The Register

European Commission says 12-month investigation could lead to fine of up to 10% of global revenue The European Commission is opening its first official probes under the Digital Markets Act with a focus on curbing the power of tech titans Apple, Meta, and Alphabet via threats of heavy fines....

It's just not economical for Chipzilla to be the factories' only customer these days Intel is keen to get its Foundry Services strategy off the ground and draw in more customers. With this in mind, it's made a move to cultivate Elon Musk and finalized an agreement with Arm intended to make it easier for chip designers to get their products built....

After declaring the end of CHIEF at least five times in as many years, HMRC hopes this June 2024 date will stick The UK's tax collector has named the date for migrating from a 30-year-old customs IT system for the fifth time in as many years after planning its replacement for more than a decade....

The CNCF is looking for a tenth anniversary logo Logowatch Are you feeling creative? To celebrate ten years of Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is seeking a design for an anniversary logo. Perhaps just the letters A and I crudely taped onto a ship's wheel would do the job?...

Move could 'weaken' Brits' personal data rights when info is transferred outside Europe Comment The UK government's proposed data protection law reform seeks to create a more business-friendly regime, though its implementation could further complicate the international flow of data between Britain and Europe, which potentially outweighs any benefits to business....

As Good Law Project considers response, ICO slams failure to comply with FoI request The UK health department has republished its contracts with US spy-tech company Palantir, blanking out fewer sections, following a warning from legal campaigners....

Mistakes years in the making tell a universal story that must not be ignored Opinion Quiz time: name one thing you know about the Library of Alexandria. Points deducted for "it's a library. In Alexandria." Looking things up is cheating and you know it....

Greybeards thought it was clever, making this an educational experience in more ways than one Who, Me? Welcome once again, dear reader, to Who, Me? - the cathartic corner of The Register wherein, once a week, we hand over to our readers, such as yourself, so that they may unburden themselves about times when things did not quite go according to plan....

Banks on allowing BYO external storage to make migrations less painful Artisanal server vendor SoftIron smells blood in the water since Broadcom's acquisition of VMware led to considerable price hikes for many users, so has developed an alternative server virtualization platform whose key selling point is the ability to run with existing external storage hardware....

United Nations finds IT contract and crypto scams are just two of DPRK's illicit menu items If you dine out at an Asian restaurant on your next holiday, the United Nations thinks your meal could help North Korea to launder money....

2024 may be the year of Linux On The Arm-or-RISC-desktop as China moves away from Western tech AMD and Intel are not present on a list of processors approved by China's Information Security Evaluation Center....

ALSO: Viasat hack wiper malware is back, users are the number one cause of data loss, and critical vulns Infosec in brief If your Windows domain controllers have been crashing since a security update was installed earlier this month, there's no longer any need to speculate why: Microsoft has admitted it introduced a memory leak in its March patches and fixed the issue....

PLUS: Tencent's profit plunge; Singtel to build three AI datacenters; McDonald's China gobbles Microsoft AI Asia In Brief Samsung has reportedly secured a massive sale of an AI accelerator it plans to launch in 2025....

Easy to exploit, not yet exploited, not widely patched - pick three As many as 300,000 servers or devices on the public internet are thought to be vulnerable right now to the recently disclosed Loop Denial-of-Service technique that works against some UDP-based application-level services....

Just 35.5M names, addresses, emails, phone numbers ... no biggie Clothing and footwear giant VF Corporation is letting 35.5 million of its customers know they may find themselves victims of identity theft following last year's security breach....

CEO Scott Johnston on company pivots and trying not to surprise the community Interview As the IT industry faces an inflection point thanks to AI, lessons can be learned from Docker in how a company can - or must - pivot in the face of a changing reality....

FOSS CLI package management framework for repeatable, declarative deployments across multiple platforms FOSDEM Flox aims to make Nix easier for newcomers, simplifying the job of installing identical development environments across Linux and macOS....

Forget the Riesling, bring on the WINELOADER The Kremlin's cyberspies targeted German political parties in a phishing campaign that used emails disguised as dinner party invitations, according to Mandiant....

Of course it's called ERNIE seeing as Google has BERT Future iPhones in China could include AI features powered by Baidu's ERNIE chat bot....

This is why Big Biz wants to dismantle America's crucial regulators The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has challenged SpaceX's severance agreements, alleging the paperwork unlawfully limits what staff can say and do once they leave the rocket maker....

Crew may well be working under contract for Beijing Chinese spies exploited a couple of critical-severity bugs in F5 and ConnectWise equipment earlier this year to sell access to compromised US defense organizations, UK government agencies, and hundreds of other entities, according to Mandiant....

'Problematic' carriers can look forward to scrutiny, fines, and new rules Ever suspected an airline was using your data to upsell, overcharge, target you with ads, or was selling it to third parties? Worried about how secure their systems are when you input that passport number? The US Department of Transportation is looking into it with a review of the country's ten biggest airlines....

As months go by without fixes, hotels take the scenic route to securing rooms Around 3 million doors protected by popular keycard locks are thought to be vulnerable to security flaws that allow miscreants to quickly slip into locked rooms....

'Safe, secure and trustworthy' AI a must, says document, but nothing in it ensures anyone plays along The United Nations has unanimously adopted a resolution aimed at establishing international AI development standards....

Short of redesigning CPUs, the fix will seriously degrade performance A side-channel vulnerability has been found in the architecture of Apple Silicon processors that gives malicious apps the ability to extract cryptographic keys from memory that should be off limits....

In wake of Post Office Horizon scandal, global execs set new profit target, and Irish ops fell short Exclusive Fujitsu is effectively shuttering business operations in the Republic of Ireland and opening consultations with employee representatives before the majority of the workforce is made redundant....

Security world reacts as NIST does a lot less of oft criticized, 'almost always thankless' work Opinion The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has almost completely stopped adding analysis to Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) listed in the National Vulnerability Database. That means big headaches for anyone using CVEs to maintain their security....

Google claims rival has made an 'art and science' out of licensing Exclusive Google says the European Union's antitrust authorities have asked if Microsoft unfairly ties authentication to Azure, in a further sign that officials are considering multiple aspects of Redmond's policies....

Price hikes and reduced competition in virtual network space raised as major concerns Vodafone and Three UK have mere days to convince Britain's competition authorities that a merger won't harm consumers. Failure to do so will result in a deeper probe of the proposed corporate marriage....

Kubecon? More like Queuecon as Paris-based show's registration system fails The European leg of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) Kubecon shindig kicked off this week with an AI-infused keynote and a broken registration system that left many attendees locked out....

Regulatory body insists it's on 'a journey of improvement' Updated Exclusive The UK Information Commissioner's Office has received a complaint detailing the mismanagement of personal data at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the regulator that oversees worker registration....

Nothing, according to its user. But the techie who tried to fix it found a sweet solution On Call As another week ebbs away, The Register hopes that readers have a nice warm cup of whatever they fancy beside them as we present another instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of the trials and tribulations of tech support....

FOSS developers gotta eat, but users need certainty Leading in-memory database vendor Redis is switching to a dual-license approach, imposing far more restrictive terms....

Doing things outside the walled garden is kinda hard, devs admit Meta's totally-not-a-Twitter clone, Threads, has joined the Fediverse....

Washington was most displeased and New Delhi knew it made a mistake India was subjected to intense US lobbying after suddenly imposing a requirement that computer importers obtain a license, according to a news report on Thursday....

CompSci and math professor by trade, he envisaged a galactic Usenet, and was utterly brilliant Obituary Science fiction author and academic Vernor Vinge has departed this life, aged 79....

Rights groups protested potential for sneaky censorship of political rivals India's supreme court on Thursday halted a plan to activate a government-run fact-checking unit that would assess info posted about the nation's government posted to social media platforms - the day after it was told to commence operations....

First tests of manycore fibres hailed as success over oceanic distances Japanese tech titans NTT and NEC reckon they've proven the performance of a novel fiber optic technology that could increase capacity of submarine cables by a factor of 12....

The device that makes it possible is required in all American big rigs, and has poor security Vulnerabilities in common Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) required in US commercial trucks could be present in over 14 million medium- and heavy-duty rigs, according to boffins at Colorado State University....

You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout, they're telling you why The US government has recommended a series of steps that critical infrastructure operators should take to prevent distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks....

Redmond says it does what it's told, but still thinks users are better off Microsoft is the subject of growing criticism in the US over allegations that its Bing search engine censors results for users in China that relate to sensitive subjects the state wants blocked....

At least we can all agree on something The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would prohibit data brokers from selling Americans' data to foreign adversaries with an unusual degree of bipartisan support: It passed without a single opposing vote....

Upgraded fondleslab and laptops limited to business buyers only, for now At a virtual press conference on Thursday, Microsoft showed off the latest additions to its Surface hardware via an updated tablet and business laptops that Redmond assures us are built for using AI for just about everything....

Rules still unclear for Microsoft users making potentially costly decisions on enterprise applications Microsoft needs to clarify licensing arrangements around its low-code Power Apps and Dynamics 365 software to prevent users from receiving unexpected bills for their projects....

While excited by the implant, Noland Arbaugh says it's not perfect and there's still work to be done Neuralink's first human patient is now a public figure, with the company publishing a video yesterday showing him playing chess on a laptop and talking about how "freakin' lucky" he is to be involved in the tests....

Spawn of Citrix and Tibco 'no longer able to support the community edition of JasperReports Server' Even if you decide to stop offering free editions, you don't get to stop providing the source code to FOSS, users of JasperReports Server are complaining....

MarineMax may be in choppy waters after 'stolen data' given million-dollar price tag The Rhysida ransomware group claims it was responsible for the cyberattack at US luxury yacht dealer MarineMax earlier this month....

Lawsuit alleges iGiant rips off fans, stifles dev innovation, makes it tough to dump iOS for rivals The US Department of Justice has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple, accusing the iMaker of stifling innovation and undermining competitors through its App Store guidelines and developer agreements....

You have my sword ... and my bow ... and my axe! Meta, Microsoft, X, and Match Group are piling on Apple in support of Epic Games' ongoing legal battle over the Cupertino giant's stranglehold on its App Store....

'Our HBM is sold out for calendar 2024,' trills CEO Micron is basking in a market bounceback, crediting the surge of interest in AI for a jump in the company's revenue, even though buyers face the prospect of rising memory prices for the year ahead....