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Arrives at the same conclusion about the nexus of Android and search as pretty much everyone else Updated Japan's Fair Trade Commission has become the latest competition regulator to decide Google is worthy of an investigation for monopolistic practices....

AI use up 266% in five years but it's still used by less than a quarter of workers Artificial intelligence-related technologies show promise but are clustering in AI hubs across the world, a group of economists has reported....

AMD also said to be working on an Arm-based PC chip Intel's stock dipped slightly on Monday after a report that Nvidia was developing an Arm-based CPU for the PC market....

Initial fall in infected devices indicates evolution, not extinction, of attack code After a six-day wait, Cisco started rolling out a patch for a critical bug that miscreants had exploited to install implants in thousands of devices. Alas, it seems, the security results have been mixed since the attackers got wise....

Plan for Chrome echoes Apple iCloud Private Relay Google says it plans to prototype a technique to mask IP addresses via network proxies in future versions of its Chrome browser, a privacy protection similar to Apple's iCloud Private Relay service for its Safari browser....

Nothing more fattening than CHIPs: Up to ten locations get initial funding, more to come The Biden administration Monday announced 31 regional tech hubs across the US poised to spur development and manufacturing of key technologies....

Home of the Republic seemingly hit by Sony/NTT Docomo ransomware crew The US Capitol's election agency says a ransomware crew might have stolen its entire voter roll, which includes the personal information of all registered voters in the District of Columbia....

Has someone been shooting their mouth off a little too much? In financial filings, Tesla has admitted that it is under a serious investigation by the US Department of Justice over the efficacy of its self-driving code, among many other things....

A $100M match made in analytics heaven, parties claim Analytics biz Databricks is set to purchase Arcion Labs, developer of a cloud-native data replication platform, in a deal estimated to be worth upwards of $100 million....

Additive manufacturing might not be for everyone, but rocket makers seem to like it NASA has tested a 3D-printed rocket engine nozzle made of a weldable type of aluminum with the aim of adding more payload to deep space missions....

Data scientists to rejoice as spreadsheet's 'helpfulness' can be curbed The days of Microsoft Excel's "helpful" habit of automatically converting values might be at an end as the Windows giant has finally admitted that, yes - not everything is a date....

SF corporate nerve center will be 87% smaller than pre-pandemic as others mandate in-person work Dropbox is shuttering one-quarter of its office space at corporate HQ in San Francisco. To be more precise, it is paying $79 million to the landlord to amend the contract and forgo more than 165,000 square feet....

The industry owes him a debt of gratitude Obituary Martin Goetz, regarded by many as the "father of third-party software," has died at the age of 93....

Copilotization of all things continues... as helper offers incident reports to share with the boss and more Microsoft is opening up the early access program for its flagship cybersecurity AI product, which marks the inevitable folding in of Copilot into its infosec suite....

Work ongoing to manually recover some storage nodes Microsoft techies are trying to recover storage nodes for a "small" number of customers following a "power issue" on October 20 that triggered Azure service disruptions and ruined breakfast for those wanting to use hosted virtual machines or SQL DB....

Bigs up commercial space as ESA prepares for Axiom 3 British astronaut Tim Peake has teased a return to space during an interview in which he doffed his cap to Axiom Space and others in the commercial space sector....

Public Accounts Committee demands timetable for replacements, because things have run so smoothly so far... A gaggle of MPs are calling for government to put together a timetable for the replacement of millions upon millions of smart meters that will be defunct when 2G and 3G mobile networks are switched off....

Plus Meta gets physical, moves bots in the house... AI In Brief The head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler has warned that the increasing use of AI systems will almost certainly crash financial markets at some point in the coming decade....

Paper describes work in massively parallel, interconnected system - with limits to data in on-chip memory IBM is back with an updated neuromorphic processor chip that it hopes will enable it to more efficiently scale up to powerful AI hardware systems, at least as far as inferencing goes....

In a world of incremental updates, Windows 12 won't be Windows 12 Opinion Ever wondered why no network exec has picked up on writers' pitches for Desperate Tech Bros? The reason is simple: the market is already saturated....

Whipping up a RAID repair nearly produced data doom Who, Me? Welcome once again to the wafer-thin buffer between the weekend and the workday that we call Who, Me? in which Reg readers share tales of tech tricks that didn't quite work out as hoped....

The upgrade might not go well, so prioritized the probe doing better science NASA patched its Voyager 2 spacecraft last week, to address a bug that last year saw its sibling generate corrupted telemetry data, but won't know if its fix worked - or overwrote critical code - until some time after October 28....

Virtzilla's final releases as an indepdent company might be biggish upgrades to its desktop hypervisors South Korea's Fair Trade Commission has conditionally approved Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, leaving China as the holdout ahead of the forecast October 30 closing day for the mammoth deal....

Boeing and SpaceX lose out. Ministry is betting 70 million people without internet access won't Indonesia has decided not to launch a hot backup satellite (HBS) to support its single broadband-beaming bird, and plans to spend the money on Earth-based digital inclusion efforts instead....

And gives itself five years to build silicon photonics cores India's government has endorsed two massive investments in semiconductors as it seeks to propel the nation into the top ranks of manufacturing and research....

ALSO: US may block clouds in China; Toyota reveals moon roover; Google expands Indian loan business; Xiaomi's new unifying OS; and more Asia In Brief On Sunday, Chinese state media reported that Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn's operations in the Chinese cities of Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces were facing tax audits....

ALSO: SolarWinds using plaintext passwords; North Korea attacks TeamCity; Critical vulns, and more Security in brief On Friday, Cisco released more details about the critical zero-day bug it disclosed on Monday, and said it hopes to have a fix available to customers beginning Sunday....

Chinese AI and GPU vendors face a less than fab-ulous dilemma where to get their chips built moving forward Analysis Chinese chipmakers face an uphill battle filling the void left by the Biden administration's latest round of export restrictions, announced this week....

'Beatings will continue until morale improves' Kettle It has been a bad week for thousands of tech workers this week, with multiple corporations announcing that headcount reduction will continue for the time being....

Tell us it's Russia without telling us it's Russia Unknown intruders broke the International Criminal Court last month in what the Hague war crimes tribunal described on Friday as a "a targeted and sophisticated attack with the objective of espionage."...

Planned episodes on China and AI reportedly worried Apple top brass The Problem With Jon Stewart, popular show on Apple TV with the eponymous host, will not be returning to the streaming service for a third season....

Intel, Siemens, Google, Meta, and Stripe among event walkouts Meta and Stripe have joined Google, Intel, and Siemens in a growing boycott of next month's Web Summit in Lisbon after the event's chief executive compared Israel's actions in response to attacks by Hamas as "war crimes."...

There was a young man from Moldova, who the Feds just want to roll over, but with 20 inside, and nowhere to hide, he just wants it all to be over A Moldovan who allegedly ran the compromised-credential marketplace E-Root has been extradited from the UK to America to stand trial....

Signal could help astronomers suss out the mass of the universe An international team of scientists have discovered a fast radio burst (FRB) so distant that it blows the previous record away, but is still one of the brightest they've ever seen....

You Can't Always scrape What You Want, even if the lyrics are Blowin' in the (digital) Wind A trio of music publishers has sued AI outfit Anthropic for slurping up song lyrics without asking for permission as it trains the Claude chatbot....

Until the Democrats leave office, that is The FCC has voted on a plan to reinstate net neutrality rules that require ISPs treat all data equally - rules which were canceled under the Trump administration in 2017....

Florida man gets 4,900 people to 'vote' via SMS after promoting it as an option Nearly 5,000 people sent in an SMS "voting" for Hillary Clinton after a man the US Office of Public Affairs characterized as a "social media influencer" promoted it as an option....

One's cheaper but with ads, the other's more expensive with no ads, says Musk X is launching two tiers of premium subscriptions, according to owner and CTO Elon Musk, but details are still scant....

Hong Kong-based maker claims cooler is 'silent' A Hong Kong-based PC maker is claiming a first with the release of a Mini PC featuring a silent, solid-state active cooling system for its processor....

Try to hold back your tears as CEO to employee pay ratio hits: 250 to 1 Microsoft boss Satya Nadella was paid $48.5 million in compensation for running the business in 2023 - the lowest amount he received in the past three years due to smaller stock awards and other incentives....

No word on motivation but pair face up to 5 years in the cooler Two men this week confessed to deliberately bypassing testing protocols that are essential to keeping nuclear power plants safe. This happened not once, not twice, but 29 times....

UK regulator lists series of potential remedies for anti-competitive practices early on in probe The UK's competition regulator is drafting remedies that could have big implications for Microsoft and AWS, should behavior that prevents or restricts customers from switching and using multi-clouds be identified....

Palantir users' endorsement letter could lay the ground for Palantir win The controversial Federated Data Platform for England's health service looks set for more delays as the government body awarding the 480 million ($582 million) contract - for which Palantir is considered a frontrunner - failed to confirm the winner this week....

Mangled spreadsheets mean government was asleep on the job and should be held to account The Royal College of Anaesthetists is to consider whether it has confidence in the UK National Health Service's recruitment process, following revelations that it made serious mistakes in selecting candidates owing to inappropriate and poorly managed use of Microsoft Excel....

The difference is especially stark at 2:00 AM On Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's weekly column featuring readers' turbulent tales of their tech support troubles. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mal" whose first job in tech was programming a mainframe at a small mutual financial services outfit....

India's big four outsourcers scored record deals in Q2, but revenue didn't reflect those successes Infosys and Wipro have decided to skip hiring graduates this year as part of their "utilization optimization" strategies, after a quarter that brought both record deals amid continued macroeconomic uncertainty for India's big four IT services outfits....

Workstation CPUs hit 96 cores, high-end desktops get 64. Prices nearly as high as clock speeds AMD has launched 7,000-series Ryzen Threadripper processors, bringing its 5nm Zen 4 cores to high-end desktops and workstations....

Suggests modular interiors for the frequent flyer in a hurry to take off in their own 737 You know how it goes: you want a private jet, but all the fuss and bother of deciding how to furnish it is just so off-putting. We here at Vulture Central completely sympathize....

Also went after crypto-crooks who sought money to buy miners for fake token Acting on information from Microsoft and Amazon, India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has raided alleged fake tech support operators and other tech-related crims across the country....

100+ diagnostic tests from a single drop of blood - sound familiar? A Silicon Valley exec who claimed to have invented a revolutionary technology that could perform diagnostic testing using a single drop of blood from a pricked finger has been sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the multi-million-dollar fraud scheme....