The Register

Talk about a bright idea IEEE 802.11bb, an amendment to the Wi-Fi specification that supports wireless networking using visible and infrared light instead of the radio spectrum, was approved last month by the electrical engineering body....

Only comms lasers, sadly The UK's Northumbria University is working on a laser communication device for small satellites that will pave the way for Britain's first university-led multi-satellite space mission....

Commercial and technical risks yet to be addressed by Home Office, spending watchdog says UK politicians have slammed progress on the 11 billion Emergency Services Network (ESN) - the replacement blue-light mobile voice and data system - saying the government is far too optimistic about its progress and the challenges ahead....

Response to taking out the trash rubbished a reputation On Call Welcome once more to On Call, the weekly column in which Reg readers dump their foulest stories of execrable tech support incidents from which they emerged smelling like roses....

Union prez Fran Drescher thinks Hollywood's digital desires have no style or flair Hollywood's top labor union for media professionals has alleged that studios want to pay extras around $200 for the rights to use their likenesses in AI - forever - for just $200....

Redacted document filed with UK regulator states customers aren't buying Virtzilla's poorly-executed vision Broadcom has argued that VMware will fail to execute its multicloud strategy - and hyperscale clouds therefore won't face strong competition - unless it is allowed to acquire the virtualization titan....

Cites 'tight supply' of certain silicon - the sort of stuff that makes servers interesting Chinese server-maker to the stars, Inspur, has warned investors that it will soon reveal an ugly set of numbers....

Mostly indistinguishable from a premium handset, but the moments it misses may leave you miffed FIRST LOOK A confession: I have learned that the iPhone 13's facial recognition facility can successfully identify me while I brush my teeth....

Brainboxes will need a license, but their makers may get to share digital public goods Chinese authorities published the nation's rules governing generative AI on Thursday, including protections that aren't in place elsewhere in the world....

'Premium' instances, bigger buckets available too Content-delivery-network-turned-cloud-player Akamai has flipped the switch on three bit barns in the US and France. The biz has also launched "premium" instances targeting commercial workloads and improved object storage capabilities....

That bot ain't ruining people's reputation or trampling their privacy, right? Right? America's Federal Trade Commission has started looking into whether OpenAI's ChatGPT is breaking consumer protection laws by causing reputational or privacy damage....

Exec faces fraud charges, one regulator wants $5 billion fine Alex Mashinsky, the now-former CEO of collapsed cryptocurrency concern Celsius, today faces charges of fraud as prosecutors and watchdogs pile in....

Subscription fatigue is a thing and regulators are circling, but Korean giant reckons you're ready to cough up after buying hardware LG Electronics has outlined its ambition to grow revenue from $51 billion company to $78 billion over the next six and a half years, thanks in part to ads streamed to its tellies and subscription services for its appliances....

Avocado prep time could be cut in half, but it still won't change the price Unhappy with the speed at which human workers prep avocados, Chipotle has introduced a robot to get the guacamole going....

Software could be 'an emerging competitive threat' to luxury design SaaS maker, notes regulator Updated The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has decided to launch a full-blown probe of Adobe's takeover of web-first collaboration and software design house Figma after the companies failed to offer remedies to worries about the merger....

Will get involved from production to hydrogen engines, hopes for 5B turnover from tech by 2030 German engineering giant Bosch says it plans to invest 2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) in hydrogen technology, starting with fuel cell power modules to be used initially in trucks built by Nikola Corporation in the US....

There are only 1,300 souls left from 7,500 before Musk, complaint claims Former Twitter employee Courtney McMillian has filed a complaint claiming the company owes $500 million in severance pay to the thousands of people that were chopped from its once 7,500-strong workforce....

Ofcom launches investigation into whether telco is making it difficult for people to cancel services Virgin Media, which provides broadband, phone and TV services in the UK, is in hot water with regulators over allegations that the company is making it difficult for customers to cancel their contracts....

May be about to join systemd as the new tech for graybeards to scorn... but adopt anyway It has taken about 15 years to get there, but there is mounting evidence that the Wayland display server may soon topple X11 as the most common way to get a GUI on Linux....

Amazon, Microsoft and VMware make their moves in the game of machines IBM claims it can cut the cost for AI models in the cloud with custom silicon to cash in on the surge of interest in generative models like ChatGPT....

So much for that 'zero-gravity' cooling The SD card reader on Asus's Steam Deck competitor is failing due to excessive heat, the manufacturer confirmed this week....

Storm-0558 had access to accounts and mail - maybe even for senior US officials US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and other State and Commerce Department officials were reportedly among the victims of a China-based group's attack on Microsoft's hosted email services....

Fantasy sports bets put on the same footing as online casinos or a punt on the gee-gees India's GST Council seems to have declared war on online gaming - raising taxes on the endeavor to 28 percent, according to the country's Ministry of Finance on Wednesday....

Janus asteroid sats headed for That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case NASA's Box Full Of Old Tech It Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case (BFOOTISPHTOBKJIC) was already probably the world's coolest collection of such cruft, but is now set to gain a pair of fully functional space probes it's decided not to launch....

Improved service massively and slashed costs. Gulp Here's a story from the Department of Massive and Terrifying Irony: a startup Indian software developer struggled to afford its customer support team, so outsourced it - to an AI chatbot that was more efficient and cheaper....

We'll just take a look at the training data, oh... wait Updated In order to comply with data protection regimes, AI chatbots and associated machine learning applications will have to be capable of forgetting what they've learned....

Not even Uncle Sam can stand between x86 titan and its profits Intel has followed Nvidia's lead and will produce a modified version of its AI accelerator - specifically the Habana division's Guadi 2 - for the Chinese market....

With xAI, second time's the charm, eh, Elon? Register Kettle With so much uncertainty and hype surrounding artificial intelligence today, it's about time someone reliable, credible, and brilliant stepped forward....

Lawmakers, yet to pass a national privacy law, demand action on money Incredible as it may seem, US tax preparation companies using Google and Meta tracking technology have been sending sensitive information back to the megacorps, not to mention other tech firms, it is claimed....

Maybe bigger isn't better when it comes to complicated, error-prone space machines? China's private space industry took a giant leap past Musk, Bezos and everyone else today with the first successful orbital launch of a methane-powered rocket....

Hyperbole, scant information, ambition: Yep, it's an EM venture Elon Musk is founding of his own AI company with some lofty ambitions. According to the billionaire, his xAI venture is being formed "to understand reality."...

Multibillion-dollar lawsuit namechecks El Reg - twice Google, DeepMind and parent company, Alphabet, have been accused of "secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans" to build their own AI chatbot, Bard....

Ditching it after a decade? Devs warn of the hours to correct documentation and chaos it'll cause Microsoft is causing a stir among some tech pros after confirming it plans to rename Azure AD to Entra....

Building blocks for life could have been present for up to 2.6 billion years on the Red Planet, rover discovery shows The Perseverance Mars rover has found evidence of a range of organic molecules that suggest a more complex chemical cycle on the planet than previously thought....

Fancy seeing you here Nvidia is the latest company reportedly in talks to become an "anchor investor" in Arm's upcoming public offering, nearly 18 months after the GPU maker's bid to acquire Arm fell through....

Just think of the margins Salesforce has announced its first price hikes in seven years, increasing the price of software services used by businesses to support sales and marketing by up to ten percent....

Head of operations job ad requires 'healthy skepticism of the status quo' Ubiquitous billionaire Elon Musk is set to bring his devil-may-care management style to Britain's electricity grid....

Chip biz pledged to allow hardware interoperability The European Commission has granted conditional approval for the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom....

Potent greenhouse gas even worse for climate than too much carbon dioxide A methane tracking satellite that can calculate emissions of this potent greenhouse gas with extreme accuracy is due to go into operation next year, following the successful testing of its instrumentation aboard a jet aircraft....

NCAR's biggish iron will also explore wildfires, drought and solar storms In hopes of mitigating the effects of climate change, scientists working in collaboration with the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are using supercomputers to explore the risks and benefits of seeding the atmosphere with aerosols that would block sunlight and lower global temperatures....

The chameleon-rancher chooses a new, Rocky course SUSE is reconsidering the change of course it made at the beginning of last year: it is launching its own RHEL-compatible distro, or as it puts it, a fork of RHEL....

But people keeping jobs might find they are less boring, study shows An international policy think-tank has found 27 percent of jobs are in occupations under threat from AI and other forms of automation....

Nifty XRISM plasma-spotting scope to ride the same Mitsubishi Japan's Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has named August 26 as its intended launch date for a lunar lander it hopes will improve humanity's ability to touch down on other worlds - as well as an astronomical observation that might help us understand how they form....

Addresses criticisms raised by sections of the community and recent controversies The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the regional internet registry for 56 economies across the region, has announced significant governance changes....

The likes of WeChat and Weibo suddenly have a lot of work to do - including turning off the money tap The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has announced new requirements for platforms, to prevent accounts that spread fake news or misinformation from monetizing their content....

Data here, model there, Virtzilla's usual abstraction principles in between VMware has teased looming announcements outlining how it will enable generative AI to run on it stack, drawing on resources housed across multiple clouds....

As allegations of forced labour circulate, CATL goes for a jolt of social responsibility Chinese battery company Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), which makes around a third of the world's EV batteries and supplies the likes of Tesla and BMW, announced on Tuesday it had joined the United Nations Global Compact, an initiative that sees CEOs make non-binding commitments for sustainability and social responsibility, including human and labor rights....

Making it easy to exit subscriptions will just baffle everyone, FTC told The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering whether to make it easier for folks to cancel deliveries and subscription services. People should be able to simply click on a page or in an app to exit a subscription, and not have to go through a maze of bureaucracy, it's suggested....

Facebook messages, obtained via valid warrant, help make case against women A Nebraska mother pleaded guilty on Friday to giving her 17-year-old daughter pills for an abortion last year and to helping her dispose of the 29-week-old fetus....

Plus: Apple bungles another rapid security response; important ICS updates land; and more Patch Tuesday Microsoft today addressed 130 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its products - and five of those bugs have already been exploited in the wild....