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That was quick: Supremes' gutting of Chevron deference is already paying dividends Regulatory dominoes have begun to fall in the wake of the US Supreme Court's gutting of federal agency rulemaking authority, with the Federal Trade Commission's ban on noncompete agreements the first to be stayed using the SCOTUS decision as justification....

Skin-sparing mastectomy and breast reconstruction scrapped as result of ransomware at supplier Exclusive The latest figures suggest that around 1,500 medical procedures have been canceled across some of London's biggest hospitals in the four weeks since Qilin's ransomware attack hit pathology services provider Synnovis. But perhaps no single person was affected as severely as Johanna Groothuizen....

Company's sales in the region have dropped under US plan to curb country's AI hopes Nvidia is forecast to make $12 billion from selling GPUs into China this year despite US trade restrictions aimed at curbing Beijing's AI ambitions....

Customers seek alternatives after claiming costs up from perpetual Exclusive Fears that VMware's switch to subscription-based licensing would lead other vendors to follow suit may be coming true after Paessler confirmed to The Reg it has introduced new subscription pricing for its network monitoring tool, PRTG....

There's also chatter about whether medium severity scare is actually code red nightmare Infosec circles are awash with chatter about a vulnerability in Ghostscript some experts believe could be the cause of several major breaches in the coming months....

Looming train wrecks face winning party after it promises investment and innovation Analysis The United Kingdom woke up to the prospect of a new government this morning, but it faces old problems in tech projects, policy, and investment....

UEK-next is bleeding edge - unlike most CentOS-alikes Oracle's Linux engineers have released their build of kernel 6.9 for Oracle Linux - and they're already planning for 6.10 and beyond....

Privacy measures apparently helping criminals evade capture Top Eurocops are appealing for help from lawmakers to undermine a privacy-enhancing technology (PET) they say is hampering criminal investigations - and it's not end-to-end encryption this time. Not exactly....

Hello, hello ... what have we here? One very dangerous storage admin, if I'm not mistaken On Call As Friday rolls around, The Register knows many readers are a little fatigued. Which is why we use this day to bring a fresh instalment of On Call - the weekly reader contributed column we hope amuses you enough to shake off a week of tech support torpor and traipse into the weekend with a smile on your dial....

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, even if Earth is spinning out The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) announced on Thursday there will be no leap second added to 2024....

Bad news: It's probably because you have to pay more for RAM Samsung Electronics has advised investors it is set to post bumper profits and notch a big jump in revenue for the quarter ended June 30....

Support line reports 'high volume of contacts' about the problem Owners of Amazon's Kindle e-reader devices looking for something new to read may have had to pick up an actual book - the old-school kind, made of dead trees - for a day or so this week, as their devices would not download content....

DJI builds a power pack for off-road two-wheelers Nations worried about China's ability to use its tech companies for more than trade now have a new class of kit to fret over: mountain bikes, thanks to Middle Kingdom drone-maker DJI's arrival in the field with an electric drive system....

Investors will be hoping so anyway Crisis-prone IT services outfit Atos says it is among the top 11 percent of companies in the industry - at least when it comes to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks - as it reaches what many investors will be hoping is its final restructuring deal....

Promise of AI features, but Big Blue won't reveal much more about next steps of its highly regarded relational database Opinion Last week, I committed a crime. No, I did not defraud the IRS/HMRC or steal some Snyder's Pretzels/Cheesy Wotsits. It was much worse. A keen reader pointed out that I had miscounted the number of versions of Db2, IBM's relational database....

Yet all its birds remain resolutely earthbound AST SpaceMobile has reiterated its plans to enable a satellite phone service covering the entire continental US that will work seamlessly with existing devices, thanks to spectrum sharing agreements with AT&T and Verizon....

Miracle-WM takes several more steps forward The Miracle-WM tiling window manager for Canonical's Mir display server has hit 0.3 - and also reaches places you may not expect to find Canonical code....

Not content with drinking up all our water, now we'll compete with DCs for power Demand for datacenter space is currently at a high in many markets around the globe because of the AI boom, despite issues with securing adequate power, at least according to commercial real estate firm CBRE....

Union advises members to turn off features government introduced to allow third parties to update records The UK's doctors' union has advised members running GP surgeries to turn off certain functionality in their IT system to prevent outside organizations adding to their workloads....

Private sector helped out with week-long operation - but didn't touch China Europol just announced that a week-long operation at the end of June dropped nearly 600 IP addresses that supported illegal copies of Cobalt Strike....

Who could have guessed that giant magnets capable of constraining mini-suns would be hard to build? The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a 35-nation effort to create electricity from nuclear fusion, has torn up its project plans and pushed operations of its tokamak back by at least eight years....

Brain Cipher was never getting the $8 million it demanded anyway Brain Cipher, the group responsible for hacking into Indonesia's Temporary National Data Center (PDNS) and disrupting the country's services, has seemingly apologized for its actions and released an encryption key to the government....

Interoperability with US infrastructure a big selling point Australia's government has announced its intention to build a Top Secret-rated cloud, with help from Amazon Web Services....

You think the US leads the field? Wrong - OpenAI is way down WIPO's charts The World Intellectual Property Organization has counted the patents and scientific publications related to generative AI it could find between 2014 and 2023, and found 54,000 GenAI-related inventions and over 75,000 scientific publications - and that China utterly dominates the field....

Now even the 'droids are being laid off - sheesh! Amazon is axing its Astro for Business robotic security sentry just seven months after announcing the thing....

'We're not there yet' on development of motors without them Comment China tightening its stranglehold on rare earth elements (REEs) makes now the perfect time for the automotive industry to start thinking about alternatives for EV motors, but not a single proposed solution appears ready for reality....

Take that for ignoring robots.txt! Cloudflare on Wednesday offered web hosting customers a way to block AI bots from scraping website content and using the data without permission to train machine learning models....

Zuckerborg's justification isn't good enough, says watchdog Meta's plan to expand its AI presence in South America has been hamstrung, with Brazilian officials today banning the Facebook parent company from using its citizens' data to train AI algorithms....

AEP and Exelon challenge electricity arrangement between power plant and colo DC Utility firms American Electric Power (AEP) and Exelon have filed an official objection with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) over Talen Energy's nuclear power deal with Amazon....

Never risk it when it comes to brisket - make sure those updates are applied Keen meatheads better hope they haven't angered any cybersecurity folk before allowing their Traeger grills to update because a new high-severity vulnerability could be used for all kinds of high jinks....

Late fees? Don't worry, the credit union has you covered San Francisco-based Patelco Credit Union confirms its service outage was the result of ransomware and has pulled systems offline....

Taste at your own risk The Linux Mint project has released the beta version of version 22, codenamed "Wilma" and featuring the latest Cinnamon desktop....

There's a lot of room for improvement in modern computing, from the low end to the very high Two separate development efforts are improving both Raspberry Pi power management and memory efficiency - one using tools built for massive clusters....

Vodafone chasing Three, but BT's complained borged entity would have 'disproportionate' capacity UK telcos Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) have struck a new network sharing agreement with a provision that seems aimed at smoothing the path for Vodafone's planned merger with Three....

The war on the relic is finally won. Now on to fax machines? Japan's digital minister, Taro Kono, confirmed that the Japanese government has finally rid itself of floppy disks....

Promises no pink slips despite service desk in crosshairs BT Group expects to cut its use of third-party support staff in service desk roles after it has introduced GenAI technology from ServiceNow....

Tributes paid to passionate LGBTQ+ equality champion Obit Tech entrepreneur Bruce Wayne Bastian, co-founder of WordPerfect, died last month at the age of 76 at his home in Palmdale, California....

Chill out, no fridge required The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been investigating exotic materials in pursuit of solid-state cooling devices without needing refrigerants or moving parts....

AI is 'like the fast food of creativity' Web and app design toolmaker Figma has temporarily pulled its generative AI "Make Design" feature because it seems to think Apple's Weather app is the be-all and end-all of mobile forecasting....

Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and more from orgs like IETF, W3C, IANA worry if techies are ignored the web could end up centralized Thirty-nine senior figures who have made significant contributions to the online world have written to the United Nations, urging it to reconsider some elements of its Global Digital Compact - an effort to "outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all."...

Outdated tech at Bureau of Industry and Security leaves licensing open to human error The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) - the agency Washington relies on to implement export licensing controls to ensure sanctioned technology doesn't reach certain nations - revealed on Tuesday it's struggling to handle a massively increased workload caused by the ever-growing number of Chinese companies added to the US Entity List, thanks to geriatric technology and systems....

Hype Cycle for datacenter techs also includes augmented reality, new types of memory, nuke power Analyst firm Gartner has published its 2024 Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies, and added virtual-to-physical migrations - aka "devirtualization" - to its list of ideas that are set to take off, thanks to Broadcom's licensing changes....

Slump in Surface sales suspected as one reason for move online Microsoft has closed its physical shops in mainland China, leaving sale of its products to partners and online sellers, including its own website....

AI datacenters blamed for the increase, even as Chocolate Factory bets on AI to fix it With six years left for Google to meet its 2030 "net zero" climate commitment, the web giant has admitted its carbon emissions are rising....

Talk about painfully invasive processes A Texas law requiring adults to show their ID to access online pornography will be heard by the US Supreme Court, setting up a potential domino effect that could undo - or reinforce - similar laws in 18 other states....

And hit AI operators 'with all the fines', says Cory Doctorow The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has proposed that the FTC apply rules prohibiting unfair trade practices to punish those operating deceptive chatbots....

How about a nice game of chess instead? The US Army is keen to integrate commercial private-sector AI algorithms into its operations and it's hoping industry can also figure out how to address the inevitable security concerns that will come from the move....

European neighbors say interference comes from Moscow and Kaliningrad, Kremlin claims it didn't find anything The UN's Radio Regulations Board (RRB) has asked Russia to play nice with Europe and not interfere with satellites....

Time to upgrade that receiver if you're one of the few Swiss that still don't have one able to receive DAB+ signals Swiss radio listeners will soon have to toss out their old sets, as the country plans to end analog FM broadcasting on December 31, 2024, in favor of a total conversion to digital....

Command injection bug being abused by suspected Chinese spies - patch up Cisco switch owners should probably apply the patch that just dropped for a vulnerability that was exploited in April as a zero-day to install malware on an array of its Nexus switches....