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Biz says it's just following EU rules instead Italy's finance police, the Guardia di Finanzia, has seized $836 million (779 million) from Airbnb that the plod claims is unpaid tax....

Months of work reveals how this tricky malware family targets... the financial services sector A brand-new macOS malware strain from North Korean state-sponsored hackers has been spotted in the wild....

Three-year-old cores, but hey - they're cheap, relatively speaking Nearly a year after launching 4th-gen Epycs, AMD still isn't ready to retire the 3rd-Gen processor family, confirming it is now extending availability of the line through 2026 and revealing six new-ish SKUs....

Repeat performance will be able to return to Earth and might one day carry crew The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to return to the International Space Station (ISS) cargo delivery business by 2028, judging by announcements made at ESA Space Summit in Seville....

Running infrastructure in the tropics has its challenges - but so do failed disaster recovery plans Outages at two banks that stopped 2.5 million payment transactions were sparked by a technical issue with the datacenter's cooling system, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Monday....

America could drive innovation... or inject fear and doubt and kill off choice Continued pressure by US lawmakers to restrict China's access to RISC-V has been called into question....

Green move comes against backdrop of 82 energy-sucking bit barns with growing power draw needs Ireland looks set to get a datacenter powered entirely by fuel cell technology thanks to an agreement between a local company and a division of Korean conglomerate SK Group....

Traditional Unix sanity plus your choice of MATE or Xfce The first new version of GhostBSD in over a year is here. If you want to try FreeBSD, Linux's most credible rival and competitor in the FOSS OS marketplace, there's no easier way....

The cloud-only move may leave out devs writing for on-prem systems, which still make up the majority SAP is the latest to bring a set of AI-assisted coding features to its cloud-based application development environments, joining a slew of vendors making similar announcements. However, developers and analysts say they're concerned the same tech is not be available for on-prem systems they are working on migrating and lifting to the cloud....

Literally... Systems Approach Perhaps the single biggest aspect of systems building I've come to appreciate since shifting my focus from academic pursuits to open source software development is the importance of testing and test automation....

And decided Intel's GPUs are worthy of on-prem AI action VMware hasn't been sitting on its hands while waiting for Broadcom to buy it: it has spent the past couple of years planning a move on the data services market....

A little peek behind the control panel, analytics curtain Cloudflare has explained how it believes it suffered that earlier multi-day control plane and analytics outage....

But plenty of tech folk wish management would just leave them alone IBM's Red Hat has some good news for UK businesses, with a survey putting Blighty's businesses ahead of competitors in Germany, France, and Spain when it comes to enterprise-wide IT automation....

Health records, financial situations, religious leanings, it's all out there, or so this study says The sensitive personal information of US military personnel and their families is available from US data brokers for a pittance, Duke University academics have found....

Mass production of C-3POs pitched for 2025 Beijing is issuing guidelines on the development of humanoid robots with the lofty goal of mass producing the technology by 2025 and having a reliable supply chain by 2027....

As Meta promises to stop political advertisers from using its generative ML tools In what may be another example of AI bias for future textbooks, WhatsApp's sticker maker apparently generated violent imagery when asked about Muslim Palestinians - and refrained from doing so for Jewish Israelis....

18 months in the slammer no laughing matter, but the rest... maybe A 34-year-old woman has been jailed for 18 months after trying to use Rentahitman.com - no, really - to pay a contract killer to eliminate a rival she was beefing with. Her would-be assassin-for-hire unsurprisingly turned out to be an FBI agent....

Plus: Doritos 'trials AI software' to mute noise of chip-crunching gamers Video Microsoft today started what it promises will be a multi-year partnership with an AI gaming startup that will let developers use generative neural networks to create characters, dialog, and adventures for Xbox games....

Audit: Craptastic security potentially put govt info in hands of enemies America's immigration cops have pushed back against an official probe that concluded their lax mobile device security potentially put sensitive government information at risk of being stolen by foreign snoops....

Neural network lab also plans to open app store with revenue sharing Video OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and less memorably branded AI models, held its first developer conference on Monday in San Francisco, where it announced a new foundational model, more affordable pricing, customizable, low-code models called GPTs, and a store to distribute them....

They're ugly but UV lighting blamed for human damage, not the dumb idea We've heard of getting burned by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but this is a new one: attendees at a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) event over the weekend in Hong Kong are reporting eye pain and difficulty seeing after an evening party went wrong....

Fortnite-maker largely lost against Apple, but can it beat the Chocolate Factory? Another front is opening in Google's antitrust war today, as a trial between the search giant and Fortnite dev Epic Games over Google's Play Store fees is kicking off in a California court....

Nothing is certain except death and taxes Heirs of Samsung patriarch billionaire Lee Kun-hee are selling approximately US$2 billion (2.6 trillion won) of company shares, reportedly to help pay off the inheritance tax due after his 2020 death....

And that includes ransomware crims, claims US of alleged sanctions-buster A Russian woman the US accuses of being a career money launderer is the latest to be sanctioned by the country for her alleged role in moving hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of oligarchs and ransomware criminals....

Which way is up? Just feel the vibrations, man Spatial disorientation among pilots led to 101 deaths, 65 lost aircraft and $2.32 billion of damages in the US Airforce between 1993 and 2013, according to research. The problem also hits astronauts, whose senses can be bamboozled when they are severed from the familiar pull of Earth's gravity....

See? It's not just Chromebooks. Now how about some flexibility around Win 10? Microsoft will offer driver and firmware updates for its Surface devices for an additional two years, claiming the decision is in response to customer demand. This comes after Google promised its rival Chromebook devices will get updates for a decade....

Plus: CVSS 4.0 is here, this week's critical vulns, and 'incident' hit loan broker promises no late fees. Generous Infosec in brief Okta has confirmed details of its October breach, reporting that the incident led to the compromise of files belonging to 134 customers, "or less than 1 percent of Okta customers."...

Getting contributions out of freeloaders Exclusive Element has become the latest company to change its open source license, but rather than going down a source-available path, it has opted to move from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3....

Plus: AI companies enter non-binding agreement to governmental safety tests of models, and more AI In Brief X, the micro-blogging site formerly known as Twitter, revealed its "first AI" to a select group of users over the weekend....

Dodged Apollo 13 disaster because of rubella, but helped to rescue the crew Obit Thomas K Mattingly II, command module pilot of Apollo 16 and commander of two Space Shuttle missions, has died aged 87....

Southend-on-Sea Council unwittingly exposed sensitive records of more than 2,000 staff for five months Southend-on-Sea City Council has reported a data breach, joining a growing list of UK public sector organizations to have accidentally and illegally exposed sensitive files this year....

A load of hot air? The UK government is stumping up 36 million ($41.4 million) to help support a green energy project that aims to use waste heat from a datacenter to keep nearby homes warm....

Ad blockers are firewalls for our sanity - turning them off is madness Opinion YouTube wants its pound of flesh. Disable your ad blocker or pay for Premium, warns a new message being shown to an unsuspecting test audience, with the barely hidden subtext of "you freeloading scum." Trouble is, its ad blocker detecting mechanism doesn't exactly comply with EU law, say privacy activists. Ask for user permission or taste regulatory boot. All good clean fun....

Curious tech learned an important lesson about keeping a grip in tight situations Who, me? Oh for heavens' sakes is it Monday already? Far out. Well, if you're here anyway, you may as well read another instalment of Who, Me? - The Register's weekly attempt to look on the bright side of the working week by revelling in the misfortune of others....

PLUS: China's taikonauts return from space, India approves PC licenses, and Foxconn founder presidential campaign investigated for bribes Alibaba announced on Friday it would make Salesforce cloud products and platform available on its Cloud Platfrom beginning December 18, 2023....

Commerce minister would love if US chipmaker took root in Chinese market Micron's fortunes in China appear to be on the mend after the Middle Kingdom's commerce minister invited the US chipmaker to expand its investments in the region....

But the astronomical performance thresholds mean few ML operators will be required to report at this rate Comment The White House wants to know who is deploying AI compute clusters and training large language models - but for now only the really, really, big ones....

No promises it's actually secure, just that it doesn't do anything obviously dumb Google wants to help Android users find more trustworthy VPN apps through better badging alerting to independent audits....

Watchdog on a tear to level the playing field Amazon and Meta have agreed to not use data collected from their marketplaces to unfairly benefit themselves, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority announced on Friday....

Taking selfie with 'official sensitive' doc wasn't smartest idea, either A British court has sentenced a "corrupt" police analyst to almost four years behind bars for tipping off a friend that officers had compromised the EncroChat encrypted messaging app network....

Firefox Android add-ons coming soon At long last, Mozilla is planning to make browser extensions, also known as add-ons, available for Firefox on Android, at some point following the expected November 21 release of the browser's version 120 build....

Whinges about Chrome maker's privacy stance while taking billions to, er, use its search engine The US Department of Justice released a series of documents in its antitrust trial against Google yesterday, including documents that reveal Apple made its default search deal with the Chocolate Factory despite considerable privacy reservations....

Look, in the sky - it's a, oh, never mind The US Army has taken delivery of its first drone-cooking weapon designed to knock unmanned aerial systems (UAS) out of the air using high-powered microwave beams....

Credit card numbers, security codes, SSNs, passwords, PINs? Yikes! Hilb Group has warned more than 81,000 people that around the start of 2023 criminals broke into the work email accounts of its employees and may have stolen a bunch of sensitive personal information....

Terrorist ideology suspected to be motivation A former software developer for Britain's cyberspy agency is facing years in the slammer after being sentenced for stabbing a National Security Agency (NSA) official multiple times....

Meanwhile, Boeing's constellation dreams crash back down to Earth SpaceX's satellite broadband service Starlink has achieved "breakeven cash flow," according to CEO Elon Musk, sparking speculation that a public offering for the company might now be on the cards....

Meta faces personal info processing ban, needs to Thread the trademark needle in the UK, while Musk loses out Kettle Social networks, once thought to have all-encompassing power to change our mood or voting strategy, have been hitting wall after wall this week....

Secure Future Initiative needed in wake of tech evolution and unrelenting ransomware criminality Microsoft has made fresh commitments to harden the security of its software and cloud services after a year in which numerous members of the global infosec community criticized the company's tech defenses....

Technical Steering Committee also formed The OpenELA team this week trumpeted public release of the Enterprise Linux source code and formation of a technical steering committee....

Small businesses need not apply Microsoft has made Microsoft 365 Copilot generally available for enterprises worldwide. But you'll need to buy at least 300 seats for the privilege and customers are not feeling festive....