Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has said the US Food and Drug Administration has given permission for its first human clinical trials.…

Come for the Kubernetes, stay for the containers After using Azure Linux internally for two years and running it in public preview since October 2022, Microsoft this week finally made its distribution generally available.…

Uncle Sam confirms it's saying nothing The US International Trade Administration (ITA) has admitted it promotes the sale of American-approved commercial spyware to foreign governments, and won't answer questions about it, according to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).…

New beta versions of Thunderbird (and Firefox, while we're at it) to help set you up It's beta season in Mozilla land and some cool shiny stuff is on the way. Versions 114 of both the Firefox browser and its distant cousin the Thunderbird email client are heading our way.…

'We accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended...' Firefox…

World's largest laptop vendor releases whizzy x86 - but we could do with a better Windows rescue party The Thinkpad Z13 is quite different from any other Lenovo machine that we have seen recently. It's a similar thin, ultra-light design to the Arm-based X13S, but this is not an unusual RISC computer: this is in some ways a relatively conventional X86 laptop.…

Just a shade under the 25% threshold that would spark investigation, but he still doesn't want to take over, honest French telecoms billionaire Patrick Drahi has upped his ownership of the UK's BT Group to nearly a quarter yet he still insists he does not intend to make an offer for the entire company.…

Beware over promising benefits and underestimating complexity Opinion Around 20 years after the largest public sector technology disaster in UK history began a £12 billion contracting escapade, they're at it again.…

ERP giant losing points on execution and flexibility SAP's drive to move customers to cloud-hosted and SaaS systems is not being matched by its flexibility and operational sophistication, the user group representing the Americas has told The Register.…

Complexity also a problem across 115 funding streams, watchdog says Great Britain needs to at least double its low carbon investment if it is to reach the ambition of achieving net zero by 2050.…

Homebrew Infrastructure Processing Unit virtualizes networks and storage to make Sapphire Rapids Xeons sing Google Cloud has given itself a significant upgrade by introducing its latest Infrastructure Processing Unit – the same kind of kit that others call SmartNICs or Data Processing Units – in its first instance type powered by Intel's fourth-gen Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors.…

FBI warns jobseekers to be very skeptical of working holidays in Cambodia The FBI has issued a warning about fake job ads that recruit workers into forced labor operations in Southeast Asia – some of which enslave visitors and force them to participate in cryptocurrency scams.…

For $100 million it better beat an Nvidia A100 IBM plans spend $100 million to build a 100,000 qubit "quantum-centric supercomputer" allegedly capable of solving the world's most intractable problems by 2023 and it's tapped the Universities of Tokyo and Chicago for help.…

The road to hell is paved with good intentions Opinion We can all agree that securing our software is a good thing. Thanks to one security fiasco after another – the SolarWinds software supply chain attack, the perpetual Log4j vulnerability, and the npm maintainer protest code gone wrong – we know we must secure our code. But the European Union's proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) goes way, way too far in trying to regulate software security.…

In cloudy Yorkshire, a ray of light can become the enemy On call With Friday upon us once more, the weather forecast assumes outsized importance as we all hope for bright days that let readers make the most of their time off.…

It's a familiar story: Legislation versus rapidly evolving technology A sweeping European Union-wide AI regulatory bill is one step closer to adoption, with the European Commission's Internal Market and Civil Liberties Committees voicing their approval by an overwhelming majority. Should the bill become law, it could lead to tough times for AI operators in the economic bloc.…

But tribunal punts on whether data was intercepted in transit The UK's National Crime Agency has partially won an important legal battle in a case that challenged the warrants used to obtain messages from cyber crook hangout EncroChat.…

How complicated can cold fusion be, really? Fusion upstart Helion Energy has named Microsoft as its first customer, and claims the software giant should be able to use electricity made by mashing together helium atoms from 2028.…

In a weird way, we can blame this on AI being a better bet than blockchain India's IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar will ask WhatsApp to explain what's up, after the Meta-owned messaging service experienced a dramatic increase in spam calls.…

Judge won't toss out two key charges, software source slurping case is on The judge overseeing the lawsuit challenging the legality of GitHub Copilot, and its underlying OpenAI Codex model, "borrowing" people's code samples has refused to dismiss two claims in the case and sent most of the other allegations back for revision.…

Talk about going against the Grain Google recently changed the default setting for adding invitations to its Calendar service in a way that interferes with third-party products. The Big G said it's just trying to block spam while some in the industry are calling foul.…

HAVA go at breaking electronic ballot box security US voting machines would undergo deeper examination for computer security holes under proposed bipartisan legislation.…

We've got four words for you: Insert coin to continue The European Union and the United Kingdom are at odds again, this time over whether to approve the proposed $68.7 billion merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.…

The threat is coming from inside the supply chain Black Hat Asia Miscreants have infected millions of Androids worldwide with malicious firmware before the devices even shipped from their factories, according to Trend Micro researchers at Black Hat Asia.…

Messy system is forcing VA pharmacies to work overtime to deal with poor IT, committee told The US Department of Veterans Affairs' ill-fated electronic health record upgrade hasn't just proved a problem for clinicians - it's also causing serious disruptions at VA pharmacies that have led to veterans not getting needed medication.…

Database hygiene matters, says Percona expert With less than six months to go before support for version 5.7 of relational database MySQL runs out, it appears users are ignoring recommendations to upgrade.…

Potential meteorite excites everyone but the insurance company Residents of a home in New Jersey have been left shaken after a possible meteorite crashed through the roof, ricocheted off a hardwood floor, and dented the ceiling before coming to a rest.…

And what next for cooling, datacenter placement, and more – tune in and find out direct from our vultures Register Kettle This week Timothy Prickett Morgan over at our sister site The Next Platform wrote a fantastic in-depth analysis of the effect this latest AI hype is having on datacenter GPUs.…

Time for AWS and pals to start thinking about JVs? Cloud services providers that aren't based in Europe — like the Big Three — may have to team up with a cloud that is operated and maintained from the EU if they want ENISA's stamp of approval for handling sensitive data.…

Despite billions of dollars in profit, Satya Nadella points to those pesky 'macroeconomic uncertainties' Call it the endless drive to sate Wall Street types or sensible business planning in the face of a cooling economy – either way Microsoft says it will freeze the salaries of full-time employees this year.…

Official Cinnamon, Edubuntu reborn, and an updated Kylin The "Lunar Lobster" release of Ubuntu has welcomed two new official remixes, as well as the first updated Ubuntu Kylin in a year or so.…