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Regulator says with a straight face that it should not be allowed to analyze ethnicity China has released draft regulations to govern the country's facial recognition technology that include prohibitions on its use to analyze race or ethnicity....

Midway through upgrade projects, users are struggling to understand the change of heart In 2020, global ERP giant SAP offered to provide "clarity and choice" on the future of its core platform, vital to the operations of a huge number of large organizations when it extended support for flagship product S/4HANA until 2040....

They kept that quiet Amazon is the most successful manufacturer of Arm server chips, accounting for just over half of Arm-based server CPUs currently deployed, while some chipmakers are also now betting on Arm-based Windows PCs....

US, UK watchdogs also question proposed $20B deal The European Commission has launched an "in-depth" investigation into Adobe's $20 billion deal to acquire Figma, citing concerns that the proposed takeover could harm competition in the design software industry....

Kim Jong Un's cyber-goons aren't above attacking the regime's few friends Two North Korean hacker groups had access to the internal systems of Russian missile and satellite developer NPO Mashinostoyeniya for five to six months, cyber security firm SentinelOne asserted on Monday. The attack illustrates potential North Korean efforts to advance development of missile and other military tech via cyber espionage....

Welcome - but weird - after months-old policy change that seemingly allowed it went viral Vidchat and collaboration outfit Zoom has insisted it never intended to give the impression vidchats it hosts would be fed into an artificial intelligence model, after a delayed viral outrage to a March change to its legalese....

Mission not accomplished Loongson Technology, the company leading China's charge to develop CPUs locally, has revealed its most recent desktop effort performs at a level comparable with Intel's tenth-generation Core architecture....

Not-so smart tech, or officers, it seems Early one February morning this year, six Detroit police officers brought an arrest warrant to the home of Porcha Woodruff. A 32-year-old mother of two, she was eight-months pregnant with a third....

Race to replicate LK-99, and the process used to create it, hits plenty of hurdles Scientists are struggling to verify South Korean eggheads' claim to have synthesized a material that exhibits superconductivity at room temperature and normal pressure....

But its suggestions are so annoyingly plausible ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants....

If you can't trust a spyware developer with your info, who can you trust? Stalkerware slinger LetMeSpy will shut down for good this month after a miscreant breached its servers and stole a heap of data in June....

Your neighbor's clacking keys aren't just annoying - they're also exploitable Researchers in the UK claim to have translated the sound of laptop keystrokes into their corresponding letters with 95 percent accuracy in some cases....

:wq buddy Obit Dutch free software developer Bram Moolenaar has died. He was 62. His Vim text editor is probably one of the single most widely used Linux programs of all time....

Greater yield than last year, but don't ditch your solar panels just yet Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have repeated their breakthrough fusion experiment, which nominally produced more energy than it consumed....

An electrically charged spring in your step A group of Scottish engineers claim to have come up with a new way to harvest the electricity wasted by everyday human movement: electrically conductive foam....

Plus: Apple has spent $22.1B on research for generative AI, and Kickstarter introduces new AI policies AI in brief Production companies are scanning the faces and bodies of actors and actresses, who fear their likeness will be used to create fake AI doubles for TV shows and films in the future....

Investment shifts to meet demand, say analysts. And demand is based on FOMO. WCGW? The cloud market continues to grow, but at a slowly declining rate, while investment is shifting to meet the demand for AI services, diverting spending away from other projects....

What does this mean for his cage fight against Zuck? YOU DECIDE Opinion Unreliable billionaire Elon Musk appears adamant that his cage fight with rival social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg will actually go ahead....

And pandemic video conferencing poster child Zoom ushers staff back into the office for two days a week Google is pitching another strategy to convince Googlers to return to the office, specifically the campus at Mountain View HQ: offer them a night in an on-site hotel for $99 where they can simply crawl to their desk the following day....

Clock is ticking on April 2024 withdrawal Fujitsu has confirmed to The Register that it will cease selling all personal computers in Europe beginning in spring next year....

Oh, this old thing? Yeah, it's got an AMD processor. Why? Black Hat There is a way to unlock those paywalled features in your car, as a group of German PhD students demonstrated at Black Hat, but it probably won't keep the automakers up at night....

FAR out, man: first build for Apple Silicon Macs might make it out this month The Asahi Linux project, which is working on getting Linux working on Apple Silicon-based Macs, is partnering with the Fedora Project for its new flagship distro....

Voyager's mix of tenacity and discovery should worry its science icon competitors Opinion The true measure of technology is not how well it matches human intelligence, but how well it survives human stupidity. Humanity's most iconic robots, the Voyager space probes, seem to be up to that job. Nearly 20 billion kilometers from home and nearly 50 years in deep space, Voyager 2 has just been told to point its antenna away from Earth and await further orders....

A PC is a PC is a PC, and by any other name would not have taken down the intranet Who, Me? Welcome, gentle reader, to the safe place we call Who, Me? where Register readers tell us about the times when their brilliance shone a little dimmer than was needed to reach a brighter future....

Plus: Musk in 'we will fund your legal bill' promise Japan's Ministry of Finance issued a warning late last week regarding an account on the platform formerly known as Twitter that impersonates its top currency official, Masato Kanda, in just one of a string of incidents involving X Corp and Elon Musk in recent days....

'Not all fixes are equal,' argues Redmond, and this one for the Power Platform didn't need to be rushed Microsoft has explained why it seemingly took its time to fix a flaw reported to it by infosec intelligence vendor Tenable....

PLUS: FBI admits buying NSO spyware; "IT" company busted for drugs 'n guns biz; this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief If you're wondering what patches to prioritize, ponder no longer: An international group of cybersecurity agencies has published a list of the 12 most commonly exploited vulnerabilities of 2022 - a list many will recognize....

ALSO: That's not a limp, that's 68 iPhones strapped to your body; Malaysia scores giant fab; Phishing phlops in Hong Kong; and more Asian in brief A day after introducing a requirement that PC and server vendors secure a license to imports their products, India's government has put the brakes on the program....

No sweat, but this could take us to infinity and beyond A science experiment that arrived at the International Space Station on Friday will help engineers build heating and air conditioning units to keep astronauts alive on missions....

Telcos also due to get it in the neck unless the government pays up Reliance on Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei could end up costing Germany's state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn upwards of 400 million if a rip-and-replace order is issued....

I Have Been Pw, er, Indexed Google is carrying out its corporate mission statement - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful - by offering to hide certain information in its search results....

Big cheese asks if anyone wants to take early retirement? Canadian telco Telus plans to ditch 6,000 workers across its business - about six percent of its global workforce - after its profits fell 61 percent year over year during the second quarter of 2023....

'Quite obviously f**king espionage,' one suspect allegedly blabbed Two US Navy service members appeared in federal court Thursday accused of espionage and stealing sensitive military information for China in separate cases....

Lead dev Graber quits Ubuntu maker, helps out this new project SUSE developer Aleksa Sarai has created Incus, a fork of Canonical's LXD code, with the backing of the now-former lead developer of the container-manager-cum-hypervisor....

SUSE security engineer goes public on unfixed client hole after disclosure drama A security engineer at Linux distro maker SUSE has published an advisory for a flaw in the Mozilla VPN client for Linux that has yet to be addressed in a publicly released fix because the disclosure process went off the rails....

We make movements when we talk, and gyro, accelerometer and sensor tech could improve speech recog Siri's ability to recognize speech may be getting a boost through the addition of lip-reading - or, more appropriately, lip-feeling - technology, according to a newly published Apple patent....

Initial drive starts in Germany, pushes automotive blueprints The RISC-V open instruction set architecture got a boost today after it emerged that five chip giants are coming together to jointly invest in a company to develop reference architectures based on the standard....

Rare coronal mass ejection so powerful it was observed from Earth, Moon, and Mars Spacecraft orbiting the Earth, Moon, and Mars have all detected the same giant coronal mass ejection from the Sun - the first time vehicles in all three locations - plus one on the surface of Mars - have all observed the same event of this sort....

Microsoft is moving Windows to the cloud and Apple will be happy to have you run macOS on the cloud Opinion If you count Android and Chrome OS as Linux, which I do, the Linux desktop accounts for 44.98 percent of the end user market. But if your idea of the "Linux desktop" has a front end of Cinnamon, GNOME or KDE, then it's more like 3.06 percent. Better than it has been at times, but it's no "Year of the Linux desktop." Maybe, though, it will be someday....

2022's MVNO spat wrapped up as world+dog reminded to check exclusion clauses A High Court judge has dismissed a 2022 24.6 million ($31 million) breach of contract lawsuit in which EE sued Virgin Media when it struck a deal with Vodafone to provide 5G services - something EE claimed was in breach of the pair's MVNO network access agreement....

Tackling sneaky Scope 3 emissions with 'best practices' and a 'climate lens' A telecoms industry body focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has called for all companies to take action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions - so-called Scope 3 emissions - across their entire value chain....

Settle in for a weighty story with plenty of gravity On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's regular Friday frolic through readers' memories of tech tasks that turned terrifying before trending towards triumph....

Why 'dont deploy on Frday' is a thnng Boffins have spent two years monitoring the computers of office staff at a large Texas energy concern and found that workers did less and made more mistakes in the afternoon - particularly on Fridays....

Big fines for breaches. Also big powers - including takedowns - for planned Data Protection Board India's long awaited digital Personal Data Protection Bill was tabled in parliament on Thursday, complete with stiff penalties for data breaches and enough exemptions that digital rights orgs have rated it a "win-win" for Big Tech and government....

What could possibly go wrong with this Fujitsu tech? A Japanese supermarket has started analyzing customers' in-store behavior and feeding it to a generative AI to drive an avatar that makes real-time suggestions about stuff you might want to buy....

This is one way to kickstart local manufacturing India yesterday changed its trade rules to require manufacturers of many types of computers to secure an import license to bring their goods into the country....

A man, a plan, and Razzlekhan fought the law - and the law won Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan on Thursday pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges related to the 2016 theft of some 120,000 Bitcoins from Hong Kong-based Bitfinex....

Some people just want to watch the world burn IBM and NASA have put together and released Prithvi: an open source foundation AI model that may help scientists and other folks analyze satellite imagery....

Plus: Tenable CEO blasts Redmond's bug disclosure habits An infamous Kremlin-backed gang has been using Microsoft Teams chats in attempts to phish marks in governments, NGOs, and IT businesses, according to the Windows giant....

Face colleagues five days a week, Jeff Bezos' space firm says Blue Origin, the off-planet enterprise owned by Jeff Bezos, has told staff to get back to the office for a five-day week - a move which sees the twilight of flexible WFH arrangements at the company....