The Register

The mass layoffs that follow tech acquisitions are likely to attract greater scrutiny Tech companies are forever acquiring each other, but future buys will likely face more scrutiny after four US federal regulators decided to share data that they hope will help antitrust investigators assess whether an acquisition impacts labor markets - not just the market for tech....

Big Blue also shifts to Prisma SASE to secure its 250,000 workforce Palo Alto Networks has completed its purchase of IBM's QRadar SaaS offering, spending $500 million to buy up the service's customers and hopefully shift them into its own Cortex platform....

Loads of governance issues to worry about, and the chance it might spout utter garbage Microsoft has published a Transparency Note for Copilot for Microsoft 365, warning enterprises to ensure user access rights are correctly managed before rolling out the technology....

93GB of info feared pilfered in Montana by heartless crooks Planned Parenthood of Montana's chief exec says the org is responding to a cyber-attack on its systems, and has drafted in federal law enforcement and infosec professionals to help investigate and rebuild its IT environment....

'Giant step' in research could unlock a bunch of crazy science stuff An international team of researchers has, for the first time, coupled an atomic nucleus to an atomic clock to compare differences in their timekeeping frequencies....

It's set to slice up the AI PC competition at $700-$900 Not to be outshined by Intel's Lunar Lake launch, Qualcomm on Wednesday rolled out a pair of slimmed-down X chips aimed at cheaper Copilot+ PCs....

The upcoming version might bring tab previews, cookie banner block, and vertical tabs Firefox 130 is landing on users' machines, while version 131 enters beta - with a feature we've all been waiting for....

Bot shouldn't have political opinions, says Amazon It would be perfectly reasonable to expect Amazon's digital assistant Alexa to decline to state opinions about the 2024 presidential race, but up until recently, that assumption would have been incorrect....

It'll also do computery stuff Nordic datacenter operator atNorth says its next facility - the biggest to date - is to feature a heat reuse scheme for large-scale greenhouses and local housing....

Deal can't lessen competition if AI minnow wasn't much of a competitor Microsoft's "acquihire" of Inflection AI was today cleared by UK authorities on the grounds that the startup isn't big enough for its absorption by Microsoft to affect competition in the enterprise AI space....

Researchers find many similarities, and nasty new customizations such as embedded compromised user credentials The Cicada3301 ransomware, which has claimed at least 20 victims since it was spotted in June, shares "striking similarities" with the notorious BlackCat ransomware, according to security researchers at Israeli outfit endpoint security outfit Morphisec....

Communications agency now passing on the order to operators The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has woken up and issued a ban on Kaspersky software being used in telecoms kit, months after Washington deemed it a national security risk and blockaded future sales....

It won't generate hundreds of million of dollars for customers tomorrow, and there's a 'lot of noise' from tech industry ServiceNow is trying to assure investors that payback for enterprise GenAI investment is coming, but it may not be soon and biz customers shouldn't expect to get huge returns "tomorrow"....

Musk fought the law and the law won... for now The sound of a screeching rubber on road was heard in South America last night as Elon Musk's satellite broadband operation, Starlink, agreed to comply with an order in Brazil to block the billionaire's social media mouthpiece, X....

But Bullseye's days are numbered and it's time to think about upgrading The latest update to Debian "Bookworm" arrives at the same time as the last ever update to "Bullseye," and there's trouble ahead for Nvidia legacy users....

60 years after Arthur C Clarke wrote Sunjammer, space agency catches up NASA has successfully extended into orbit an 80 m (860 square foot) sail that is designed to catch emissions from the Sun and convert them into propulsion for space exploration....

As AWS, Microsoft, and Google hike some prices, it's time to open up the ROI calculator After an initial euphoric rush to the cloud, administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services....

The train on platform 4 is destined for networking hell BORK!BORK!BORK! Strange things are afoot at Brighton Station as football fans keen to make the journey to London to see their team take on England's finest instead found themselves destined for Addr = 67 (43h)....

And you may ask yourself, 'How do I work this?' And you may ask yourself, 'Where is that large computer?' Part 3 This is the third part of The Register FOSS desk's roundup of some of the more memorable missteps and could-have-beens from the beginnings of the microcomputer industry until today....

The signal may not rot your mind, we can't say the same for the content Time to take off the tin foil hat: A review of 28 years of research into the health effects of radio wave exposure from cellphones has found no evidence to link the handhelds to brain cancer, or negative effects on health more generally....

Last year's 43B was a nice snack. Now for a feast of regulatory capture Sixteen months after the European Union signed off on its 43 billion Chips Act in the hope it would stimulate semiconductor manufacturing in the bloc, semiconductor trade group the European Semiconductor Industry Association (ESIA) has asked for more public money - and more say over policy decisions impacting local chipmakers....

Unclear if this is a sign controversial service is cleaning up its act everywhere Controversial social network Telegram has co-operated with South Korean authorities and taken down 25 videos depicting sex crimes....

Another job for Broadcom, then OpenAI's first custom-designed silicon chips allegedly will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the same outfit churning out processors for Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, and others....

Uncle Sam apparently worried GPU giant may be punishing customers who shop around The US Department of Justice on Tuesday is said to have stepped up its antitrust investigation into Nvidia, issuing subpoenas seeking evidence for its case against the AI chip giant....

Bagging two posh properties, three luxury cars on a govt salary a bit of a giveaway - allegedly The US Department of Justice has accused a now-former senior official of the New York State government of illegally advancing the interests of the Chinese government and communist party....

What was screwing with minds of US diplomats - wait, is that a black helicopt... An inquiry by the US government's National Institutes of Health (NIH) into Havana Syndrome - the seemingly mysterious illness that struck down American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba and then around the world - has been halted after it was found the study's participants had been coerced into taking part....

Better late than never The White House on Tuesday indicated it hopes to shore up the weak security of internet routing, specifically the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)....

The group bragged they could steal one-time passwords from Apply Pay and 30+ sites A trio of men have pleaded guilty to running a multifactor authentication (MFA) bypass ring in the UK, which authorities estimate has raked in millions in less than two years....

And all it took was some good old fashioned outsourcing to TSMC Intel's first chips to exceed Microsoft's lofty Copilot+ performance target have arrived, promising up to 120 TOPS of AI performance across an improved CPU, GPU and NPU. This development brought to you by the move to jump ship to TSMC....

No, Abbey is not really a "pure patriotic girl" Spamouflage, the Beijing-linked trolls known for spreading fake news about American politics, is back with new accounts on X and TikTok that claim to be frustrated US voters in "more aggressive" attempts to influence the upcoming presidential election....

Trajectory tweak means a delay of almost a year, though 165 km flyby should produce eye candy The BepiColombo spacecraft is to make a closer-than-planned flyby of Mercury this week, whizzing past the planet at approximately 165 km from the surface after the European Space Agency's (ESA) Flight Dynamics team tweaked the trajectory to compensate for malfunctioning thrusters....

27 days to get your users' third-party apps on Google's sign-in Google Workspace administrators, consider yourselves on notice: In less than a month, many third-party apps (mail, calendar, etc.) will stop connecting to Workspace accounts....

50% dive in market cap during 2024 forcing CEO Pat Gelsinger to revisit strategy Intel could lose a longstanding seat on the Dow Jones Industrial Average due to the slump in its share price, adding to the chipmaker's existing troubles....

Selfie-scraper again claims European law does not apply to it The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) has fined controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI 30.5 million ($33 million) over the "illegal" collation of images....

First major version in two decades is worth getting to know GNU screen is included in most Linux distros, but newer, fancier tools such as tmux often outshine it....

Now the Numbat has been neatened, you can replace your Jellyfish - if you dare Ubuntu 24.04.1 is here, which means that users of the previous LTS release, 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish," will be offered the update....

$25B semiconductor shopping spree leaves rivals in the dust China spent more in the first half of this year on chipmaking equipment to expand its semiconductor capacity than the US, Taiwan, and South Korea combined, indicating how serious the country is about self-reliance in silicon and building its own industry....

Other options considered too as the power draw on electricity grids continues unabated Analysis Cloud computing is one of the few areas of the tech industry to show continual growth, even during the pandemic and the subsequent inflation-driven curb on spending. Yet one thing that might hinder cloud's inexorable expansion is finding the power for the infrastructure it depends on....

Board member offers apology for 'inappropriate' behavior SAP CTO and executive board member Jurgen Muller is set to depart the German software corporation over an "incident" at a company event....

It's going to take more than CAPTCHA to prove you're real Researchers at Microsoft and OpenAI, among others, have proposed "personhood credentials" to counter the online deception enabled by the AI models sold by Microsoft and OpenAI, among others....

Government body claims there is no evidence of customer data being compromised Transport for London (TfL) - responsible for much of the public network carrying people around England's capital - is battling to stay on top of an unfolding "cyber security incident."...

Fusion biz wants to break superconducting tech into other sectors Brit nuclear fusion firm Tokamak Energy has formed a separate division to commercialize the superconducting magnet tech it developed for reactors in other markets including renewable energy or transport....

Appeal panel upholds ban as Musk Xeets up a rage-storm Brazil's Supreme Court has backed an earlier decision to force local carriers to block Elon Musk's social network, X, as the dispute between the billionaire and the South American nation widens....

The GSMA and its friends are looking for ways to bring those within mobile range onto the 'net In 2015 Google gave itself a mission: connect the "next billion" people to the internet. That plan more-than-succeeded, but also left three billion people offline - a situation that other orgs are trying to address....

Machine learning helps, but more data catches more faults - so Chinese champ has shared its data Alibaba Cloud has revealed homebrew tech it used to improve server fault prediction and detection, which it claims saw its ability to detect problems beat comparable tech by ten percent....

Needs new investors to get beyond current modest products Chinese GPU-maker Xiangdixian Computing Technology has admitted it has not met its development targets and let go of some staff as part of a restructuring plan....

VP Adam Meyers to testify about that faulty software update which ruined July and some of August Crowdstrike is to be hauled before the US House Homeland Security Committee this month to explain why its faulty software update - the one that took down millions of computer systems worldwide - ever happened....

CEO Pavel Durov charged in France, messaging platform insists it abides by EU laws Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was cuffed and charged by the French police last week, was "too free" in his approach to managing the global messaging platform, according to Russia's foreign minister....

Meanwhile, strange noises emanate from Starliner NASA has confirmed the names of the two crew members who will be flying to the International Space Station (ISS) on the next SpaceX mission: NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov....

A Firefox fork aimed at power surfers The Zen Browser is a new effort to modernize web browsing by bringing tiling, workspaces, and so on - and it's blissfully free of Google code....