The Register

Web devs, rejoice: Finally something is happening in the quiet and steady world of JavaScript For Chrome 117, Google has expanded the browser's Developer Tools, aka DevTools, with 16 new features - the largest capability jump since Chrome 91 surfaced in 2021....

What do we want? Discretionary increases. When do we want them? Since 2002 Retired Digital Equipment Corporation employees are scheduling a protest day outside of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's UK headquarters over its refusal to increase their pensions - something the corporation is not legally obliged to do....

Big Blue looks back at 2022 in Britain, one of the world's economies 'hit hardest' by pandemic Products and services price hikes were initiated by IBM UK in 2022 to offset rising labor and component costs, the company has said in its latest set of profit and loss accounts....

Biz says folks know the difference between fixed and mobile broadband. Do they, though, asks ASA Despite "diagrams" and in-depth descriptions of exactly how its "full fibre directly to your home" fixed line product works, UK ISP 6G Internet is in hot water after an ads regulator ruled consumers may have thought it was "offering a non-existent future mobile technology."...

Subscriptions and software surge - just the way boss Chuck Robbins planned Cisco has almost cleared the massive backlog of orders it racked up after COVID-19 kicked holes in its supply chain....

Machines have no experience in the real world, so why would you turn to them for advice? Google is reportedly developing generative AI tools to power chatbots capable of performing 21 different tasks - including writing plans, tutoring users in new skills, and dispensing life advice....

The My Number card mess remains unsolved as trust in e-government remains muted Japan's digital minister has doubled down on a June promise to penalize himself for the poor rollout of the country's digital ID, My Number Card, by offering up three months salary on Tuesday....

Which is a problem, because local orgs are leaking data and shadowy traders are cashing in Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications has admitted the nation has a vast shortfall of infosec pros....

Drives are anything but solid, allegedly Western Digital was sued on Tuesday on behalf of a California resident who claims the solid state drive he bought from the manufacturer was defective and that the storage slinger shipped kit that didn't live up to its marketing promises....

Cleanup will involve 'complete rewrite of our website's code' Discord.io has shut down "for the foreseeable future," after crooks stole, and then put up for sale, data belonging to all 760,000 of the service's users....

Tired? Drink coffee, says Starbucks. Bored? Try whiskey, says Jameson. Lazy? Why not drive, says Ford. Etc etc GPT-4 can help moderate content online more quickly and consistently than humans can, the model's maker OpenAI has argued....

Billions of downloads and no defense against typosquatting feels like a bad combination in this day and age A trio of PowerShell Gallery design flaws reported to Microsoft almost a year ago remain unfixed, leaving registry users vulnerable to typosquatting and supply chain attacks, according to Aqua Nautilus....

Less lunacy? LunA-10 is seeking designs for 'optimized and integrated lunar infrastructure' In DARPA's view, if we're going to live on the Moon, we need to rethink our technological paradigm. The research agency has thus launched its latest project to develop "an optimized and integrated lunar infrastructure" - for peaceful purposes, of course....

Elon, curing the world of imposter syndrome one decision at a time Elon Musk's X was this week caught throttling outbound links to several sites, coincidentally ones that the billionaire has complained about or feuded with in the past....

Another team is harnessing nature's own algorithm to solve problems faster than classical computers Practical quantum computers are still on the horizon, but scientists continue to make improvements in the underlying technology required to make such systems possible....

This is not the robotaxi future that was promised Just days after Cruise won the right to operate completely computer-controlled taxi rides in San Francisco at all hours, one of its units has got stuck in wet cement....

Big Purple may be moving away from the desktop or it could be more strategic A blog post from senior Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera indicates that the IBM-owned company is further consolidating its development efforts on desktop Linux....

Missions bid to secure comms time on Deep Space Network The remarkable images and data captured by the James Webb Space Telescope are being sent to Earth after more than six months of jockeying to secure network resources, NASA has revealed....

'Hey our enemies are going to use this technology, so why shouldn't we?' The US Department of Defense has set up Task Force Lima, a new team to investigate what generative AI can do for the military, with the stated aim of protecting national security....

Termination fee of $353 million wipes out Intel Foundry Services' revenue for last quarter Intel's planned $5.4 billion buy of Israeli chip biz Tower Semiconductor has fallen through after the vendor failed to get regulatory approval from China within the time frame for the deal to close....

A menu-driven, snapshot-enabled bootloader for Linux with root on ZFS The next minor version of OpenZFS is nearly ready, and ZFSBootMenu makes it easy to boot Linux from it, via a clever workaround....

You don't want to hand your datacenter over to an intruder quite so easily Systems Approach One of the fun things about being an Australian living in the Northern hemisphere (which was my situation for over thirty years) is having repeated conversations about which way water rotates when it goes down the drain....

A plea for improvements for disabled people who rely on accessibility features Opinion As someone who relies on Apple's Voice Control application to dictate, navigate, and interact with my iPhone and Mac via my voice due to a severe physical disability, I can't help but feel both grateful for its existence and frustrated by its shortcomings....

Taming that unforgiving dust world may be significantly less expensive than anticipated When humans head off to colonize the Red Planet, it's not entirely clear how many colonists will be needed to keep everyone alive....

Reports police called to control ATM frenzy after 1,000 added to accounts, by leprechauns maybe Queues have formed at automatic teller machines in Ireland after a local bank allowed withdrawals of sums greater than their account balances, and possibly even mistakenly gave away free cash....

Design this bad should sicken developers - but it's the rest of us who end up feeling queasy Column "I have a problem," my medical specialist said - before he saw the fear on my face and quickly corrected himself. "No, not with you - you're fine! With this." Both hands swept past the shiny new convertible laptop-slash-tablet that sat on his desk....

After regulators are done with them, providers will look a lot like boring old banks The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) endorsed the use of stablecoins on Tuesday, when it released a regulatory framework for the digital assets that allows their use provided their operators implement protections for owners....

Starts monitoring developer deals after first slapping the G-force with substantial fine South Korea's Fair Trade Commission today commenced monitoring of Google's app store operations - an action that follows its April decision to fine the advertising and mobile OS giant for its competition-crimping activities....

In footsteps of GiveUpGitHub, campaign follows AI ToS fiasco The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is calling on free and open source software (FOSS) contributors to stop using Zoom video conferencing in light of the software maker's terms-of-service scandal....

Plus: Medical records for 4M people within reach of Clop gang after IBM MOVEit deployment hit The Clorox Company has some cleaning up to do as some of its IT systems remain offline and operations "temporarily impaired" following a security breach....

Promise of action excites some, others wish America had Cali-style Delete Act for personal info Analysis An American watchdog today said it will propose fresh rules governing the type of personal information data brokers can collect and sell - as the White House hosted a roundtable on how to better protect individuals from unwanted surveillance....

You can still drive 'em, but park outside for ... OTA updates, says EV maker Electric semi truck maker Nikola's fortunes just keep getting worse - after a couple dismal quarters, it's now recalling nearly all of its battery electric vehicles due to a fire risk....

Turns out bigger isn't always better Since its introduction, AVX-512 has gotten a bit of bad rap for being hot, power hungry, and inconsistent in its implementation and feature set....

$112M for 12 projects announced on heels of LLNL's second successful fusion ignition Fusion is hot right now - so hot that the US Department of Energy is dumping another $112 million into a dozen supercomputing projects to advance progress on further clean energy breakthroughs....

Or so says a worrying survey We're all dumbasses walking around in adult clothes, but you'd hope that the managers in charge of ensuring the company does well and functions properly are relying on something a bit stronger than gut instinct, when we all know how variable that can be....

And cool it on the export bans, pleads CEO - we want to sell fish, not fishing rods, to China Intel should benefit more from the US government's $52 billion CHIPS Act largesse than some other companies building local chip plants because it conducts its R&D Stateside as well, according to CEO Pat Gelsinger....

Estimated payments of $65 can now be distributed to those who filed a claim in 2018 lawsuit Apple's "Batterygate" legal saga is finally swinging shut - in the US, at least - with a final appeal being voluntarily dismissed, clearing the way for payouts to class members....

Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand on mega-manufacturer's list of not-China expansion targets Foxconn CEO Young Liu said on Monday that the massive conglomerate also known as Hon Hai Technology Group plans to invest billions expanding into India - a move that reflects a desire to diversify its bases of operation....

New AI Services policies also prohibit any reverse engineering and data collection of its products Microsoft prohibits users from reverse engineering or harvesting data from its AI software to train or improve other models, and will store inputs passed into its products as well as any output generated....

You need resources in lots of places, which is the hybrid cloud taming trick the company exists to perform Interest in AI workloads has reached the point at which major enterprise vendors are packaging it for easy consumption, with Nutanix the latest to prep its platform for binary brainboxes....

We, for one, welcome our distorted-letter-recognizing overlords Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - better known as the ubiquitous CAPTCHA we see standing athwart the doors to many websites - may now be a misnomer as researchers have found that computers are much better at completing them....

Norfolk and Suffolk constabularies admit to accidentally including raw crime data in FoI responses Norfolk and Suffolk police have stepped forward to admit that a technical issue" resulted in raw data pertaining to crime reports accidentally being included in Freedom of Information responses....

Abreezio? Maybe not, but it was a plea deal The former chief executive of a company that was sold to Qualcomm for more than $150 million has pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering relating to a $1.5 million transaction involving proceeds from the deal....

Time for some fresh GRUB Although it's not long after job cuts at Red Hat, the company's team in Mexico is looking for a developer to work on the Linux bootloader stack....

In unrelated news, agency wants to teach folks how to spot a pyramid scheme A Florida man is in hot water for allegedly raising $108 million from more than 800,000 investors for what he claimed was an artificial intelligence development company - but which America's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges was a fraudulent, unregistered securities offering....

Storms on Saturn last for hundreds of years, leaving long-lasting impacts and raising lots of scientific questions Scientists are reassessing theories of how gas giants form after observing that fallout from Saturn's cyclical mega storms can last for centuries....

Voting machines and their data allegedly accessed without authorization by keen golfer's gofers Authorities in the US state of Georgia have indicted a famous Floridian and his loyal associates on counts including theft of data, software, and personal information....

Digital safety org worries OpenAI and pals aren't doing enough Popular generative AI models produce problematic content when prompted with terms associated with eating disorders, according to research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) - a London-based non-profit focused on protecting people online....

Meanwhile, in China, electric auto outfit emphasizes local bit barn for storage Elon Musk's electric auto outfit Tesla appears to be building new datacenters....

Again labels America a hacker empire over alleged backdoors found in earthquake monitoring kit China's Global Times, a state-controlled media outlet, has teased an imminent expose of alleged US attacks on seismic data measurement stations....