The Register

$65 million cable project to connect US to Australia by way of Fiji and French Polynesia Google will build a pair of subsea cables connecting the US to Australia by way of Fiji and French Polynesia....

Two thumbs down as ACLU lawsuit yields uncomfortable results The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has used an AI-powered data-scanning tool called Giant Oak Search Technology (GOST) to scour social media looking for post containing "derogatory" comments about the nation....

But beware geeks bearing gifts Apple is backing the Biden Administrations' push for a nationwide right-to-repair law but, as with all things Apple, always check the terms and conditions....

Chocolate Factory agrees $23m guilt-free settlement About 2.5 million people who clicked on a Google Search link between October 25, 2006, and September 30, 2013 can expect to receive $7.16 to compensate them for claims of violated privacy, after an epic legal battle with the ad giant....

Shareholders rejoice! Apple TV+, News+ raises prices over 40% Subscription pricing has been on the rise for nearly every service imaginable, and Apple isn't about to miss the opportunity to squeeze its customers for a little more....

Eh? Canucks cracked by cyber crims Cybercriminals have Canada in the crosshairs, with five Ontario hospitals and a fresh Spamoflague disinformation campaign targeting "dozens" of Canadian government officials, including the PM....

Student's new dorm room comes with bars, not the good kind Food delivery robots became a source of fear for students at Oregon State University on Tuesday after a bomb threat claimed explosives had been placed in an autonomous Starship bot....

In 1983, David Copperfield vanished the Statue of Liberty and Word for DOS turned up Microsoft's Word is 40 years old today. Celebrations aside, it's worth pointing out the productivity juggernaut of 2023 was not always the bloated behemoth that is found on so many workstations....

Meanwhile, ESA looks to SpaceX for help with Galileo constellation United Launch Alliance's (ULA) first certification mission of its Atlas V replacement, the Vulcan Centaur, is set for near the end of the 2023 with a Christmas Eve launch....

With this zero-day, researchers say the 'scrappy' group is stepping up its operations The Winter Vivern cyber spy group is exploiting an XSS zero-day vulnerability in attacks on European governments....

No word on whether getting that energy from space to Earth will be made any easier, though Boffins from two UK universities believe they've figured a viable way to make space-based solar farms feasible, and it doesn't even require any new-fangled or expensive technology to accomplish....

New version of Debian-based live distro boasts added GNUstep, too Back in August, a new version of Window Maker arrived. Now there's a corresponding update to Window Maker Live, so you can try it out without installing....

The purpose is refocusing and 'realigning,' according to chip designer RISC-V chip designer SiFive has laid off 20 percent of its engineers and other staff amid efforts to refocus on creating bespoke processor cores for customers, but insists everything's fine....

Investigations ongoing as full extent of July breach is questioned Seiko Group, the Japanese company known best for its timekeeping business, has published a fresh update on its July ransomware attack, revealing that the group behind it stole 60,000 items of personal data....

'There could have been ways we could have made it work' Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella regrets the abrupt termination of the Windows Phone project....

Unit aims to 'take share in storage, scale private cloud, and expand into infrastructure software' HPE's Hybrid Cloud unit starts operations next month, yet it is unclear if the hardware giant can persuade more customers that its GreenLake service can steer them through the complexity of a multi-cloud world....

Appealing to growing crowd that wants data outside US jurisdiction Amazon is planning to launch a dedicated sovereign cloud for customers in Europe with stringent data residency requirements, and claims this will be physically and logically separate from existing AWS Regions....

The things the kingdom will do to get away from Europe... The UK Space Agency and Axiom Space are signing an agreement to send more Brits into space on a commercially sponsored mission....

5.7 million fiber kilometers of the stuff could be worth 88M to Brit players, claims government The UK is cracking down on Chinese imports to protect its optical fiber cable market, which translated to a length of approximately "5.7 million kilometers" in 2021 alone....

Will there be tinkering under the Christmas tree? The Raspberry Pi 5 has started shipping, but with pre-orders likely to snap up the first batch, will the faithful have a merry or miserable Christmas?...

No honor among thieves as group denies Hive ransomware links A newly emerged ransomware gang claims to have successfully gained access to the systems of a US plastic surgeon's clinic, leaking patients' pre-operation pictures in an attempt to hurry a ransom payment....

Had to kiss Nvidia's ring to make its vision real Lenovo has kicked off its Tech World gabfest by bending a flexible smartphone concept into its AI vision, which goes from the cloud to the wrist....

Crooks swindled about 3 million from victims Spain's National Police say they have busted a 3 million ($3.2 million) cyber crime ring, arresting 34 miscreants allegedly responsible for phishing, stealing personal data belonging to about four million individuals....

Takes rare step of issuing patches for end-of-life versions, as some staff report end-of-career letters VMware has disclosed a critical vulnerability in its vCenter Server - and that it issued an update to fix it weeks ago, along with patches for unsupported versions of the software....

Keeping old servers alive is more lucrative than the G-Cloud Google Cloud remains profitable, but the search and ads giant's rent-a-server side-hustle has struggled as customers seek to reduce costs....

Worked 38 years and was stiffed at the end, tells El Reg age was a probably factor IBM Canada has lost its bid to challenge a judgment that it wrongfully dismissed a former employee....

Chipmaker thought it had 30 days to get last few orders out the door Restrictions on the export high-performance AI accelerators to China have already gone into effect, Nvidia informed investors in a Monday regulatory filing....

Suggest developers spend 'at least one-third of their R&D budget' on safety A group of 24 AI luminaries have published a paper and open letter calling for stronger regulation of, and safeguards for, the technology, before it harms society and individuals....

ETH Zurich boffins say they've devised a better CPU fuzzer to find flaws Video Boffins from ETH Zurich have devised a novel fuzzer for finding bugs in RISC-V chips and have used it to find more than three dozen....

At this point, just assume your kit is compromised Citrix has urged admins to "immediately" apply a fix for CVE-2023-4966, a critical information disclosure bug that affects NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, admitting it has been exploited....

Oh, and there's a new Snapdragon 8 Gen3 chip bristling with AI potential Qualcomm is claiming its latest PC processors are ready to go toe-to-toe with Intel, AMD, and Apple on performance and efficiency....

Cracks down on the so-called four-pronged process of luring the youth Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is facing another multi-state lawsuit, this time from 33 attorneys general who say the site knowingly - and by design - harms the mental wellbeing of children and teenagers....

Indefinite ban due to 'public safety' Updated California's Department of Motor Vehicles has rescinded GM-owned Cruise's right to roam the streets, citing public safety and accusing the biz of withholding information....

Holly Million faces scorn despite proven job record Holly Million is replacing Neil McGovern as the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, although her colorful CV is leading to shocked reactions from some in the community....

When a 1960s dream ran headlong into economic reality Today marks 20 years since the final commercial flight of the iconic supersonic airliner, Concorde....

Wannabe spy undone by system logs, among other lapses in judgement A former US National Security Agency techie has plead guilty to six counts of violating the Espionage Act after being caught handing classified information to FBI agents he thought were Russian spies....

Could be easier to get into, but check out that 7-year update commitment Not satisfied with ripping apart the Meta Quest 3, the iFixit team has turned its clamps and picks to Google's latest and greatest: the Pixel 8 Pro....

Says logins are safe, as high-profile customers complain they knew about the breach before Okta 1Password is confirming it was attacked by cyber criminals after Okta was breached for the second time in as many years, but says customers' login details are safe....

NATO, United Nations, US DoD, and French government among its customer base Element, one of the companies behind decentralized comms platform Matrix, says customers are asking it to insert a protective clause from the encryption-busting element of UK government's Online Safety Bill (OSB)....

4 astronauts in one 'cozy' space about the size of two minivans NASA is confirming that the Orion crew and service module for the Artemis II mission were successfully joined together....

Politicians fear sale will place critical infrastructure in hands of foreign company Troubled French IT giant Atos is facing more difficulties following calls for the company to be nationalized on security grounds, resulting in its share price plunging to the lowest level in two decades....

They do this in their free time Of all the things parents might suspect their little darlings of doing on game creation platform Roblox, replicating Ryanair flights likely isn't one....

If true, wages of sin aren't that good A former ASML employee accused of stealing trade secrets about advanced chipmaking equipment may now be employed by Huawei....

Robbins and the C suite bumper pay day on back of router and switch kingpin's 2023 double digit sales swing Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins' compensation swelled to $31.8 million in the company's fiscal 2023, after he steered the networking kingpin to hit performance and operational targets....

Details of civilians and Garda officers were included, as well as high-res scans of identity documents A third-party contractor running a database without password protection exposed more than 500,000 records related to vehicle seizures by the Irish National Police (An Garda Siochana, "Garda")....

The last version to support x86-32 is currently expected early in November Release Candidate 2 of FreeBSD 14 is out, and includes the newly released OpenZFS 2.2. So far, the OS is not looking radically different from version 13, but bigger changes are afoot....

Fiber to the Premises just a premise for many Very few households and businesses across Euope are getting Gigabit broadband speeds regardless of official claims, and the UK is trailing in key areas - especially FTTP coverage....

'It looks like even Sundar Pichai is confused about how this control works' A recently released video deposition in long-running lawsuit over Google tracking its users has claimed that even the CEO Sundar Pichai isn't clear on what's going on below him....

Countries signed on for India's stack might watch out China-based scammers are using a combination of fake loan apps and India's real-time mobile payment system, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), to separate victims from their cash, according to a report by threat intel firm CloudSEK....

Surprisingly little, but the KAMRUI GK3 Plus doesn't inspire confidence Desktop Tourism Confession time: I am fascinated by very cheap PCs. I once bought a Windows tablet for AU$50 ($32) and a couple of years ago bought a brand-new Chromebook listed at $AU99.99 ($63) just to see if it was worth even that modest sum....