The Register

Mission to the Moon likely to slip to 2024 following dress rehearsal issues United Launch Alliance's heavy-lift launch vehicle Vulcan Centaur is facing yet another delay after the company was unable to complete a Wet Dress Rehearsal on December 8....

Chip giant claims demo tech could 'significantly' improve device density Intel is looking to new options for its future chips including 3D stacking of transistors to enable greater density, extending backside power, and use of gallium nitride for greater power delivery....

Ofcom opens consultation on resilience requirements... power backup for mobile networks, anyone? Britain's comms regulator is asking telecoms providers for updated guidance on how resilient their networks are, given modern society's increasing reliance on digital services....

Also: 'well-known Bay Area tech' firm's laptops stolen and check out some critical vulns Security in brief The saga of 23andMe's mega data breach has reached something of a conclusion, with the company saying its probe has determined millions of leaked records originated from illicit break-ins into just 14,000 accounts....

Almost 100M in handouts available for LEO connectivity projects UK government may subsidize Brit companies working on low Earth orbit satellite connectivity projects - the aim being to support comms for remote parts of the country and boost the domestic satellite industry....

Keeping the lights on with an enterprise product while staying true to your roots Interview Monitoring biz VictoriaMetrics is relatively unusual in its field. It is yet to accept external investment, preferring instead to try to grow organically rather than being forced to through a private equity meat grinder by committing to grow by X every year until the investor exits....

Better than a Pi? It's an open and shut case Opinion Space junk grabs headlines. There's a lot of space hardware alive and dead - 9,064 objects at the time of writing according to the Orbiting Now tracker - and cleaning it up at end of life is the focus of a number of bizarrely nautical technology proposals like sails, harpoons and nets, more at home on an 18th century whaling ship than Low Earth Orbit....

Vast battery life, zippy performance, and rich speakers make an impressive package Desktop Tourism When I speak to laptop-makers about their wares, they often admit that the benchmark in their field is the MacBook Air. Ever since its 2008 debut, Apple's minimalist portable has been the standard others aspire to match, despite changing little from the formula of a gently tapering aluminum clamshell with screens of between 11 and 13 inches....

Nice ridiculously redundant drive you've got there - what a pity if something ...happened to it Who, Me? Heavens to Betsy, dear reader, are you back again? It feels like only a week since we last met in the corner of The Register we call Who, Me? to share the schadenfreude of a fellow Regizen's misfortune....

Big Tech plays the 'this might hurt innovation' card for rules that bar predictive policing, workplace emotion assessments The European Union (EU) on Saturday reached provisional agreement on the AI Act - a broad legal framework limiting how artificial intelligence can be used....

And the joy of slaughtering demons as John Romero himself delivers a frag-tastic new level Seminal first-person shooter Doom marked the thirtieth anniversary of its release on December 10, and co-creator John Romero marked the occasion by releasing new levels for the game and celebrating its role as the genesis of many IT careers....

First to wear it will be an M.2 connector that draws power from PCIe The Raspberry Pi project has released the first revision to its Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) spec, along with an update to the RPi 5's PCIE handling tools....

PLUS: The AI companies that will use AMD's latest GPUs, and more AI In brief Google wowed the internet with a demo video showing the multimodal capabilities of its latest large language model Gemini - but some of the the demo was faked....

PLUS: Japan Moon landing scheduled; Mastercard's APAC pay-by-face trial; Scammers feast on restaurant QR code Microsoft last week announced price hikes for its software and services, with the biggest rises to be felt across Asia....

Silicon carbide production for EVs among key targets Silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors are getting a lot of attention of late and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry doesn't want to be left out....

Proposals now due in 2024 for a launch 5 years later NASA has tweaked the contract and shuffled the dates for its procurement notice covering a vehicle to deorbit the International Space Station (ISS.)...

Microsoft spots surge in pro-Russia exploits of video platform to spread propaganda An unknown pro-Russia influence group spent time recruiting unwitting Hollywood actors to assist in smear campaigns against Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky....

Register journos brew up on the future of hybrid in our latest Kettle Kettle Readers have been up in arms this week about a study by Stanford boffins suggesting that the return to the office trend is stalling, as workers rebel against demands that they take up the commute again....

'This is a brainstorming concept a team is at the early stages of exploring' Google is reportedly toying with the idea of using its latest Gemini AI models to analyze images from Google Photos and text from Search to put together a life story for users....

End-of-year deadline looms on US surveillance Two competing bills to reauthorize America's FISA Section 702 spying powers advanced in the House of Representatives committees this week, setting up Congress for a battle over warrantless surveillance before the law lapses in the New Year....

Same old argument about free speech - let's see if it sticks this time Elon Musk's lawyers are again trying to get the world's richest man out of his "Twitter sitter" consent decree with the US Securities and Exchange Commission via an appeal to the US Supreme Court....

Latest Insider Build brings new features for Windows 365 Boot Microsoft has begun rolling out fresh Windows 365 Boot features, starting with its Windows Insider program....

CTO Mark Papermaster lays out the plan for the next two years Interview Semiconductors have been getting progressively hotter over the past few years as Moore's Law has slowed and more power is required to push higher performance gen over gen....

HashiCorp software faces challenge after licensing change The rebellion against HashiCorp for adopting a competition-limiting license for its Terraform software expanded this week, with word that The Linux Foundation aims to help hatch an open source alternative to Vault, the company's secrets management project....

Experimerntal milestone needs work before it can be considered a candidate for power generation The US Department of Energy has released $42 million in seed funding to help research the nuclear fusion techniques successfully demonstrated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last year....

It's tricky to pull off, but new rules may make reuse more common Datacenters generate lots of heat and myraid providers are trying to put this resource to use, but there are geographic and various practical limitations on re-purposing it....

Interpol increasingly concerned as abject abuse of victims scales far beyond Asia origins Human trafficking for the purposes of populating cyber scam call centers is expanding beyond southeast Asia, where the crime was previously isolated....

It looks like everything is coming up HP. Do you want some help with that? The curious case of the HP Smart app and unexpected renaming of printers has taken another turn, after a Reg reader pointed to broken metadata pushed out in a November Windows Servicing Stack Update (SSU)....

Days left to decide chameleon's fate ... vote now LOGOWATCH Linux distro openSUSE this week parked its electric scooter outside the marketing boutique as it pursues a brand that somehow reflects the paradigm shift in its own not-so-corporate journey....

Has recent CEO, board shenanigans given rise to a merger situation? CMA is asking for a friend The UK's competition regulator wants to know if recent changes at OpenAI and its evolving relationship with Microsoft are cause for concern....

This is release 0b11111111 (0xFF) - what could possibly go wrong? The 255th version of systemd is here, banishing support for split and unmerged /usr directories but enriching its UKI boot support....

Yearning for the pre-web internet can be misplaced... it certainly wasn't user-friendly Long before the internet became our world, there was a mishmash of online services such as AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy. Except for being faster, there's less difference between then and now than you might think....

12.5 million teased with speedy internet, only 4 million take the bait Openreach claims it has reached the halfway point in its goal of rolling out fiber broadband to 25 million UK premises by the end of 2026....

Cover-up saved the culprit after a battery of tests diagnosed the problem On Call The steady process of time means that The Register has once again arrived at Friday and the timeslot we reserve for On Call - our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support trials and tribulations....

No repair mission required - for now The Hubble Space Telescope is expected to resume science operations on Friday, after a gyroscope glitch forced NASA to suspend astronomical observations for weeks....

Says it was probably hacked, which isn't good news either A trio of Polish security researchers claim to have found that trains built by Newag SA contain software that sabotages them if the hardware is serviced by competitors....

Committee worries licenses are being issued to boost and suit business, not national security On Thursday, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report urging tighter restrictions on export of critical technologies to China - including a policy of denial for all items controlled for national security reasons....

Bundled support has already come to Catalyst - but don't bother asking how it works Cisco has quietly introduced changes to the licensing model for its Catalyst range, and will bring it to more products over time....

The idea that Big Content should pay network operators is in trouble Amazon's game-streaming business Twitch has announced it will quit South Korea, citing network access costs ten times higher than those it pays in any other nation....

The Russians are coming! Err, they've already infiltrated UK, US inboxes Russia-backed attackers have named new targets for their ongoing phishing campaigns, with defense-industrial firms and energy facilities now in their sights, according to agencies of the Five Eyes alliance....

Security boosted and inappropriate content blocked in large language models Meta has launched Purple Llama - a project aimed at building open source tools to help developers assess and improve trust and safety in their generative AI models before deployment....

Warns of $1.3 billion charge for cutting Virtzilla's costs, rapid shift to subs and sales of the whole vStack rather than individual pieces Updated Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has announced his intention to divest VMware's end-user computing and Carbon Black units, and signalled a rapid shift to subscription licenses of bigger software bundles....

Akamai says it reported the flaws to Microsoft. Redmond shrugged A series of attacks against Microsoft Active Directory domains could allow miscreants to spoof DNS records, compromise Active Directory and steal all the secrets it stores, according to Akamai security researchers....

In the race for the Red Planet, NASA is falling behind Inspired by the success of NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter, Chinese boffins are proposing a more capable extraterrestrial flier for a planned Mars sample return mission....

Middling performance, but check out the longevity Fairphone has retained top marks for repairability, with the Dutch manufacturer's fifth iteration scoring high for software longevity, even if some components are starting to get a little more "conventional."...

As Cyber Solidarity Act edges closer to full adoption in Europe The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has signed a working arrangement with its EU counterparts to increase cross-border information sharing and more to tackle criminals....

First post-Pi 5 update brings dark mode among numerous bug fixes As many users wait for their Raspberry Pi 5 units to arrive, a fresh version of the Raspberry Pi OS has just landed, complete with fixes and that most essential of operating system add-ons - dark mode....

Just install the latest client and follow the instructions, but don't ask questions Google has released an updated version of the Google Drive app for Windows and macOS that, along with some simple manual work, should resolve missing file issues....

Surfing the cryptographic wave Meta is pressing ahead with default end-to-end encryption on chats and calls in Messenger, with the rollout beginning today....

Apparently they're being serious What's this? A tacit admission from Hewlett Packard that customers hate printer products?...