The Register

New Budgie and Sway spins, Xfce 4.18, and initial support for Unified Kernel Images A Fedora Project meeting this week is starting to set the shape of the next release, Fedora 38, due in April.…

The coolant-deprived vessel that got them there will return to Earth alone Russian space agency Roscosmos has decided to send another Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station to rescue crew stranded by a coolant leak in their return ride. …

January Patch Tuesday update resolves issue caused by Patch Tuesday update late in '22 Included in the usual tsunami of fixes Microsoft issued this week as part of Patch Tuesday was one that took care of a connectivity problem for applications using the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface.…

Not transparent, not specific, and too easy to say yes to Google users don't have enough choice over whether – and to what extent – they agree to "far-reaching processing of their data across services," Germany's competition regulator says, adding that the tech giant should change its "data processing" terms and practices.…

Anything to avoid interacting with Elon Musk We must have all heard about "emotional support animals" by now – pets that provide comfort to people with psychiatric disabilities. They're also used as an excuse to try to take peacocks and more recently boa constrictors on airplanes.…

References to Palantir use cases, 'unique tools' litter the tender docs as critics mull legal action NHS England has kicked off the formal competition for its Federated Data Platform, giving suppliers just one month to bid for the increased contract value of up to £480 million ($581 million) over seven years, as rights groups threaten legal action.…

Air traffic resuming (but chaos remaining) after thousands of flights cancelled, 'no evidence of a cyberattack at this point' The US Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to "pause all domestic departures" this morning as it tries to deal with an outage in a critical computer system.…

Vendors lower prices to stimulate demand but inflation, fears of recession trump discounts Global PC shipments – desktops, notebooks and workstations – saw out 2022 with something of a whimper as sales volumes crashed to levels last seen before the pandemic.…

Part of a settlement with US Department of Justice after ads discrimination case Meta is rolling out a more open-minded AI-powered system that promises to reduce discrimination after it was sued by the Department of Justice for preventing Facebook users from seeing housing ads based on personal characteristics like their ethnicity, sex, and marital status.…

Open source reimplementation could be even better than the original in its prime Haiku is an open source OS with a few differences. The big one is that it's not a Unix. The next is that it's pretty close to being a realistic, usable alternative OS for ordinary, everyday use.…

Researchers see pandemic boom in computer-related tech spend England's public spending on information technology has at least doubled, to reach £17.3 billion ($21 billion) over the last five years, according to research.…

Complex software packages need ever gruntier specs... and Koomey’s Law awaits Comment A few months back, I wrote that buying software is a big lie. All lies have consequences, of course. The worst kind of consequences are the ones you didn't see coming. So let's look at some of those, and some other lies they conceal.…

At least the penknives are still secure A supposedly secure messaging app preferred by the Swiss government and army was infested with bugs – possibly for a long time – before an audit by ETH Zurich researchers.…

International Monetary Fund report suggests 'diffusion' - a kind of tech trickle-down - might sort things out Asia is the biggest user of industrial robots, its residents account for nearly 60 percent of the world's online retail sales, and the region's researchers created the same proportion of patents in digital tech before the pandemic. Yet a report published this week by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) asserts that the region is not digitizing fast enough to avoid a slowdown in productivity growth, and attendant economic unpleasantness.…

Wants around $10 a month for stuff you get free today, plus plenty more new features Microsoft has revealed that a Premium cut of its Teams cloudy collaborationware suite will debut in early February, and some features that are currently included in Microsoft 365 will move to the new – more costly – product.…

Future is cloudy at the Cloud Software Group After months of speculation, job cuts appear to have commenced at the Cloud Software Group (CSG) – the company formed by the odd couple merger of Citrix and Tibco.…

Zurich’s Japanese outpost also leaks a couple of million records Global insurer Aflac's Japanese branch has revealed that personal data describing more than three million customers of its cancer insurance product has been leaked online.…

Call metadata can be ferreted out Boffins based in China and the UK have devised a telecom network attack that can expose call metadata during VoLTE/VoNR conversations.…

Plus: Intel, Adobe, SAP and Android bugs Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed 98 security flaws in its first Patch Tuesday of 2023 including one that's already been exploited and another listed as publicly known. Of the new January vulnerabilities, 11 are rated critical because they lead to remote code execution.…

Union claims bosses are flying the biz into 'graveyard spiral' In the wake of a Christmas meltdown that saw it cancel some 16,700 flights, one would expect heads to roll at Southwest Airlines, but that's not the case.…

Boffins find Twitter foreign influence campaign didn't have much pull Russian disinformation didn't materially affect the way people voted in the 2016 US presidential election, according to a research study published on Monday, though that doesn't make the effect totally inconsequential.…

Could ChatGPT be Google's nemesis? Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 billion into OpenAI as it looks towards integrating ChatGPT into its web search engine Bing and Office products.…

Climate change, drugs and immigration behind semiconductors on White House priority list The US, Mexico, and Canada have renewed talks on semiconductor manufacturing supply chains during the North American Leaders Summit (NALS) in Mexico City which kicks off today.…

US watchdog puts its foot down: Even a small possibility of interference means a fix is mandatory America's Federal Aviation Administration is directing all aircraft to get new altimeters, or install filters on existing ones, by February 1, 2024, to eliminate risks posed by C-band 5G networks.…

Look at our big claims, but don’t think about how AMD beat us in the DDR5, PCIe 5 race After dealing with multiple delays, Intel is finally marking the launch of its 4-Gen Xeon Scalable processors, and the x86 giant is hoping it can distract you long enough from its increasingly capable rivals with accelerators galore and self-anointed superlatives for the new server chips.…

Herman Hauser of Acorn fame among the investors providing cash injection A UK quantum startup has secured £30 million ($36.3 million) in Series A funding to help advance its technology, which it claims uses trapped ions as qubits but does not need lasers to control them, making it scalable through existing silicon manufacturing processes.…

A bit of sloppy JSON let security folk track, modify and delete Reviver's digital plates California's street-legal ink license plates only received a nod from the US government in October, but reverse engineers have already discovered vulnerabilities in the system allowing them to track each plate, reprogram them or even delete them at a whim.…

This is the company that claims: 'Privacy. That's iPhone' Apple "unlawfully records and uses consumers' personal information and activity," claims a new lawsuit accusing the company of tracking iPhone users' device data even when they've asked for tracking to be switched off.…

Who needs shiny new blowers when there bills to pay and kids to feed? Answer: fewer and fewer folk More and more cash-strapped people are opting to buy second hand and refurbished handsets in these tougher economic times with sales of used and refurbished devices estimated to have passed 282 million in 2022.…

Meanwhile, the regime is angling to pocket the money owed to rightsholders Life just got a whole lot better in Belarus – apparently piracy is now legal as long as the media being stolen is from a country that has been mean to the Eastern European utopia.…

Wouldn't home-grown silicon look pretty in our walled garden? Apple is said to be working to replace key wireless components in its devices with its own chips, a move that could see the Cupertino giant controlling most of the technology inside the smartphones and other mobile devices it makes.…

Maybe pursuit of health and wellness requires driving fast in an orange Corvette What's the point of owning an island if you don't get to make the rules? That's the question Larry Ellison must be asking himself after he was apparently pulled over for running a stop sign and speeding on Lanai, the Hawaiian island he bought 98 percent of for $300 million in 2012.…

Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 adds autofocus and wider field of view The Raspberry Pi has new cameras to capture images, attention, cash... and maybe your affection and/or admiration.…

SaaS CRM slinger blamed the pandemic for 10% workforce cull, but scattergun M&A strategy hasn't helped Opinion The philosophy behind tech industry leaders during the pandemic appeared to be, "never waste a good crisis." While the likes of ServiceNow scrambled to show the advantages of producing a new workflow on the fly, Salesforce reached for its checkbook.…

Both companies knew about the patent, claims lawsuit Media solutions company BSD Crown, best known for video encoding products as well as building Android smartphones in the Noughties, has filed a lawsuit against Amazon and livestreaming offshoot Twitch, claiming the pair infringed its patent.…

Code hosting service fed up with excessive bandwidth consumption Sourcehut, a code hosting service similar to GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and the like, plans to start blocking the Go Module Mirror, a proxy that fetches and caches code from git servers, because it has been using up too much network bandwidth.…

We might be looking at a new China for 2023 and the Year of the Rabbit After two chaotic years for China’s tech industry, a top Chinese central bank official has told state sponsored media Beijing’s regulatory crackdown is coming to a close.…

First sat launch from UK soil experienced ‘anomaly’ after entering space but did not deploy payloads Virgin Orbit, the Beardy-Branson-backed outfit that slings satellites into space from a 747, has failed in its first attempt to launch from the UK.…

Slurps ‘Fungible’, a manufacturer of DPUs and fabrics that will join Redmond’s engineering gang Microsoft has announced the acquisition of composable infrastructure and digital processing unit (DPU, aka SmartNIC) vendor Fungible.…

Synthetic media undermine's national security, says internet regulator China's new rules banning the creation of AI deepfakes used to spread fake news and impersonate people without consent will take effect on Tuesday.…

Advice follows embarrassing leak of audio from Prime Minister’s office Pakistan’s government has warned its agencies that the dark web exists, is home to all sorts of unpleasant people, and should be avoided.…

High-spec system is crucial to defending against the latest threats Two of the US government's leading security agencies are building a machine learning-based analytics environment to defend against rapidly evolving threats and create more resilient infrastructures for both government entities and private organizations.…

Social media as public nuisance? Seattle may be on to something Another lawsuit accuses Meta, Alphabet and other tech giants of harming kids in the interest of boosting profits. But this one takes it a step further and alleges that by contributing to the "youth mental health crisis," the companies' social media platforms are exacerbating US schools' counselors and clinics, and directly affecting their ability to educate kids.…

South Korean authorities warned locals to avoid falling space junk, which probably splashed down harmlessly A defunct weather-monitoring satellite came crashing back to Earth over the weekend, and reentered the atmosphere over the Bering Sea, the US Department of Defense confirmed on Monday.…

BMW i4, i7 and iX drivers need a fix BMW is starting off 2023 with a recall of 90 percent of the EVs it sold in the United States in 2022 thanks to battery software that could cause loss of power while driving.…

British developer uses homegrown scanning tool to check for risks The Python Package Index, or PyPI, continues to surprise and not in a good way.…

NSO maintains that it's all legit The US Supreme Court has quashed spyware maker NSO Group's argument that it cannot be held legally responsible for using WhatsApp technology to deploy its Pegasus snoop-ware on users' phones.…

American ambassador to Japan wants a unified front against the Middle Kingdom US efforts to starve China's semiconductor and tech industry of chips has entered a new phase: pressuring its allies to join its cause.…

The poles have ice but it's freezing up there, so why not grind gems for cocktails? A study of old data from the Curiosity rover is causing scientists to reassess their belief that Mars' relatively temperate equatorial region is devoid of water. …

Time has run out for users of legacy operating systems: will you upgrade or buy a new PC? Changes are imminent for users running legacy versions of Windows operating systems on their machines.…