The Register

Summit's crowning glory was a not-legally-binding document that China didn't sign The UK government has announced a tech industry agreement it claims will form a plan for AI safety testing....

Complete rebuild of Debian distro optimized for diminutive computer Raspberry Pi OS has undergone more than a modest version upgrade including a new set of tools for writing it to a bootable SD card....

'High-pressure' sales tactics targeted people registered with Telephone Preference Service A "debt management company" is itself facing a bill from Britain's data regulator for sending hundreds of thousands of text messages to households that opted not to receive marketing junk mail....

Annual report reveals 'challenges' around 'commercial and risk appetite' A UK government pensions organization paid Atos 74 million for two years of a 1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) contract, which it then ended 16 years short of its potential 18-year term....

Which? and Uswitch call on UK regulator to tackle specter of bigger bills for Brits come April UK telcos are facing complaints about mid-contract price rises, with 87 percent of consumers saying they should be allowed to simply walk away with no penalty if their provider hikes charges this way. Uswitch and Which? are also calling on Ofcom to end mid-contract hikes altogether....

Working from home, smaller office footprints, and cost cutting made GoogleVille redundant Google and real estate developer Lendlease have binned their scheme to create four master-planned California communities known as the San Francisco Bay Project....

'They were basically using Emacs for their OS, and a custom LISP script to read email' - what could possibly go wrong? On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's chronicle of computing crises that your fellow readers corrected and recalled in sufficient detail to share with us all....

Can't RISC losing them to another ISA Arm Holdings has acquired a minority stake in the popular single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi in a bid to cement its influence over the IoT developer community....

Hardware (other than iPhones) is not so hot, but 'emerging markets' are getting Apple fever Apple has posted revenue of $383.3 billion - or about $12,000 per second - for the year, cracked the billion-subscriber barrier, and welcomed increased demand for its goods and services in new markets....

That is not the plan - nor was a larger loss - so investors whacked the Aussie's share price Atlassian's share price has taken a sharp dive after the Australian collaboration corporation revealed decent results, but predicted its on-prem products would grow faster than its cloud....

'Ejecta halo' detected by orbiter reminds that life on Luna will be dirty, gritty, and sneezy India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has published resrarch that reveals its Chandrayaan-3 mission made quite a mess on the Moon....

Jury took just four hours to reach guilty verdicts Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty of seven criminal charges....

So much for appy cabbies being 'partners' - Big U kept fares low by making 'em pay fees that riders should have picked up Uber and Lyft will hand over $328 million in back pay to more than 100,000 New York drivers, the state's Attorney General Letitia James announced on Thursday....

Or maybe just not let foreign govts buy this stuff at all? The US Commerce Department has promised to stop promoting American-made commercial spyware to foreign governments....

Chocolate Factory to focus on more limited attestation for Android WebViews Amid rising community concern, Google says it will no longer develop controversial technology that was said to fight fraud online though to critics looked more like DRM for websites....

Plus: Beatles emit song with a little help from a neural network Lawyers representing Scarlett Johansson have pressured the developers of an AI avatar-generating app into taking down an advert that used the Hollywood megastar's face and voice without permission....

More details emerge from Loch Jassy, including how this may have been anything but a 'scrapped' project A fresh less-redacted copy of the US FTC's monopoly-abuse lawsuit against Amazon has confirmed some of what we previously reported about the web goliath's secret price-setting algorithm, and spilled a bunch of juicy details, too....

And with a straight face, too. Brussels didn't buy it Apple tried to avoid regulation in the European Union by making a surprising claim - that it offers not one but three distinct web browsers, all coincidentally named Safari....

Zephr bags $3.5M, reckons its tech can pinpoint location to sub-60cm levels Interview A startup that's just emerged from stealth claims it's solved smartphone GPS positioning problems by adding software to triangulate a handset with "sub metre absolute accuracy."...

Online form isn't for just anyone, so stow your crackpot theories for now The Pentagon's UFO hunters have set up an online form to collect first-hand information about secret US government programs involving unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)....

Industry facing burnout scare as workplace issues snowball The proportion of cybersecurity professionals reporting low "happiness ratings" has risen sharply over the last 12 months, raising concerns about increasing burnout rates in the industry....

Over a week later and barely any patches for the 10/10 vulnerability have been applied Security researchers have confirmed that ransomware criminals are capitalizing on a maximum-severity vulnerability in Apache ActiveMQ....

Usage barely measurable so ax will swing on compression dinosaur The Theora video compression codec is finally being put out to pasture as Google pulls it from Chrome and Mozilla mulls the same for Firefox....

As more features come to Data Cloud, customers might want to keep an eye on consumption Cloud data warehouse biz Snowflake has launched a fully managed service designed to rid developers building LLMs into their applications of the onerous task of creating the supporting infrastructure....

The hits keep on coming for troubled ID management biz Updated Okta has sent out breach notifications to almost 5,000 current and former employees, warning them that miscreants breached one of its third-party vendors and stole a file containing staff names, social security numbers, and health or medical insurance plan numbers....

Right on time for results day Cloudflare is having a bad day amid reports of problems with its dashboard and API service following datacenter power issues....

Meanwhile, RISC-V has Uncle Sam rattled China's YMTC is being forced by US sanctions to raise fresh capital, as lawmakers continue to press for tougher action against Beijing, including restrictions on the RISC-V instruction set architecture....

Smartphone sales not nearly so bad and just think of the AI potential for margins Fiscal 2023 could be described as an annus horribilis for mobile chipmaker Qualcomm, but the company, like the smartphone market it sells into, sees better times just around the corner....

We will scan them on the beaches Britain has conducted a maritime trial to collect data for developing AI technology for the Ministry of Defence....

Otherwise known as 0x13 - and not coming to a desktop near you To celebrate Halloween this week, Windows veteran Raymond Chen has dug into the lengthy list of Windows bug check codes and come up with something obscure and vaguely threatening - the Thread Reaper....

Return to flight followed by a trip to Venus Rocket Lab's launch window for its long-awaited mission to Venus opens at the end of 2024 and stretches into 2025....

It's already available on this lightweight Debian spin A new version of the Trinity desktop is out, with a new window-snapping feature. And that's not the only way it's snappy....

Larry promised Brussels 'less risk and cost' and they believed it Oracle has signed a deal with the European Commission to provide Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and its platform services across EU administrations....

24 million more angry iPhone users get their turn to give iGiant a kicking The UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal has allowed a case to proceed in which Apple will be accused of misleading iPhone users about the state of their smartphone batteries, potentially exposing Apple to a billion-dollar payout....

We'd make some kind of Sun sets joke here but it's too early in the morning Intel, Dell, and the University of Cambridge are today talking up Dawn, a UK supercomputer that's being deployed as you read this....

Scientists offer explanation for origin of two anomalous structures nestled within our world The remains of a giant ancient space rock that scientists believe collided with Earth billions of years may be hiding deep below Earth's surface, according to a research paper published in Nature on Wednesday....

Updated T&Cs reveal intent to restrict access under undefined circumstances Microsoft has changed the terms and conditions for its online services to include warning that excessive" users of its generative AI services will have their access restricted....

The day after Halloween, at a slightly less scary price than LG, HPE, and ASUS charge for their folding laptops Lenovo has finally delivered the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16 folding laptop, more than a year after teasing the device....

Won't say if it's LockBit, but LockBit appears to have claimed credit. Maybe payment, too Boeing has acknowledged a cyber incident just days after ransomware gang LockBit reportedly exfiltrated sensitive data from the aerospace defence contractor....

Alibaba service fined as Beijing calls for online platforms to name major creators and deploy kid-mode services China's Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has punished Alibaba-owned search engine Quark and livestreaming platform NetEase for content it deemed vulgar....

Of course, he would say that, wouldn't he? As the expiration date for the Feds' Section 702 surveillance powers draws closer, FBI Director Christopher Wray has warned a US Senate committee that his agents may not be able to stop the next major cyberattack if lawmakers allow the contentious spying authorization to lapse....

Changes gone down about as well as a hard reboot on a production DB IBM is set to shake up its retirement benefits in 2024 much to the alarm of at least some staff....

5,448 GraceHopper superchips and 200PFLOPS gets you somewhere in the global public top ten The UK government says it will cough up 225 million ($273 million) for a supercomputer capable of more than 200 petaFLOPS of double-precision performance, with the University of Bristol to house the machine and Nvidia providing the core computing components....

Advarra probes intrusion claims, says 'the matter is contained' Ransomware crooks claim they've stolen data from a firm that helps other organizations run medical trials after one of its executives had their cellphone number and accounts hijacked....

EU folks have no chill, not that we're complaining European officials have told Ireland's privacy watchdog to impose a ban on Meta's processing of personal data for behavioral advertising throughout the European single market within the next two weeks....

Middle Kingdom or self-immolation - there are a couple of theories The Mozi botnet has all but disappeared according to security folks who first noticed the prolific network's slowdown and then uncovered a kill switch for the IoT system. But they still have one unanswered question: "Who killed Mozi?"...

Have another great quarter? Time to get rid of some staff, then Enterprise analytics software specialist Splunk, which Cisco plans to purchase for $28 billion, has decided it needs to lay off 7 percent of the workforce....

Parts sent to Moscow allegedly found on Ukrainian battlefields Three Russian nationals were arrested in New York yesterday on charges of moving electronics components worth millions to sanctioned entities in Russia, pieces of which were later recovered on battlefields in Ukraine....

Better make sure you really need it on the day. Paid upfront and no modifications to orders allowed AWS has come up with a new money-making scheme - letting customers desperate for GPU resources pay to reserve them for scheduled dates and times, paid upfront, and with no order modification allowed....

Refresh rate glitch could leave MacBook Pro 14" and 16" models unbootable Asahi Linux, a project to port Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has reported a combination of bugs in Apple's macOS that could leave users with hardware in a difficult-to-recover state....