The Register

'Geopolitical environment' leads to spin-out of cloud, self-driving and other tech Russia's most prominent tech company, Yandex, has announced steps to move some of its intellectual property out of Putin country and dispose of the rest to local interests.…

PLUS: Criminal probe of Singapore crypto exchange; Bosch invests in China R&D; $2B APAC datacenter fund formed; and more Asia In brief Japan's space agency has successfully used water to propel a spacecraft and claimed it represents "the world's first successful orbit control beyond low-Earth orbit using a water propellant propulsion system."…

Predicts version 6.1 will need an eighth release candidate Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has warned contributors that the rhythm of the project's development cycle will clash with Christmas, so developers need to make sure they ready their work before the holiday season.…

Part bureaucratic box ticking, part crackdown that makes even Wi-Fi routers and smartphones off limits The United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has barred itself from authorizing the import or sale of Chinese telecoms and video surveillance products from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications, Hikvision, and Dahua, on national security grounds.…

Supplier 'ethics' in the spotlight after Palantir makes multimillion competition a 'must-win' A family doctors' conference has called on the UK's medics union to help scrutinize bidders for the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract to ensure they have a positive track record on security, privacy and ethics.…

Using loan for expansion as political bloc pursues tech autonomy strategy French cloud operator OVHcloud has been granted dedicated funding for its expansion by the European Investment Bank (EIB), comprising a €200 million ($208 million) credit facility to help it open new datacenters.…

Goggles unhooked from Facebook login, but officials still watching for antitrust abuse Germany's Federal Cartel Office is claiming a win after Meta unhooked the VR glasses formerly known as Oculus from a Facebook login.…

Insertion burn scheduled to take place today then engineers have six days to see how spacecraft fares in deep space Nine days into its flight to the Moon and beyond, NASA's uncrewed Orion capsule is due to fire its engines for an insertion burn that will place the craft into a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) about 50,000km from the lunar surface.…

Also, Another red team tool at risk of turning to the darkside, and Meta catches the US military behaving badly In brief NordPass has released its list of the most common passwords of 2022, and frankly we're disappointed in all of you.…

'It remains to be seen to what degree of process depth the offer will prove itself in practice' SAP users have voiced concerns about the German enterprise application vendor's latest "low-code" offering, saying the company had yet to show the level of "process depth" it could demonstrate.…

Keeping things tidy is a thankless but critical task On-Call Give thanks, dear reader – the weekend is upon us and it's a lovely long one for readers in the US of A. But that's not stopping us from bringing you another instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tale of the thankless chores IT pros are asked to perform.…

23,000 applied, just 17 made the list of potential crew The European Space Agency (ESA) announced its intake of 17 astronauts for 2022 on Wednesday – including five career astronauts, 11 astronaut reserves and one selected from its November 2021 Parastronaut Feasibility Study.…

Promises restoration of suspended accounts, despite previous pledge to do no such thing Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to allow suspended accounts back onto the micro-blogging service.…

Plenty of top tech CEOs graduated from the country's unis, which are seen as a ticket to prosperity Amazon has quit India's market for online educational services.…

Agencies told to rip 'em off core networks and replace 'em whenever and wherever possible The United Kingdom has decided Chinese video cameras have no place in government facilities.…

Both announce green power purchase agreements for UK and Irish DCs as European worries over power continue Microsoft and Google have both unveiled new agreements for access to renewable energy sources for their datacenters as part of attempts to lower the carbon footprint of their IT operations.…

NASA's IXPE space telescope pays off with 'dazzling' observation of intergalactic X-rays Scientists have reported a "huge leap forward" in the understanding of light and other electromagnetic radiation emitted by black holes using NASA's newly deployed $188m space telescope IXPE.…

Leaders give unanimous support to unlocking €43 billion – but industry says it's nowhere near enough The EU is groping towards a consensus in order to allocate funding for its scheme to revitalize the European semiconductor manufacturing industry, with representatives of member states agreeing an amended version of the proposals.…

Scrapping 'temporary' measure will slash queue times at airports... but don't ditch your baggie yet, say officials Everyone remembers the indignity of having to toss water, shampoo, toothpaste because of some far-fetched airport security rules that flew over their head. But the days of clear plastic bags and the rush to buy "travel-sized" toiletries could be coming to an end.…

Didn't say they were good, though – covert ops apparently got 'little to no engagement' from targets In its latest quarterly threat report, Meta said it had detected and disrupted influence operations originating in the US, and it calls out those it believes are responsible: the American military.…

JAXA hopes second lost lander can be recovered for radiation experiments Japan's Equilibrium Lunar-Earth point 6U Spacecraft (EQUEELEUS), one of 10 cubesat payloads aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, has successfully sent back to Earth photos of the far side of the Moon.…

196MWh installation has capacity to power 300,000 homes for two hours Europe's largest battery energy storage installation has gone live in the UK with the capacity to store up to 196MWh of electricity, pointing the way towards greater use of the technology to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.…

Spoiler alert: court proceedings suggest crypto exchange was a mess and investors will be out of pocket The collapse of crypto exchange FTX has already been turned into a television drama.…

Says sanctions could even accelerate China's drive for silicon self-sufficiency Chinese AI and search giant Baidu has shrugged off the impact of the United States' ban on export of certain semiconductor technologies to the Middle Kingdom, saying it will not have any noteworthy effect on its AI business or autonomous driving operations, and may indeed accelerate China's drive for silicon self-sufficiency.…

DDoS started not long after Russia was declared a state sponsor of terrorism The European Parliament has experienced a cyber attack that started not long after it declared Russia to be a state sponsor of terrorism.…

Takes over presidency of global AI group, and uses G20 leadership to flex manufacturing muscle India's IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has called for development of global standards to ensure that artificial intelligence does not harm humanity.…

Suddenly discovers that game-adjacent tech has its uses – and it's a huge export industry China has declared victory over the scourge of teenage video game addiction.…

Asimov would like a word Next week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on a policy proposal that will allow the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) to deploy robots authorized to kill people.…

Shares have already been moving in the wrong direction for Gelsinger's stock awards Intel is making it more difficult for CEO Pat Gelsinger to earn a significant portion of his compensation package, even as such awards have become increasingly out of reach due to a tanking stock price.…

CISA updates security framework, tech industry calls it 'confusing' Federal agencies are continuing to put in place their cybersecurity strategies 18 months after the Biden Administration issued its executive order to strengthen the government's defenses.…

US aviation advisory addresses concerns raised follow 2013 Asiana Airlines crash The US Federal Aviation Administration has issued new guidance calling for flight procedures and training to ensure that pilots can operate aircraft manually, without being too dependent on automated systems.…

A sign of the computer industry’s sad state, but at least there’s supply! All those shiny, expensive graphics cards you've seen sitting on retail shelves the past few months really have been a sign of tough times for the computer industry.…

Flaws in the open-source tool exploited – and India's power grid was a target Microsoft is warning that systems using the long-discontinued Boa web server could be at risk of attacks after a series of intrusion attempts of power grid operations in India likely included exploiting security flaws in the technology.…

The reason your morning drive sucks is because of you, the impulsive human behind the wheel A multi-university research team has discovered the solution to traffic jams plaguing everyone's commutes: AI traffic managers that, rather than driving like impulsive humans, react to their surroundings to make traffic flow more smoothly.…

Two-year ban comes as state attempts to reduce emissions by 85% New York State has banned a practice becoming more common in the crypto-mining industry – the rescuing and repurposing of mothballed fossil fuel plants to exclusively provide energy for mining digital currency.…

Case claims collecting personal data breaches UK GDPR, but implications could be wider A lawsuit filed in the High Court of England and Wales has demanded that Meta's Facebook social media platform stops harvesting personal data for the purposes of advertising and marketing.…

Police reported to be using teargas and smoke bombs against demonstrators Protests have erupted at Foxconn, the largest contract supplier for Apple's iPhone, as workers voice complaints over pay and working conditions following new draconian COVID-19 measures.…

Staff forced to make their own purchases after suppliers walk away due to payment failures The University of Edinburgh has launched a review into its disastrous go-live of an Oracle finance system as it admitted suppliers have walked away over stalled payments.…

Broadband plumber's BT Group parent is determined to cut costs Openreach, the infrastructure arm of UK telco giant BT, looks set to prioritize existing projects rather than starting new buildouts of its fiber broadband network as it seeks to control costs amid surging inflation.…

After a mysterious pause in crackdowns, it looks like the Beijing everyone knows is back China's antitrust watchdog, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), has proposed a revision of the nation's competition law that targets tech firms.…

Alexa, how does Amazon decide when the grand plan for conversational commerce has failed? Comment Black Friday is nearly upon us, but the annual online price-drop frenzy seems to be losing its shine. Numerous reports highlight that discounting may not be all it seems, and buyers would be best to shop around.…

An Apple a day keeps the doctor away, but too many might be a burden on the planet. Opinion Apple's Mac hardware keeps getting thinner and lighter, and its iPads keep becoming more and more capable. I'm hardly the first to observe that the two products are getting closer together - but if Apple's environmental claims mean anything the products are now so close it's irresponsible they don't overlap.…

Microsoft playing chicken with regulators, making it cheaper on Azure Microsoft last week made SQL Server 2022 generally available, and this week started to advise of price hikes for the database.…

Apple doesn't want to bite The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a market investigation into cloud gaming and mobile browsers after its study found Apple and Google constitute a duopoly that controls the mobile ecosystem.…

Korea's antitrust org to develop a platform to respond to Big Tech’s sneaky ways According to South Korea's Fair Trade Commission, Apple said it will correct an oddity that sees local developers charged even more than the usual 30 percent Cupertino demands for sales of software in its App Store.…

‘Portfolio optimization’ plan aims to cull some PCs, sell more pricey subscriptions HP Inc. has announced it will lay off between 4,000 and 6,000 staff as part of a cost-cutting drive aimed at adding $1.4 billion to its bottom line in coming years.…

Nothing says 'We love open source and want it to be available in Windows' like only delivering updates from a closed digital tat bazaar Microsoft has made its Store the home of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WLS).…

We knew Wasp 39b was rich in CO, but now we have the full molecular picture The James Webb Space Telescope keeps opening the world to new science. This time it's the first molecular and chemical profile of an exoplanet's atmosphere, complete with signs of active photochemical reactions. …

AI agent proves better than most people in classic game of trust and betrayal Meta researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system called Cicero that can play the classic strategy game Diplomacy at a level comparable to most human players.…

'We allege these fraudsters bled dry each of their victims' of $10m The US government seized seven domain names used in so-called "pig butchering" scams that netted criminals more than $10 million.…