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Also: Remember that balloon over the US last February? It might have used a US internet provider Four Chinese balloons have reportedly floated over the Taiwan Strait, three of them crossing over the island's land mass and near its Ching-Chuan-Kang air base before disappearing, according to the Taiwan's defense ministry....

But not enough sodas Christmas has been and gone. Were you a good techie? Did you get a Raspberry Pi 5? Or were you more like this vulture, who became the proud owner of an Xbox Series X ... fridge?...

One of the ad APIs that will fill the void - Protected Audience - may actually improve privacy From today there will be a great disturbance in Chrome - as if millions of browser cookies suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced....

Draw a picture of a smoking gun in the style of Sarah Andersen A spreadsheet submitted as evidence in a copyright lawsuit against Midjourney allegedly lists thousands of artists whose images the startup's AI picture generator "can successfully mimic or imitate."...

Unpleasant Christmas package lets malware down the chimney Microsoft has disabled a protocol that allowed the installation of Windows apps after finding that miscreants were abusing the mechanism to install malware....

Happy New Year, now go replace that human resources cartridge 2024 isn't starting off that well for Xerox: first it said it suffered an IT security breach, and now it's laying off 15 percent of staff....

Pay up, or just decline to submit One of America's biggest private freight shippers, Estes Express Lines, has told more than 20,000 customers that criminals stole their personal information....

'Independent' biz unsurprisingly uses in Xeon and Habana, and patent libraries In the latest bid to push its AI portfolio, Intel has teamed up with investment firm DigitalBridge to form a software spin-off specializing in the deployment of machine learning and large language models (LLMs)....

The real beef concerns our future to create and be rewarded for it Kettle A slew of copyright lawsuits were filed against the makers of text and image-generating AI systems last year. Now in 2024 and beyond, we're going to see how those play out, and what ramifications and settlements they bring....

And you thought your in-laws were bad Updated The next time someone accuses you of being a bad son-in-law, you can counter with the case of retired Akamai chairman and CEO George Conrades, who just sued his daughter's ex-husband in an attempt to recover millions in unpaid business loans....

Drew Barbier and Brad Burgess join after restructure at former employer Chip designer MIPS has picked up two former execs from SiFive in a bid to boost its RISC-V development efforts....

It's like a cell tower... in spaaaaace SpaceX has put the first six Direct to Cell-capable Starlink satellites into orbit following a successful Jan 3, 2023 launch....

Already more than 37 years old, the relational system continues to gain popularity Open source PostgreSQL was today named database management system of the year by popular ranking site DB-Engines....

Tick-tock, developers: End of the road comes on April 9, 2024 Microsoft is warning developers that only months remain before extended support for Visual Studio 2013 is pulled on April 9....

IT service company's latest move to clear its maturing debts French IT services provider Atos has entered talks with Airbus to sell its tech security division in an effort to ease its financial burdens....

The source? Repurposed parts from electric vehicles Honda and Mitsubishi are to test the feasibility of powering a datacenter with fuel cells taken from electric vehicles, using hydrogen produced as a byproduct of an industrial process....

Users aren't the only ones questioning the Windows 11 feature's utility Windows boss Mikhail Parakhin has admitted that the Start menu needs a bit of work....

Company's removal from ransomware gang's leak blog could mean negotiations underway Xerox has officially confirmed that a cyber baddie broke into the systems of its US subsidiary - a week after INC Ransom claimed to have exfiltrated data from the copier and print giant....

Sacha Labourey on the HashiCorp license, Jenkins X experiments, and when LLMs will come for your job Interview "It's the experiment that went too far," says CloudBees' Sacha Labourey of HashiCorp's licensing change....

Interpretation, debate, and judges set to decide how the rubber hits the road Analysis As 2023 drew to a close, the year of AI hype was ending as it began. According to figures from Pitchbook, Big Tech spent twice as much on deals with Generative AI startups than venture capital groups during the year....

Industry lull good for tech, but human toll is grim reading The 7.6 preliminary magnitude earthquake that hit Japan on New Year's Day is forcing Ishikawa Prefecture chip and electronics companies to temporarily shut their doors, with affected companies including Toshiba, GlobalWafers, Murata and others....

The most successful compile-it-yourself Linux distro now has compiled, packaged executables Gentoo now offers 20-plus gigabytes of pre-compiled binaries, from desktops to office suites, to speed up installations and updates....

Details sub-CPU allotments, performant Iceberg tables after Microsoft, Databricks bring market noise Feature Last year was a big one for data analytics and ML in the cloud. Two of the biggest players, Microsoft and Databricks, both overhauled their platforms, with the former also managing to launch products....

With the average demand hitting $1.5 million, something's gotta change Emsisoft has called for a complete ban on ransom payments following another record-breaking year of digital extortion....

Meanwhile, ISRO chief sets sights on next crewed mission India kicked off the new year with the launch of an X-ray polarimetry space observatory to research cosmic radiation....

Meanwhile: Fidelity downgrades social network's valuation by 71%, so far Links to articles and pages on the web made sense again on X, for a short while at least, as headlines and titles returned to preview cards shown in tweets in the digital land formerly known as Twitter....

Arizona and Texas are ahead in terms of regulating autonomous vehicles Driverless cars are not subject to traffic citations in California even if they violate driving laws under the state's current rules....

Justice Roberts thinks ML can help in legal cases, if humans keep their hands on the tiller US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts believes that artificial intelligence will play an increasingly important role in the legal process, but he expects "human judges will be around for a while."...

Now every miscreant is jumping on Big G's OAuth account security hole Security researchers say info-stealing malware can still access victims' compromised Google accounts even after passwords have been changed....

Updates for the 1% of holdouts halt Valve rang in the New Year by dropping Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 support on its Steam gaming platform, giving your gaming grandparets yet another reason to upgrade....

No, you aren't special - we're probably all visual learners Scientists say they have discovered the neural coding system our brains use to transform images into memories, suggesting we're all visual thinkers deep down....

Dutch photolithography giant claims export control not hurting its bottom line Washington reportedly pressed chipmaking equipment giant ASML to cancel some deliveries to China ahead of updated restrictions coming into force, but the company itself is declining to confirm if this is the case....

'Magnificent' image shows violent volcanic surface New images of Jupiter's moon, Io, were this week released by NASA following the flyby of the Juno spacecraft on December 30....

From legal proceedings to potential YouTube fodder The court system of Victoria, Australia, was subject to a suspected ransomware attack in which audiovisual recordings of court hearings may have been accessed....

December figures give Redmond little reason to cheer ahead of OS changes to meet EU law Many users are still steering clear of Windows 11 as Microsoft continues to shovel AI into its flagship operating system and prepares updates to mollify regulators....

Yields could double next year - provided the budget is passed To say 2023 was a big year in the world of fusion research would be an understatement....

Ice, ice maybe - water-seeking lunar trundlebot overcomes iffy connectors NASA's much-delayed Moon rover, VIPER, is progressing toward a 2024 launch, with its project manager declaring the trundlebot half-built....

Former British state telco claims only tiny percentage of voice and data traffic passes over kit The deadline for UK telcos to remove Huawei equipment from their core networks has now passed, with BT admitting 2G and 3G services are still served by infrastructure that is not compliant. Yet it isn't clear what measures, if any, BT may face for this....

Health org that previously promised it learned its lesson on transparency will , , and NHS England picked the last working day before Christmas to publish a heavily redacted contract for the controversial Federated Data Platform, which it awarded to US spy-tech firm Palantir in November....

Which is all about privacy and encryption, apparently Mozilla closed out 2023 with a report that dodges its flatlining browser market share and Mozilla.social beta in favor of calls for a faster pace from its highly paid CEO....

Loads of chips from Nvidia, AMD, Intel on the way - and very probably some surprises along the way as well Comment The new year is already shaping up to be one of the most significant in terms of datacenter silicon we've seen in a while. Every major chip house is slated to refresh their CPU and/or GPU product lines over the coming twelve months....

Recognizing what's unique about AI will give us the tools to keep it in check Opinion All the worries and fears about AI boil down to one. How do we know how well it's working?...

Right to repair meets right to recycle The UK government hopes to make it easier for folks to reuse and recycle electrical goods rather than consign old gear to the landfill....

Eighth charge related to campaign contributions would just take too dang long US prosecutors do not plan to proceed with a second trial of convicted and imprisoned crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), according to a Southern District of New York court letter filed on December 29....

Redmond's AI assistant bounds onto Android and iOS without Bing branding First Look While many readers enjoyed holiday downtime, Microsoft was busy bringing its Copilot AI to Android and iOS....

Compute, networking and storage are key, and global sales are still possible - despite, y'know, controversy Huawei chair Hu Houkun has prepared the Chinese tech giant for 2024 by suggesting its datacenter offerings are the key to success in the new year....

Less than you might imagine, thankfully The US Coast Guard has advised that a ship carrying around 800 tonnes of Lithium-Ion batteries - some of which caught fire - is out of danger after its crew handled the situation admirably....

And don't get us started on what it's like to work around high explosives On Call: Dirt File All good things must end, even the holidays - and with them On Call's Dirt File, a special festive edition of our reader-contributed tech support trauma tales dedicated to the filthiest places techies have been asked to toil....

Artist Agnieszka Pilat tells The Register how she gets Spot to paint, not pant Boston Dynamics' "Spot" robot dog has been deployed as a tour guide, a police officer, and a warehouse worker. At the National Gallery Of Victoria's Triennial in Melbourne, Australia, it's now doing duty as an artist....

As we argue over freeing ourselves from fossil fuels, can SRM buy us time to develop green energy we need? In-depth At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting (AGU23) in San Francisco the other week, the 25,000-plus science folks in attendance pretty much all agreed on one unequivocal fact: the Earth is warming and it's warming quickly. Discussions centered not on "if" - that's been settled - but on how to best measure that rise, how to best model it, and what best to do about it....