The Register

Plus: CISA has a flowchart for patching, privacy campaign goes after face search engine In Brief A suspected member of the notorious international LockBit ransomware mob has been arrested – and could spend several years behind bars if convicted.…

Lost among the Twitter chaos? We'll try to sort it out for you, so far You could say Twitter, now in its second week of Elon Musk's reign, has had an interesting week. That would be an understatement.…

Unless you're fine with Qatar snoops remotely accessing your phone With mandated spyware downloads to tens of thousands of surveillance cameras equipped with facial-recognition technology, the World Cup in Qatar next month is looking more like a data security and privacy nightmare than a celebration of the beautiful game.…

Only one of the two new 3D XPoint-based drives offer a performance improvement From the rotting corpse that is Intel's axed Optane memory business come a pair of new 3D XPoint-based SSDs for servers and workstations. Only one of them seems like an upgrade from drives released two years ago.…

Licensing down 53% due to major one-off deals signed a year ago Chip designer Arm reported record revenues for its latest quarterly trading update as it continues to diversify the business beyond licensing.…

Hopefully servers will sweat a little less than the ones in Doha Microsoft is building four datacenters in North Carolina as part of a phased development that will see it invest at least $1 billion over the next decade.…

2nm and beyond: Interesting time to get into bed with American chip giant Japan looks set inject 70 billion yen ($500 million) into a new semiconductor company amid plans to jump-start next generation advanced chip production with the help of IBM.…

Narrowing permissions could be difference between mildly pwned and totally pwned corporate network Microsoft is bringing a granular personal access token (PAT) to its Azure DevOps REST APIs to try to reduce the damage that can happen when credentials are leaked or stolen.…

Alleged genius behind electric car spots one thing that might save company from the abyss: ending WFH Comment Twitter CEO Elon Musk has told employees of the risk of short-term bankruptcy as corporations — hence potential advertisers — get trashed by spoof accounts set up under the new blue checkmark scheme he introduced.…

Tasteless food chain claims 'semi-automated' process skipped internal review process US fast food chain KFC has apologized for a promotional message sent via its app that encouraged customers to commemorate Kristallnacht by ordering extra cheese on their chicken.…

CEO says UK government cap on energy has given it wiggle room, hopes payment will end further strikes BT says UK government’s price cap on energy bills will allow it to provide financial assistance to employees struggling with relentless rises in inflation - a marked change on the CEO’s previous stance.…

C/C++ on the bench, as NSA puts its trust in Rust, C#, Go, Java, Ruby and Swift The US National Security Agency (NSA) has released guidance encouraging organizations to shift programming languages from the likes of C and C++ to memory safe alternatives – namely C#, Rust, Go, Java, Ruby or Swift.…

It won't be the last Opinion GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's AI-driven, pair-programming service, is already wildly popular. Microsoft broke out GitHub's revenue and subscription numbers in its latest quarterly report for the first time.…

You'd think tech support people would stick together … On Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday frolic through readers' memories of support jobs that had odd endings.…

EC veep: 'Cyber is the new domain in warfare' The European Commission on Thursday proposed a cyber defense policy in response to Europe's "deteriorating security environment" since Russia illegally invaded Ukraine earlier this year.…

Boffins baffled: There's, like, zero magnetic field and very little atmosphere. What gives? A coronal mass ejection from our Sun sent a shower of charged particles to Mars, generating two types of ultraviolet auroras astronomers have never seen at the same time before.…

Crims accessed 10 million customer records and are releasing intimate medical details The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has pointed to Russia as the location of the attackers who breached local health insurer Medibank, accessed almost ten million customer records, and in recent days dumped some customer data onto the dark web.…

Both firms have been hit with plunges in PC chip sales, and there's no Ryzen shine AMD has grown its share in the server processor market against Intel once again, though the chip designer lost out to its much larger rival in the broader x86 market.…

Hushpuppi swaps private jet, Dubai penthouse for prison duds and $1.7m to victims An international cyber-scammer and Instagram star who plotted to launder more than $300 million over the course of 18 months was this week jailed – and he must pay back more than $1.7 million to his victims. …

Chipmaker tired of Putin choking the supply chain of the gas Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC is reported to be seeking local sources of neon gas for use in its fabs, following disruptions to global supply chains caused by the Russian war in Ukraine.…

Its also twice as fast as Milan, AMD execs claim AMD's status as scrappy underdog trailing in Intel's wake has been upended. The chipmaker has managed to pull out ahead of rival Intel with the launch of its fourth-generation Epyc "Genoa" processors this week.…

Canonical is working on a new way to prove to employers you know your stuff Ubuntu Summit Canonical is working on a new training and skills-testing scheme, currently codenamed CUE, to help people without formal certifications to show that they've got what it takes.…

Taps mic: Elon? Elon are you there? Care to comment? Electric carmaker Rivian is reporting more trouble – this time it's the loss of $1.7 billion in Q3 alone, although the biz said it has enough cash on hand for three more years of business. …

The Toebbes tried selling US Navy secrets, but handed them right to the FBI A woman and her husband, who both copped to trying to sell nuclear warship secrets to a foreign government, have been sentenced to prison, with each set to spend around two decades behind bars.…

As social media giant grapples with Musk takeover, a safe pair of hands reaches for the door Troubled social media giant Twitter has lost the services of its chief information and security officer to cap off another chaotic week following its acquisition by Elon Musk.…

Difficult decision did not end with RISE with SAP, analyst tells The Reg SAP’s plans for moving customers to S/4HANA in the cloud – the assumed destination for the majority of SAP's ERP users – belies the complexity of decision in terms of software licensing, infrastructure and business processes, according to Gartner.…

Alleges agreement choked resellers using Amazon Marketplace, eliminated 98% of competition Apple and Amazon stand accused of colluding to push up the price of iPhones and iPads by trying to suppress the competitive threat from resellers using Amazon's Marketplace.…

Hasn't escaped Europe's notice that US, China, Russia are launching sat after sat The EU is said to be nearing a deal on building a satellite internet service to fill in gaps in terrestrial broadband coverage, as well as providing "strategic independence" for the region.…

Still quite a way to go before fabled 4,158-qubit system lands, scheduled for 2025. Plus: Fujitsu details quantum/HPC hybrid calculation tech IBM has officially unveiled its Osprey quantum processor featuring 433 qubits, more than three times the qubits seen in its Eagle processor introduced just a year ago.…

Can't do anything about their musical taste though Japanese telecommunications megalith NTT released details on Wednesday of ambitious headphone tech that eliminates pesky sound leakage – even on open-ear earphones.…

Or, how to make an unsupported printer work on Windows 11 with Ubuntu and WSL2 Ubuntu Summit The OpenPrinting project – together with Windows Services for Linux – enables printers that Windows no longer supports to work on Windows 11.…

Weakness of local currencies vs the dollar will force US vendors to act and act again Chief information officers in Western Europe should buckle up for enterprise tech price inflation in 2023 unless local currencies stage something of a dramatic recovery against the US dollar.…

More support for multiple platforms, Arm architecture, and the cloud in release 7 Microsoft's unveiling this week of the production release of .NET 7 advances the company's efforts over the past few years to unify the open source development runtime to support multiple architectures and platforms.…

They'd need to be a kilometer wide and point at even larger landside targets, so they won't fire up the renewables market A recent demonstration has proven the feasibility of the European Space Agency's (ESA) plan to beam power to Earth from space, giving the astro agency some additional ammunition as it prepares to ask its governing body for more cash to fund solar energy research. …

Addressing social media's baked-in flaws starts with users realizing its true worth Opinion I've decided to sign up for Twitter's subscription-based service for a simple reason: to put my money where my mouth is.…

'Acoustic blanket' cuts power by 50 percent An Cygnus cargo ship has successfully made it to the International Space Station despite the failure of half its solar panel array.…

We're the malware of Nim! A malware loader deemed in June to be a "work in progress" is now fully functional and infecting thousands of Windows corporate and home PCs.…

Today's messes: a possible crypto venture; blue tick blackflips; advertiser assurances; and a promise to try dumb things The Twitter "Official" label that showed up on the platform yesterday as a way to fix an arguably unbroken verification system has apparently disappeared from many accounts in less than 24 hours.…

And they don't like the states' 'patchwork' privacy laws, either US federal rulemaking on surveillance and data privacy should be left to Congress, not American consumer watchdog agencies — or states — according to a trio of Republican senators.…

Federal judge won't revisit fraud case, sets a date for sentencing instead Elizabeth Holmes, founder of debunked blood-testing startup Theranos, will be sentenced next week after a federal judge denied her request for a new trial.…

Customers 'more than twice' as likely to be hit by scams, says Dem Senator Wells Fargo customers who use Zelle to send and request payments suffer more than twice the rate of fraud and other online scams as people using other big banks, according to US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).…

Veep still says 'technology will eventually be very successful' A startup that bet on the old concept of analog chips to provide energy-efficient AI computing has run out of capital.…

Say that three times in a row. Better yet, train a model with Nvidia GPUs to say it Cloud-sim platform Rescale believes its forthcoming Compute Recommendation Engine can cut the time needed to optimize AI/ML and high-performance compute (HPC) workloads, giving people more time to actually run the software.…

Foundries folk pity the fool who writes off whole of 2023, though analyst says GF crew is 'optimistic' Semiconductor manufacturing biz GlobalFoundries expects weakening chip demand to bottom out in the first half of 2023, as it announced better than expected results for Q3 2022.…

The metaverse is shaping up to be such an inviting place Palmer Luckey, originator of the device that evolved into the cornerstone of Mark Zuckerberg's crumbling metaverse empire, has developed a new headset with a twist: It can kill gamers in real life when they die in VR. …

America's Chip Act looking a bit less like 'expensive exercise in futility' Taiwan's chipmaking giant TSMC is said to be preparing to build another semiconductor fabrication plant in Arizona, alongside the facility it completed this summer, in a move that may be seen as a vindication of the US government’s CHIPS Act funding.…

Meanwhile, more advertisers pause spending on loss-making social media platform and user base said to be declining What's the latest in the life of the world’s richest man? Elon Musk has offloaded almost $4 billion in Tesla stock after buying Twitter, the social media platform that is losing advertisers, money and maybe users.…

The COVID-era hiring spree which saw thousands onboarded comes to an abrupt end Salesforce is set to lay off hundreds of staff as the COVID-19-related hiring boom runs out of steam.…

x86 giant goes all-in with high-bandwidth memory Intel's latest plan to ward off rivals from high-performance computing workloads involves a CPU with large stacks of high-bandwidth memory and new kinds of accelerators, plus its long-awaited datacenter GPU that will go head-to-head against Nvidia's most powerful chips.…

Of course the IT giant's Epyc 4 systems will still ship first For the first time in years, Intel's CPUs will be at the heart of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Cray supercomputing platforms, following the launch of new systems based on the chipmaker's Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processors in early 2023.…