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You didn't have anything else to do this Tuesday, right? VMware and Atlassian today disclosed critical vulnerabilities and, while neither appear to have been exploited by miscreants yet, admins should patch now to avoid disappointment....

Makes sense since the global market fell 11% in 2023 China's imports of semiconductors and integrated circuits were hit by their largest ever drop last year, although chips are said to remain the country's biggest import item....

Majority of public-facing devices still unpatched against critical vulns from as far back as 2022 More than 178,000 SonicWall firewalls are still vulnerable to years-old vulnerabilities, an infosec reseacher claims....

SpaceX gets chance to prove the FCC was wrong for rejecting its $885m rural broadband subsidy bid Farm equipment maker John Deere has signed a deal with SpaceX to use its Starlink satellite internet service to keep combines and other farm equipment connected to the internet in underserved rural areas....

Unlikely to be a stop-the-slurpage button, but look at the wallpaper A visualization of what Windows 12 - or whatever Microsoft decides to call its upcoming OS - might look like has arrived, and it is expectedly heavy on AI integration....

Shipments grow in Q4 after near two years of declines, and Huawei making a comeback in China Apple's iPhone is the frontrunner in the global smartphone market for the first time after demand finally returned to a sector that has shrunk for almost two years....

Customers still patchless and mitigation only goes so far There's a "reasonable chance" that Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN users are already compromised if they didn't apply the vulnerability mitigation released last week, experts say....

Not all batteries like subzero temperatures This week's frigid winter conditions in North America exposed the shortcomings of certain electric vehicles, particularly Teslas....

Calls for stronger team play in the global economic tournament The EU needs to get serious and act more decisively and collectively if it wants economic security, especially in advanced technology, as it is trailing global rivals such as Japan, China, and the US....

AI for customers and staff, while Euro bitbarns shifted to Azure Microsoft and Vodafone have inked a 10-year deal worth $1.5 billion, resulting in the telecommunication giant shuttering physical datacenters across Europe in favor of virtual ones using Azure....

Good progress for penguinistas keen on Macs The Asahi Linux team has followed up the release of Fedora Asahi Remix with a post detailing the progress of the project to bring Linux to Apple silicon....

Spending watchdog slams reliance on outdated systems and poor governance The UK's chief auditor has claimed the government could save at least 20 billion by modernizing IT systems and other measures....

Compatible hardware and peripherals are still on sale, four decades after its launch Retro Tech Week Two weeks before Apple launched the Macintosh, Sir Clive Sinclair launched his unprecedentedly powerful yet affordable Motorola-powered SOHO computer - starting a line of hardware and software that, remarkably, is still going....

Octopus Energy wants to back server-cooling, district heating projects Datacenter operator Deep Green has bagged 200 million ($254 million) from power provider Octopus Energy to help scale deployments that give municipal sites free heat in exchange for cooling its IT hardware....

Playing Colossal Cave Adventure on an ICL 2966 and coding on the last Elliott 803 Retro Tech Week Keeping old computers running for everyone to enjoy is getting increasingly difficult as the years pass. Parts get harder to obtain, and the skills needed start fading away....

Korean giant wants a local source of the stuff needed to build batteries Samsung's battery unit may have found part of a solution to sourcing the raw materials needed for the products it packs into gadgets and cars: buy a nickel mine. Or part of a nickel mine, at least....

The only PC with a keyboard so dreadful it challenged the ZX80, now even less usable Retro Tech Week Judges pondering contenders for the title of World's Worst PC Keyboard, Ever", seldom look too far beyond Sinclair's ZX80, which offered a membrane that caused attached screens to flicker with every keystroke....

Desktops escape regulations, laptops and servers don't, no reasons explained India's Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has announced that import restrictions targeting PCs will not include desktop computers, adding another twist to the strange saga of the nation's plan to require import licenses for many types of computers....

Inaccessible and autonomous armed group territories' host crooks who use tech to launder cash, run slave scam gangs, and more Global crime networks have set up shop in autonomous territories run by armed gangs across Southeast Asia, and are using them to host physical and online casinos that, in concert with crypto exchanges, have led to an explosion of money laundering, cyberfraud, and cybercrime across the region and beyond....

Intros Pro' AI for creators, ditches 300-seat requirement for business use Microsoft has revealed new versions of its OpenAI-powered Copilot services, at prices around triple the cost of its flagship M365 suite....

Billionaire suggests a payload would have solved the problem. And we have a suggestion for who that payload could be SpaceX boss Elon Musk has blamed a lack of payload coupled with the venting of liquid oxygen for last year's fiery end to the second flight of the company's Starship and Super Heavy combo....

Yet more support for the argument to adopt memory-safe languages More than 11,500 Juniper Networks devices are exposed to a new remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, and infosec researchers are pressing admins to urgently apply the patches....

Doing science and still alive ... but not for long Astrobotic has confirmed that the doomed Peregrine Lunar Lander's mission will end on Thursday, January 18 with the spacecraft burning up in the Earth's atmosphere....

The bug with a perfect 10 severity score has been ripe for exploitation since May GitLab admins should apply the latest batch of security patches pronto given the new critical account-bypass vulnerability just disclosed....

Web giant retorts that researchers simply used its publicly available APIs Web giant Baidu's stock is down 12 percent after a report linked its AI platform with the Chinese military, amid separate claims the Middle Kingdon's armed forces are sidestepping US sanctions to buy Nvidia GPUs....

Also, iOS spyware abused Apple's own ECC, breach victim says it can't figure out what hackers took, and some critical vulns Infosec in brief The US Federal Trade Commission has secured its first data broker settlement agreement, prohibiting X-Mode Social from sharing or selling sensitive location data....

The future's bright. The future's retro Interview Inspired at least in part by Pi creator Eben Upton's dalliances with the home computers of the 1980s, the Raspberry Pi casts a long shadow over the retro computing world....

If AWS, Microsoft, Google were anywhere close to capacity, their revenues would be way higher Cloud providers have deployed tens of thousands of GPUs and AI accelerators in their race to capitalize on the surge in demand for large language models....

Experiment is limited to the Insider Dev Channel. For now Microsoft is experimenting with having Copilot open automatically upon Windows startup....

Applications across chemistry, energy, and medicine await human-free acceleration Scientists have developed a platform based around a robot guided by an AI-based computer system, which could slash the time for engineering new proteins from months to weeks....

Meanwhile pending case from Cisco accuses Dexon of selling counterfeit kit CDW, the world's largest reseller, has reached a settlement with relative minnow in an antitrust case involving Cisco....

New versions and ports of the Plasma desktop ahoy The KDE dev team has spent many nights working on the first release candidate of the new Qt 6-based release, during which time a tiny, intrepid band of coders was able to bring the current stable release to OpenBSD....

If you think Sinclair's hardware was odd, you haven't met the people Opinion Following an unlikely series of events involving British Telecom, Prince Philip and a VTX-5000 modem, your teenage protagonist found himself at a drunken dinner party in 1984's West London. Across the table, excitingly, sat my boyhood hero Sir Clive Sinclair, and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say about the Sinclair QL, which was not thriving....

It's not like Gandhi ever saw his kids, says Narayana Murthy Indian billionaire and Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has doubled down on his comments that India's youth should voluntarily work 70-hour weeks....

Who's going to complain about free labor? Who, Me? As the year gets into gear, so does Who, Me?, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of getting away with tech shortcuts that should really have led to long career detours....

Net-taming firm lets staff go if they're bad at measurable performance targets' or aren't right for the team', which seems a tad contradictory Cloudflare has defended its HR practices after a former employee posted a nine-minute video of a phone call during which she was fired, asked for an explanation for being let go, but was told those who made the call were unaware of the reasons for her dismissal....

Roads are icy and drivers are dangerous. There will be no Starbucks run. Linus Torvalds has indefinitely postponed the merge window for version 6.8 of the Linux kernel after a winter storm knocked out power and internet near his work-from-home location in Oregon....

Infosec academic suggests Beijing's warning that iThing owners aren't anonymous deserves attention outside the great firewall too In June 2023 China made a typically bombastic announcement: operators of short-distance ad hoc networks must ensure they run according to proper socialist principles, and ensure all users divulge their real-world identities....

PLUS: It's difficult to make a bad LLM turn good; ELVIS Act seeks AI voice clone ban AI in brief OpenAI has changed the policies covering use of its models and removed "disallowed usages" of its models including "the generation of malware", "military and warfare" applications, "multi-level marketing", "plagiarism", "astroturfing", and more....

PLUS: Microsoft taps 700 million new customers in China; AI comes to Korean DMZ; India's semiconductor sector surges Asia in Brief Papua New Guinea (PNG) has implemented a two-week state of emergency after failure to reconfigure the nation's payroll system for government employees sparked riots that resulted in multiple deaths....

Boffins say the quiet part out loud: There's no room for the sonic boom NASA's X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft made its public debut on Friday in a media event at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, where the plane was designed....

Lack of skills, funding, and scrutiny - pick three Kettle This week the incredible scandal that is the UK's Post Office Horizon computer system, which ruined people's lives and drove some to suicide, finally exploded into the mainstream....

Snoops had no fewer than five custom bits of malware to hand to backdoor networks Two zero-day bugs in Ivanti products were likely under attack by cyberspies as early as December, according to Mandiant's threat intel team....

Phemedrone Stealer loots drives for passwords, cookies, login tokens, etc Criminals are exploiting a Windows Defender SmartScreen bypass vulnerability to infect PCs with Phemedrone Stealer, a malware strain that scans machines for sensitive information - passwords, cookies, authentication tokens, you name it - to grab and leak....

Microsoft and OpenAI fail to shake off AI infringement allegations The judge overseeing the AI code-copying case filed against GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft has dismissed some but not all of the aggrieved developers' claims, leaving the plaintiffs a more limited but still potentially potent opportunity to challenge the alleged algorithmic reproduction of their source code....

Cat flap fever, a streaming service for dogs, and other oddities on display in Vegas this week CES Ah, January: The start of a new year, crisp winter weather (if you live in the northern hemisphere, at least) and CES, with the latter giving us a look at what's in store from the biggest names in tech....

It's taken months for crims to hack together a working exploit chain Security experts claim ransomware criminals have got their hands on a functional exploit for a nearly year-old critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability that was this week added to the US's must-patch list....

Humboldt cable to zoom from Chile to Australia through the South Pacific Google says it is building the first ever subsea cable connecting South America to Asia-Pacific, in partnership with Chilean state-run infrastructure fund Desarrollo Pais and the Office of Posts and Telecommunications of French Polynesia (OPT)....

Criminal scored $2M in crypto proceeds but ends up in cuffs following property raid The criminal thought to be behind a multimillion-dollar cryptojacking scheme is in custody following a Europol-led investigation....

But Congress is on top of that, right? A US federal tax change that took effect in 2022 thanks to a time-triggered portion of the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may leave entrepreneurs with massive tax bills....