The Register

Printer names messed up? Debug It Yourself Microsoft has issued a fix for the mysterious HP Smart app issue and Windows subsequently renaming printers, and it's anything but simple....

That'll make a lot of expensive ashtrays Good news, everyone! Earlier this week, it looked as though your opportunity to snap up a piece of aviation history in the form of a Concorde engine might have gone. However, if your pockets are deep enough, it appears there's still a chance you could buy your very own Olympus Turbojet....

LAION-5B contains 1,008 verifiable instances of illegal pictures of children, likely lots more, say researchers A massive public dataset that served as training data for popular AI image generators including Stable Diffusion has been found to contain thousands of instances of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)....

Tabby footage crosses millions of miles and was still faster than most folks' home broadband From the department of "what must the aliens think of us?" comes news that NASA has demonstrated its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment through the medium of a cat video....

Among the mistakes, an 11-year-old girl was misidentified as a shoplifter and searched The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has banned American drugstore chain Rite Aid from using AI facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes for five years....

Life's a vector, then you die Just as language models can predict what phrase might come next in a sentence, Danish researchers claim to have shown human life events can be predicted using similar statistical techniques....

See, it wasn't just you Microsoft has finally acknowldged that Windows does have a Wi-Fi problem and offered a resolution for those affected: Known Issue Rollback....

Latest version of Mozilla's web browser brings something different depending on your machine Version 121 of Mozilla's Firefox web browser, released yesterday, has changes that affect Linux, Windows, and Mac users differently....

Parking meters and trash collection face disruption as networks switch off A worrying number of UK authorities are still unaware of the impending switch-off of 2G and 3G mobile networks, according to Local Government Association (LGA) figures....

Enforcement notice issued months after data regulator schooled police force Updated Greater Manchester Police (GMP) must clear the backlog of hundreds of Freedom of Information (FOI) Act requests - some years old - or find itself in contempt of court....

Chartered institute highlights lack of progress in tech role equality It will take 283 years for female representation in IT to make up an equal share of the tech workforce in the UK, according to a report from the British Computer Society, the chartered institute for IT (BCS)....

No need to panic, but grab those updates or mitigations anyway just to be safe A vulnerability in the SSH protocol can be exploited by a well-placed adversary to weaken the security of people's connections, if conditions are right....

Latest launch sim went off without a hitch. An upper stage test, not so much The European Space Agency (ESA) has declared its Ariane 6 rocket is "ready to go" - at least in terms of its ability to launch the long - delayed rocket. But some concerns remain about the performance of its upper stage....

MTT S4000 GPU isn't super-fast, but the 'kilocard cluster' design supporting it looks interesting Moore Threads, a Chinese purveyor of GPUs, has unveiled its mightiest model to date - and it may even give market leader Nvidia a little to worry about....

Even systems located outside city-state could be considered 'foundational' and face performance demands Singapore's government has proposed amendments to its 2018-era Cybersecurity Bill that would extend the oversight of its cyber security agency to cloud service providers and datacenter operators....

ERP for 63,000 small rural lenders, software for 1,800 banks, and better-than-hyperscale cloud for the rest India is building massive technology infrastructure to support its financial services sector....

Alleged crims used AI to pose as friends, family, romantic partners - and sold dodgy NFTs A transnational police operation has resulted in the arrest of 3,500 alleged cybercriminals and the seizure of $300 million in cash and digital assets....

'Water? Like out of the toilet?' It will get cleaned first and it'll be better than Brawndo Taking a cue from water-starved environments like Arrakis in Frank Herbert's Dune books and the International Space Station, arid California is shortening the distance between wastewater and drinking water....

Oh yes, please, get in the sea Never mind that it is years late, hampered by production problems, and still not on the actual horizon: Elon Musk wants to turn the Cybertruck into a boat....

35M-plus Comcast user IDs accessed by intruder via Citrix Bleed Millions of Comcast Xfinity subscribers' personal data - including potentially their usernames, hashed passwords, contact details, and secret security question-answers - was likely stolen by one or more miscreants exploiting Citrix Bleed in October....

Microsoft bug hunters highlight weaknesses in source-wrangling suite Four vulnerabilities in Perforce Helix Core Server, including one critical remote code execution bug, should be patched "immediately," according to Microsoft, which spotted the flaws and disclosed them to the software vendor....

5 out of 6 'gatekeepers' are US-based so regulators across pond are just being mean to us, say lawmakers Bipartisan congressional representatives have sent a letter to President Joe Biden, demanding action over what they claim is the unfair targeting of US tech companies by the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

Bad news for several downstream distros, but good news for NetBSD After a recent meetup in Cambridge, Debian developers are discussing how to start gradually dropping 32-bit x86 support....

Crims laugh it off and resume their activity The FBI created a decryption tool for the ransomware used by the gang known as BlackCat and/or ALPHV, as part of a wider disruption campaign against the group....

Soul searching in the wake of Virgin Orbit failure The UK Space Agency has published a "Lessons Learned" report after the failure of the first orbital launch attempt from Spaceport Cornwall in Newquay on the south west coast of England....

Gives Apple a sly nod over sideloading Google is to pay $700 million and overhaul some policies to settle the Play Store antitrust lawsuit launched by US states and consumers....

The difference between 1983 and 1993 is vast. Since then, not so much Comment As we approach the end of 2023, it's interesting to look back at the tech of three decades ago. Not just to compare it to today's, but also to that a decade earlier. The interesting aspect isn't how much has changed: it's how fast it was, and is, changing....

Rivals will need to dislodge incumbent SAP in competition for 5-year deal across three departments The UK's tax collector is seeking software and technical services suppliers to replace its SAP ERP with a subscription-based product, in a project already judged a "red" risk by the government's projects watchdog....

Experts say malware strain make take years to die off completely Multiple sources are confirming the resurgence of Qakbot malware mere months after the FBI and other law enforcement agencies shuttered the Windows botnet....

UK software reseller alleges 'no real prospect of success' of Windows giant's arguments Microsoft's tussle with ValueLicensing over perpetual licensing terms has taken another turn after the software reseller asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to strike out parts of Redmond's amended defense....

Maybe check the label before you next sip a Kirin alcopop? With less than two weeks remaining in 2023, The Register thinks we've almost reached the point at which we can prove Nothing Is Safe From AI - thanks to an announcement that Japan's Kirin Holdings, purveyor of many fine beers, has enlisted a binary brainbox to brew ideas for new products....

Would you rather a cloud that not-so-gently migrates you, or a retirement home like HCL? Broadcom recently revaled it intends to divest VMware's end-user compute products, which span virtual desktops, app publishing, and device management. Let's ponder where they might land....

Grammar might be off, but use case remains groundbreaking While pundits fear a future where elections are clouded by AI-created videos of faked politicans spreading misinformation, a Pakistani politician has deliberately delivered a deepfake of a speech while isolated from media behind bars....

OTT apps in the clear. Indian citizens, not so much - law proposes registration, surveillance, and shutdown powers India's government has introduced its Telecommunications Bill - heavily anticipated legislation that will replace laws that were passed before the internet existed and prior to India turning on over a billion mobile phone subscriptions....

Its hard to disagree with a mandate to make government digital services fit for people, not box-tickers Beijing's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has decided government digital services and apps need to become less bureaucratic and formal....

Someone needs to think of the children ... and the consequences of breaking encryption and trashing privacy The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has warned that policy proposals requiring or enabling the automated scouring of people's devices for illegal material - as floated by the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States - threaten the open internet....

Predatory Sparrow previously knocked out railways and a steel plant Hacktivists reportedly disrupted services at about 70 percent of Iran's gas stations in a politically motivated cyberattack....

Anticompetitive ... or simply keeping iDevice users nice and safe? Apple's game of Whac-A-Mole with messaging platform Beeper continues unabated, with the service reporting today that most users can again no longer send or receive iMessages....

Mortgage lender says no evidence of identity theft (yet) after SSNs, DoBs, addresses, more swiped Mortgage lender Mr Cooper has now admitted almost 14.7 million people's private information, including addresses and bank account numbers, were stolen in an earlier IT security breach, which is expected to cost the business at least $25 million to clean up....

Wrist, meet slap: Only a quarter will be paid to Treasury, the rest is vouchers and credits The US Department of Transportation has, on paper at least, fined Southwest Airlines $140 million in addition to refunds the government strong-armed the biz to pay out, as a result of the budget airline's massive Christmas outage last year....

IT systems encrypted, personal data pilfered from North Face parent, we're told A digital break-in has disrupted VF Corp's operations and its ability to fulfill orders, according to the apparel and footwear giant....

Now Photoshop giant needs to cough up that $1B break-up fee Adobe has decided to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of Figma in a concession to regulatory pressure in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States....

$270M secret building project includes 5,000 sq ft bunker On a remote part of Kauai, the fourth largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, someone with a lot of money is bankrolling an extensive construction project....

Get those holiday orders wrapped up now, because the bell tolls for iStrap If you're planning to give someone an Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 for the holidays you'd better act fast: Apple plans to pull both models from shelves in the United States in mere days after losing a patent fight earlier this year....

With Emerald Rapids, Chipzilla's Xeon roadmap is back on track - now it just needs to stay there Interview Intel's 5th-gen Xeon server processors have launched into the most competitive CPU market in years....

Musk-owned platform first to face freshly minted rules Elon Musk's X has earned the dubious honor of being the first online platform to have formal Digital Services Act (DSA) proceedings launched against it, with the European Commission accusing it of disseminating illegal content among other violations of the recently enacted rule....

iFixit tears down the M3 workstation The iFixit gang has rounded out their year by tearing into 2023's M3 iMac, where they found Apple's most replaceable battery yet....

Redmond stuffs IT admin Christmas stockings with network issues Microsoft has broken Wi-Fi connectivity for some users with a recent Windows update....

Big Blue shall not iPaaS up on app integration, APIs and data management to help with AI push IBM will buy two of European software industry veteran Software AG's tech platforms for 2.13 billion in cash....

Move reportedly made after consulting with National Cyber Security Centre The National Grid is reportedly the latest organization in the UK to begin pulling China-manufactured equipment from its network over cybersecurity fears....