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Beijing reckons they could be handy for manufacturing, but for now they're just a mess China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced Monday it will form a working group to set metaverse standards - becuase without them, metaversal matters have meandered....

Local corporate regulator warns boards that cyber is totally a directorial duty Australia will build "six cyber shields around our nation" declared home affairs minister Clare O'Neill yesterday, as part of a national cyber security strategy....

CVs are starting to appear on social media because staff think it's a sensible time to be in the shop window VMware last week held a staff meeting at which it reportedly foreshadowed job cuts - perhaps before its acquisition by Broadcom closes in late October....

A different type of ARM - the Augmented Reality Microscope Google has contributed software to an AI-powered microscope the US Department of Defense hopes will help pathologists spot cancerous cells in tissue samples much more quickly....

US DoE particle will be a 'strobe light' in atomic disco The world's most powerful publicly known X-ray laser at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has fired its first pulses with an upgrade that could see it scan our world in strange new ways....

Unauthenticated and remote code execution possible without dropping a file on disk About 79 percent of public-facing Juniper SRX firewalls remain vulnerable to a single security flaw can allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code on the devices, according to threat intelligence platform provider VulnCheck....

Don't get too excited, tech won't be ready until the end of the decade Intel's latest gambit to keep Moores' Law on life support involves ditching organic substrates - the intermediary through which data and power flows on its way in and out of a compute die - for glass ones....

Board member sold off stock just before listing, Lyft forgot to mention it Ride sharing firm Lyft has agreed to pay the US Securities and Exchange Commission $10 million to settle charges that it failed to report a company director's role in a massive pre-IPO stock deal....

Now-NASA boffin not impressed Last October, Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) was sued by a former chief information officer for allegedly falsifying government security compliance reports....

Rumors point to Panay headed to Amazon to take over for outgoing Alexa and Echo chief David Limp Panos Panay, Microsoft chief product officer and VP for devices, abruptly announced his departure today after 19 years with the company....

ITC judge rules you can't sue over invalid patents, but the fight goes on The years-long legal drama resulting from a brief fling between Google and smart speaker maker Sonos has resulted in another loss for the Chocolate Factory, which had its claims of copyright infringement tossed out by a US International Trade Commission (ITC) judge Friday....

Included secrets, private keys, passwords, 30,000+ internal Teams messages A Microsoft employee accidentally exposed 38 terabytes of private data while publishing a bucket of open-source AI training data on GitHub, according to Wiz security researchers who spotted the leaky account and reported it to the Windows giant....

Yet another attempt at a permanent takedown - but will it stick? A group of large US science and education publishers are trying to get "notorious" online database Library Genesis -known by students as LibGen - kicked offline and claw back some of the cash they allege the owners made from copyright infringement....

US military enlists public to help track down missing jet Updated Anyone who has ever misplaced their car keys can sympathize with the US military, which has reportedly lost one of its F-35 stealth fighters after the pilot ejected but the aircraft continued flying, and is now seeking public help to find it....

At least it was the weekend Azure SQL Database caused some annoyance over the weekend with admins on the US east coast unable to connect to the service following a network infrastructure power failure....

Run 3 reboot provoked challenges for Europe's particle-smashing project Europe's particle accelerator at CERN spews out around a petabyte of data daily, which means monitoring the computing infrastructure that processes the data is crucial....

Auditors unable to sign off accounts partly due to lack of IT controls amid challenging ERP deployment Birmingham City Council turned off security features on its Oracle ERP system, meaning auditors have been unable to sign off the accounts for Europe's largest local government body, which effectively went bankrupt earlier this year....

Little chip promises big power savings AMD's latest CPU is a shrunken Epyc optimized for power-limited and thermally challenging telco and cloud edge deployments....

Also, LockBit gets a new second stringer, AirTag owners find yet another illicit use, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief Californians may be on their way to the nation's first "do not broker" list with the passage of a bill that would create a one-stop service for residents of the Golden State who want to opt out of being tracked by data brokers....

But the damage has already been done Hell hath no fury like a developer scorned, and Unity is finding out the hard way after poorly received adjustments to its runtime policy last week....

AMBERSQUID operation takes AWS's paths less travelled in search of compute As cloud native computing continues to gain popularity, so does the risk posed by criminals seeking to exploit the unwary. One newly spotted method targets services on the AWS platform, but not necessarily the ones you might think....

This week's story is brought to you by the letters C, E, O, as well as B and S Readers may have noticed there's a great deal of interest in AI at the moment but can the merest mention of those two letters drive up a company's share price? The answer seems to be yes....

Fuming customers steamed as they'd already paid luxury prices Opinion It's enough to warm the cockles of more than your heart. After an experimental rollout in a few test markets including Britain, posh motor maker BMW has abandoned its subscription plan to activate heated seats....

At least the economists seem to have a better grip on tech than Online Safety Bill pushers... "Nobody in this country wants there to be programmable digital currency like the Chinese system, where the government can basically determine what you look at, what you're spending, and determine what you can spend it on," said a member of the Treasury Committee grilling the incoming deputy governor of Financial Stability for the Bank of England....

Where there's smoke, there's ire Who, Me? The world is still turning, which sadly means another Monday has come around and many readers must resume the tedious business of exchanging their labor for currency - a tiresome necessity that The Register marks by each week offering up a new instalment of Who, Me? in which readers reveal errors they almost escaped....

Maybe better together? Duo announce AI and entertainment product partnership South Korean telecom SK Broadband and Netflix have called a truce in their dispute over who should pay for the trillions of bits of video content flowing over mobile networks....

PLUS: Coca-Cola's AI-designed drink to debut; chip startups struggle to compete with Nvidia as funding flees AI in brief A judge working at the UK's Court of Appeal has admitted he used ChatGPT to help him write a ruling....

Owner of Cloudera and Barracuda likes the look of Singtel's portfolio Global investment firm KKR will acquire a 20 percent stake in the regional datacenter business of major telecom conglomerate Singtel - a move intended to expand its Asian footprint....

CTO David Heinemeier Hansson reckons he's on track to hit $10 million over five years David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of SaaS project management outfit 37Signals, has posted an update on the cloud repatriation project he's led, writing that it's already saved the company $1 million....

We're rubbish at recycling plastic, but Singaporean scientists think they can make more of it recoverable. Even the hard cases used in electronics Researchers have developed a method to reuse plastics - including those employed in electronics, computers and packaging - as hydrogen fuel, food preservatives, and other products....

PLUS: Hong Kong's CoinEx crypto exchange frozen; Uber eyes off India; and more! Asia In Brief SK hynix Vice Chairman Park Jung-ho has denied doing business with Huawei and called for further investigation of the memory in the Chinese tech champion's controversial Huawei Mate 60 Pro smartphone....

You shall not pass judgement, Lakera AI insists, because exposed player info was harmless Gandalf, an educational game designed to teach people about the risks of prompt injection attacks on large language models (LLMs), until recently included an unintended expert level: a publicly accessible analytics dashboard that provided access to the prompts players submitted and related metrics....

Oh s#!t, Sherlock Israeli software maker Insanet has reportedly developed a commercial product called Sherlock that can infect devices via online adverts to snoop on targets and collect data about them for the biz's clients....

Mandiant warns casino raiders are doubling down on 'monetization strategies' Scattered Spider, the crew behind at least one of the recent Las Vegas casino IT security breaches, has already hit some 100 organizations during its so-far brief tenure in the cybercrime scene, according to Mandiant....

SEMI predicts factory equipment spending will slide another 15% before rebounding in 2024 Faced with uncertain market conditions, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is said to have temporarily delayed delivery of some advanced chipmaking equipment....

Half a percent of last quarter's net income? That'll teach 'em Google has been hit with another lawsuit alleging it deceived users about its collection, storage, and use of their location data, this time from the state of California.Yet it's over before it really began....

If you don't tackle Redmond's abuse of software licensing in rival clouds it'll be game over for innovation, warns Amit Zavery Google is urging regulators on both sides of the pond to tackle Microsoft's alleged software licensing abuses in the cloud before it is too late, claiming it may already be too late in the collaboration services market, which is also attracting interest from antitrust authorities....

Tok is Tiking for app to bring processing into compliance within 3 months The Irish Data Protection Commission has fined TikTok 345 million ($367 million) for breaking European law over how it processed children's data....

Recruitment U-turn down to search for growth and margins, CEO says Salesforce supremo Marc Benioff has said the company plans to hire 3,300 new staff as it focuses on growth and margins - a little more than six months after the SaaS biz confirmed a 10 percent cull of its workforce....

Tech buffet of updates dished out ahead of IFTD event Intel has expanded its FPGA line-up with cost-optimized offerings, open sourced the official release of its software stack, and added a free RISC-V processor design, among other updates....

Backlash has spilled offline and into potential violence The backlash against Unity runtime fees has been so extreme that the game engine company felt the need to cancel a town hall meeting and close two offices after receiving a "threat," reportedly from an employee....

40-50% reduction in power needs isn't an efficiency to be sniffed at BT is to trial liquid cooling solutions in a bid to improve energy consumption and efficiency across its networks and IT infrastructure....

Are you the weakest link? The UK's Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has admitted that crooks have got their mitts on some of its data after a third-party supplier responsible for ID badges was attacked....

Choosing the right one for you means understanding the trade-off, says MySQL expert Peter Zaitsev Feature It has been a decade since Amazon RDS launched support for PostgreSQL. Since then, the relational system authored by Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker in the 1980s has gone on to become the most popular database among professional developers, used by nearly half of them, according to Stack Overflow's 2023 Developer Survey....

For once, the boss rescued IT from a revolting customer On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that recounts readers' stories from the frontlines of tech support....

The Motocompacto is a successor to the '81 Motocompo, but with greater ability to deprive its rider of dignity With a growing market for electric scooters, we were expecting manufacturers to all eventually pile in, but Honda arriving on the scene with a rideable suitcase isn't quite what we had in mind....

There's a weird one-and-a-half screen laptop mode, too New PC form factors are few and far between, but HP Inc. has tried to shake things up with a foldable device called the Spectre Foldable PC that can be a 12.3-inch laptop, or a bigger laptop, or a 17-inch desktop, or a 17-inch tablet....

Larry Ellison and Satya Nadella find a common enemy: latency that alows data moving from DBs to AIs The same Oracle Cloud hardware that Big Red uses to run databases in its own hyperscale cloud will be placed in Microsoft's Azure datacenters, under an expanded collaboration between the two software giants....

Mobile-first service aims to bring e-learning to the masses, covering tech and plenty more India on Wednesday launched a government-supported e-learning and job posting service, Skill India Digital (SID), that includes free courses from the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, and Google....

British chip design biz plans to satisfy investors by seeking new customers, while RISC-V and China are already challenges Comment The Arm that listed on the Nasdaq Thursday is a very different operation to the one Softbank took private in 2016, because the British chip designer has evolved from licensing its architecture and core designs to developing pre-validated almost-complete processor blueprints that offer a swift and cheap route to developing custom silicon....