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If a facility falls down, 'the microscope inside it is useless to you' While NASA prepares to journey through the unforgiving vacuum of space to the Moon and Mars, it faces a terrestrial threat in the meantime. A vacuum of funding that has left its own buildings crumbling around it....

What a difference four years makes Germany is determined to remove any systems from its telecoms networks that might pose a security threat, regardless of cost, in a remarkable reversal of the country's stance from just a few years ago....

Maybe Pat dodged a bullet - mature process nodes aren't the kind of thing shareholders get excited about Analysis With its $5.4 billion bid to acquire Tower Semiconductor in ruins, Intel Foundry Services' (IFS) master plan has been turned on its head....

Not in office three days a week? Repeated 'violations' could lead to termination Tough times loom for Meta engineers and the wider workforce that refuse to return to the office for at least three days a week following a warning from HR of the potential career-ending consequences of non-compliance....

That's a massive workload you've got there - how much does it cost? Google is working with Harvard University on a medical research program using public cloud resources rather than a supercomputer to run very large scale simulations.....

Sometimes nothing fails like success Opinion Company after company has had their start in open source software, and then gone on to dump their open source licenses once they've achieved a measure of success. It's time to stop it....

'Perfect' for your next camping trip! For three hours... We've all been there - the camping holiday where the Sun shines for about three hours and the rest of the trip is spent sitting in a tent in soggy misery. What are you supposed to do then?...

When you need to patch a problem in your drone and no one's got the source Imagine a world where, rather than inspiring fear and trembling in even the stoutest of IT professional's hearts, snipping bugs out of, or adding features to, legacy closed-source binaries was just another basic, low-stress task....

If you thought a 700W GPU was hot, imagine what it takes to keep racks full of 15kW accelerators cool Analysis The mad dash to secure and deploy AI infrastructure is forcing datacenter operators to reevaluate the way they build and run their facilities....

Successful failover can sometimes be a failure On Call Nothing ruins a weekend like failed failover, which is why every Friday The Register brings readers a new instalment of On Call, the column in which we celebrate the readers whose recreation is ruined by rotten resilience regimes....

The search for a politically neutral 'truth' goes on Poll Academics have developed a method to assess whether ChatGPT's output displays political bias, and assert the OpenAI model revealed a "significant and systemic" preference for left-leaning parties in the US, UK, and Brazil....

Buyout offer is at 16 per share, compared to 30 at its 2021 IPO Linux-loving software house SUSE is to quit the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and become a private company again, just two years after it listed in 2021....

France likes its payment system, Saudi Arabia is close to co-operating, and the Caribbean is calling India's government has announced that the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to share India Stack, making it the latest territory to adopt the collection of digital public goods the world's most populous nation has created as a means to assist development of government digital services (and its own diplomacy) around the world....

Bizarrely, Bezos's bookshop is also promoting a book about the book A book that purports to recount the history of this month's deadly Maui wildfire has become a bestseller on Amazon, despite reviewers panning the work because its prose is on a par with that of AI....

Web giant comes out swinging, says allegations 'without merit' YouTube has allegedly been tracking children online and targeting them with personalized ads, potentially in violation of its agreement with the FTC and of the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), according to a report released on Thursday....

But it may help with fuzzing Analysis Despite the hype around criminals using ChatGPT and various other large language models to ease the chore of writing malware, it seems this generative AI technology isn't terribly good at helping with that kind of work....

About 2,000 NetScaler installations feared compromised as CISA raises alarm over ShareFile Miscreants are actively exploiting critical bugs in two of Citrix's products, both of which the business IT player fixed earlier this summer....

Software's alleged inability to handle cross traffic central to court battle after two similar road deaths Tesla's Autopilot engineers have claimed the automaker's leadership not only knew the software was unable to detect and respond to cross traffic, it did nothing to fix it....

Don't worry, your downloaded games are safe ... for now? Microsoft revealed Thursday it will shutter its Xbox 360 Store next summer, nearly two decades after the console hit the market. That will leave the IT giant catering for its current-gen Xbox Series X and S consoles....

Measures needed to protect 'national interest,' says Beijing. Rubbish, it's retaliation, scoff critics The price of gallium is said to have hit a 10-month high following export restrictions from China, which kicked in at the beginning of August in response to Western sanctions on sales of advanced technology to the country....

No rush on this seemingly vital component of defense, guys It's taken a few years, but the US Space Force finally has a unit dedicated to target analysis, development, and engagement....

Plaintiffs say recent partnership has 'magnified' danger and allege bypass of anti-stalking feature is allowed A lawsuit filed this week alleges the integration between Amazon location-tracking network Sidewalk and Tile's trackers and apps has "magnified" the danger posed to stalking victims "exponentially," and claims the vendors have been negligent in the implementation of safeguards....

August 16 was an especially big day for this island of stability Debian is an island of stability and sanity in the constant swirling chaos of Linux and open source. Long may it continue to be....

It's buzzword bingo: The datacenter sustainability edition Green Energy Partners (GEP) has tapped IP3 International to help realize its dream of a massive datacenter campus in Virginia powered entirely by small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) and hydrogen gas generators....

First up: Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 1 A group of scientists say they are the first to reconstruct a recognizable song from data collected directly from the brain by monitoring electrical activity and modeling the resultant patterns with regression-based decoding models....

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Profit down 66% as execs try to clear inventory decks Lenovo profits took a nosedive for the second consecutive quarter as demand for personal computers continues to slump in the face of a crappy economy....

Plus laptop and radio with yet more officers details reportedly nicked from car A man was arrested in Northern Ireland for suspected Collection of Terrorist Information following an incident where police mistakenly leaked details that identified 10,000 serving officers, but he has now been released on bail....

Web devs, rejoice: Finally something is happening in the quiet and steady world of JavaScript For Chrome 117, Google has expanded the browser's Developer Tools, aka DevTools, with 16 new features - the largest capability jump since Chrome 91 surfaced in 2021....

What do we want? Discretionary increases. When do we want them? Since 2002 Retired Digital Equipment Corporation employees are scheduling a protest day outside of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's UK headquarters over its refusal to increase their pensions - something the corporation is not legally obliged to do....

Big Blue looks back at 2022 in Britain, one of the world's economies 'hit hardest' by pandemic Products and services price hikes were initiated by IBM UK in 2022 to offset rising labor and component costs, the company has said in its latest set of profit and loss accounts....

Biz says folks know the difference between fixed and mobile broadband. Do they, though, asks ASA Despite "diagrams" and in-depth descriptions of exactly how its "full fibre directly to your home" fixed line product works, UK ISP 6G Internet is in hot water after an ads regulator ruled consumers may have thought it was "offering a non-existent future mobile technology."...

Subscriptions and software surge - just the way boss Chuck Robbins planned Cisco has almost cleared the massive backlog of orders it racked up after COVID-19 kicked holes in its supply chain....

Machines have no experience in the real world, so why would you turn to them for advice? Google is reportedly developing generative AI tools to power chatbots capable of performing 21 different tasks - including writing plans, tutoring users in new skills, and dispensing life advice....

The My Number card mess remains unsolved as trust in e-government remains muted Japan's digital minister has doubled down on a June promise to penalize himself for the poor rollout of the country's digital ID, My Number Card, by offering up three months salary on Tuesday....

Which is a problem, because local orgs are leaking data and shadowy traders are cashing in Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications has admitted the nation has a vast shortfall of infosec pros....

Drives are anything but solid, allegedly Western Digital was sued on Tuesday on behalf of a California resident who claims the solid state drive he bought from the manufacturer was defective and that the storage slinger shipped kit that didn't live up to its marketing promises....

Cleanup will involve 'complete rewrite of our website's code' Discord.io has shut down "for the foreseeable future," after crooks stole, and then put up for sale, data belonging to all 760,000 of the service's users....

Tired? Drink coffee, says Starbucks. Bored? Try whiskey, says Jameson. Lazy? Why not drive, says Ford. Etc etc GPT-4 can help moderate content online more quickly and consistently than humans can, the model's maker OpenAI has argued....

Billions of downloads and no defense against typosquatting feels like a bad combination in this day and age A trio of PowerShell Gallery design flaws reported to Microsoft almost a year ago remain unfixed, leaving registry users vulnerable to typosquatting and supply chain attacks, according to Aqua Nautilus....

Less lunacy? LunA-10 is seeking designs for 'optimized and integrated lunar infrastructure' In DARPA's view, if we're going to live on the Moon, we need to rethink our technological paradigm. The research agency has thus launched its latest project to develop "an optimized and integrated lunar infrastructure" - for peaceful purposes, of course....

Elon, curing the world of imposter syndrome one decision at a time Elon Musk's X was this week caught throttling outbound links to several sites, coincidentally ones that the billionaire has complained about or feuded with in the past....

Another team is harnessing nature's own algorithm to solve problems faster than classical computers Practical quantum computers are still on the horizon, but scientists continue to make improvements in the underlying technology required to make such systems possible....

This is not the robotaxi future that was promised Just days after Cruise won the right to operate completely computer-controlled taxi rides in San Francisco at all hours, one of its units has got stuck in wet cement....

Big Purple may be moving away from the desktop or it could be more strategic A blog post from senior Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera indicates that the IBM-owned company is further consolidating its development efforts on desktop Linux....

Missions bid to secure comms time on Deep Space Network The remarkable images and data captured by the James Webb Space Telescope are being sent to Earth after more than six months of jockeying to secure network resources, NASA has revealed....

'Hey our enemies are going to use this technology, so why shouldn't we?' The US Department of Defense has set up Task Force Lima, a new team to investigate what generative AI can do for the military, with the stated aim of protecting national security....

Termination fee of $353 million wipes out Intel Foundry Services' revenue for last quarter Intel's planned $5.4 billion buy of Israeli chip biz Tower Semiconductor has fallen through after the vendor failed to get regulatory approval from China within the time frame for the deal to close....

A menu-driven, snapshot-enabled bootloader for Linux with root on ZFS The next minor version of OpenZFS is nearly ready, and ZFSBootMenu makes it easy to boot Linux from it, via a clever workaround....

You don't want to hand your datacenter over to an intruder quite so easily Systems Approach One of the fun things about being an Australian living in the Northern hemisphere (which was my situation for over thirty years) is having repeated conversations about which way water rotates when it goes down the drain....

A plea for improvements for disabled people who rely on accessibility features Opinion As someone who relies on Apple's Voice Control application to dictate, navigate, and interact with my iPhone and Mac via my voice due to a severe physical disability, I can't help but feel both grateful for its existence and frustrated by its shortcomings....