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Remember making Windows and DOS talk to a network? You could go back to the future with this assignment If you were thinking about forcing an AI to write a job ad for an administrator of an obsolete operating system, it looks like somebody has beaten you to it with a vacancy for a Windows 3.11 techie....

Lords warn Home Secretary there is nothing to regulate wider trawl of large populations A UK committee in its upper house has written to Home Secretary James Cleverly to warn of the lack of legal basis for the use of live facial recognition by police....

You can get Ceefax via a Pi, but behold it in its most exotic of habitats Got an old BBC computer in the loft, a spare Raspberry Pi gathering dust in a drawer, and a yearning to return to the days when Teletext was a neat thing?...

'Primary focus' is 'welfare of our staff as we resolve any errors,' says UK council after rollout of 30M SAP replacement Exclusive After schools in Surrey went live on a new 30 million HR, payroll and finance system, the responsible county council is being forced to prioritize support calls for problems that are delaying staff pay....

Miss hardware QWERTY? Warm up your soldering iron and 3D printer Hardware hacker's non-trivial project to weld a Blackberry keyboard to an Android fondleslab is being updated with an off-the-shelf PCB....

Questionable institutional change and myriad IT issues pervade the governance landscape The farewell report written by the UK's biometrics and surveillance commissioner highlights a litany of failings in the Home Office's approach to governing the technology....

It's not just you - things really are getting worse Opinion An apocryphal tale regarding the late, great footballer George Best being interviewed by a reporter just after getting suspended from Manchester United offers an apt description of today's tech industry right now....

Fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake ... time to fake it off Fake sexually explicit AI-generated viral images of pop royalty Taylor Swift have struck a nerve, leading fans, Microsoft's boss, and even the White House to call for immediate action to tackle deepfakes....

Controling prostheses? Elon imagines an app for that Elon Musk's brain-computer interface implant company Neuralink has begun its first human clinical trial....

SKAMPI was made in China, driven by Docker, located in South Africa, and aimed at the stars Reg In Space One of the radio telescope designs to be used by the Square Kilometre Array has achieved first light....

Hiring for regional and global execs to help it find new spots for bit barns, and make sure they get built right Microsoft has signaled significant expansion of its datacenter footprint in the Asia Pacific region....

You're free to choose your own adventure, from options that involve Copilot and OpenAI Comment If the future of work is a choice and "not a predetermined destiny" - as Microsoft puts it in a recent report - it would be nice to know why Redmond is so intent on shoving its version of that future down our throats....

Legacy OS and app holdouts get three more years of paid support, also on versions 10.0 and 11.3 Oracle has quietly extended paid support and upgrades for Solaris 11.4 to 2037 - three years past its previous deadline - and did the same for earlier versions of the OS last year....

18,000 customers, including the Pentagon and Microsoft, may have other thoughts SolarWinds - whose network monitoring software was backdoored by Russian spies so that the biz's customers could be spied upon - has accused America's financial watchdog of seeking to "revictimise the victim" after the agency sued it over the 2020 attack....

Angstrom age is right around the corner - for state-of-the-art chips, anyway Comment With 3nm production reaching maturity and 2nm on the way, TSMC is reportedly laying the groundwork for the next logical step, a 1nm fab....

Businesses can at long last submit digital docs to government agencies Japan is saying sayonara to the floppy disk, which until now was a required medium for submitting some 1,900 official documents to the government....

Distributed system makes a grab for Oracle, Db2 features CockroachDB has released its 23.2 iteration containing new features designed to tempt mainframe and other legacy database users to shift workloads to its distributed cloud-based system....

Maybe those Twitter cuts ran too deep, huh? Not long after it emerged that X, formerly Twitter, cut 1 in 3 Trust and Safety employees after Elon Musk's takeover in October 2022, the social media platform now claims it's ready to hire 100 full-time content moderators at a new office in Austin, Texas....

Winter Night is coming Japan's Moon lander has woken up on the lunar surface and begun transmitting data back to controllers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA.)...

Retailer steps back from Roomba-maker and 350 staff will have to step back from a job Amazon's $1.7 billion bid to buy iRobot is off, and while Jeff Bezos's business faces a termination fee, almost a third of the vacuum cleaner maker's staff face termination of an altogether different nature....

Plus: Dodgy ex-US official also sentenced for software and database theft in big day for the courts A dark web drug kingpin has handed more than $150 million in cryptocurrency to US authorities and pleaded guilty to selling hundreds of kilograms of drugs over the internet....

Plus: It kills off WordPad once and for all Microsoft is unleashing build 26040 of Windows Server and has revealed the official branding for the product: Windows Server 2025....

You're wrong to think that jammin' was a thing of the past Europe's aviation safety body is working with the airline industry to counter a danger posed by interference with GPS signals - now seen as a growing threat to the safety of air travel....

40 years on, it's still widely misunderstood Apple launched the original 128 kB Macintosh around 40 years ago, and in so doing changed the computer industry, in ways that a lot of people still don't fully understand....

Plus: George Carlin's family suing creators who used AI to rip off his comedy, and more AI in brief The US Department of Justice and Securities Exchange Commission are both launching investigations into the Cruise accident that hit a woman and dragged her for six meters (20 feet) under the wheels of its driverless car....

If a new browser arrives on an OS nobody cares about, did it arrive at all? It was a while coming, but Google has finally made a Windows on ARM-native version of Chrome....

Trio of spacecraft to capture ripples in spacetime The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed off on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission to detect gravitational waves from space....

We've been working on the solution for 70 years. It's there if we want it Opinion Datacenter power is a shocking business. The latest report from the International Energy Agency makes some hair-raising predictions, such as Irish datacenter electricity usage making up a third of that country's total juice budget by 2026....

Clever techie thought of everything - except someone else's stupidity Who, Me? Why hello, dear reader - fancy seeing you here again on a Monday - the slot we The Register reserves for a fresh instalment of Who, Me? in which Register readers share their tales of tech tribulations....

The plan is to keep the world at bay by never recording it in the DNS root - like may already do with a subdomain for an intranet The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root....

What's the point of hardware export bans if foreign entities can access what they want on the cloud? US-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) operators could soon be required to strengthen know-your-customer (KYC) procedures in order to prevent foreign actors renting the infrastructure needed to train AI models....

And it will all come together in one big, happy, hybrid innovation engine Chinese tech giant Tencent has predicted that high-performance computing (HPC), quantum computing, cloud computing and edge computing will soon merge....

Kernel 6.8-rc2 debuts after very robust discussion about 'inodes' Linus Torvalds has dished up one of his most strongly worded Linux kernel mailing list posts in years, lashing a contributor from Google for his suggestions regarding filesystems....

ALSO: SEC admits to X account negligence; New macOS malware family appears; and some critical vulns Infosec in brief Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) held its first-ever automotive-focused Pwn2Own event in Tokyo last week, and awarded over $1.3 million to the discoverers of 49 vehicle-related zero day vulnerabilities....

ALSO: Samsung turns to Baidu for Galaxy AI in China; Terraform Labs files for bankruptcy; India's supercomputing ambitions Asia In Brief Indian infosec firm CloudSEK last week claimed it found records describing 750 million Indian mobile network subscribers on the dark web, with two crime gangs offering the trove of data for just $3,000....

Suppliers know they can get away with less and the cloud means alternatives are less likely to emerge Comment HPE's decision to acquire Juniper is bad news for enterprise IT, as yet another example of consolidation in a field that already offers fewer, and less palatable, competitive choices in a shrinking market....

Both stable and rolling releases, Pi versions, and some very unusual customizations SparkyLinux is a lightweight distro based on Debian, but it offers some choices that few if any others do....

Brain research could help find the right mix between handwriting and new technologies, researchers claim Scientists claim to have found evidence that handwriting promotes learning more than typing on keyboards....

Computer science teachers, software experts share their advice on ML assistants Feature Learning how to program is perhaps now easier than ever with AI, though the tools that suggest or generate source code for you have to be used wisely....

It takes more than open source, it takes open standards and consensus Opinion Today, thanks to Android and ChromeOS, Linux is an important end-user operating system. But, before Linux, there were important Unix desktops, although most of them never made it....

Crunchy, tasty, coconut flavoured... and hopefully thicker than a few nanometers TSMC is known for making advanced semiconductors, but it seems the company is now driving up the price of chips made with tastier materials than traditional silicon....

Despite US chemistry boffin claiming it improves the taste, we respectfully disagree Poll It's well established that the British are an eccentric people. Among their national obsessions is drinking tea - they consider themselves experts - and one way to trigger the entire United Kingdom is to fuck with the formula....

Don't pack your swimming costumes as it could be more of a sauna planet Not to be outdone by the younger, hipper equipment in NASA's arsenal, the Hubble Space Telescope is still proving its worth, spotting evidence of water vapor in the smallest-ever exoplanet known to us....

At least web competition will finally be allowed Analysis Apple co-founder Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. But he failed to let that metaphor shape his greatest achievement, the iPhone, which has become a shackle for the soul....

Network rollback fails to resolve issue in Americas as Redmond scrambles to optimize its way out of the problem Corporate communications ground to a halt for many Office 365 subscribers around the world on Friday after a network outage left Microsoft Teams unresponsive for them for several hours....

Step one, actually turn on MFA Microsoft, a week after disclosing that Kremlin-backed spies broke into its network and stole internal emails and files from its executives and staff, has now confirmed the compromised corporate account used in the genesis of the heist didn't even have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled....

Honestly, it sounds like a fun time The FBI plans to use Amazon's controversial Rekognition cloud service "to extract information and insights from lawfully acquired images and videos," according to US Justice Department documents....

Microsoft and Salesforce the latest to toss more folks onto industry's employment bonfire More than 20,000 people working in tech lost their job in January, continuing the 2023 trend when 250,000+ were ditched after companies hired heavily in the pandemic and couldn't justify headcount amid slowing customer spending....

And software makers seem to be OK with this, apparently Comment There's a line in the latest plea from CISA - the US government's cybersecurity agency - to software developers to do a better job of writing secure code that may make you spit out your coffee....

If you could just not harvest our info unlawfully and without a warrant, that would be great US Senator Ron Wyden on Thursday asked US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to stop US intelligence agencies from purchasing Americans' unlawfully collected personal data from data brokers....