The Register

Secure-by-default... if your pockets are deep enough Microsoft has come under fire for charging for security add-ons despite the company's own patchy record when it comes to vulnerabilities and breaches....

Senior execs making $150K+ will still have to abide by them, but they fall away for everyone else The US Chamber of Commerce is saying it will sue the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for officially banning noncompete clauses in employment contracts across Amercia....

What's that? Q1 was better than expected? Pump those shares Another Boeing whistleblower has come forward to report problems at his former employer, but that doesn't seem to have upset shareholders, who sent shares skyward on news of a quarter bearing fewer losses than expected....

The firm 'fessed up to staff misconduct and avoided criminal liability A company contracted to manage an Amarillo, Texas nuclear weapons facility has to pay US government $18.4 million in a settlement over allegations that its atomic technicians fudged their timesheets to collect more money from Uncle Sam....

Privacy Sandbox slips into 2025 after challenges from UK authorities Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is being postponed to 2025 amid wrangling with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)....

Their holiday options are now far more restricted The US has charged and sanctioned four Iranian nationals for their alleged roles in various attacks on US companies and government departments, all of whom are claimed to have worked for fake companies linked to Iran's military....

Nashville 'ticked all the boxes' for Big Red's employees, says founder Ellison Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has confirmed that the tech giant plans to move its global headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee....

Who cares that net profit slid 55%? Not Wall Street In a dynamic first quarter, Elon Musk's Tesla contended with a terrorist organization, survived an arson attempt, and fiercely competed with hybrid car makers, all against a backdrop of falling prices as competition for electric vehicle customers intensified....

CISPE says concessions 'solve nothing' Updated Euro cloud trade body CISPE has hit back at concessions offered by Broadcom over VMware licensing, saying these do not address key issues that led it to lobby the European Commission into investigating....

Directive places requirements on gizmo vendors, but still needs formal approval The European Parliament has adopted the right-to-repair directive with 584 votes in favor and three against, making repairing goods more accessible and cost-effective....

Big tech backlash and animus against the machines will invite stifling red tape Video Generative AI is destined to drown in a tsunami of regulation, argues Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman....

International Energy Agency points out obvious: Infrastructure needs to meet demand The International Energy Agency (IEA) is reminding governments to match the continued rapid growth of electric car sales with infrastructure improvements....

Japanese foundry upstart aims to bolster domestic production while catering to growing demand for custom accelerators Interview The foundry space is arguably the most complex and competitive it has been in decades as foundry upstarts in the US and Japan look to challenge heavyweights Samsung and TSMC for a piece of the action....

Standards body adoption could help ease portability between vendors GQL, the query language for graph databases, has been recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), offering users more portability of queries and skills between graph database systems....

One wonders why are there adverts on public-sector portals at all Exclusive At least 18 public-sector websites in the UK and US send visitor data in some form to various web advertising brokers - including an ad-tech biz in China involved in past privacy controversies, a security firm claims....

You read that right - it's a bit like Pokemon Go, but for telephone poles Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) - which manages infrastructure including the Fukushima nuclear power plant - is reportedly involved in an IP dispute over an app that gamifies the crowdsourced identification of faulty power poles....

China Mobile alone wants almost 8,000 machines Giant Chinese telco China Mobile, which boasts over a billion customers, wants to purchase nearly 8,000 AI servers....

Somewhere in Beijing, someone's screaming: Mother, PFACAA! The US Senate has passed a bill that compels TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to offload the app to a US-approved buyer or face a ban. President Biden has indicated he will sign it into law....

Permissive licenses may be about to collide with geopolitics The United States Department of Commerce is reportedly considering lawmakers' calls to make it harder for China to use the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)....

In theory, this should make it harder for states to compel data-sharing to enforce anti-abortion laws A revision to America's healthcare privacy rules aims to better protect abortion providers and patients seeking the procedure - and other types of reproductive care, such as in vitro fertilization and contraception - as some US states ban procedures and attempt prosecutions....

Gelsinger and gang certified to court wider array of defense contractors Intel's Foundry division is one step closer to manufacturing chips for military applications using its forthcoming 18A process node....

Smaller dies, less wafer loss equals lower emissions, exec claims Comment AMD says its decision to ditch monolithic datacenter chips seven years ago in favor of a chiplet architecture has helped cut global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by tens of thousands of metric tons a year....

Strange tales from San Francisco A self-driving Waymo taxi in San Francisco was filmed passing unicyclists and scooters - which would have been mundane if it weren't for the fact that the autonomous vehicle drove down the wrong side of the street to do so....

Graphics giant and partners say they're clean - it's all technically legit More banned Nvidia GPUs are making their way into Chinese universities, local governments, and private companies....

ZBLAN fibers made in space hopefully don't crystallize and are far less brittle, opening the path to faster photonics Fiber optics of the future may be manufactured in space if the results of a recent ISS experiment prove its feasibility....

Expect ongoing supply shortages this year, say storage analysts Seagate has joined Western Digital in increasing the prices of hard drives, with rising demand due to the huge data requirements of AI taking the blame. AI is also behind a rapid growth in orders for Enterprise solid state drives (SSDs)....

Musk outfit's figures almost 10 times worse than industry averages Workplace safety data reported to the US government for 2023 indicates that SpaceX's injury rate continues to surpass the industry average....

What are Mir and Wayland all about anyway? Mir-based tiling window manager Miracle-WM version 0.2.0 is here, building on the basis of the initial release. Will Mir bring peace and harmony and convergence after all?...

Motorists file class action alleging breach of contract and more after their premiums went up Two New Jersey drivers claim they now pay more for their car insurance because General Motors (GM) and its OnStar app snooped on their driving behavior without their consent and sent metrics to "various insurance carriers."...

From first place to third as local brands grow iPhone sales in China - the world's largest smartphone market - slipped by 19.1 percent in Q1 year-over-year while many domestic brands rose, pushing Apple from first to third place....

Language model focused on reasoning fits on a smartphone and runs offline Microsoft claims the latest incarnation of its lightweight Phi-3 Mini AI model rivals competitors such as GPT-3.5 while being small enough to be deployed on a phone....

Electricity goes both ways as bit barns in Dublin aim to cut emissions and boost the bank Datacenter biz Digital Realty is to let facilities in Ireland feed energy back to the electricity grid when needed, helping to smooth out variability in supply, cut CO emissions and provide an additional revenue stream....

Even tighter requirements, so it's time to put old hardware out to pasture... or find an alternative OS Microsoft's war on old PCs appears to have intensified as the latest builds of Windows 11 will not boot if your CPU does not support the SSE4.2 instruction set....

Cloud migration good for margins, CEO says SAP booked revenue of 8.04 billion ($8.58 billion) in the first calendar quarter of 2024, up eight percent on the same period of 2023....

The 'big victory for the good guys' shouldn't be celebrated too much, though The average time taken by global organizations to detect cyberattacks has dropped to its lowest-ever level of ten days, Mandiant revealed today....

That said, good old US healthcare system so elaborately costly some are forced to avoid altogether UnitedHealth Group, the parent of ransomware-struck Change Healthcare, delivered some very unwelcome news for customers today as it continues to recover from the massively expensive side and disruptive digital break-in....

All from billions of miles away NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has begun returning usable engineering data after engineers devised a way to work around a damaged memory chip....

City council says it lost control after shutting down systems It's become somewhat cliche in cybersecurity reporting to speculate whether an organization will have the resources to "keep the lights on" after an attack. But the opposite turns out to be true with Leicester City Council following its March ransomware incident....

Accidents at intersection quadruple The United States are widely free from roundabout tyranny with only one for every 33,330 people. A good thing too because people passing by Hollister, just south of Silicon Valley, can't seem to grok their new one....

Risky bet? Premium price with 'no demonstrable benefits'? It doesn't sound like an order avalanche Italic text...

Unverified users could scoop up data on high-value individuals without any form of verification process Neighbourhood Watch (NW) groups across the UK can now rest easy knowing the developers behind a communications platform fixed a web app bug that leaked their data en masse....

Memo to Andy Stone: Don't go to Russia for your holidays Meta's communications director Andy Stone has been sentenced in absentia to six years imprisonment in Russia for "justifying terrorism."...

For some reason the world's most notorious app decided not to tick all boxes under the world's toughest digital law TikTok has earned itself a second investigation under the European Union's Digital Services Act - and suspension of its rewards program - after failing to comply with the law in two important regards....

Outsourcers outsourced work for the BBC, Amazon, and HBO Max to the hermit kingdom A misconfigured cloud server that used a North Korean IP address has led to the discovery that film production studios including the BBC, Amazon, and HBO Max could be inadvertently hiring workers from the hermit kingdom for animation projects....

Yet X remains a supporter of The Christchurch Call, an international agreement to stop video nasties +Comment Australia's government has secured a court order requiring Elon Musk's social network, X, to remove all videos depicting a terrorist attack....

Digital reform conference sees PM repeat calls to get online government services right at last Usually when a government announces it's drawing up a digitalization roadmap, it's being metaphorical. In Japan's case, it's quite literal: roadways dedicated to autonomous vehicles handling logistics-related traffic will be mapped out....

Putin's pals use 'GooseEgg' malware to launch attacks you can defeat with patches or deletion Russian spies are exploiting a years-old Windows print spooler vulnerability and using a custom tool called GooseEgg to elevate privileges and steal credentials across compromised networks, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence....

Group of now-ex Googlers say 50 folks have been let go, vow ongoing protests After firing 28 people for protesting its cloud deal with Israel by occupying its offices, Google reportedly spent the weekend letting go of more staff to bring the number of employees let go over the incident to an even 50....

Seven years of stonewalling and no consequences for advertising giant Japan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has concluded that Google unfairly blocked its local Yahoo! rival from accessing advertising technology, but will not fine the Chocolate Factory....

Senate kills reform amendments, Biden swiftly signs bill into law US lawmakers on Saturday reauthorized a contentious warrantless surveillance tool for another two years - and added a whole bunch of people and organizations to the list of those who can be compelled to spy for Uncle Sam....