The Register

Digital Markets Act rules agreed, set to include fines of up to 10% of turnover and power to break up businesses Sanctions for non-compliance with new EU powers could hit tech giants with fines of up to 10 percent of their worldwide turnover – that's around $21.bn in the case of dominant online retailer Amazon.…

You can now read your comics in the metaverse Something for the Weekend? Here lie the bones of Good Ideas: child of impressionable managers, twin of floundering projects, much-beloved parent to scope creep. We will miss you. Not.…

SMEs' software spending subsidy continues As the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer struggles to bring cheer to the nation's greatest cost of living crisis in 50 years, he let slip a few nuggets for the tech industry.…

Robo-worker manipulates test tubes and pipettes, images skin cells to classify disease A robotic system armed with AI-powered cameras can grow and image skin cells from test tubes to diagnose Parkinson's disease with minimal human help, according to researchers from Google and the New York Stem Cell Foundation.…

Looks like a job for ... Spotting the Obvious man! (I see you baby, shaking that mouse) On Call You know that plumber who charges hundreds to just to change a magic washer? The IT world can be the same, where seemingly magical skills are grounded in the most mundane of realities. Welcome to Contractor Time in On Call.…

BigScience is a collaborative effort by developers volunteering to make ML research more accessible GTC BigScience – a team made up of roughly a thousand developers around the world – has started training its 176-billion-parameter open-source AI language model in a bid to advance research into natural language processing (NLP).…

Poisoned SCADA apps could have disrupted power supply – perhaps even at nuclear plants The United States Department of Justice has unsealed a pair of indictments that detail alleged Russian government hackers' efforts to use supply chain attacks and malware in an attempt to compromise and control critical infrastructure around the world – including at least one nuclear power plant.…

Did lessons learned from South Korea make it all less scary? Google has revealed a shift of policy that means it is inclined to allow third-party party payment systems access to its Play Store.…

Security software vendor saddened but says its channel is holding firm Australian technology distributor Dicker Data has decided to end its commercial relationship with Russian security software vendor Kaspersky.…

Never mind those flashy GPUs, MCU drought hits health to automotive The global semiconductor shortage has engineers scrambling to acquire replacement parts, cancelling projects, or redesigning hardware from scratch, distributor Avnet revealed this month.…

Fake Oracle and Disney job ads to lure victims is certainly an interesting choice Google on Thursday described how it apparently caught and thwarted North Korea's efforts to exploit a remote code execution vulnerability in Chrome.…

COVID saw sales surge, but there's less reason to buy in the new normal The APAC region's market for traditional PCs - desktops notebooks and workstations - grew 15.9 per cent year-on-year in 2021 to 120.3 million units, but shipments appear to have peaked according to analyst firm IDC.…

Another day, another attack on the software supply chain A group of more than 200 malicious npm packages targeting developers who use Microsoft Azure has been removed two days after they were made available to the public.…

And machine learning that flags your CEO as suspicious GTC Weaponized AI that goes beyond Zelenskyy deepfakes and is keeping some security researchers and data scientists up at night.…

Bitcoin millionaire teen said to be among those detained British cops investigating a cyber-crime group have made a string of arrests.…

Putting silicon in the cloud so you can design silicon in the cloud The continued march of chip design tools into the cloud has received another endorsement, this time from GlobalFoundries, the fourth largest chip manufacturer in the world.…

For all those worried about the Firefox maker, now you can chip in five or ten bucks a month The Mozilla Developer Network, which hosts free, open access to web standard documentation, tools, samples and other good stuff, is going pay-for-play with a premium subscription plan that adds new personalization features. …

Tesla, Porche, jewelry, bags, purses... not quite enough for ink, though A now-former HP finance planning manager pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and filing false tax returns that follow from the misappropriation of company funds.…

Vitess-based database splits system for 30 minutes allowing users to right regrettable changes Distributed transaction database biz PlanetScale has introduced an "undo" button it says can reverse schema changes, allowing devs to avoid embarrassing disasters by reverting to the original design without losing data within a 30-minute window.…

French research giant, C12 see challenges, but prototype slated for 2024 Here's something we will only believe once we see it: A quantum computing chip the size of a large silicon wafer.…

China's Twitter analog is latest in SEC crosshairs over audits Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, has been added to an SEC roll of companies that may be delisted due to inaccessible audits. Surprisingly, China seems to be taking DC's side.…

All-cash Veoneer deal's real target is full ownership of Arriver vehicle vision stacks Chipmaker Qualcomm is set to acquire Swedish automotive technology company Veoneer next week in a complex deal to bolster Qualcomm’s driver assistance and autonomous vehicle portfolio.…

It was MySQL, with the resource contention, in the database cluster Code shack GitHub is offering an explanation for a succession of lengthy outages this month - it's the fault of resource contention issues in its primary database cluster during peak loads but more investigation is needed.…

Absolutely Fabless: A good year for those who don't make the things themselves 2021 was a fabulous year for the largest global fabless chip designers, thanks to ongoing global chip shortage that caused silicon prices to spike, according to a new report from TrendForce.…

Major spec refresh includes 600 watt connector for GPUs Intel has detailed new ATX power supply unit (PSU) specifications that it says are designed to support the demands of upcoming PCIe Gen-5 graphics cards, while also delivering greater efficiency.…

Small, self-described sample, sure. But results show shifts over time Never mind what enterprise programmers are trained to do, a self-defined set of hackers has its own programming language zeitgeist, one that apparently changes with the wind, at least according to the relatively small set surveyed.…

Reports suggest Digital Markets Act could hit a broader sweep of players than the FAANG gang The European Union is to launch a legislative process that is set to enforce greater competition among the leading digital platform providers.…

Bored of the bleeding edge? Come over and be bored in beta instead Windows Insiders weary of life on the bleeding edge can now opt for a more stable existence as the Dev and Beta channels briefly synchronize.…

That's no quadcopter... that's a... cooling system? Apple's latest and greatest – the Mac Studio – has come under the gaze of teardown merchants, iFixit. The good news? There might be hope for storage swappers. The bad news? Everything else.…

Info of those signing up to be soldiers leaked, as sources finger Capita-run system Exclusive The UK Ministry of Defence has suspended online application and support services for the British Army's Capita-run Defence Recruitment System and confirmed to us that digital intruders compromised some data held on would-be soldiers.…

Investment sentiment for S/4HANA drops off while public cloud hosting only two per cent of environments Investment sentiment in S/4HANA, SAP's in-memory ERP platform, is falling for the first time among the software giant's German-speaking users.…

Multiple systems remain down as spokesperson confirms 'security incident' was cyber attack Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University has entered a second week of woe following a vist by an infosec nasty.…

Regulators worry about financial stability if binary Baht spread Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on Wednesday a ban on using cryptocurrencies and other digital assets as a means of making payments.…

Thank you, Stephen E. Wilhite for your seminal image format, and John Roach for your pioneering microcomputer Two important figures in computing industry have died.…

Evolving threat environment means preventative AI – and SmartNICs – are needed to improve protection GTC Check Point Software has put Nvidia GPUs and artificial intelligence techniques to work across its broad portfolio of security tools in order to address and adapt better to an increasingly sophisticated and rapidly changing threat environment.…

Will bring bots to workflow users, perhaps not with the same precision RPA specialists muster Workflow specialist ServiceNow has announced a heavy emphasis on robotic process automation (RPA) in the next release of its platform, to get aging applications working with each other in a more user-friendly fashion.…

Back to the drawing board for company plagued by years of scandals Toshiba's shareholders have rejected both the company's plan to split into two companies and a proposal to look for a private buyer.…

Plans more SaaS and PaaS, and to stop selling IaaS at a loss Tencent has decided to stop spending whatever it takes to increase its cloud revenue.…

25 per cent CAGR will see $87 billion a year spent by 2026, says Canalys Mainland China's cloud infrastructure services market – covering both infrastructure as-a-service and platform as-a-service – is expected to grow to $84.7 billion by 2026, according to market analyst firm Canalys.…

CEO tells The Reg of new branding ahead of Finnish vendor's corporate split F-Secure's enterprise-facing business will have a new brand – WithSecure – and a sharpened focus when the company splits into two independent operations.…

Big Blue efforts to protect sensitive docs thwarted by mass of litigants Confidential IBM documents presented in court as evidence to support claims Big Blue systematically shed older workers – documents subsequently placed under seal – have now publicly surfaced in one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against the IT giant.…

Gelsinger also confirms he's ended multi-billion share-buyback scheme Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on Wednesday urged US Congress yet again to pass $52 billion in funding swiftly to boost America's semiconductor industry – and said Wall Street's negative response to his costly manufacturing expansion plan is proof Intel is worthy of the subsidies.…

Matching TSMC is not for the faint of heart, though, Huang warns GTC Nvidia is considering expanding its supplier base by getting at least some of its chips made in Intel factories.…

Miscreants can exploit these to make a bad situation much worse VMware has patched two security flaws, an OS command injection vulnerability and a file upload hole, in its Carbon Black App Control security product running on Windows.…

Cyber-souk offered bundle deals of account access and credit card info, says Uncle Sam A Russian national was indicted in the US on Tuesday for allegedly running an online marketplace selling access to credit card, shopping, and web payment accounts belonging to tens of thousands of victims.…

As in encryption, not coins, thankfully IBM has unveiled a cloud-based key management service that should make it easier for organizations to manage encryption keys across complex multi-cloud hybrid environments, as well as on-premises.…

Have a break, don't have any more KitKat, junk food giant also tells Russia Nestlé, which is to stop selling KitKats and other brands in Russia, says corporate data leaked online this week by Anonymous was not stolen nor all that useful.…

Agreement could simplify demands for potential evidence, leaves real-time surveillance unaddressed The US and Canada said on Wednesday that representatives are negotiating an agreement to apply the CLOUD Act to law enforcement operations that reach across their respective borders.…

Amazon, Pepsi, Siemens and more go for digitally twinned ops GTC Nvidia is investing mightily in the concept of "digital twins" or large-scale simulations that illuminate real-world processes. This week at the company's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) they demonstrated how several high-profile companies are bringing digital twins into production via their all-encompassing Omniverse hardware and software platforms.…

No one should be using long-dead protocol so it's gotta go The Samba project just released version 4.16, and with it parts of the veteran SMB 1 file-sharing protocol are being permanently removed.…