The Register

Happy New Year! Concession is made on GPUs and other parts Those fearing that graphics cards could see a significant price increase due to US tariffs returning for certain Chinese components can take a sigh of relief — for now.…

Part missile, part spy plane, all Mach 5+ and coming in 2028, maybe The US Air Force has awarded $334 million to defense contractor Leidos to develop the next phase in its hypersonic arsenal: An unmanned craft meant for super-speed spying dubbed "Mayhem." …

Thirsty officials drained of arguments after media outlet legal battle to free the information Google has disclosed how much water its datacenters consume, following a legal battle between a local media outlet and the city of The Dalles in Oregon, which sought to keep the information confidential.…

Salads recalled after consumers report hallucinations, dilated pupils, and worse Some 130 salad fans in Australia got more than they bargained for when picking up grub where contaminated baby spinach was an ingredient – including hallucinations and delirium.…

The lions shall lie down with the lamb on 'cross-industry' Speedometer v.3 Apple, Google and Mozilla are teaming up to develop a new version of the Speedometer browser benchmark that they say will score web browser performance in a novel way: one that reflects user journeys, not under-the-hood streamlining. …

Believes Facebook Marketplace broke EU rules by 'distorting competition' for online ads The European Commission has a problem with Meta tying its online classified ads service, Marketplace, to the Facebook social network, and is concerned it is "imposing unfair trading conditions on Facebook Marketplace's competitors for its own benefit."…

No longer 'a definitive date' for facility scheduled to be built from next year Intel is set to delay construction of its planned semiconductor manufacturing plant at Magdeburg in Germany, and is said to be seeking further public subsidies for the project, citing increased costs as one reason for the rethink.…

Founder and bossman asks if WFH freedoms to blame Salesforce founder and soon-to-be sole CEO Marc Benioff says newbies on the payroll are being less productive and he is trying to get a better handle on why this might be, asking staff if the lack of office time is a contributing factor.…

Study measures wrong things, fails to offer an accurate picture of tax regime, say consultants Two-fifths of organizations hired fewer off-payroll staff under the new IR35 rules in September 2021 than in March 2020, according to research published by UK tax collector HMRC, yet critics claims the findings fail to measure the true impact of the reforms.…

Existing hold ups already cost millions as UK authority fails to put a price on latest setback Surrey County Council has suffered another delay to the implementation of its protracted and accident prone £30 million ERP project that will, at some point, see it switch systems from SAP to Unit4.…

CityFibre seethes that move comes straight out of 'dominant operator ... playbook' Openreach has revealed new wholesale pricing for fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP), offering more discounts for internet service providers (ISPs) to encourage a migration of consumers to fiber broadband connections.…

One version to bind them all, and in the darkness rock them Opinion If you're not a musician, you may never think of MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface standard that links up keyboards and other electronic noise boxes. Firefox has, adding the super-niche Web MIDI API in its latest version. That's one of those "uh, OK" decisions which gets weirder the longer you look at it – but then, MIDI is utterly unlike other tech standards.…

The ayes have it: You said 'YES' Updated Elon Musk may be about to fire himself as CEO of Twitter.…

One dumb downtime-inducing panic is survivable. The second is a career-killer Who, Me? Once again, gentle readerfolk, it is time for the Reg's weekly confessional – Who, Me? in which we recount readers' technical anti-triumphs. This one follows on from recent tales of big red buttons, and goes one better.…

Hundreds of millions of cases expected to bring new waves of disruption One of COVID-19's many side effects was to disrupt the technology industry's supply chains – especially when they linked to China.…

Plus: Suomi security warnings and artists rebel against AI on Artstation In Brief The squishy brains behind OpenAI's artificial ones are predicting developments like the ChatGPT system will see money flooding in – with a forecast of earning around $1 billion by 2024.…

Is Zuck's org doomed, or is this a case of a techie struggling with management? Legendary developer John Carmack has quit his role as a consultant to Meta, where he worked as an executive consultant on its Oculus virtual reality hardware.…

PLUS: FTX may be sold in Japan and Singapore; Binance busted in Australia; India won’t limit gaming time Japanese tech conglomerate Toshiba has broken its silence on rumors of its impending sale, issuing an open letter [PDF] in which management told shareholders nothing has been decided.…

One research firm thinks YMTC may have to exit 3D NAND altogether Analysis The US has ramped up trade restrictions against YMTC, China's biggest domestic flash memory supplier, triggering concerns that the chipmaker will face significant production issues and potentially be forced to exit the 3D NAND market.…

Also, TLC gets schooled by Karakurt, and Cloudflare is offering free zero trust stuff to some small companies In brief Business email compromise (BEC) continues to be a multibillion-dollar threat, but it's evolving, with the FBI and other federal agencies warning that cybercriminals have started using spoofed emails to steal shipments of physical goods – in this case, food. …

Cloud souk reportedly ready to play a little more fairly with its own merchants Amazon will reportedly make changes to its business practices to resolve two European antitrust investigations next week.…

You're holding your staff meetings the wrong way Apple has been accused of creating its own labor organization to prevent workers from forming an employee-run union, according to a complaint filed on Friday.…

And the corporations making the tools for stalking and harassment in the first place? Anyone? A bipartisan trio of US lawmakers has proposed a law that pledges as much as $22 million of public funding to help victims of tech-enabled domestic abuse.…

Helps if you're teetering on the edge Analysis Some AI chip startups are managing to raise capital from investors despite operating in a crowded market of competitors where venture capital funding has plummeted in the past year.…

Tweeter, tailor, soldier, bye A Twitter employee who spied for the Saudi government and royal family has been sentenced to three and half years behind bars in America.…

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only Bezos. Oh, and Henry Cavill Amazon has reached into the Warp and pulled out an "agreement in principle" with Warhammer maker Games Workshop (GW) that would give it film, television and merchandising rights to the company's sci-fi Warhammer 40,000 franchise. …

Tumbleweed hits some turbulence, but there's no reason to be alarmed… 'By the way, does anyone know how to fly a plane?' Tumbleweed is changing course once again, but it's due to popular demand, and it means broader compatibility for more people. Saying that, it's looking for someone to help maintain its 32-bit support.…

Study finds fruit and veg also help improve health and performance, even during space hops Space dietitians have discovered that increasing fruits, vegetables, and fish in the diets of astronauts — compared to their standard rations — can provide multiple health and performance outcomes.…

Niklaus Wirth's lesser known programming language still kicking around Incoming support for Modula-2 in GCC, and a new Gitlab repository for its descendant Oberon, shows that the Wirthian family of programming languages remains livelier than you might think.…

Options? Customers have heard of them. Software giant reports record $17b+ revs, with biggest growth in ... PDFs? Adobe's planned $20b buy of Figma – one of the largest takeovers of a private software dev on record – is being probed globally, "including by the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK," the software maker has confirmed, saying it expects "the transaction will also be reviewed in the EU."…

A day after Openreach engineers overwhelmingly accept new compensation, telco says it will merge Enterprise and Global businesses Just as one source of tension at BT ends, with unionized workers voting to accept the latest pay offer rather than to extend industrial action, the British telco giant is merging Global and Enterprise divisions to save costs.…

It brought you Monty Python and Jimi Hendrix, but Auntie Beeb must compete with digital monsters like Netflix The BBC has failed to plan for switching to internet-based media and move away from traditional broadcasting at a “more wholesale, strategic level,” according to a public spending watchdog.…

Sing it in the key of C-suite, because operations truly doesn't care Whether it's because they have vast real estate investments they can't shift without hemorrhaging cash, or genuinely think their workers perform better in that space, C-suite execs are working hard to convince staff to return to the workplace.…

Cancelled bit barns the latest casualties following mass layoffs last month Meta has canned two datacenters under development in Denmark as part of a broader plan to deepen investments in artificial intelligence.…

Cause of weeklong outage was under tech support's nose – but not on their mind On-Call The week, and indeed the year, may be ebbing away to their respective conclusions, but The Register continues to toil away at On-Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of techies triumphing under trying circumstances.…

Surely it must realize regulators aren't going to go for this? With its telecoms and consumer electronics businesses prevented from addressing rich overseas markets, Huawei has set itself on the road to a new industry: electric cars.…

Redmond and Cupertino criticized for slow and weak responses by Australian regulator Australia's e-safety commissioner, a government agency charged with keeping citizens safe online, has delivered a report on seven tech platforms' mechanisms to protect children from online sexual abuse – and found most don't respond quickly, or have the processes to do so well.…

Some are suspected of helping other banned suppliers get around sanctions The United States Department of Commerce has added 36 Chinese companies or subsidiaries to its list of companies that cannot import certain US technologies without a license, citing national security, foreign policy interests, and the possibility that some might help already banned companies to evade restrictions.…

More ways to boot, with less overhead – just what's needed in the embedded market Version 4.17 of the Xen project's eponymous hypervisor has debuted, bringing with it the first look at Hyperlaunch capabilities that allow the creation of multipole VMs on startup.…

How about right now? Right now is good The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says it's time to retire Secure Hash Algorithm-1 (SHA-1), a 27-year-old weak algorithm used in security applications.…

Free speech? Or 'roving internet censors' An internet trade association whose members include Amazon, Google, Meta, TikTok and Twitter has sued the state of California to block a recently signed law that aims to protect kids online by requiring websites to verify the ages of all users. …

Putin it into operation will take a while at this rate The debut of Bill Gates' advanced nuclear power plant will be delayed for at least two years because the only company that makes its fuel in sufficient quantities to make it work is located in Russia.…

We sure do love those government subsidies says industry cheerleader This year's shaky economy has tripped up a some semiconductor companies, although plenty of them apparently feel excited enough that they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on new chip manufacturing plants.…

It's a Jersey thing, and the $26,000 can be filed under business expenses The US Department of Justice (DoJ) said on Wednesday that it reached a settlement with Secureapp Technologies LLC, an IT recruiting firm based in New Jersey, to resolve the department's determination that Secureapp discriminated against US-based job applicants.…

Cops give denial-of-service sites an extra special denial of service Police around the globe have seized as many as 50 internet domains said to be involved in tens of millions of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks worldwide. Seven people were collared during the swoop.…

Frankly my dear, I do give a DAAML A bipartisan bill introduced in the US Senate could finally bring the cryptocurrency industry to heel by, among other things, extending existing banking regulations to cover digital currencies and designating cryptocash sellers as money service businesses. …

If electric car ownership keeps going up, they’ll be coining it Microsoft is one of the investors contributing to the latest funding round for Group14 Technologies, a company developing silicon battery technology for applications including electric vehicles.…

Say what you want – until Elon decides it affects him, too Updated Twitter has suspended an account dedicated to tracking Elon Musk's private jet trips using public flight data – a month after the world's second-richest man said his "commitment to free speech" prevented him from doing so. …

Cross-platform so you can run it on a Windows box, too Two of the leading open source video editing programs got new versions in the same week… and they're both cross-platform, so you don't need to be a penguin-botherer to try them.…

When putting software on trial is a good thing An AI application that aids early stage breast cancer screening has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for commercialization, software developer MedCognetics announced this week.…