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Peter Smails talks community, licensing, and AI pragmatism Interview Open source companies do not run on goodwill alone, and industry veteran SUSE is walking the tighrope between pleasing the community and charging cold hard cash for some of its wares....

Global Combat Air Program aims to replace Eurofighter Typhoon and Mitsubishi F-2 Britain will be acting as headquarters for a not-so-secret next-generation fighter aircraft program the UK has linked up with Japan and Italy to build, the MoD revealed late last week....

The magic that defied the iron will of Steve Jobs has a lot more to offer Opinion The passage of time can harsh one's mellow in bittersweet ways. Tech anniversaries, while they do make you feel "That can't be true, it was just the other year," also offer the chance of a bit of fun in the form of emulated nostalgia....

Some jokes don't deserve an audience Who, Me? As the year rolls down to its inevitable conclusion, we're running out of Mondays. But have no fear, gentle reader - future Mondays will bring you further installments of Who, Me? in which Register readers share their tales of tech support gone wrong....

Mark your diary for 2061 - if you're over the disappointment of 1986's fuzzy blob Halley's Comet, officially 1P/Halley, has begun its long journey back towards Earth after making it to aphelion - the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun - on December 9....

The online communities that arguably fuelled the search giant's dominance have become too nasty to bother with Google Groups has announced it will end support for Usenet - a significant change that undoes one of the early decisions that propelled the search and ads giant to dominance....

Server tanks can do more than heat water - they can also build into resilient many-site clouds Building owners should consider an on-site datacenter an amenity they need to offer tenants - according to an Australian outfit that hopes to provide those same datacenters....

iGiant was on the back foot after courts found virtual iPhones were fair use Apple and iOS virtualization software maker Corellium have ended their four-year-long battle with a confidential settlement....

PLUS: Cancer patients get ransom notes for Christmas, Delta Dental is the latest MOVEit victim, and critical vulns Infosec in brief MongoDB on Saturday issued an alert warning of "a security incident involving unauthorized access to certain MongoDB corporate systems, which includes exposure of customer account metadata and contact information."...

PLUS: Beijing wants ten-minute reporting of infosec incidents; Infosys CFO bails; TikTok's Indonesia comeback approved, for now Think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) last week published details of a campaign that spreads English language pro-China and anti-US narratives on YouTube....

As world heads into 2024, scientists are asked: When will Big Oil face the heat? Comment You surely noticed much of the world was on fire this year, especially if you were in the western United States, western or eastern Canada, Australia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Tunisia... you get the idea....

Former worker phished then NPM repo hijacked Cryptocurrency wallet maker Ledger says someone slipped malicious code into one of its JavaScript libraries to steal more than half a million dollars from victims....

Cloud misconfig blamed and now fixed Ubiquiti says it fixed a bug that allowed some of its customers to glimpse strangers' security camera footage and access accounts and devices that didn't belong to them....

Android giant follows Apple's lead, will store whereabouts on device and delete info earlier by default Google has announced changes to its handling of Location History data that are expected to limit the internet giant's ability to respond to so-called geofence warrants....

Ah, beans The Kraft Heinz Company says its systems are all up and running as usual as it probes claims that some of its data was stolen by ransomware crooks....

Sadly not saucy enough in this state for return trip to Earth There is good news and bad news regarding the two tomatoes lost aboard the International Space Station (ISS) last year. The good news is that they've been found. The bad news is that they look less than appetizing....

You'd better have 2GB free on that handset and be running Android 14 Google Pixel owners who need to take their devices in for repair now have an option to protect their data from snooping techs in the form of a new "repair mode."...

Mitchell Hashimoto departs, apparently unconnected to controversial licensing change HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto is leaving the building....

Low Earth orbit cell ops will help remote region get services SpaceX has got approval to run tests of a proposed service that allows unmodified smartphones to make calls via a satellite link....

Novel malware adapts delivers DDoS attacks and provides RAT functionality Incident responders say they've found a new type of multi-platform malware abusing the New Kind of Network (NKN) protocol....

Choose your own adventure: Use the old qualification tanks, or squeeze in some from Vega-C? The final Vega rocket launch is being delayed to September 2024 as engineers wrestle with the unusual problem of disappearing fuel tanks....

Another Johnson era fantasy fails to survive its encounter with science, engineering and economics A second planned trial to provide hydrogen for home heating was this week officially cancelled in England, a government minister has confirmed....

Incoming datacenter chips will power new ThinkAgile, ThinkSystem boxes Lenovo is the latest vendor to unveil systems aimed at the wave of interest in AI, but the China-based tech giant is also among the first to say its boxes will feature Intel's Emerald Rapids Xeon chips featuring AMX technology for AI acceleration....

The dos and don'ts of bulk emailing A data regulator has reminded companies they need to take care while writing emails to avoid unintentionally blurting out personal data....

And it's priceless when that abuse is shown to be unreasonable On Call Here at The Register we don't guarantee much - other than that every Friday morning will feature a new instalment of On Call, our weekly column featuring readers' stories of supplying support services and the sometimes-savage response to their efforts....

Nobody expects the Spanish admonition! Pope Francis urged world leaders to establish an international treaty regulating AI, and warned against relying on machines to make moral and ethical decisions that should be left to humans....

'Cos Ananova worked out so well A startup with aspirations of becoming a trusted global news brand is planning to launch a service delivering curated content - written by AI and delivered by artificial anchors....

If all goes to plan, more Chinese goods will flow into the global market Amazon is set to open an innovation center in the Chinese city of Shenzhen to assist Middle Kingdom businesses increase exports - an effort that aligns with the likes of Alibaba and the wider Chinese e-commerce industry....

Association offers utopian vision of authors and model-makers bargaining over the price at which to opt-in for content scraping The Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) has asked us all to imagine a future in which builders of AI models offer a price they're willing to pay for the copyrighted material they need, and creators choose whether to pay it until enough deals are struck that all stakeholders achieve satisfaction....

Finding a reason to do it might be the hardest part CANALYS APAC FORUM Businesses are clamoring to adopt AI, without really knowing what to do with it, according to speakers on a panel at last week's Canalys APAC Forum in Bangkok....

As Broadcom division announces it will keep desktop hypervisors, revive 'Flings' VMware by Broadcom, as the former VMware is now known, has in recent days dished out welcome news for its faithful....

'Your info won't be harvested for training' is the new 'Your private chatter won't be used for ads' Comment Cloud storage biz Dropbox spent time on Wednesday trying to clean up a misinformation spill because someone was wrong on the internet....

Congress renews warrantless spying tool scribbled on back of huge check for the Pentagon US lawmakers today approved an $886 billion defense policy bill that includes a four-month extension to Section 702, the controversial surveillance tool that allows American intelligence to potentially spy on its citizens and permanent residents....

That should solve the global cybercrime problem, right? Microsoft has taken down US-based infrastructure and websites used by a cybercrime group to sell fraudulent online accounts to other crooks including Scattered Spider, the infamous social-engineering and extortion crew that hacked two Las Vegas casinos over the summer....

One percent of Chrome users will experience the web as if using Firefox or Safari Starting January 4, 2024, Google says it will begin blocking third-party cookies by default in Chrome for one percent of users, only three or four years after rival browsers implemented similar privacy protections....

Software cons reportedly outweighed public-cloud pros LinkedIn has abandoned its efforts to migrate its datacenter infrastructure to Microsoft Azure four years after announcing the planned move....

The rapture of the black T-shirt brigade was very short indeed The kernel 6.6.6 version number delighted many a black-clad open source fan, but not for long. It's already been replaced with a more neighborly 6.6.7....

Campaign to promote 'chat control' legislation allegedly sorted users by political views, religious beliefs An EU privacy rights group has filed a complaint against Elon Musk's X, alleging the platform unlawfully targeted advertisements from the bloc's Home Affairs directorate in a bid to build public support for hotly contested "chat control" legislation....

Visual Studio Code extension preview has a bunch of limitations for now A preview of Microsoft's Windows AI Studio has landed - a set of tools and models from catalogs, including Azure AI Studio and Hugging Face - however you'll need Linux to run it....

Science and telemetry data hit by latest issue NASA's veteran Voyager 1 spacecraft has stopped transmitting engineering and science data back to Earth....

Oh and its got more cores, a bigger cache, and a simpler chiplet architecture to boot Intel launched its 5th-generation Xeon Scalable processors with more cores, cache, and machine learning grunt during its AI Everywhere Event in New York Thursday....

National security and infosec authorities band together to help victims sniff out stealthy Russian baddies hiding in networks Updated The offensive cyber unit linked to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is exploiting the critical vulnerability affecting the JetBrains TeamCity CI/CD server at scale, and has been since September, authorities warn....

Browser history also deposited under the Christmas Tree in new release Vivaldi - the browser for users who just can't get enough settings - has launched version 6.5 of its software on desktop and mobile....

Flags up potential job cuts, price hikes, and national security issues Union Unite thinks the proposed merger in Britain of telcos Vodafone and Three would results in thousands of people losing their jobs, price hikes for customers, and a "serious threat" to national security....

Business email compromise, illicit cryptomining, phishing ... if it makes a dollar, this lot do it Multiple miscreants are misusing OAuth to automate financially motivated cyber crimes - such as business email compromise (BEC), phishing, large-scale spamming campaigns - and deploying virtual machines to illicitly mine for cryptocurrencies, according to Microsoft....

Internet plod highlight tactics used by cruel Karakurt crime gang Karakurt, a particularly nasty extortion gang that uses "extensive harassment" to pressure victims into handing over millions of dollars in ransom payments after compromising their IT infrastructure, pose a "significant challenge" for network defenders, we're told....

If it looks like a job, and is supervised like a job, it'll be classified as a job Millions of contractors for digital platforms - often referred to as gig workers - may soon be classified as employees in the European Union....

Extortionware 'relentlessly deprioritized' and even King Charles seems oblivious to danger, scathing report finds The UK has failed to address the threat posed by ransomware, leaving the country at the mercy of a catastrophic ransomware attack that the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) yesterday warned could occur "at any moment."...

Software giant learned the hard way that lift-and-shift isn't easy SAP has revealed that its attempts to create an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool for its cloud "was abandoned after a year and a half as a failure."...

Robotaxi firm's car ran over a woman, then it allegedly misled investigators GM's self-driving taxi outfit, Cruise, has dismissed nine execs - including its chief operating officer - after staff withheld information regarding an incident in which a woman was injured by one of the firm's robotaxis....