The Register

Judge rejects defense effort to toss warrantless device search on privacy grounds A US prisoner has been charged with orchestrating an $11 million scam from his cell using a hidden … cellphone.…

Plus, the Surface Laptop drops AMD, Studio arrives with an even higher price, and more Ignite Microsoft put a coat of polish on its Surface line this week, including its third-generation tablet powered by an Arm-based CPU.…

Back off FAA, I'm a scientist Fears that 5G C-band signals could disrupt aircraft altimeters are misplaced, US government researchers claim in a report, saying that current efforts to filter any potentially dangerous frequencies are likely enough to combat problems. …

It's almost like there's some midterms coming up Election workers in US battleground states have been hit by a surge in phishing and malware-laced emails in the run up to their primaries and the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.…

Heh, prove us wrong, kids. Prove us wrong NASA now hopes to blast an unmanned Orion capsule atop a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the Moon on November 14 after suffering, among other delays, a setback due to Hurricane Ian smashing up Florida. …

Insiders tell of struggle to access patient info, meds without working computers Updated Computer systems are still down at CommonSpirit Health – America's second-largest nonprofit hospital network – more than a week after it was hit by a somewhat mystery cyberattack.…

Gah, for a few milliseconds there, we were willing a cold, faceless corporation to succeed General Motors' newest endeavor is a business unit dedicated to producing energy storage systems – and the automaker left no doubts about who it sees as its top competitor in the space: Tesla. …

Redmond hopes move will lure more to its PostgreSQL managed service Ignite Microsoft is launching a database migration tool to help Oracle users shift to a PostgreSQL managed service on Azure.…

Preview service claims to eliminate risks of migrating mission-critical workloads GCN Google is preparing a mainframe modernization service that intends to simplify and lessen the risk of migrating mainframe workloads to the cloud - a complex process that can be frought with pitfalls.…

Energy granddad wants in on the next generation of atomic tech Uranium fuel producer Cameco Corp and investment firm Brookfield Renewable Partners intend to buy Westinghouse Electric Company in a bid to accelerate a nuclear power resurgence. …

Identity governance and SOCs also on the menu Ignite Microsoft is rolling out its usual host of cloud security features and services at this week's Ignite 2022 conference, with the focus on what's happening in and outside the firewall.…

'The Essence of Repugnant Desire', selling via Boring Company website for $100, will accept Dogecoin Elon Musk, the world's richest man, is threatening to break into the fragrance industry with a scent branded “Burnt Hair – The Essence of Repugnant Desire" and it's already for sale on his Boring Co website.…

We spin up Linux PC vendor's first public version of its in-house OS Tuxedo OS 1 is Ubuntu 22.04, tweaked for the company's own kit, with KDE instead of GNOME, a natively packaged Firefox, and Flatpak instead of Snap.…

It's IDM 2.0 ... 2.0. Or perhaps this was the plan all along... Intel has detailed plans to begin some separation between the semiconductor foundry side of its business and the design teams that create its own products. This is part of CEO Pat Gelsinger's efforts to revitalize the company with his Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0 (IDM 2.0) strategy.…

Will fly passengers to and from city airports, if it ever takes off The fledgling flying taxi industry has been given another vote of confidence with a $60 million investment from US airline Delta in Joby Aviation.…

Staff couldn't access patient records and paper stocks were running low Hospitals in the UK are recovering from an outage in their vital electronic health records system from Oracle Cerner which left doctors unable to access vital patient information.…

Throwing cash at industry to keep chip well from running dry as US sanctions continue to bite The Chinese city of Shenzhen has proposed a plan to lure semiconductor makers, offering subsidies to the tune of 20 percent of a qualifying applicant's annual investment, up to a maximum of $1.4 million a year.…

Running direct numerical simulation on 'an industrial scale' Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) say they have developed a method to run suites of simulations to better understand turbulence in fluid flows and so deliver more efficient combustion for improved space propulsion systems.…

Global tech recruiter Robert Walters says pay scale too high to feel tight grip of inflation, etc Unlike other professions, retired techies may not be beating down the door to return to the workplace to cope with the unrelenting rise in the cost of living, according to a global recruitment agency.…

Check your rooftops: Flying gear caught carrying network-intrusion kit Modified off-the-shelf drones have been found carrying wireless network-intrusion kit in a very unlikely place.…

Who exactly asked for this? Can you explain how it works? Or why? Poll Microsoft and Meta have teamed up in the metaverse, to bring the software giant's OS and productivity tools into The Social Network's Meta Quest virtual reality hardware.…

Will work from Earth orbit, as opposed to the Sun-grazing paths of US and EU solar probes China has placed a solar observation satellite in orbit, to conduct a four-year mission staring at Sol to understand its secrets.…

Opponents want data to flow across borders for business and democracy. Privacy? They've heard of it India's IT minister has hinted that a revised data protection law will drop a requirement for sovereign data storage – satisfying big tech companies, which have railed against onshore storage.…

Stand down Bruce Willis, 'first planetary defense test' a success NASA's DART spacecraft successfully smashed into asteroid Dimorphos with enough impact to alter the rock's orbit, scientists confirmed on Tuesday.…

Because 100G was so 2011 The fiber network connecting the US Department of Energy's (DoE) national laboratories received its first major upgrade in more than a decade this week, boosting its bandwidth capacity to a total of 46Tbit/sec.…

Feds also said the biz sucked at policing transactions for suspicious activity – as if! Bittrex will cough up $53 million after being accused of flouting US sanctions and breaking federal money laundering laws and other banking rules.…

Intel’s Sapphire Rapids CPUs and Mount Evans SmartNICs pop their heads above ground, too Cloud-based AI training got a little more diverse this week after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud announced the general availability of their latest custom AI accelerators.…

And for bonus points, there's a Windows flaw under active exploit Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed more than 80 security flaws in its products for October's Patch Tuesday. But let's start off with what Redmond didn't fix: two Exchange Server bugs dubbed ProxyNotShell that have been exploited by snoops as far back as August.…

Plus: AI services, security tools and more from Google Cloud Next this week Google Cloud today said it will start accepting select cryptocurrencies as payment for its online services.…

About to get a lot trickier to justify contractor status for app-hired folks The US Department of Labor today signaled it hopes to make it much harder for companies to argue that gig workers and laborers, among others, are individual contractors rather than employees.…

At $74k, this gear is an odd pitch for TEAC's time to shine again Things are a bit financially tight right now – we get it – but sometimes an audiophile has to treat themselves, and what better way to do it than with a turntable priced higher than a top electric car?…

Hungry microbes blamed for chilling out the party too much Microbial life may have flourished on early Mars but those early Martians may have been the cause of potentially life-ending climate change on the Red Planet.…

Latest version of FOSS hypervisor boasts support for new 3D acceleration tech and encrypted virtual machines VirtualBox 7.0 is the latest version of the FOSS hypervisor that Oracle cquired along with Sun Microsystems in 2009 – barely more than a year after Sun acquired VirtualBox's developers Innovision.…

Which is great news for the single company that makes them California has ended a pilot program and fully legalized digital license plates for private and commercial vehicles, which is great news for the one company that makes them.…

Apache Spark comes to BigQuery while BigLake gets Iceberg support Google is promoting updates to its cloud-based data management portfolio with the ambition of bringing analysis of structured and unstructured data closer together.…

GCHQ spy boss talks up threat of east's tech dominance, says Putin has 'badly misjudged' Ukraine attack UK intelligence agency, GCHQ, boss Jeremy Fleming says China is "learning lessons" from the war in Ukraine and could make use of a centralized digital currency to partly get around the type of sanctions being imposed on Putin's Russia.…

R&D Center focuses on autonomous AI, otherwise known as On-Device AI Samsung's Ukraine headquarters were damaged during a Russian attack on Kyiv that began Monday morning and which killed at least 14, injuring others.…

User group's views are at odds with the software giant's direction SAP users are putting more emphasis on on-premises solutions than the cloud when it comes to future workloads, according to a survey among the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG), which represents users in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.…

Mmmmm... smells like Space-BACN Intel has revealed more about its involvement in DARPA's project to build an "internet of satellites" in which the chipmaker will help develop the optical communications subsystem to enable links between satellites.…

More analysts emerge to talk up hefty double digit shrink in unit volumes PC shipments are plunging by record levels as enterprises spend less on devices and sweat assets for longer in the face of a worldwide economic slowdown.…

Automating infosec knowhow, essentially Mandiant, now officially owned by Google, has the scale (not to mention the deep pockets) to be the "brain" across organizations' myriad security products and automate protection on top of these controls, according to the security shop's CEO Kevin Mandia.…

This is despite a history of assistive software being involved in crashes Despite years of headlines about driver assistance systems being involved in horrific car crashes, a study by the US-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) suggests motorists continue to use their vehicles as though they are fully self-driving.…

Naturally, they're already under attack – so you know what to do next Security appliance vendor Fortinet has become the subject of a bug report by its own FortiGuard Labs after the discovery of a critical-rated flaw in three of its products.…

As Nvidia hikes prices, Intel is only too happy to profit from your discontent, and AMD remains a wild card Comment For the first time in what feels like an eternity, customers have a third choice when it comes to graphics processors with the launch of Intel's mainstream Arc GPUs. It could be that AMD and Nvidia's long-standing duopoly has come to a close.…

First chunk of mega-frameworks go to market The UK government has kicked off procurement to modernize aging legacy applications used by the national tax collector, HMRC.…

Pinging something missing on a network is frustrating enough, imagine if it's out in space NASA is back in control of its CAPSTONE spacecraft after the lunar orbiter lost power and communications and spent weeks powered down in safe mode while tumbling through the void.…

Monetary Authority director calls current system 'not fit for 21st century' Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) managing director Ravi Menon said on Monday the solution to costly, slow and inefficient cross-border payments is the implementation of industry-led blockchain stablecoin transactions and multi-CBDC platforms.…

As energy prices rise, so does demand for the kind of low-end chips China cranks out Here's an odd side effect of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine: a small boom in exports of Chinese electric blankets to Europe.…

Data retention requirements to be considered alongside infosec failings Australian carrier Optus's recent data breach will be investigated by two regulators, the double trouble likely an indicator of the nation's displeasure at the incident – which saw almost ten million locals' personal data exposed online.…

Some plan to take a whole hour off The union representing Apple Store workers in Australia has called a strike as part of ongoing negotiations for a new pay and conditions deal.…