The Register

What a cowboy! More used to farming data via his social media empire, Mark Zuckerberg is expanding his horizons to raise cattle at his Ko'olau Ranch in Hawaii - the one where he's also preparing for the end of the world....

Fans of the tech dinosaur have a few months to fill their drives with software Bad news for OS/2 fans: the Hobbes OS/2 software archive is to be shuttered once and for all in April....

Sebastien Raoult developed various credential-harvesting websites over more than 2 years A key member of the ShinyHunters cybercrime group is facing three years in the slammer and being forced to return $5 million in criminal proceeds....

Magnetosheath jets found around Earth may be present on other planets after Jupiter discovery Researchers, after discovering magnetosheath jets around Jupiter, now believe these phenomena may exist on all solar system planets....

New moves follow year where customers complained it broke their trust Global ERP giant SAP has announced two changes to its executive board in order to spur its quest to shift customers to the cloud....

Streamlines from 3 product groups to 2 as Automotive chief leaves the building Euro chipmaker STMicroelectronics is reorganizing into two product groups, down from three, saying it wants to boost efficiency and get closer to customers in a decision that will also cut overhead....

Farewell IA64, hello snapshots and Rusty refinements The latest stable Linux kernel, 6.7, is out and finally includes the new next-gen copy-on-write (COW) bcachefs file system....

Roll up, roll up. See Ouroboros-3 eating its own fuselage Interview The concept of a self-eating rocket is rearing its head once again as engineers showcase their work at the AIAA SciTech Forum....

AI can't cite cases, fully grok the law, or reason about it effectively study finds Interview Top large language models tend to generate inaccurate legal information and should not be relied upon for litigation, according to new research....

Singular alleges AI accelerators built from ripped-off blueprints Allegations that Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) were developed using stolen designs are being put to the test as a jury trial brought against the search giant by Singular Computing kicks off this week....

No human will set foot on Moon for 2+years now NASA's Moon mission launch dates have slid by about a year - Artemis II to September 2025 and Artemis III to September 2026. Artemis IV, the first mission to the Gateway lunar space station, remains scheduled for September 2028....

Jansen can let someone else worry about nationwide fiber rollout now UK telco giant BT is confirming a start date for Allison Kirkby, who will become its chief executive on February 1, facing down the challenge of the company's nationwide fiber rollout and trying to reverse its declining share price....

Minister says Fujitsu could be 'on the hook' for compensation pending inquiry Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells, at the center of a media storm in recent days, is returning her CBE* following multiple calls for her to be stripped of the title....

That's going to be a recurring question in 2024 Luma, a generative AI startup building software that transforms text descriptions to corresponding 3D models, just raised $43 million (34 million) in a series-B funding round led by Andreesen Horowitz, Nvidia, and others....

Gulp! The average store-bought bottle of water contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 100 times more minute plastic particles than previously believed, judging from a study published this week....

From whom, exactly, we wonder As America gears up for a contentious presidential election this year, the Department of Justice has launched a campaign to convince the public that each and every qualified vote will be counted, and there won't be any interference or shenanigans to worry about....

Low-code gubbins may not be able to count on much platform protection OpenAI's GPT Store, expected to launch Wednesday - has been hyped as a replay of the Apple App Store gold rush of 2008....

Monopoly watchdogs permitting Hewlett Packard Enterprise officially announced Tuesday its intent to acquire Juniper Networks in a deal valued at $40 per share, or roughly $14 billion....

Ex-Twitter isn't exactly rolling in cash - has anyone thought about how much it'll cost to run all that new stuff? Peer-to-peer payments, AI integration, additional exposure to stuff you hate, and more: That's what's apparently coming to the site formerly known as Twitter in 2024....

Nothing under exploit... The calm before the storm? Patch Tuesday Microsoft rang in the New Year with a relatively calm Patch Tuesday: Just 49 Windows security updates including fixes for two critical-rated bugs, plus four high-severity Chrome flaws in Microsoft Edge....

Buy the hype, sell the, wait, what do we do now?! Updated The SEC today said its Twitter account was hijacked to wrongly claim it had approved a bunch of hotly anticipated Bitcoin ETFs, causing the cryptocurrency to spike and then slip in price....

Redmond's three Es strike again: Embrace, Extend... EU Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI is being checked by the European Commission to see if the deal runs afoul of the continent's merger rules....

UK trumpets British tech aboard doomed spacecraft The Peregrine Mission One lunar lander has just hours of power left before its ambitious mission will be prematurely terminated....

On the wrong side of the digital divide in America? The clock is ticking The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) warns it will start winding down the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) unless more funds are released to keep it going....

Petty officer Wenheng Zhao admitted to taking as many as 14 payoffs in return for non-public military information A US Naval sailor will face more than two years behind bars after pleading guilty to taking bribes from Chinese spies in exchange for sensitive military information....

C-suite exec gets 223 staffers' worth of pay after cyclical headwinds dampen consumer demand for kit Qualcomm might have had a relatively rough ride in 2023 given the continued decline in smartphone chip shipments across the industry but its execs didn't, at least not in terms of their pay awards....

Someone please remind Boeing how to build airplanes ... again Both US operators of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft are finding loose parts in the aircraft during the latest inspections that were prompted by an emergency exit door plug blowout during flight over the weekend....

Fancy a Windows laptop that's also an Android tablet or a mouse and keyboard powered by kinetic energy and solar CES Where can you find a voice-controlled luxury toilet seat and a transparent television set? The annual CES show, of course, where the world's tech companies and others gather to show off the products they hope will catch the interest of buyers....

US, Netherlands, Germany all show spikes, while the UK no longer collects data US President Joe Biden declared the pandemic over in September 2022. Weeks into 2024, however, global data points to a surge in infections....

Then the company cranked up the price of cartridges, complaint alleges HP is facing a potential class action complaint regarding a firmware update that rendered its printers unable to use ink from any other supplier....

Experts' job made 'straightforward' by crooks failing to update encryption schema after three years Security researchers have put out an updated decryptor for the Babuk ransomware family, providing a free solution for victims of the Tortilla variant....

'Tech visionary and pioneer' replaced by former comms president, as company faces pressure from activist investors Jeff Lawson has stepped down as CEO of Twilio with Khozema Shipchandler filling that less-than-comfy executive chair with immediate effect....

Move comes months after software licensing scandal Video game software company Unity is laying off a quarter of its workforce, it confirmed in a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing....

This one time at band gap... we managed to use wonder stuff as an electronic material for semiconducting Researchers say they have discovered a way to produce semiconductors using graphene that could - at some stage further down the road - deliver high performance devices able to outmatch those made from silicon....

Tribunal nixes appeal from provider of network that cops and firefighters can't seem to migrate from... Motorola's appeal against price controls on the longstanding mission-critical Airwave network used by the UK emergency services was dismissed by a tribunal, meaning the cap imposed by the regulator must stand....

Networking kit maker would be biggest potential acquisition since Autonomy - but hopefully goes better than that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is in the late stages of talks to buy California networking hardware maker Juniper Networks for $13 billion, according to reports....

A little more speed and less latency CES Just in time for CES this year, the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun certifying hardware for Wi-Fi 7, the latest update to the global wireless networking specification....

Plus: Deloitte rolls out homegrown AI for its 75K workers to dogfood CES Volkswagen says it intends to inject ChatGPT into its vehicles in Europe this year, allowing drivers to ask questions about life, the universe, and everything, and have them answered by the software, maybe....

Also: Huawei in patent deal with Nokia, and China slates 2025 as year for mass produced flying cars ASIA IN BRIEF The Indian government's commercial space agency arm, NewSpace India, has spilled the details [PDF] on how the country would launch a broadband communication satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket....

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's GPUs with slightly better specs CES Nvidia revamped its RTX 40 series GPU lineup at CES on Monday with three "Super" cards, which boast higher performance and memory upgrades over their predecessors....

As IEEE study shows super lab's neural nets can emit 'plagiaristic output' OpenAI has said it would be "impossible" to build top-tier neural networks that meet today's needs without using people's copyrighted work. The Microsoft-backed lab, which believes it is lawfully harvesting said content for training its models, said using out-of-copyright public domain material would result in sub-par AI software....

Astrobotic's Peregrine packed with NASA science gear and other payloads may be a bust Updated The first commercial American Moon lander - built by startup Astrobotic to carry NASA instruments and private payloads to the lunar surface - is in trouble: the spacecraft's propulsion system malfunctioned shortly after launch on Monday....

Kit sucked out of Alaska Airlines 1282 found on the side of the road Apple has become the first smartphone manufacturer to pass the three-mile drop test after one of its iPhones was found on the side of a road by volunteers helping to recover debris from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 over the weekend....

Once again, export restrictions are having the opposite to intended effects Nvidia is caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to China, banned from shipping its most capable products but discovering that the Chinese may not want to buy those it is allowed to sell....

Issue has been patched so be sure to check your implementations SonicWall says it has observed thousands of daily attempts to exploit an Apache OFBiz zero-day for nearly a fortnight....

Pandemic overhiring + AI-generated cuts at the entry level = A bad year to be a techie, says Janco A mere 700 IT jobs were added in the US last year compared to 267,000 the year prior, it's claimed. It'd be easy to blame layoffs, but that's not all there is to it, says tech consultancy Janco Associates....

Generative AI - huh - what is it good for? Premium priced PC sales, apparently says Canalys The AI-capable PC is coming to save a shrinking market, according to Canalys, although vendors need to be far clearer about any benefits to charge higher margins for the devices....

The House of Zen's aging Ryzen 5000 processors get some love too CES AMD unveiled its first desktop processors with integrated neural processing units alongside refreshed 5000-series CPUs and a new entry-level graphics card at CES on Monday....

NTSB chair pushes for 25 hours of cockpit voice and flight data recordings On Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the temporary grounding of approximately 171 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes one day after an emergency exit seal, known as a door plug, blew out of one operated by Alaska Airlines mid-air....

Your turn, Starship The relief was palpable as United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched the first of its next-generation Vulcan rockets....