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It's all about your chemistry Noted anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, who lead groundbreaking research into how the brain deals with love and passion, has died at the age of 79 after suffering endometrial cancer....

With a warning: Words have power A Pakistani court on Monday acquitted a man of cyber terrorism charges after he allegedly spread fake news on social media websites that sparked riots across the UK earlier this month....

But they have to show for unpaid training, or lose their jobs-in-waiting Infosys CEO Salil Parekh has promised to honor job offers made over two years ago to graduates yet to be employed by the outsourcing giant....

Kingdom sees growing demand for hard disks and drives to maintain global dominance The Kingdom of Thailand yesterday approved Western Digital's plans to expand its hard disk manufacturing facilities in the nation....

Lasted longer than expected, but hasn't been heard from since late April Japan's Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) has ended operations of the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) that it landed on Earth's sole natural satellite in January....

Hallucinating AI models excel at defamation Microsoft Bing Copilot has falsely described a German journalist as a child molester, an escapee from a psychiatric institution, and a fraudster who preys on widows....

Legitimate emails misclassified in software snafu Updated Many administrators have had a trying Monday after getting spammed out with false malware reports by Microsoft....

Also working to clean up inconsistent APIs and lack of SSO across vSphere, vSAN, NSX, SDDC Manager, vRealize and more VMware Explore VMware by Broadcom is working on a unified SDK for its core products and will deliver it before the major release of its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite that the virtualization giant has previously said will express its strategy of offering a unified hybrid cloud suite....

National security data up for grabs, Office of the Inspector General finds update The FBI has made serious slip-ups in how it processes and destroys electronic storage media seized as part of investigations, according to an audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General....

No word yet on if ransomware is to blame The Port of Seattle, which operates the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, is investigating a "possible cyberattack" after computer outages disrupted the airport's operations and delayed flights....

Multiple lawsuits doesn't mean investors are coming for the board yet, but better safe than sorry, right? Worried shareholders may drag it kicking and screaming into directions unknown, Intel has reportedly been meeting with advisors to hash out an anti-activist game plan....

Second sensitive info theft claimed by the same crims since June Digital data thieves have reportedly breached AMD's internal communications and are offering the allegedly stolen goods for sale....

The ride-sharing provider insists it broke no rules during the three-year legal gap Privacy authorities in the Netherlands have imposed a 290 million ($324 million) fine on ride-share giant Uber for sending driver data to servers in the United States - "a serious violation" of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)....

A few lines of Python is all it takes to get a model to use a calculator or even automate your hypervisor Hands on Let's say you're tasked with solving a math problem like 4,242 x 1,977. Some of you might be able to do this in your head, but most of us would probably be reaching for a calculator right about now, not only because it's faster, but also to minimize the potential for error....

Unprotected database with 12 years of biz records yanked offline Exclusive Nearly 2.7 TB of sensitive data - 31.5 million invoices, contracts, HIPPA patient consent forms, and other business documents regarding numerous companies across industries - has been exposed to the public internet in a non-password protected database for an unknown amount of time....

Sueball suggests outsourcer went out of bounds by developing competing product A subsidiary of IT outsourcer Cognizant filed a lawsuit on Friday in Texas federal court alleging that rival Infosys was involved in stealing trade secrets and engaging in anticompetitive behavior....

Buying PCs off the gray market can (literally) blow up in your face Who, Me? Welcome, gentle reader, to another Monday morning. We here at The Reg hope your working week is starting well - or at least better than it went for the protagonist of this week's instalment of Who, Me?...

It needs to - Virtzilla's customers, allies, and enemies are all pondering off-ramps and trying to lure unhappy users VMware Explore Adopting - or increasing the use of - a proprietary computing architecture like IBM's POWER is a very niche thing to do in 2024. Yet in June, Big Blue suggested doing just that: employing its single-supplier stack as a replacement for the VMware stack....

Rumors swirl that lack of content moderation has angered authorities The founder and CEO of made-in-Russia messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on Saturday - and subjected to further detention the next day - apparently over his company's failure to follow content moderation laws and assist with several criminal investigations....

Plus: Microsoft issues workaround for dual-boot crashes; ARRL cops to ransom payment, and more Infosec in brief Deniss Zolotarjovs, a suspected member of the Russian Karakurt ransomware gang, has been charged in a US court with allegedly conspiring to commit money laundering, wire fraud and Hobbs Act extortion....

Plus: Glowing reports for Fukushima wastewater; New datacenters in Fiji, Malaysia & South Korea; and more ASIA IN BRIEF India's Telecom Regulatory Authority last Friday admitted the nation has fallen "much below" its target to deploy ten million public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2022, and a further goal of 50 million hotspots by 2030 is in peril....

Eight days going on eight months for pilots stuck on orbiting space station +Comment NASA has decided the Boeing Starliner pilots stuck on the International Space Station will return to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon pod next year - after the US agency's engineers could not clear the Starliner's thrusters for the return trip....

If you guessed TOPS and FLOPS, that's only half right Feature Ready to dive in and play with AI locally on your machine? Whether you want to see what all the fuss is about with all the new open models popping up, or you're interested in exploring how AI can be integrated into your apps or business before making a major commitment, this guide will help you get started....

And still step on in the dark Hands on Having admired the Concorde perched atop the Sinsheim Museum, we wanted one of our own but had to settle for the next best thing - the LEGO(R) Concorde....

Spending returns to pandemic levels as tech deals make up bulk of framework agreements UK public expenditure on management consultancies has returned to COVID-era levels, despite repeated plans by the previous government to reduce dependency on external expertise....

Cupertino quits screwing around with defaults - for those in the EU Analysis Apple has agreed to change the way it implements web browser choice screens and browser capabilities to comply with Europe's monopoly-busting Digital Markets Act....

Algorithm just a fancy way to collude using private info, prosecutors say The Justice Department and the Attorneys General of eight states in the US on Friday filed a civil antitrust complaint against real estate service firm RealPage for providing landlords with software that maximizes rent at the expense of renters....

For 100 concurrent users, the card delivered 12.88 tokens per second-just slightly faster than average human reading speed If you want to scale a large language model (LLM) to a few thousand users, you might think a beefy enterprise GPU is a hard requirement. However, at least according to Backprop, all you actually need is a four-year-old graphics card....

Because everyone has a box of mystery computer bits they simply can't part with Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took a trip down memory lane this week by building a functioning PDP-11 minicomputer from parts found in a tub of hardware....

A glimpse into the rapidly advancing world of Chinese open source After a couple of years in development, Linux Deepin 23 arrives, with some new shiny that throws shade on the leading Western desktop distros....

Decision time arrives for NASA bigwigs A big weekend lies ahead for Boeing's CST-100 Starliner as NASA prepares to make a call on whether the crew will be returning in the spacecraft, as originally planned, or as part of the Crew-9 mission in 2025....

Rap sheet spells out major no-nos after disgruntled staff blow whistle The US is suing one of its leading research universities over a litany of alleged failures to meet cybersecurity standards set by the Department of Defense (DoD) for contract awardees....

Orgs are accessing restricted tech, raising concerns about more potential loopholes More claims are emerging that developers in China are using US-based cloud services to bypass measures intended to block its access to advanced chips and other technologies for accelerating AI development....

As VC-owned fauxpen source biz yells 'show me the money,' more may follow to the peril of the community Opinion Repeat after me: Open source is not a business model. It is a programming model. Still businesses keep trying to make it one, and far more often than not, they fail....

Over 20 years into a 2-year mission, but all good things come to an end The first of the European Space Agency's Cluster satellites is set to return to Earth next month after an extraordinarily long mission. The spacecraft is destined to burn up over the South Pacific....

Mature, stable - and can rescue corrupt files The second LibreOffice release of 2024 is here, with additional spreadsheet functions, improved presentation layouts, better searching, and more....

A tale of retro tech - have you heard of Trivector computers? - and a very troubled tech support journey On Call Every IT pro has a story filed away about the time they were asked to provide tech support under odd circumstances, which is why each Friday The Register brings you one such story in a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that celebrates odd circumstances....

As results from 2023's Chandrayaan-3 mission suggest south pole Moon magma India's Department of Space has outlined plans to send its first astronaut to space next year, establish a space station by 2035, and land an Indian on the Moon by 2045....

There's a lot of CO in datacenters, and Big Tech has promised to get to net zero The Open Compute Project, the org best known for offering designs for hyperscale hardware, has rounded up AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft to help it test concrete....

LY Corp's QA team struggled to manage projects while wading through prolix posts LY Corp, a joint venture between Japan's SoftBank Group and South Korea's Naver Corporation known for its flagship messaging app LINE, has detailed how it uses an in-house ChatGPT implementation to keep its quality assurance (QA) tasks on track....

Also testing allowing women to chose female drivers Chinese ride-share provider DiDi Chuxing announced on Thursday that it has started testing a feature that would allow riders to name and shame operators of smelly cars - and even take them off the road....

Those using Windows 11, version 24H2, should see better speed AMD has responded to community concerns about underwhelming gaming performance of its Ryzen 9000 Series desktop processors by attributing disappointing results recorded by independent testers to the vagaries of their system and software setups....

The data analytics vendor's CEO says rival's over $1 billion Tabular acquisition is the 'vindication' Databricks' $1 billion plus purchase of Tabular demonstrates Iceberg has won the data table format wars, according to rival data analytics and ML vendor Snowflake....

Why go to the effort of backdooring code when devs will basically do it for you accidentally anyway SolarWinds left hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product that can be used by remote, unauthenticated attackers to log into vulnerable instances, access internal functionality, and modify sensitive data...

Complaints about lack of notice plus an inquiry from El Reg prompt U-turn by web giant Google Chrome 128, released on Wednesday, does not function without intervention on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver," and Google initially had no plans to fix it....

Big Blue says companies are so obsessed, basic services are going to pot Is chasing the promise of generative AI causing companies to neglect other IT services? IBM seems to think so....

So what's that good for? Like eight of Nvidia's NVL-72s? As GPUs and AI accelerators push beyond one kilowatt of power consumption, many systems builders are turning to liquid cooling to manage the heat. However, these systems still rely on complex networks of plumbing, manifolds, and coolant distribution units (CDUs) to make it all work....

DC appeals court reverses dismissal, finding enough evidence of anticompetitive behavior to proceed The District of Columbia Court of Appeals on Thursday found there was sufficient evidence of anticompetitive behavior by Amazon to allow Washington DC's antitrust case against the e-commerce giant to move forward....

And CFO is off, maybe to find a role where she doesn't have to come into the office Zoom continues to turn a profit from providing remote collaboration tools, despite mandating that its own staff must work in the office at least twice a week....

Not related to the massive outage in July, security biz spokesperson told us Some IT administrators suffered a moment of deja vu on Thursday morning as CrowdStrike blamed a cloud service issue for performance problems and lagging boot times affecting some of European customers....