The Register

Software expected to top $1 trillion next year, according to analysts In the face of continuing economic uncertainty and geopolitical conflict, spending on computer software continues at a staggering pace, forecast to grow 13.5 percent in 2023....

Will people really hop on a plane to gaze at their phone? Singapore attracts millions of tourists every year, but lags well behind competing Asian destinations like Malaysia, Indonesia or Japan. Part of the problem is limited space available to build tourist attractions - the whole country is on an island. So the Singapore Tourism Board has turned to creating digital experiences to lure in guests and their wallets....

John Kelly is building approach around Microsoft, but there's room for flexibility Interview The UK government is to spend 1.2 trillion in the current financial year overseen mainly by HM Treasury, the department also responsible for keeping the economy on track and overseeing financial markets. To do its job, the Treasury aims to create a "production model" of a new data platform by the end of the 2024-2025 financial year....

Won't someone think of Zuck's pocket change? Norwegian data protection authorities have temporarily banned Meta from tracking users for the purposes of serving ads, and threatened the US company with fines of one million Kroner per day if it doesn't comply....

As Microsoft warns it'll charge $30 per user per month for Copilot for Business Llama 2, Meta's latest collection of large language models, can now be downloaded for free and commercial use is supported....

Predator dev joins Pegasus slinger The US government on Tuesday added commercial spyware makers Intellexa and Cytrox to its Entity List, saying the duo are a possible threat to national security....

Enough to make you hopping mad JumpCloud says a "sophisticated nation-state" attacker broke into its IT systems and targeted some of its customers....

Look who is learning to share: Deal includes no admission of fault, naturally Tesla's board of directors has settled a case with shareholders who accused its members of awarding themselves oversized compensation packages....

Industry body warns against political rhetoric or US subsidy efforts will be diminished The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has stepped into the fray to lower tensions between Washington and Beijing over chip exports, as well as calling for further restrictions to be put on ice....

China's Alibaba comes in third followed by Google and Huawei The global market for cloud infrastructure services grew by 30 percent last year, exceeding $100 billion in value for the first time and two lions account for nearly two-thirds of that entire spend....

Also: OpenAI enters deals with the Associated Press and Shutterstock to license content, and more AI in brief More than 8,000 writers have signed an open letter penned by the US Authors Guild urging leaders from six top AI companies to obtain consent and compensate them for training models on their copyrighted work....

Data from 2021 Mercury flyby shows same mechanisms cause phenomena throughout our star system Scientists have found that the fundamental mechanism behind the spectacular light shows of auroras on Earth are universal throughout the solar system....

Probably not aliens, maybe The Australian Space Agency said on Monday it was making enquiries related to a mysterious cylindrical object that washed ashore on Western Australia's Jurien Bay....

Says baddies launched attack at weekend, isolates parts of tech infrastructure to contain spread Norwegian mining and recycling giant TOMRA says it has isolated tech systems as it deals with an "extensive cyberattack."...

Could've sworn that came out yesterday OK, going by previous auctions of retro Apple hardware, it's clear that there are fanbois out there benefiting from an infinite money glitch or something - but this is getting ridiculous....

It would be twice as much if people could stop arguing about who counts and who doesn't Opinion Linux is now a little more than three 3 per cent of the desktop OS market, excluding the just over four per cent that is ChromeOS. Which is also Linux, but the wrong kind of Linux....

Misconfiguration led to hours of pain for engineers as bootstrap service caught in a loop A code deployment for Azure Container Apps that contained a misconfiguration triggered prolonged log data access issues, according to a technical incident report from Microsoft....

The race to 2nm is getting crowded as Intel, Japan's Rapidus enter the fray Samsung Electronics has reportedly caught up with rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in advanced processor design, achieving comparable yields for both 4nm and 3nm nodes....

Good thing Mali isn't best pals with Russia right no- oh, shoot For the past decade, millions of emails destined for .mil US military addresses were actually directed at .ml addresses, that being the top-level domain for the African nation of Mali, it's claimed....

Redmond one step closer to $69B Activision Blizzard merger Microsoft and Sony have signed a pact to keep Call of Duty games available for PlayStation consoles for the next ten years, clearing a major roadblock to Microsoft closing its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard....

Smells like Russian cyber spies (again) A vulnerability in Zimbra's software is being exploited right now by miscreants to compromise systems and attack selected government organizations, experts reckon....

Three years after Slack flagged up 'illegal' bundling of chat app European Union antitrust regulators are expected to next week launch their first formal probe into Microsoft's integration of collaboration app Teams with its dominant Office 365 productivity software suite....

There's never been a fruit winder like this before An Apple patent application indicates that Cook and Company are possibly entertaining the idea of adding roll-up screens to everything from the all-in-one iMac to the iPhone - and even wearables....

Also more fiery, with vague but firm orders to create a 'security barrier' Over the weekend Chinese president Xi Jinping gave a directive to officials to build a Beijing-supervised "security barrier" around its internet....

Why are you hitting yourselves? semiconductor CEOs ask The chip wars between the US and China continue apace amid warnings that both sides may be harming their own economy as much as the other, and tech companies are increasingly concerned about doing business within constantly shifting restrictions....

Trust and safety push promises ability to delete app-associated accounts Google, citing trust and safety concerns, has issued updated policies for those distributing Android apps through the Play Store....

Suffering and financial loss of subpostmasters prompts decision in interim report An inquiry into one of the UK's greatest IT scandals has called for compensation offered by the government to victims falsely accused of fraud to be brought forward and strengthened....

Wait, so it wasn't an elaborate joke? It's been almost four years since we were able to write "Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues"....

A worrying concession means that the shape of the marketplace is changing The AlmaLinux distribution's goal is shifting from being one-to-one, bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to being application binary interface (ABI) compatible. But this represents a larger shift in the enterprise Linux market....

Meanwhile, ORNL's Summit simulates bacteria battling cicada wings The US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory has finally completed the installation of the Aurora supercomputer after a bevy of delays but scientists are already clamoring to put it to work....

While Zuckerberg's Threads reels in users at record rates Despite the best efforts of Elon Musk, the world's most compelling/irritating social media platform has been more or less assured as the go-to outlet for the political commentary, shitposting and cat pics. But that looks set to change....

There's probably someone out there who likes a wobbly laptop that cuts their flesh Desktop Tourism In one of the documents uncovered during Microsoft's defense of its acquisition of Activision is a slide in which the software giant expresses its desire for "Surface devices to inspire the ecosystem and set the premium bar for quality and innovation."...

Meanwhile, Conservative stalwart calls to repeal law Campaigners have called for the UK tax collector to respond to a consultation on how to avoid tech contractors paying a double tax while their status is defined....

Relic of the Ballmer years, we shall not see such marketing nonsense again... oh, hang on Opinion All tech grunts know an update from a vendor can be good news, bad news, or both. Fortunately, there's a quick way to tell even before the first sentence of the community blog post that is today's royal proclamation of choice. If the person addressing the community is an engineer, it's good news. If marketing, not so much....

Employees are kicking back and letting chatbots do the work Almost one in two fleshbags that have dabbled with generative AI believe its responses are always bang on the money, and some are using it at work despite knowing their employer frowns upon it....

Yippee-ki-yay, other sockets! who, me? Welcome, gentle reader, to another instalment of Who, Me? in which we cushion your entry to the working week with tales of Reg readers having worse days than you. So kick off your shoes and socks, make fists with your toes, and read on....

ALSO: More high-profile MOVEit victims; CVSS 4.0 coming soon; and a long list of critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson lobbed a wrench into the works of the country's COVID-19 inquiry by claiming he couldn't remember the passcode to unlock an old phone being sought by investigators....

ALSO: China taikonaut moon plans; Singapore's Temasek to stay clear of crypto; India ponders ban on for-profit .IN sales; and more. APAC in brief India's big four services giants are doing it tough, with Wipro and HCL deferring pay reviews and rises, Infosys rumored to have done the same, and TCS again postponing onboarding for workers to whom it's promised jobs...

You can't steal what you can't access ... we hope Microsoft has vowed to bulk up security around its Azure DevOps cloud services developers use to build their applications and manage their software projects....

PIGEON homes in on your geolocation A trio of Stanford computer scientists have developed a deep learning model to geolocate Google Street View images, meaning it can figure out generally where a picture was taken just by looking at it....

A 100 days over 100F and historic drought don't worry Microsoft or Google With more than a hundred 100F (37.7C) days a year and a persistent drought, on paper Phoenix, Arizona is one of the last places you'd expect to find cloud and colocation providers setting down roots....

Why limit yourself to only stealing AWS credentials? A criminal crew with a history of deploying malware to harvest credentials from Amazon Web Services accounts may expand its attention to organizations using Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform....

After that $20B Vedanta deal went up in smoke Just days after its $19.5 billion semiconductor manufacturing venture with India's Vedanta went belly up, Foxconn is reportedly in talks with Taiwanese giant TSMC and Japan's TMH to build chip factories in India....

We'll see in 42 days whether economical $74.5M rover sticks The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, successfully launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Friday at 1435 local time....

Lawyers say unknown John Does are profiting at Musk's expense Elon Musk's X Corp, lately the parent company of Twitter, is suing four unknown individuals for scraping data from the bird site, claiming that the parties unjustly enriched themselves on the back of Twitter data....

But the outcome is far from certain Teradata is hitting all the major clouds with its VantageCloud Lake technology on Microsoft Azure following a similar deal with AWS, and with a deployment in Google Cloud expected in the first half of next year....

Stock price plunges after malfunction, as vendor works with part supplier to nail down cause Satellite operator Viasat is facing an issue with its latest satellite, which appears to have affected antenna deployment and may impact its ability to deliver high-speed broadband....

The artist formerly known as Bierstadt Haters of official Microsoft Office font Calibri finally have their wish - the infuriatingly 11-point default typeface has been chucked tothe bin in favor of Aptos, the new official font to be used in all the Microsoft Office apps....

AWS Sydney users less fortunate - the backup was deleted Luck, rather than judgement, has given InfluxDB users some hope of restoring 100 days of data after the vendor decided to shut down its Belgium Google Cloud region. Customers depending on the database in Australia are not so fortunate....

The truth is... somewhere in these piles of government documents. Maybe US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been pulling some strings to force the government to spill what it knows about UFOs....