The Register

See? It's not just Chromebooks. Now how about some flexibility around Win 10? Microsoft will offer driver and firmware updates for its Surface devices for an additional two years, claiming the decision is in response to customer demand. This comes after Google promised its rival Chromebook devices will get updates for a decade....

Plus: CVSS 4.0 is here, this week's critical vulns, and 'incident' hit loan broker promises no late fees. Generous Infosec in brief Okta has confirmed details of its October breach, reporting that the incident led to the compromise of files belonging to 134 customers, "or less than 1 percent of Okta customers."...

Getting contributions out of freeloaders Exclusive Element has become the latest company to change its open source license, but rather than going down a source-available path, it has opted to move from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3....

Plus: AI companies enter non-binding agreement to governmental safety tests of models, and more AI In Brief X, the micro-blogging site formerly known as Twitter, revealed its "first AI" to a select group of users over the weekend....

Dodged Apollo 13 disaster because of rubella, but helped to rescue the crew Obit Thomas K Mattingly II, command module pilot of Apollo 16 and commander of two Space Shuttle missions, has died aged 87....

Southend-on-Sea Council unwittingly exposed sensitive records of more than 2,000 staff for five months Southend-on-Sea City Council has reported a data breach, joining a growing list of UK public sector organizations to have accidentally and illegally exposed sensitive files this year....

A load of hot air? The UK government is stumping up 36 million ($41.4 million) to help support a green energy project that aims to use waste heat from a datacenter to keep nearby homes warm....

Ad blockers are firewalls for our sanity - turning them off is madness Opinion YouTube wants its pound of flesh. Disable your ad blocker or pay for Premium, warns a new message being shown to an unsuspecting test audience, with the barely hidden subtext of "you freeloading scum." Trouble is, its ad blocker detecting mechanism doesn't exactly comply with EU law, say privacy activists. Ask for user permission or taste regulatory boot. All good clean fun....

Curious tech learned an important lesson about keeping a grip in tight situations Who, me? Oh for heavens' sakes is it Monday already? Far out. Well, if you're here anyway, you may as well read another instalment of Who, Me? - The Register's weekly attempt to look on the bright side of the working week by revelling in the misfortune of others....

PLUS: China's taikonauts return from space, India approves PC licenses, and Foxconn founder presidential campaign investigated for bribes Alibaba announced on Friday it would make Salesforce cloud products and platform available on its Cloud Platfrom beginning December 18, 2023....

Commerce minister would love if US chipmaker took root in Chinese market Micron's fortunes in China appear to be on the mend after the Middle Kingdom's commerce minister invited the US chipmaker to expand its investments in the region....

But the astronomical performance thresholds mean few ML operators will be required to report at this rate Comment The White House wants to know who is deploying AI compute clusters and training large language models - but for now only the really, really, big ones....

No promises it's actually secure, just that it doesn't do anything obviously dumb Google wants to help Android users find more trustworthy VPN apps through better badging alerting to independent audits....

Watchdog on a tear to level the playing field Amazon and Meta have agreed to not use data collected from their marketplaces to unfairly benefit themselves, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority announced on Friday....

Taking selfie with 'official sensitive' doc wasn't smartest idea, either A British court has sentenced a "corrupt" police analyst to almost four years behind bars for tipping off a friend that officers had compromised the EncroChat encrypted messaging app network....

Firefox Android add-ons coming soon At long last, Mozilla is planning to make browser extensions, also known as add-ons, available for Firefox on Android, at some point following the expected November 21 release of the browser's version 120 build....

Whinges about Chrome maker's privacy stance while taking billions to, er, use its search engine The US Department of Justice released a series of documents in its antitrust trial against Google yesterday, including documents that reveal Apple made its default search deal with the Chocolate Factory despite considerable privacy reservations....

Look, in the sky - it's a, oh, never mind The US Army has taken delivery of its first drone-cooking weapon designed to knock unmanned aerial systems (UAS) out of the air using high-powered microwave beams....

Credit card numbers, security codes, SSNs, passwords, PINs? Yikes! Hilb Group has warned more than 81,000 people that around the start of 2023 criminals broke into the work email accounts of its employees and may have stolen a bunch of sensitive personal information....

Terrorist ideology suspected to be motivation A former software developer for Britain's cyberspy agency is facing years in the slammer after being sentenced for stabbing a National Security Agency (NSA) official multiple times....

Meanwhile, Boeing's constellation dreams crash back down to Earth SpaceX's satellite broadband service Starlink has achieved "breakeven cash flow," according to CEO Elon Musk, sparking speculation that a public offering for the company might now be on the cards....

Meta faces personal info processing ban, needs to Thread the trademark needle in the UK, while Musk loses out Kettle Social networks, once thought to have all-encompassing power to change our mood or voting strategy, have been hitting wall after wall this week....

Secure Future Initiative needed in wake of tech evolution and unrelenting ransomware criminality Microsoft has made fresh commitments to harden the security of its software and cloud services after a year in which numerous members of the global infosec community criticized the company's tech defenses....

Technical Steering Committee also formed The OpenELA team this week trumpeted public release of the Enterprise Linux source code and formation of a technical steering committee....

Small businesses need not apply Microsoft has made Microsoft 365 Copilot generally available for enterprises worldwide. But you'll need to buy at least 300 seats for the privilege and customers are not feeling festive....

Summit's crowning glory was a not-legally-binding document that China didn't sign The UK government has announced a tech industry agreement it claims will form a plan for AI safety testing....

Complete rebuild of Debian distro optimized for diminutive computer Raspberry Pi OS has undergone more than a modest version upgrade including a new set of tools for writing it to a bootable SD card....

'High-pressure' sales tactics targeted people registered with Telephone Preference Service A "debt management company" is itself facing a bill from Britain's data regulator for sending hundreds of thousands of text messages to households that opted not to receive marketing junk mail....

Annual report reveals 'challenges' around 'commercial and risk appetite' A UK government pensions organization paid Atos 74 million for two years of a 1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) contract, which it then ended 16 years short of its potential 18-year term....

Which? and Uswitch call on UK regulator to tackle specter of bigger bills for Brits come April UK telcos are facing complaints about mid-contract price rises, with 87 percent of consumers saying they should be allowed to simply walk away with no penalty if their provider hikes charges this way. Uswitch and Which? are also calling on Ofcom to end mid-contract hikes altogether....

Working from home, smaller office footprints, and cost cutting made GoogleVille redundant Google and real estate developer Lendlease have binned their scheme to create four master-planned California communities known as the San Francisco Bay Project....

'They were basically using Emacs for their OS, and a custom LISP script to read email' - what could possibly go wrong? On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's chronicle of computing crises that your fellow readers corrected and recalled in sufficient detail to share with us all....

Can't RISC losing them to another ISA Arm Holdings has acquired a minority stake in the popular single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi in a bid to cement its influence over the IoT developer community....

Hardware (other than iPhones) is not so hot, but 'emerging markets' are getting Apple fever Apple has posted revenue of $383.3 billion - or about $12,000 per second - for the year, cracked the billion-subscriber barrier, and welcomed increased demand for its goods and services in new markets....

That is not the plan - nor was a larger loss - so investors whacked the Aussie's share price Atlassian's share price has taken a sharp dive after the Australian collaboration corporation revealed decent results, but predicted its on-prem products would grow faster than its cloud....

'Ejecta halo' detected by orbiter reminds that life on Luna will be dirty, gritty, and sneezy India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has published resrarch that reveals its Chandrayaan-3 mission made quite a mess on the Moon....

Jury took just four hours to reach guilty verdicts Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty of seven criminal charges....

So much for appy cabbies being 'partners' - Big U kept fares low by making 'em pay fees that riders should have picked up Uber and Lyft will hand over $328 million in back pay to more than 100,000 New York drivers, the state's Attorney General Letitia James announced on Thursday....

Or maybe just not let foreign govts buy this stuff at all? The US Commerce Department has promised to stop promoting American-made commercial spyware to foreign governments....

Chocolate Factory to focus on more limited attestation for Android WebViews Amid rising community concern, Google says it will no longer develop controversial technology that was said to fight fraud online though to critics looked more like DRM for websites....

Plus: Beatles emit song with a little help from a neural network Lawyers representing Scarlett Johansson have pressured the developers of an AI avatar-generating app into taking down an advert that used the Hollywood megastar's face and voice without permission....

More details emerge from Loch Jassy, including how this may have been anything but a 'scrapped' project A fresh less-redacted copy of the US FTC's monopoly-abuse lawsuit against Amazon has confirmed some of what we previously reported about the web goliath's secret price-setting algorithm, and spilled a bunch of juicy details, too....

And with a straight face, too. Brussels didn't buy it Apple tried to avoid regulation in the European Union by making a surprising claim - that it offers not one but three distinct web browsers, all coincidentally named Safari....

Zephr bags $3.5M, reckons its tech can pinpoint location to sub-60cm levels Interview A startup that's just emerged from stealth claims it's solved smartphone GPS positioning problems by adding software to triangulate a handset with "sub metre absolute accuracy."...

Online form isn't for just anyone, so stow your crackpot theories for now The Pentagon's UFO hunters have set up an online form to collect first-hand information about secret US government programs involving unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)....

Industry facing burnout scare as workplace issues snowball The proportion of cybersecurity professionals reporting low "happiness ratings" has risen sharply over the last 12 months, raising concerns about increasing burnout rates in the industry....

Over a week later and barely any patches for the 10/10 vulnerability have been applied Security researchers have confirmed that ransomware criminals are capitalizing on a maximum-severity vulnerability in Apache ActiveMQ....

Usage barely measurable so ax will swing on compression dinosaur The Theora video compression codec is finally being put out to pasture as Google pulls it from Chrome and Mozilla mulls the same for Firefox....

As more features come to Data Cloud, customers might want to keep an eye on consumption Cloud data warehouse biz Snowflake has launched a fully managed service designed to rid developers building LLMs into their applications of the onerous task of creating the supporting infrastructure....

The hits keep on coming for troubled ID management biz Updated Okta has sent out breach notifications to almost 5,000 current and former employees, warning them that miscreants breached one of its third-party vendors and stole a file containing staff names, social security numbers, and health or medical insurance plan numbers....