The Register

Somebody set us up the bomb Electronic Arts stock has been volatile this morning on rumors that Amazon was preparing to put in an offer to buy the company that were quickly deemed questionable.…

Also: Smiling, eye tracking, and general 'social presence' baked into Project Cambria Facebook limited the visibility of the New York Post's story about Hunter Biden's laptop on the social media platform while it was being fact-checked after receiving warnings of disinformation campaigns from the FBI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Joe Rogan Experience on Thursday.…

Resting place of Novell – and one-time home to SUSE – finds new life in the Great White North Canadian software biz OpenText has bought UK tech stalwart Micro Focus in a deal worth around $6 billion.…

Wouldn't it be nice to have the features you want, rather than accept whatever's bundled by suppliers Systems Approach Edge routers have been an essential part of the internet for decades, connecting access networks – enterprise LANs, mobile and broadband networks – to the global backbone.…

The diagnosis? Ignorance is bliss, but educating users is hell On Call If it's Friday – and we have no reason to believe it is not – then it must be time for another instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly tale of techies who rise above the trivial troubles that colleagues demand be addressed with undue haste.…

And not the fake ones that just try to change their minds Google search results and Maps will clearly label healthcare clinics that provide abortion services, reducing the chances that women in crisis will be misdirected to "clinics" that don't in fact offer healthcare.…

Navigation tool still on the road ... for now Google is shutting down its Waze carpooling service apparently due to poor demand from workers commuting into the office – although road traffic has bounced back to levels from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. …

This, this is more like what we mean by a sophisticated cyberattack Criminals behind the cyberattack attempts on Twilio and Cloudflare earlier this month had cast a much wider net in their phishing expedition, targeting as many as 135 organizations — primarily IT, software development and cloud services providers based in the US.…

Move over, GitLab, this purge begins in October Heroku, Saleforce's platform-as-a-service biz, on Thursday said it will discontinue its free container and database offerings, and will purge inactive accounts because of ongoing abuse.…

Air board votes unanimously to approve wind down of gas guzzlers There's a popular adage that "as California goes, so goes the nation."…

Your passwords are still safe, biz says Internal source code and documents have been stolen from LastPass by a cyber-thief.…

Remembering Aaron Swartz Fourteen years after the late Aaron Swartz published his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto calling for the liberation of publicly funded scientific literature, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has called for taxpayer-funded research to be made available to the public at no cost.…

A small but functional quantum system accelerating science, not search Chinese search giant Baidu has unveiled its first quantum computing hardware and software capabilities during the Quantum Create developer conference in Beijing this week.…

Says it's already used Wujian 600 to pull up its own SoC China's Alibaba has released a development platform to help engineers building high-performance Systems-on-Chip (SoC) silicon based on the RISC-V open architecture, which is claimed to also include an optimized software stack to help speed product rollout.…

'Widespread' campaign hunts for multimillion-dollar transactions A business email compromise scheme targeting CEOs and CFOs using Microsoft Office 365 combines phishing with a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication.…

Researchers ran a current through vanadium dioxide and were never forgiven Researchers in Switzerland have discovered a compound that can "remember" its previous phase transition states, offering potential applications in computer memory and information processing.…

Big changes are afoot in a forthcoming version, but they're not fully visible yet A leading Chinese Linux vendor is polishing what may be its last Debian-based release, and preparing for the move to becoming a fully independent distro with its own new package format, Linglong.…

It turns out online chicanery aiming to destabilize foreign nations is a two-way street Well known for an abundance of anti-western troll accounts and propaganda, Twitter and Meta are reporting that they've taken down nearly 200 accounts that, for the past five years, have been amplifying pro-Western messages in the Middle East and Central Asia.…

But graphics giant foresees revenues falling even further in the next quarter as gamer GPU sales drop Graphics giant Nvidia plans to unveil the architecture for its next-generation consumer GPU, Lovelace, at its GTC conference in September, CEO Jensen Huang has said.…

Get the popcorn out for September 13 Former head of security at Twitter and whistleblower Peiter "Mudge" Zatko is scheduled to appear before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on September 13 to discuss allegations that his former employer made serious failures in protecting user data.…

Customers 'more measured' and this will continue, says CRM giant, but Snowflake lifts forecasts Salesforce said last night it was seeing sales cycles stretch and was taking a "very deliberate" approach to hiring after it missed analysts' expectations for revenue growth.…

Tension between anonymity and identity in web3 is being tested as firms seek a way to control rampant fraud Web3, blockchain, and decentralized finance (DeFi) technologies, with their famously libertarian users, seem like the last places you'd expect to see a credit-scoring system. But money talks, even in a DeFi world.…

PC component manufacturers won't get priority as area faces fires and heatwaves Officials from the manufacturing hub of Chongqing notified factories on Wednesday that mandated power cuts in the municipality were extended until further notice, affecting both PC and Apple suppliers.…

I am the one who NOCs The folks tasked with defending the Black Hat conference network see a lot of weird, sometimes hostile activity, and this year it included malware linked to Kim Jong-un's agents.…

Plans afoot to replace Oracle EBS/AIX system used by 1.8 million staff dating from 2008 The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is in the market for a company to manage HR and a new electronic staff records system as part of a procurement worth up to £1.7 billion ($2 billion).…

Mobilises the Pi nicely but also frustrates in a few ways Desktop Tourism The Raspberry Pi is rightly celebrated as a very clever feat of design. But I've always found Pi-based machines hard to work with because connecting a Pi to the peripherals needed to make it useful creates a tangle of wires.…

Human remains from millennia ago analyzed by the machines their descendants built AI algorithms can be used to date ancient human remains by analyzing their DNA, just-published research has proposed.…

India wants low-end Chinese smartphones out – and its efforts may be working Chinese gadget giant Xiaomi has warned in its April-June 2022 earnings report that its troubles in India – related to allegations of improperly moving funds offshore – could noticeably affect business.…

Frozen firm has yet to return all funds to netizens More than 30 employees at the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange Voyager will receive $1.6 million in bonus pay as the company scrambles to return customers' funds frozen on its platform. …

'Don't be such a Square' hits different these days Block – the digital payments giant formerly known as Square – faces allegations it failed to take adequate measures to protect customers' personal information.…

Chipzilla's story Arc continues Hot Chips Intel says its datacenter-focused Flex-series GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound, are finally ready, and computer makers are expected to begin shipping systems over the next few months.…

Just more IoT conscripts for the botnet armies Tens of thousands of internet-facing IP cameras made by China-based Hikvision remain unpatched and exploitable despite a fix being issued for a critical security bug nearly a year ago.…

Embedded electronics workaround for his phone's 'aggressive' power management Tesla owner Brandon Dalaly has seemingly implanted a chip in his hand that he uses to unlock his car, among other things.…

PM says shuttered plants can re-open, fresh reactors will be built, old ones are getting their lives extended Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said today his country would begin not only restarting nuclear plants sitting idle since the Fukushima affair, but will begin building reactors as well.…

Just how bad does existing AI hardware have to be to start from scratch? To quench the thirst for ever larger AI and machine learning models, Tesla has revealed a wealth of details at Hot Chips 34 on their fully custom supercomputing architecture called Dojo.…

Well, you can't be attacked if your PC won't boot VMware has admitted an update on some versions of its Carbon Black endpoint solution is responsible for BSODs and boot loops on Windows machines after multiple organizations were affected by the problem.…

Different core counts, different cache sizes, and various cores possible in mix and match design, it says Hot Chips Intel has given more detail on how its upcoming Meteor Lake processors will be made from multiple chiplets, enabling it to mix and match to deliver different capabilities, and easing the introduction of its successor, Arrow Lake – which follows the same construction.…

'Limited subset' of users have emails, usernames, and hashed passwords stolen from the platform Users of popular streaming and media organizing service Plex are waking up to an unpleasant email this morning saying, in the words of a Reg reader, "Plex have been hacked and their main site is down as we all rush to change passwords."…

Enterprise agreements can increase pricing, marring an overall positive assessment from the analyst Updated ServiceNow customers struggle with its pricing policy, feeling they are being nudged into higher price brackets and failing to benefit from supposed discount packages, according to Gartner.…

Artemis 1 is ready to light its candle NASA's most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System, just passed its flight readiness review, bringing it one step closer to meeting a target launch date of August 29. …

Tiny electromechanical units bounce traffic down different fibers Google has scaled its network capacity from over one petabit per second to beyond six petabits per second since 2015, and some of that growth has come from switches that bounce optical signals off an array of mirrors to redirect traffic.…

Utility says there's no reason facilities should be using drinking water, but also wastes a lot itself Thames Water has started looking at the amount of water used by datacenters in the area it serves around London as parts of the UK are hit by drought.…

Don't ask us how this is decided, it probably involved a lot of Perl Once again, Python is at the top of the IEEE's annual survey of popular programming languages – seemingly decided by a grab bag of metrics – while SQL appears to be a crucial skill.…

Sometimes you just want something dead simple that can maybe handle bold, italics, and a hyperlink or two FOSS Fest PanWriter isn't all that small, but it's simple, clean, and does the bare minimum over a plain text editor.…

Smile! You're on Candid Doorbell – and the joke's on us all Column It's hard to understand why anyone expressed surprise when Amazon's VP of public policy, Brian Huseman, recently admitted sharing data with police.…

Cost control measures seem to hit CFO too – he's re-used quotes about cuts Concerns over rising labor costs and the subsequent impacts on their profits have led Indian outsourcer Infosys to cut Q1FY23 variable bonuses to an organizational average of 70 percent of theoretical maximum.…

Kim Jong-un has entered the chat Lloyd's of London insurance policies will stop covering losses from certain nation-state cyber attacks and those that happen during wars, beginning in seven months' time.…

Ren Zhengfei warns tough economic times mean it’s time to focus on profit and quality Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei has reportedly told staff that tough economic times represent a real threat to the company.…

Cryptography prof tells Microsoft to get forked Earlier this month, the US Treasury Department sanctioned cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash, claiming it provided money laundering for entities deemed national threats to America.…

Users may get around $0.53 each, Facebook would lose about eight hours of annual profit Meta has offered to pay $37.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit, which claimed its social media platform Facebook illegally harvested location data even when users explicitly denied consent.…