The Register

New Year's Day debacle strands thousands of passengers, attributed to decade-old tech While weather and workforce strikes have affected air travel in Europe and the US this holiday season, Southeast Asia experienced disruption of its own due to a New Year's Day power outage at Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) that shut down both flights and airspace.…

After 10 month’s deliberation, abandons current competition as ERP support deadline looms City, University of London has abandoned procurement of a new £17 million ($20 million) ERP system following a 10-month-long competition exercise after it initially failed to understand the complexity of its own requirements.…

Using a gigahertz-class computer to get an 36MHz computer onto the internet – or even just printing Code whizz and tinkerer Kian Ryan's ingenious "Sidecar" is a self-contained, battery-powered Wi-Fi-to-RS232 bridge that enables his elderly Psion 5MX PDA to access a little bit of the modern internet.…

Adopted by Snowflake, Google and Cloudera, we look at why the Netflix-developed table format is important Feature By 2015, Netflix had completed its move from an on-premises data warehouse and analytics stack to one based around AWS S3 object storage. But the environment soon began to hit some snags.…

A pose by any other name would pay as sweet Opinion Information technology has a long tradition of making up new job titles to emphasize how futuristic we all are. Who can forget IBM's Worldwide Head Of Objects?…

Need a New Year's resolution? How about stop paying for memory you don't need We're all used to dealing with system memory in neat factors of eight. As capacity goes up, it follows a predictable binary scale doubling from 8GB to 16GB to 32GB and so on. But with the introduction of DDR5 and non-binary memory in the datacenter, all of that's changing.…

Can it even do that? And does FOSS deserve an exemption to sanctions? Opinion In 2022, information technology collided with geopolitics like never before. After Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, many nations decided that Vladimir Putin's regime and populace should be denied access to technology and even to services from the companies that make and wield it.…

ActivityPub isn't just what we've been doing over the Christmas break Systems Approach Toward the end of 2022, we joined the masses of people leaving Twitter for Mastodon. The fact that Mastodon, building on some earlier ideas for federated social networking, is a decentralized approach, has renewed our interest in, and hope for, the decentralization of the internet.…

The answers aren't much fun either Would you like to use Edge as your default browser?…

Hopefully it comes with a 'new' competitive price, too Nvidia this week quietly, and perhaps unintentionally, revealed the previously canceled RTX 4080 12GB would be reborn as the RTX 4070 TI.…

Did someone say teenage mutant ninja servers? Datacenters use a lot of power and despite our best efforts, a big chunk of that still comes from burning fossil fuels. But what if instead of relying on local utilities for power, these facilities generated their own – maybe using a relatively itty-bitty nuclear reactor?…

Oh, Shapps Blocked by the British government from acquiring Newport Wafer Fab — Britain's largest chip factory — Nexperia has solicited the help of US law firm Akin Gump in the hopes of overturning the ban.…

Sometimes bringing your work laptop on a trip pays off On-Call Much of the world may be on holiday, but On-Call – The Register’s weekly tale of readers being asked to rescue tortured tech, is still hard at it.…

We can already imagine Louis R's reaction Video New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has approved a comprehensive right-to-repair law for tech products – the first of its kind for a US state – though not before some changes were made to the fine print.…

And Elon's still distracted by Twitter, yes? OK, that's probably for the best NASA is considering using SpaceX to bring three astronauts back to Earth from the International Space Station after the Russian spacecraft due to return the crew suffered a significant coolant leak. …

We'll have what Europe's having Smartphones and other mobile devices sold in India must have a USB-C charging port as standard by March 2025.…

Actions speak volumes Mass production of 3nm components has begun at TSMC's south Taiwan facilities, the silicon slinger announced on Thursday.…

There's more than one way to beat the heat – and save serious money Comment Hype around liquid and immersion cooling has reached a fever pitch in recent months, and it appears that the colocation datacenter market is ready to get in on the action.…

Turns out patent trolls don't like being outed by their lawyers Intel and SoftBank-backed VLSI Technology have agreed to end a $4 billion patent dispute, according to documents filed in Delaware District Court this week.…

Have they tried turning it off and back on again? Winter storms and staff shortages were only the tipping point that sent Southwest Airlines IT infrastructure over the edge, leaving thousands still stranded across the US, chief operating officer Andrew Watterson has explained.…

Having claimed North America and Europe, the cloud giants hope to add Latin America and Africa to their empires Opinion When the major cloud providers warned of slowing customer demand earlier this quarter, many expected them to pull back on their capex expenditures until the latest macroeconomic headwinds had blown over. Only, they didn't.…

When the chips are down, bet the farm In spite of uncertain economic conditions, Kyocera is reportedly putting its stake in Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI on the line to expand its semiconductor footprint.…

ByteDance ban for federal devices awaits Biden’s signature The US government's New Year's resolution for 2023: no more TikTok at work.…

Plus: Cracked Piers Morgan spews offensive tweets, not the usual kind A miscreant this Christmas weekend said they are willing to sell public and private info on more than 400 million Twitter accounts.…

Teachers need to work harder to get students to write and think for themselves Feature As word of students using AI to automatically complete essays continues to spread, some lecturers are beginning to rethink how they should teach their pupils to write.…

What to do with the boss who refuses to answer the phone? Or wants a bigger cubicle? Revenge, that's what Who, Me? The Reg's weekly confessional column, Who, Me?, is on holidays with shoes off, a festive drink in hand, and a warm fire. That's a combination that's set our mind wandering into the Who, Me? mailbag for a roundup of some stories we think deserve to be told together.…

Users may be the product, but we come with a hell of a price tag Opinion Consequences can come at you fast or slow. If you’re a trillion-dollar company, you get to choose which, a bit, but you can never escape completely.…

Plus ArtStation cracks down on rebellious creators and lame-duck AI laws in the US on the cards In brief Sundar Pichai is apparently all in a pickle over OpenAI's ChatGPT engine, and is gearing up Google to meet the perceived threat.…

Also, script kiddies are coming for your gift cards, and Meta's Cambridge Analytica pathetic payout Merry Christmas, Linux systems administrators: Here's a kernel vulnerability with a CVSS score of 10 in your SMB server for the holiday season giving an unauthenticated user remote code execution. …

Some terms and condition may apply Hot off the heels of the US Department of Energy's (DoE) sort-of nuclear fusion breakthrough, the agency is offering up $33 million for researchers that can wrangle artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other data resources to the cause.…

As if you needed another reason to delete the app right now Video sharing platform TikTok and its parent company Bytedance are leakier than a sieve – and it has emerged that in an attempt to plug the holes, members of Bytedance's internal audit team tracked the physical location of journalists via their IP addresses.…

'No plans at this time,' it tells us, but won't rule it out amid reports execs are visiting Dresden, Germany TSMC told The Reg it has no "plans at this time" to site one of its factories in Europe but wouldn't rule anything out amid reports that the world's most strategically important chipmaker was sending senior suits to Dresden, Germany, to discuss the possibility of a factory there.…

Ideal if you're looking for something to play with over the holidays As the end of the year and the holiday season both approach, so do new previews of both SUSE's new enterprise Linux distro, ALP, and the NetBSD OS.…

Xbox maker responds to US regulator's lawsuit to block the acquisition Microsoft has put forward its argument against the US trade regulator's attempt to block its massive purchase of games dev Activision Blizzard from going through, claiming the deal would be good for consumers.…

Fintech, you're better than this. Time to concentrate on more helpful stuff Opinion With the quick one-two punch of FTX and Binance, crypto is finally losing its luster as the next revolution in money.…

'Plague' of ageing, inadequate data systems strikes again as state struggles to cut £22b maintenance bill The UK government has failed to get a grip on the management of its £158 billion ($190 billion) property portfolio because of a failure to replace an ageing database system.…

We really should have known better than to end up with siloed applications on different platforms Opinion Enterprise IT infrastructure has consistently given us worthy investments to make and jobs to do in the last 20 years.…

For one thing, an ignorant user could shut down all of IT On Call Welcome, dear reader, to On Call, The Register's regular column in which we share your stories of being asked to fix the ridiculous.…

Thankfully a well encrypted copy that could take an eon to crack, unless users practiced bad password hygiene Password locker LastPass has warned customers that the August 2022 attack on its systems saw unknown parties copy encrypted files that contains the passwords to their accounts.…

This has the ring of truth to it because Chinese giant has disclosed similar worries on earnings calls Tencent CEO Pony Ma has reportedly dumped on his own company in a company meeting, railing against corruption, low quality products, and failing business units being propped up.…

US investigators probe Bay Bridge multi-car smash A serious accident on San Francisco's Bay Bridge has been blamed on Tesla's "full-self-driving" software by the driver, and the US government is investigating.…

The hack wraps up a year of bad security incidents for identity Intruders copied source code belonging to Okta after breaching the identity management company's GitHub repositories.…

Lower demand? Bid adieu to 10% of workers and cut production American chipmaker Micron Technology plans to cut 10 percent of its workforce and significantly reduce capital spending next year as demand for its memory and storage silicon have reached lows not seen since the Great Recession in 2009.…

5 billion calls over three months. Was your phone spammed? US regulators want to fine the operators of a claimed massive robocall operation almost $300 million that made more than 5 billion pre-recorded calls over three months early last year.…

We don't have the power It turns out Meta isn’t the only one cancelling datacenters this month. Google has reportedly walked away from a $600 million bitbarn project under development in Becker, Minnesota.…

Upgraded threat, time to patch The Zerobot botnet, first detected earlier this month, is expanding the types of Internet of Things (IoT) devices it can compromise by going after Apache systems.…

Woohoo! Cameras on robot's belly confirm it isn't going to drive over it A titanium tube that looks a bit like a steampunk telescope has been dropped off by the plucky Perseverance rover, stuffed with a Mars rock sample that NASA astrobiologists are hoping might reveal traces of ancient microbial life.…

Asks Florida judge to sanction 'American-Latino centric version of Netflix’ for alleged fraud The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a media company based in Florida with defrauding investors about its ability to stream content on a functioning media platform, and accused its CEO of misappropriating over $450,000 of investor funds.…

Samuel Bankman-Fried in FBI custody to face court 'as soon as possible' Two members of Samuel Bankman-Fried's inner circle have pleaded guilty to defrauding equity investors in the moribund FTX cryptocurrency trading platform.…

First satellite to be launched into orbit from western Europe... when it takes off After some tension around a delayed launch of what will be the first satellite to go into orbit from British soil – or indeed from anywhere in western Europe – UK regulators have confirmed they've issued all licenses necessary for Virgin Orbit to deploy a rocket for horizontal takeoff from a modified Boeing 747 from Spaceport Cornwall.…