The Register

Distributed database biz doesn't like bigger customers using the free version of its software CockroachDB, the distributed transactional system with a mostly PostgreSQL compatible front end, plans to retire its free open source "Core" product in favor of a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users....

Company continues to investigate root cause Brighton-based ISP and hosting provider Fastnet has emerged from a trying week which involved battling VMware/Broadcom tech issues that have downed a number of its customers' websites....

Innovation dead for twenty years? Tell that to 2004 Opinion Want a good time on stage, but you're not a performance artist? Surprisingly easy. Fill a hall with an audience of your peers, tell them the world's gone to hell in a handcart, then that they're the only ones who can fix it. You'll feel the love. Guaranteed....

Nobody really needs more than that, right? Almost a year after Raspberry Pi 5 debuted, a cheaper 2 GB version has appeared for users that want to save a little cash or for whom 4 or 8 GB was just slightly excessive....

Debugging software on the waterfront is a strangely dangerous task Who, Me? Welcome once more, dear reader, to Who, Me? in which Reg readers like your good self attempt to soften the blow of the working week with tales of techie misadventure....

The plan is to do away with an H-IIA rocket upper stage - and prove it's possible Japanese space debris cleaning outfit Astroscale revealed on Monday that it will enter a 12,000 million ($81.4 million) five-year contract with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to remove the upper stage of the space org's H-IIA rocket from orbit using a newly developed satellite....

Plus: China's richest man used to work for Google; Singtel profit jumps; most APAC governments don't have AI governance policies, and more ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese semiconductor equipment manufacturer Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMMEC) is challenging its inclusion on a US blacklist for alleged ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), according to numerous reports....

Also: Your external-facing NetSuite sites need a review; five popular malware varieties for Q2, and more in brief Malware that kills endpoint detection and response (EDR) software has been spotted on the scene and, given it's deploying RansomHub, it could soon be prolific....

Here's how to get started with the open source tool Continue Hands-on Code assistants have gained considerable attention as an early use case for generative AI - especially following the launch of Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. But, if you don't relish the idea of letting Microsoft loose on your code or paying $10/month for the privilege, you can always build your own....

Good for beginners, but a few missing features will annoy Hands On Purveyor of optics Beaverlab has unveiled its an inexpensive telescope for wannabe star-gazers: the Finder TW2....

But the cost of battling Apple and Google? A hefty $1B lost in revenue Epic Games, booted from Apple's walled garden four years ago for crimes against App Store policy, has built its own digital store for customers in Europe....

Officials claim it'll be able to develop defensive solutions in 'days, if not hours' The Pentagon's newest toy isn't a fancy warfighting machine - it's a combined supercomputer and rapid response laboratory (RRL) dedicated to beefing up the US's biodefenses....

And as Anthropic boss reckons there's 'a good chance ... we'll be able to get models that are better than most humans at most things' Legislation to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) software in California has been revised in response to industry discontent with the bill, which awaits a State Assembly vote later this month....

Names, addresses, Social Security numbers, more all out there A Florida firm has all but confirmed that millions of people's sensitive personal info was stolen from it by cybercriminals and publicly leaked....

Another $3B in loans also on the table to support $18B foundry enlargement Texas Instruments is set to receive up to $1.6 billion and as much as $3 billion in loans from good-old Uncle Sam under the CHIPS and Science Act, the US Commerce Department announced on Friday....

Attacker locked out all staff for four days The cryptocurrency offshoot of reality TV and entrepreneurship show Unicorn Hunters has confirmed that an unknown attacker compromised its G-Suite, locking all staff out of their accounts....

Arrives in the Canary Channel and updated via the Microsoft Store Build 27686 of Windows 11 is out for Canary Channel Windows Insiders including the Sandbox Client preview, a fix for a potentially alarming registry issue and a warning for owners of Copilot+ PCs....

Rivals claim signal waiver would interfere with terrestrial networks Starlink's rivals in the satellite phone service race are asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reject its request for a waiver relating to out-of-band emission limits on signals, claiming this would cause interference with terrestrial cell networks....

Oracle of Omaha's exit follows revenue growth shortfall, CEO switch, and customer data leak Berkshire Hathaway has offloaded nearly $1 billion in Snowflake stock as it exits the former IPO chart-smashing cloud data warehousing and analytics specialist....

Entrepreneur vows to keep on buffering Kim Dotcom, founder and CEO of defunct file hosting service Megaupload, revealed this week that his long-fought extradition to the United States was finally approved....

There can be only one ... annoying management technique Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has penned a blog that gives further insight into the inner workings of the software titan under Bill Gates's leadership....

Future of low carbon sustainable tech? Not so fast, this is still a trial and only for backup power Equinix is moving forward with trials of fuel cell technology as an alternative backup power source, revealing it has a demonstration unit at one of its facilities in Dublin, Ireland....

Controversial payment systems set for another lease of life The UK's government department for farming and the environment is offering up to 27 million to keep its controversial legacy farm payments systems running for another three years as it develops a replacement....

BVLOS operations to modernize airspace The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has approved six new trials to test the use of drones in deliveries, inspections and emergency services, including one from e-commerce megabiz Amazon....

A long and strange tech support story that starts in Africa and ends in a Presidential Suite On Call Welcome yet again to On Call, the reader-contributed column in which The Register immortalizes readers' stories of escaping tech support traumas....

NYU doc died from allergic reaction after eating at Florida resort pub Walt Disney Parks and Resorts wants a wrongful death lawsuit filed against it and one of its tenants, an Irish pub, to be booted from court into arbitration....

The CMP boasts to be the orchestration platform behind GreenLake since 2022 Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced the acquisition of yet another partner, this time scooping up cloud management biz Morpheus Data for an unspecified sum....

Teams wanting the cash have to commit to handing their models to OpenSSF after next year's final One year after it began, the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) has whittled its pool of contestants down to seven semifinalists....

Hype is peaking now and digital employee experience stuck in trough of disillusionment Mainstream adoption of AI in the office and among employees remains around two years off, according to analysis from consultancy Gartner....

US politicians and Israeli officials among the top targets for the IRGC's cyber unit Google has joined Microsoft in publishing intel on Iranian cyber influence activity following a recent uptick in attacks that led to data being leaked from the Trump re-election campaign....

If you guessed Beijing, sorry - but it is number 2, according to Synergy Research figures If the internet can be said to have a geographic location, then perhaps it is Northern Virginia, which has the largest share of the hyperscale datacenter capacity within which the world's data is stored....

When is a mishap not really a mishap? NASA has continued to twist itself into a pretzel over whether Boeing's CST-100 Starliner -now two months past its original return date - can be used to bring back its crew to Earth and whether a failure to do so would be classed as a mishap....

Eric Schmidt blamed WFH and work-life balance policies for Google's stumbles in AI race Eric Schmidt, Google's ex-CEO and executive chairman has had to row back on remarks he made that linked the megacorp's poor showing in the AI race with the company's flexible working policies....

He'll also have to pay back $1.2 million from fraudulent transactions he facilitated A Russian national is taking a trip to prison in the US after being found guilty of peddling stolen credentials on a popular dark web marketplace....

A business breakup may be coming - but what comes after may not be better Comment After more than 15 years of insisting that "competition is only a click away," Google's antitrust mantra is no longer keeping the regulators at bay....

Anydesk is its access tool of choice A new extortion gang called Mad Liberator uses social engineering and the remote-access tool Anydesk to steal organizations' data and then demand a ransom payment, according to Sophos X-Ops....

Remember the 'go hardcore or go home' email? Turns out: not super compatible with Irish employment law Twitter has been ordered to pay 550,000 ($607,000) compensation for unfair dismissal to a former senior executive in Ireland, said to be a record amount awarded in the country over such a case....

Reorg of entire biz as tech giant addresses downturn in core networking segment Networking titan Cisco has confirmed in a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) that it is eliminating 7 percent of its global workforce as it embarks upon a restructuring plan....

Everyone knows automation will happen, which is why everyone needs proof of human involvement Column Earlier this year I got fired and replaced by a robot. And the managers who made the decision didn't tell me - or anyone else affected by the change - that it was happening....

Payment arm of Korean messaging app denies any illegal activity Kakao Pay, a subsidiary of Korea's WhatsApp analog Kakao, handed over data from more than 40 million users to the Singaporean arm of Chinese payment platform Alipay, without user consent, Korea's financial watchdog revealed Tuesday....

No, no, go ahead, don't let us stop you, Xi Cyber-spies suspected of connections with China have infected "dozens" of computers belonging to Russian government agencies and IT providers with backdoors and trojans since late July, according to Kaspersky....

Thesps at least get final say on what their doppelgangers will say AI-generated voices in ads might become more common thanks to an agreement between SAG-AFTRA and an AI cloning upstart....

Git blame an infrastructure update If you can't or couldn't access GitHub today, it's because the site broke itself....

Treasury questions the retirement of the, er, Technology Retirement Office A shuttered IRS office focused on retiring and replacing legacy technology should be reopened, an audit has concluded, so that the US tax collection agency can get a firm grip on replacing its aging tech stack....

Don't use LLMs for anything important and don't try to reverse engineer it Microsoft is notifying folks that its AI services should not be taken too seriously, echoing prior service-specific disclaimers....

Production ramp won't kick off until Q1 2025 Nvidia's alleged Blackwell supply problem may not be as bad as first thought, according to Foxconn executives who claimed they would begin shipping a small volume of GB200 systems in the fourth quarter....

Citizen Lab also spots a COLDWASTREL swimming in the Rivers of Phish Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) cyberspies, joined by a new digital snooping crew, have been conducting a massive online phishing espionage campaign via phishing against targets in the US and Europe over the past two years, according to the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab....

Lone Star State alleges GM cashed in with "millions in lump sum payments" from the sale Texas has sued General Motors for what it said is a years-long scheme to collect and sell drivers' data to third parties - including insurance companies - without their knowledge or consent....

Three state attorneys general probed the company and found plenty to chastise Biotech biz Enzo Biochem is being forced to pay three state attorneys general a $4.5 million penalty following a 2023 ransomware attack that compromised the data of more than 2.4 million people....

Intuitive Machines tosses hat into the ring for NASA's canceled trundlebot Intuitive Machines has submitted a bid to save NASA's VIPER rover, describing the $84 million savings claimed by the US space agency when cutting it as "a government number."...