The Register

Nobody expects more flexible string parsing Python 3.12, the latest stable release of the Python programming language, was released on Monday, offering developers a handful of new capabilities and the removal of some cruft....

Detailed design and long lead contracts signed off for SSN-AUKUS project The UK government has signed off on contracts worth 4 billion ($4.8 billion) to start the design and long lead phase for building the next generation of nuclear-powered attack submarines....

Yet history tells us it's an ever present temptation to grab greater chunks of the stack Rather than MongoDB's AI-powered SQL converter, natural language queries, or ML visualization releases, it's the document database company's strategy for vertical markets that is catching one analyst's eye....

Ofcom to refer findings to CMA - which insiders say will home in on egress fees, interoperability and licensing The Reg can reveal that UK's comms regulator Ofcom is expected to refer the findings of its six-month inquiry into the health of Britain's cloud computing landscape to the Competition Markets Authority later this week for a deeper probe....

Just because you're paranoid... We're sure you'll be pleased to know Microsoft Defender has stopped mistakenly breaking the latest version of Tor Browser. The antivirus tool had flagged and quarantined the application's core tor.exe program as a trojan, causing the software to stop working as desired....

Eurolauncher won't fly again until 2024 as it awaits another redesign The Vega-C rocket will not return to launch until late 2024 because a test on a redesigned nozzle failed, the European Space Agency revealed on Monday....

Some may be made in India, where the Big G has teamed to make kit with HP Google has added a 'Plus' designation to its Chromebook spec that requires machines to offer at least an Intel Core i3 12th Gen or above, or AMD Ryzen 3 7000, plus 8GB of memory and 128GB of onboard storage....

CYNEX Alliance brings industry, government, and academia together to share info and devise tools Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology yesterday launched the CYNEX Alliance - an entity charged with fostering local development of security tools and encouraging their adoption by local industry to reduce dependence on imported infosec tools....

Plus: Philippine state health insurance knocked offline by ransomware, China relaxes data export laws, and more Asia in brief Zhu Su, co-founder of fallen crypto business Three Arrows Capital (3AC), was arrested last Friday at Changi Airport in Singapore as he attempted to leave the country....

Fixes about to flow, perhaps along with an iSearch engine Apple has warned that a bug in the iOS 17 software powering its latest iPhone 15 Pro model is causing smartphones to overheat....

End-of-life systems still in use, poor inventory control, and China's hunting The US Department of State has largely failed to implement an effective cybersecurity risk program, auditors concluded in a report last week. That means a crucial arm of the American government is potentially wide open to cyberattacks it may not be able to identify or stop....

Basically, it's 'not going to work' Exclusive In July, the White House announced that seven large tech players have committed to AI safety measures, including the deployment of watermarking to ensure that algorithmically-generated content can be distinguished from the work of actual people....

Better late than never, we guess An urgent ransomware warning from the Feds has some industry analysts scratching their heads and wondering if Uncle Sam's noggin has been buried in the sand for too long....

I'm not a smart man, but I know it should be cast away A dental healthcare advert featuring what looks like a younger Tom Hanks dressed in a black suit is fake and AI-generated, the Forrest Gump actor has warned....

A petabyte or more a day of readings? No problem, pal In preparation for its latest round of ion-smashing tests, CERN boosted its storage array for the experiments to more than one million terabytes in total size....

One (very) small leap for humanity's future in space NASA has announced plans to fund eight short-term research projects aimed at improving our understanding of space's effects on the human body, but all eight will have to share just $1.5 million in funding to accomplish their goals....

Keep rollin', rollin', rollin', rollin' The openSUSEproject is undergoing changes that, to us at least, indicate a multiplicity of future directions for the code base....

Irony alert: Complaint cites defendant as claiming X 'did not even pay rent for such period' Elon Musk's X Corp is suing a former subtenant for breach of contract, saying it owes X nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in unpaid rent and early lease termination fees - ironic as Twitter itself is being sued for not allegedly paying rent on the same building....

Agency boss warns enemies trying to nick AI advances and 'corrupt our application of it' The US National Security Agency (NSA) is trying to head off trouble early by opening an office to oversee the development and integration of AI capabilities into defense and national security systems....

It looks like you're a perpetual Office user who needs a hidden feature disabled. Would you like help? Microsoft has issued a patch to resolve an unwanted Outlook prompt that urges users to reopen items from a previous session....

Good news: More science. Bad news: Somebody has to pay for it NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which performed a flyby of Pluto in 2015, is being granted a mission extension through 2029....

Early signs emerge after Progress Software said there were no active attempts last week Security researchers have spotted what they believe to be a "possible mass exploitation" of vulnerabilities in Progress Software's WS_FTP Server....

No formal moves yet, but massive demand for GPUs has drawn its attention The European Commission is said to be monitoring the AI-driven chipmakers for potential anticompetitive practices, though no formal investigation has been announced....

Auditors issue new deadline following ill-fated migration IT teams at Europe's largest local authority are being given less than two months to get their disastrous Oracle system fit to provide finance reports and close down accounts....

Ride-share app originally told man they'd charge him $20 for Tux's return One man's hunt for his cat captivated an entire town, and the internet, after a Lyft driver allegedly sped off with the kitty still inside on Saturday afternoon....

Security exec Mark Ryland spills the tea on hush-hush threat intel tool Interview AWS has unveiled MadPot, its previously secret threat-intelligence tool that one of the cloud giant's security execs tells us has thwarted Chinese and Russian spies - and millions of bots....

Skills shortage is also holding industry back, survey finds The datacenter industry is caught between conflicting demands: the pressure to deliver projects faster, while product and skills shortages lead to delays....

It's about time! Set your watches! Scientists have set the clock ticking for the development of a new generation of timepieces with accuracy of up to 1 second in 300 billion years or about 22 times the age of the universe....

How's he done? tl;dr - not very well Opinion Next month will see the first anniversary of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. The rest of the media will be full of analyses on what's gone right and wrong, and what it means for Musk and our perception of his business acumen....

Tech's second day on the job nearly saw his high-flying career grounded Who, me? What? Monday again? Didn't we just do one of those last week? Oh well, if we must, dear reader, we must. Welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers regale us with reports of righteous wrongness....

Plus: Mistral emits uncensored model, Meta expands Llama 2's context window, Alexa drills into your voice AI In Brief OpenAI is rolling out upgrades for GPT-4 that will, among other things, allow the AI model to answer queries from a user about a submitted image - and the super-lab has at least documented some safety risks involving that ability....

Consensus is cuts and spin-offs are coming, whether they'll help is another matter Broadcom's takeover of VMware is on track to conclude in just over four weeks, and while the semiconductor company's CEO Hock Tan has pledged extra cash for R&D to boost Virtzilla's multicloud offerings, The Register has also heard of looming job cuts, and noted silence on whether some of VMware's products figure in Broadcom's plans....

Taiwanese brand is a portability and productivity contender Desktop Tourism The Register has sensibly struck a deal with a global PC provider who dispatches machines to vultures wherever they work around the world. After spending time with the ASUS Zenbook S 13, I wish that supplier was ASUS because the machine does everything right....

No, that does not mean you can leave it at home just yet Last week the internet was abuzz with talk that Singapore's commercial Changi airport was no longer going to require passports for clearance at immigration. Although it is true the paper documentation will be replaced by biometric measures, it's not quite time to pack the document away....

Plus: Johnson Controls hit by IT 'incident', Exim and Chrome security updates, and more Infosec in brief Progress Software, maker of the mass-exploited MOVEit document transfer tool, is back in the news with more must-apply security patches, this time for another file-handling product: WS_FTP....

Google says Topics warning is anti-innovative fearmongering The Electronic Frontier Foundation has urged folks to switch off several Privacy Sandbox settings in Google Chrome to mask their online habits, or to consider switching to Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari....

Given it was first due to blast off last year, what's another week or so? NASA has pushed back the launch date of its Psyche asteroid probe to October 12 as engineers make sure the spacecraft's nitrogen gas thrusters work as needed....

We thought you people loved spending dollars, what gives? China has formally asked the United States to reconsider rules curbing investments in companies based in the Middle Kingdom....

From AI to just plain aaaiiiee! Microsoft introduced its Bing Chat AI search assistant in February and a month later began serving ads alongside it to help cover costs....

'Research purposes' excuse didn't fly A PhD student has been found guilty of building a potentially deadly drone for Islamic State terrorists, in part using his home 3D printer....

Now have a look at these third-party alternatives from our partners, says Chocolate Factory Customers aren't usually left with a mostly useless 55-inch Android tablet when Google sends another of its many services to the graveyard, but here we are. The Jamboard and its accompanying apps will cease to work in a little more than a year....

A changed RMS appeared at the GNU 40th anniversary event in Switzerland Richard Stallman has revealed he is undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of cancer of the white blood cells, but says thathis prognosis is good....

Like some sort of bizarro greatest hits album, the EEOC case sounds just like multiple previous suits The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit against Tesla alleging "widespread and ongoing racial harassment of Black employees," at the company's Fremont, California plant....

Fancy running Windows, Linux and Classic MacOS on your modern x86-64 or Arm64 Mac? Walk this way Friday FOSS Fest UTM is a handy hypervisor for Macs and Apple fondleslabs, but it's more than just that. It has some very particular skills. We are quite taken with it....

But Meta was just about to start asking people for their permission! Norway has told the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) it believes a countrywide ban on Meta harvesting user data to serve up advertising on Facebook and Instagram should be made permanent and extended across Europe....

Whatever the cause, MNVO customers not happy UK government orders to remove Huawei equipment from Britain's 5G networks have reportedly led to outages for customers of Sky Mobile....

NHS also launches 2M project to engage patients with data strategy The contract award for the 480 million ($588 million) NHS Federated Data Platform - a huge analytics project for one of the world's largest healthcare providers - has been delayed by a few weeks....

Or very right? Either way, it's not the usual atomic op we see in IT Kettle The growth of electricity-hungry datacenters is causing some operators to fear for their power security and consider the nuclear option. In this week's Kettle The Register discusses how practical this is....

Can the sleeping fox ever wake up? Comment Mozilla seems to be asleep at the wheel, when it once drove online activity and communications. We have some suggestions where it could go....

Or how one pesky press release ruined a vacation Interview One victim of HashiCorp's license change was the vacation of Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation....