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Sneakernet for the stars? Scientists have revealed how data from a NASA telescope was secured thanks to creative thinking and a batch of Raspberry Pi computers....

Dead spin is a dangerous orbital dance that can be stopped with magnets and friction, apparently Airbus has developed a completely mechanical solution to help make space junk easier to capture - using magnets, the Earth's magnetic field and a bit of friction....

'The industry can not be allowed to put elected leaders, military personnel at risk' Online ad auctions represent a threat to national security in the US and Europe, a civil rights group claims, because the data that enables personalized advertising could be used to compromise civilian and military leaders....

Supply chain is back to pre-COVID normal, just in time for big clouds to spend $1 billion on networks for AI Would you please hurry up and build your network?...

No turning back for cash replacement tokens, especially if they make credit more accessible The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) urged the application of AI technology to speed along the maturity and accelerate adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in a speech in Singapore on Wednesday....

Linked to org that UK authorities found once failed its anti-money-laundering obligations Swedish digital rights organization Qurium has discovered around 250 cloned websites and suggested they exist to drive people to China-linked gambling sites....

Refuses to sing from the corporate songbook on the legal grounds for training neural nets on people's work The VP of audio at Stability AI has decided his position at the content-generating startup is untenable, given his belief in protecting artists' copyrights and his now-former employer's stance that training machine-learning models on copyrighted material is legally OK....

Plus: Ransomware crooks file SEC complaint against victim The Clorox Company's chief security officer has left her job in the wake of a corporate network breach that cost the manufacturer hundreds of millions of dollars....

Big Tech's toys have privacy problems. Why not buy utterly unconnected dead-tree books instead? Mozilla has slapped its "Privacy Not Included" labels on several products from Google, Amazon and Microsoft - just in time for Christmas shopping....

Facebook: If only we had a national law to ensure kids get parental permission to indulge in damaging social media Meta, which stands accused in multiple lawsuits of ignoring the mental health toll its services have taken on teens and children, is finally calling for change - on the part of Apple and Google....

Roadblocks ahead as external watchdog hired for full audit of self-driving biz Cruise is temporarily halting supervised and manual operations of its autonomous vehicles in the US and is hiring an outsider to assess the technology and safety risks of its computer-controlled cars....

Why shouldn't you be able to fix your own kit? Clue: Profit is involved iFixit and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) have teamed up to go straight to the US Federal Trade Commission with a rulemaking petition urging it to implement national right-to-repair rules....

Fabric update cuts against the grain, and may have more to do with Databricks partnerships Ignite Microsoft is advising customers using its Fabric platform to copy data from other data warehouses and analytics systems in a move against the prevailing industry trend....

Exploits come with caveats, but Google says no fixes as user security should do the heavy lifting here Novel weaknesses in Google Workspace have been exposed by researchers, with exploits potentially leading to ransomware attacks, data exfiltration, and password decryption....

Bing Chat is now known as - you can guess. Plus more AI bits and pieces coming to Teams, Office, etc Ignite Microsoft continues to push its Copilot concept onto users and shoehorn the technology into every crevice of the Windows giant line-up and others via Copilot Studio....

If only there was an investor with a scalable cloud to hand... Users ready to part with cold, hard cash for OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus service will no doubt be disappointed to learn that sign-ups are being paused following what's claimed to be a surge in demand....

Time for eBay jockeys to ready their watchlists for second-hand clunkers Tesla's threats to sue Cybertruck buyers who resell their vehicles appear to be nothing but hot air, with the language removed from the Musk-owned automaker's terms and conditions just days after it appeared....

We know who's been naughty and who's been nice, says box-shifting-cum-cloud-computing biz Amazon is warning employees they risk undermining their own promotion prospects unless they return to the office (RTO) for three days a week, as was mandated by CEO Andy Jassy months ago....

Semiconductors are a dirty business Intel has published proposals to tackle its environmental impact, largely focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving to renewable energy, but gave less attention to water usage and the harsh chemicals involved in chipmaking....

War of words escalates as deadline draws near FBI director Christopher Wray made yet another impassioned plea to US lawmakers to kill a proposed warrant requirement for so-called "US person queries" of data collected via the Feds' favorite snooping tool, FISA Section 702....

The Hat adds tool to facilitate migration from various free RHEL-a-like distros The latest version of Red Hat's flagship distro appeared last week, closely followed by Alma Linux 9.3. RHEL 8.9 is coming soon - and presumably, so is Rocky Linux 9.3....

One that Microsoft and Meta dodged during House of Lords committee In the UK's Parliament this week, Microsoft and Meta ducked the question of whether creators should be paid when their copyrighted material is used to train large language models....

Plus: US execs line up to dine with President Xi US bans on exports of advanced chipmaking equipment to China are not working, according to a report from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission....

Ruh-roh, where did the aircon go? Some drivers of American electric vehicle brand Rivian found themselves on an unexpectedly silent ride at unknown speeds after infotainment and instrument systems failed this week....

Nic Cage? Rami Malek? Or maybe Donald Duck? You decide... A biopic of Elon Musk is in the works, with Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of the controversial figure serving as the source. But who should step into Musk's shoes? Only The Register readership can advise....

Trying times for incident responders who battle fastest-ever ransomware blitz as attackers keep scrubbing evidence clean Organizations are still failing to implement adequate logging measures, increasing the difficulty faced by defenders and incident responders to identify the cause of infosec attacks....

... Even its creators say it ain't 'a replacement for traditional forecasting methods' Google DeepMind claims its latest AI model is capable of generating ten-day weather forecasts in under a minute and is just as accurate as traditional predictive models running on supercomputers....

Talking back to devices will end the confusion caused by long menus of functions nobody uses Comment A fortnight ago my Apple Watch automatically updated to WatchOS 10 and ever since it's taken me twice as many taps to perform basic tasks like telling the device to stop tracking exercise sessions....

Might be great for the datacenter, but not likely to be in EVs anytime soon Japanese battery maker FDK reckons a major improvement in its Ni-Zn battery has proven its durability enough to deem it practical for use as an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)....

Post-acute care algorithm allegedly comes up short 90% of the time UnitedHealthcare has been sued in Minnesota for allegedly denying healthcare claims based on a faulty AI model....

Plus: VMware closes critical hole, Adobe fixes a whopping 76 flaws Patch Tuesday Heads up: Microsoft's November Patch Tuesday includes fixes for about 60 vulnerabilities - including three that have already been found and abused in the wild....

23K nodes earned operator more than $500K - and now perhaps jail time The FBI says it has dismantled another botnet after collaring its operator, who admitted hijacking tens of thousands of machines around the world to create his network of obedient nodes....

Fess up before Google's robo-cops possibly finger your synthetic drivel YouTube is slapping a bunch of rules on AI-generated videos in the hope of curbing: the spread of faked footage masqueraded as legit; deepfakes that make people appear to say or do things they never did; and tracks that rip off artists' copyrighted work....

Bonfire of the web trackers is coming, industry ready or not Google on Monday began the formalities of phasing out third-party cookies from Chrome during the first quarter of 2024, signaling the beginning of the end for legacy online advertising....

98% of posts reported stay up, and Musk's response is to sue the messenger Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, continues to have problems policing hate speech, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has reported, with 98 percent of inflammatory posts about the Israel-Gaza war remaining up a week after being flagged....

Mayor wants to electrify downtown heliport, but the FAA has yet to certify eVTOL for passenger flights Two electric air taxi makers have demoed their craft in New York City as part of Mayor Eric Adams' plans to create the world's first heliport with infrastructure necessary to support the vehicles - eventually....

Just what virtual reality needs - an update that brings a bit of texture torture Scientists have developed a robotic sensing system they say can distinguish between multiple types of fabric, including corduroy, in work they hope may bring a detailed sense of touch to virtual reality....

Let's do the CacheWarp again Boffins based in Germany and Austria have found a flaw in AMD's SEV trusted execution environment that makes it less than trustworthy....

Sapphire Rapids, Alder Lake, and Raptor Lake chip families treated for 'Redundant Prefix' Intel on Tuesday issued an out-of-band security update to address a privilege escalation vulnerability in recent server and personal computer chips....

One person's garbage band is another person's treasure, right Citizen's Broadband Radio Service? The US government has drafted a blueprint to change the way wireless spectrum is managed in a bid to maximize available resources. This includes identifying wireless frequencies that may be repurposed for new uses....

Robotic process hunts down local extraterrestrial materials to aid supply of on-site fuel and oxygen Scientists in China claim they have employed artificial intelligence and physical robotics to help make oxygen from water and space rocks available on the Martian surface....

Reasons less technical than you'd think as research respondents cite EU's DORA rules According to research released today, fears over vendor lock-in and the need to stay compliant with regulations are topping the reasons for multi-cloud adoption....

Royal alone scored $275M in past year as FBI, other agencies hot on merging trail The US' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have released fresh guidance on the Royal ransomware operation, saying that evidence suggests it may soon undergo a long-speculated rebrand....

Quarterly stats to show when units exceed manufacturer max temp Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has released its latest drive statistics report, introducing tracking of temperature data for drives and failure rates for each datacenter....

FAA grants license to fly, though not fry local wildlife The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given SpaceX clearance to try launching the monster Starship / Super Heavy combo from the company's Boca Chica facility....

But if you really care about performance, there are better options out there, natch SC23 This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Top500 ranking of the world's publicly known fastest supercomputers....

Brit telco BT's digital boss asks people 'how did horses feel when cars were invented? They didn't complain or go on strike' BT's chief digital innovation officer wants the world to stop moaning about how cuddly AI is going to put pesky humans out of work because horses "didn't complain" when cars were invented....

Got a Confluence server? Listen up. Malware said to have wide-ranging capabilities A new backdoor was this week found implanted in the environments of organizations to exploit the recently disclosed critical vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence....

OK gr8. CU down the pub A lengthy lawsuit is nearing an end after a judge dismissed a claim from defunct British phone retailer Phones 4u that local telco operators conspired to put it out of business....

Head in the sand about the end of CentOS? Have a few more years of support... for a fee Interview SUSE is serious about Linux in the enterprise, so much so that the veteran penguin-botherer is willing to risk the ire of Red Hat with OpenELA and the offer of CentOS support for users that just can't let go of the soon-to-be end-of-life operating system....