The Register

Review will also look at barriers to entry where hyperscalers hold all the cards Britain's competition watchdog is to cast an eye over the development and use of AI, saying it wants to ensure that innovation in the field proceeds in a way that benefits consumers, businesses and the wider UK economy. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears to be thinking along similar lines.…

Thanks for your service, now push off Web commerce platform Shopify on Thursday announced a 25 percent increase in revenue followed by a 20 percent decrease in staff.…

Twelve-year interaction ended with a bang Scientists have concluded that an unexplained optical burst from the Milky Way galaxy provides evidence of a star eating up its local giant planet.…

For the event itself, it's like the COVID-19 pandemic was all just a long-gone bad dream RSA Conference The 32nd RSA Conference is done. The halls are now empty, bars and restaurants are thankfully free of tech bros, and attendees have dispersed back to their homes.…

Deals between Zuckercorp + FTC in 2012 and 2020 are being ignored, so time to get stricter, says commish The US Federal Trade Commission is preparing to take action against Facebook parent company Meta for a third time over claims it failed to protect user privacy, as required under a 2020 agreement Meta made with the regulator.…

That's certainly one of the stranger headlines we've written Cult dad rockers the Pixies have apologized to a Google Pixel owner for repeatedly turning off their smartphone's alarm in the morning, presumably when they have important stuff to do.…

Lawyers quip: 'The definition of hell is European legislation with American enforcement' A major decision on GDPR compensation rights includes what looks like a nasty surprise for many businesses: there is no threshold that non-material damage needs to pass before data subjects can make a claim.…

And $70B in share repurchases didn't calm matters Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai's bumper 2022 pay award and the company's plan to repurchase shares amid a ferocious cost-cutting campaign is upsetting some in the workforce.…

Yes, maybe ChatGPT can write them a better earnings report next time Qualcomm's top line sagged further during the second quarter of the chipmaker's fiscal 2023 with the slump in demand for smartphones set to continue.…

For those envious of Rust and Cargo The recent debut of a Python tool called Rye has raised hopes that the programming language's long standing setup and packaging shortcomings may be solvable.…

Paper details previously unknown step in process of converting light energy to chemical energy Photosynthesis – the process by which plants and some other organisms convert sunlight to food – is complex, and scientists don't fully understand how it works. But a team of researchers led by the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory reckon they're closer to solving the mystery – they captured an image of the atoms inside cyanobacteria undergoing photosynthesis just as the tiny organism released oxygen.…

Climbing the software stack, new owner sees IBM and ServiceNow as rivals Interview It is nearly three years since Micro Focus recorded a $1bn plus loss, owing to COVID-19 disruption and the fall-out from the $8.8bn acquisition of HP Software in 2017. None of this stopped content management and enterprise integration vendor OpenText from paying $6 billion for the company in August 2022.…

It's 2023 and tech giants have discovered email and unified dashboards You might think that the biggest players in the information technology industry might be good at providing their customers with important and timely information, but tragically you would be misguided in that belief. Thankfully, on Wednesday Microsoft and Amazon Web Services both announced fixes to their surprisingly unsophisticated factoid feeds.…

And a reminder that experience points matter a lot Python is still a top choice for software developers, beating out other programming languages, according to a widely respected industry poll.…

Digi-dollars are toxic in many ways and the administration wants the sector needs to clean up its act The Biden Administration on Tuesday detailed a proposed tax designed to counter the environmental and economic effects of cryptocurrency mining.…

UK not included, too busy enjoying Brexit's sunlit uplands instead A collaboration between TSMC, NXP Semiconductor, Bosch, and Infineon would see the construction of a new fab in Saxony, Germany valued at as much as $11 billion (€10 billion).…

Hock Tan thinks hybrid multicloud can be made much easier to use Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has promised to spend $2 billion a year on research and development at VMware.…

Buy now, even services or second-hand kit, and pay in 2024 … if you feel lucky Cisco Capital, the networking giant's finance limb, announced on Wednesday it will sell you stuff for the next three months and not ask for any money until 2024.…

Human Rights Watch details mass surveillance and repression Authorities in the Chinese province of Xinjiang have conducted more than 11 million searches of residents' devices, to check for the presence of 50,000 items considered indicators of dissent or terror. Among them is the Quran – the central text of Islam.…

Two Limeys and two Yanks in immigration situation conversation Register Kettle The H-1B visa system, which is used by businesses to import skilled foreign workers into America, has seen a massive jump in applications. It's a big enough surge to get the attention of Uncle Sam.…

'But they're gonna take my thumbs' hits different in 2023 Google wants to take us further into a passwordless future by allowing personal account holders to login using passkeys rather than using passphrases and multifactor authentication (MFA).…

Who would have thought crims would try using Facebook to fool people? Meta says it has shut down over 1,000 links related to ChatGPT that lead its users to malware, as criminals seek to profit from the current craze for generative AI.…

VR headset maker and software dev clash over blame Drone-racing goggles from Orqa stopped working over the weekend due to what was alleged by the manufacturer to be a "ransomware time-bomb" embedded in the hardware's bootloader by a "greedy former contractor." Or as contractor put it, the code was provided under license, which had now expired, leading to the shut down of kit.…

'The get-out-of-jail-free card option has been removed' as one expert put it Merck's insurers can't use an "act of war" clause to deny the pharmaceutical giant an enormous payout to clean up its NotPetya infection, a court has ruled.…

Microsoft OS stutters with Japanese and Chinese languages If some of the applications on your Windows 11 systems are having problems with features like speech recognition and handwriting when using Japanese or Chinese languages, it's likely linked to recent updates to the operating system.…

As blue check marks start showing up in Gmail Logowatch Google plans to retire the padlock icon that appears in the Chrome status bar during a secure HTTPS web browsing session because the interface graphic has outlived its usefulness.…

We thought you loved us, cries someone in a fab somewhere, probably Worldwide shipments of silicon wafers slid nine percent during the first quarter of 2023 versus Q1 2021, and fell 11.3 percent from Q1 2022, the SEMI's Silicon Manufacturing Group's (SMG) reported this week.…

Anyone else still has to pay for once-free service to help social network pay its bills The paywall around Twitter's API has crumbled slightly, with the bird site U-turning for organizations providing a public service.…

Always Be Closing – deals to grab that sweet, sweet renminbi The US semiconductor industry wants to have its cake and eat it, or rather it wants to have continued access to the huge Chinese market despite Washington’s ongoing campaign to limit Beijing’s access to advanced chip technology.…

Neither war nor bad sensors nor a nautical journey will keep this probe from building a 3D map of space It's been a decade since it was announced, but the Euclid mission to build a 3D map of the universe is finally getting close to launch with the spacecraft landing in Florida ahead of an expected July liftoff.…

It's not an NFT either! Albert Einstein is – to put it mildly – a bit of a ledge so science fans will be interested to note that a handwritten essay by the granddaddy of modern physics is being flogged by Boston-based RR Auction.…

Breached businesses might have to cough for your discomfort too Could EU residents receive compensation for "non-material" harm caused by illegal data use under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)? We'll find out tomorrow, when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is set to make a ruling in a case being nervously watched by many a data-hungry company doing business across the political bloc.…

50-year-old ERP vendor reaches for 15-year-old AI to be down with the kids ERP giant SAP has inked an agreement with IBM to use its Watson AI technology, the aim being to help users find apps on its solutions cloud.…

Flotations in the UK down 40% since 2008, might be more at play than UK's split from EU The UK's financial regulator is looking at ways to make London more attractive for companies in the wake of Arm choosing to list in New York and Herman Hauser blaming the decision on "Brexit idiocy."…

Don't hold your breath waiting for all those breakthroughs we've been promised A group of researchers from Microsoft and the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory in Zurich have offered a harsh reality check to those hyping the world altering potential of quantum computers, by finding that off-the-shelf GPUs can sometimes do better than machines from the frontiers of physics.…

Institution yet to answer 'elementary' project management questions after upgrade left staff and suppliers unpaid Updated The University of Edinburgh academic representative body has issued a statement of no confidence in the institution over its disastrous Oracle migration, which left research students and suppliers unpaid.…

Gosh, you're a fussy old lot, aren't you? Comment There are lots of distros out there. Some people hop from one to another, some stay on the same one for decades. What constitutes a good enough reason?…

iGiant now battles to kill off $2B UK class-action suit Half a decade after introducing a software feature designed to dial back performance on iPhones with degraded batteries, Apple is still dealing with the reaction to what became known as "Batterygate".…

Don't get too comfortable, machines are doing more thinking Businesses globally have introduced automation into their operations at a slower pace than previously anticipated, the World Economic Forum (WEF) opined this week.…

A new twist on fast food Hong Kong authorities have caught a pair of smugglers who attempted to shift a vanload of live lobsters, along with some decrepit GPUs, into China.…

Still smiling despite Q1 PC chip sales slumping 65 points and flat server sales AMD has revealed it's scored a big customer for its Pensando Data Processing Units (DPUs, aka SmartNICs): Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which is offering them as a service.…

They go down, down, down, with the burning pull of gravity ... or do they? Astronomers will direct NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to peer at Saturn in an attempt to discern when its iconic rings might vanish.…

Dare we say that's a master stroke Smut surfers in Utah are facing disappointment if attempting to visit Pornhub lately. Rather than their planned, er, viewing, they're instead greeted with a video informing them all access to the site has been blocked within their state.…

This top-drawer AI tech has a major science-fiction habit Boffins at the University of California, Berkeley, have delved into the undisclosed depths of OpenAI's ChatGPT and the GPT-4 large language model at its heart, and found they're trained on text from copyrighted books.…

Maybe you're just installing it wrong? Apple on Monday pushed to some iPhones and Macs its first-ever rapid security fix.…

Oracle and Apache holes also on Uncle Sam's list of big bad abused bugs The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is adding three more flaws to its list of known-exploited vulnerabilities, including one involving TP-Link routers that is being targeted by the operators of the notorious Mirai botnet.…

Student app maker says it's 'not a sky falling thing,' customizes own LLM just in case Chegg's stock price plummeted 49 per cent on Tuesday, wiping nearly $1 billion off its market valuation, after the education technology biz blamed a slowdown in subscriptions on ChatGPT.…

We moved fast and broke things, people got harassed and murdered, so let's revisit privacy Apple and Google have come together to develop an industry specification to prevent "unwanted tracking," otherwise known as stalking, via Bluetooth location tracking tags.…

US tells criminals it 'will find you' and has a particular set of skills In an international operation 288 people have been arrested across the US, Europe and South America after allegedly selling opioids on the now-shuttered Monopoly Market dark web drug trafficking marketplace, according to US and European law enforcement.…

World's largest semiconductor contract manufacturer also gives details on 3nm nodes Taiwanese chip manufacturing behemoth TSMC has given an update on its process technologies, indicating that it is still on track to start production of 2nm chips in 2025, and expanding its 3nm portfolio to include nodes optimized for high performance computing (HPC) and another aimed at automotive applications.…