The Register

Authentication portal to match snaps on existing IDs with user-provided snaps The US General Services Administration (GSA) plans to support facial recognition through its Login.gov authentication service, after declining to do so last year....

Public gallery invites you to have a scroll and wonder where the hours went If you fancy a scroll among the stars, an atlas of nearly 400,000 of our galactic neighbors has been captured in new levels of detail and accuracy and is freely accessible to anyone wanting to get a new look at strange new galaxies....

Datacenter GPUs and some consumer cards now exceed performance limits Analysis With the latest round of trade restrictions on AI chips, the Biden Administration is poised to all but cut off the Chinese market from high-end GPUs and accelerators - not just in the datacenter, but at home as well....

Crooks broke into the ClassPad server and swiped online learning database Japanese electronics giant Casio said miscreants broke into its ClassPad server and stole a database with personal information belonging to customers in 149 countries....

SBF comes up like a bad penny Updated New York's Attorney General Letitia James is going after cryptocurrency shenanigans and the Gemini Trust Company, set up by the Winklevoss twins who claimed to have inspired Facebook, is one of those in the firing line....

Regulator twiddled thumbs for Intel and Tower Semi, it could happen again China may yet throw a spanner in the works of Broadcom's imminent takeover of virtualization supremo VMware as payback for the latest in line of export restrictions imposed on it by Washington....

But look over there: A Cybertruck release date! Just please 'temper expectations,' Elon begs Tesla's Q3 2023 earnings missed Wall Street expectations, sending stocks tumbling after-hours, but hey - we finally have a Cybertruck delivery date....

Group will be remembered as staunch negotiator and a bullier of critical infrastructure orgs Law enforcement agencies have taken over RagnarLocker ransomware group's leak site in an internationally coordinated takedown....

Class action lawsuits abound after mega breach A cybercriminal claims they've uploaded a second batch of stolen profile data from biotech company 23andMe, posting it to the same cybercrime forum that hosted the first batch two weeks ago....

Isn't that what it said last time? Premium chips are picking up ... no really TSMC has posted another double-digit year-on-year revenue drop, yet is again banking on a pick up in the near future in what is virtually a re-run of the chipmaker's financial results for the previous quarter....

Seafaring cybercrim's wife faces similar sentence next month A former IT manager for the US Navy is facing a five-and-a-half year prison sentence for selling thousands of people's personal records on the dark web....

Profits plunge, sales down in Q3. Multi-year cost cutting drive means staff will be decimated Nokia, one of the world's largest telecommunications kit makers, is erasing up to 14,000 jobs after a plunge in net profit was caused by jittery customers delaying spending amid a slowing economy and rising interest rates....

Plus: Working from home is 'detached from reality' says world's richest man Comment Elon Musk is said to be toying with the idea of withdrawing access to X in the European Union rather than go to the effort of complying with the bloc's Digital Services Act....

American selfie-scraper shakes off $9M privacy fine as the 'actions of a foreign state are out of scope' A British tribunal yesterday ruled US selfie-scraper Clearview AI would not have to pay a 7.5 million ($9 million) privacy fine....

'Their future is murky at the moment' Database industry observers are slamming MariaDB's decision to ditch two of its core products as it restructures the business in the face of financial challenges....

OV-103 was there for Hubble and the assembly of the ISS Never one to ignore a bit of history, NASA this week marked the 40th anniversary of Space Shuttle Discovery's public debut during a rollout at the Palmdale manufacturing plant in California on October 16, 1983....

Aims to lower costs and broaden appeal of system popular with devs Redis, the go-to in-memory database used as a cache and system broker, is looking to include disk as part of a tiered storage architecture to reduce costs and broaden the system's appeal....

Open Source or Source Available? Does anyone really care? Interview Controversial cloud wrangler HashiCorp came out swinging last week at its San Francisco HashiConf shindig when the topic of licensing came up....

Multiple orbiters failed to find a crater matching rumble. Boffins now blame Red planet's internal problems Mars doesn't have tectonic activity but still manages to have marsquakes, according to a paper that probed a 2022 shake detected by the InSight lander....

Smaller, quieter, and expected to deliver millions of packages in coming years Amazon on Thursday released photos of its newest delivery drone, the MK 30, and announced will expand its Prime Air drone delivery operations to Italy, the UK, and an unnamed American city in 2024....

Big Blue in early talks to advance local RISC-V designs India's pursuit of a slice of the world's semiconductor industry has seen it court three major players - Intel, Tower Semiconductors, and IBM - on a single day....

Advise turning off and never using remote desktop protocol, prohibiting private VPNs, not trusting recruiters' due diligence US and South Korean authorities have updated their guidance on how to avoid hiring North Korean agents seeking work as freelance IT practitioners....

Suggests bodycam footage should replace paperwork for simple arrests San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, has proposed drone surveillance and cameras on public buildings to curb the city's crime problems....

Arson case produces a very tricky precedent for anyone who values digital privacy The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that police can use Google search histories to identify suspects in criminal investigations, leading digital rights orgs to warn the ruling has broad privacy implications for anyone using search engines....

Incidentally, Windows 11 has native rar support now If you needed another reason to keep your installation of venerable decompression app WinRAR updated, Google's Threat Analysis Group says it has spotted a vulnerability patched in August being actively abused by multiple state-backed threat actors....

Or, at least, information that can drive profits anyway Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn plans to build so-called "AI factories" with the help of Nvidia....

'My god, it's full of aerosolized metals!' A group of scientists studying the effects of rocket and satellite reentry vaporization in Earth's atmosphere have found some startling evidence that could point to disastrous environmental effects on the horizon....

Time to close those active sessions Updated Bad news for anyone using Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances: miscreants have been exploiting a critical information disclosure bug in these devices since late August - almost two months before a patch was issued....

Spending needs to double to $600B by 2030 if we want to stay within 2C warming Renewable energy investments continue to rise, but a key component of our planned zero-carbon future is being ignored, and could endanger the future of Earth: Energy grids....

Games developer latest to row back on WFH flexibility. 'Zoom fatigue is real,' says bigwig The CEO at gaming biz Roblox Corporation has given employees two stark choices: haul their asses to the company's HQ offices three days a week, which means relocation for some, or find a new employer....

And it's going to suck... up more power too Total capacity of hyperscale datacenters is set to grow almost threefold over the next six years on the back of AI demand, substantially increasing the amount of power required by those facilities....

A space station, Venus, and Mars also on the cards but the budget is TBD Flushed with robotic lunar success, India says it has plans to send a crew to the Moon by 2040....

Time to rethink Windows 10 support cycle then? Windows 11 is consistently failing to capture hearts and devices, if recent figures are to be believed....

Who knew 3 million actually means 700 in cybercrime forum lingo? D-Link has confirmed suspicions that it was successfully targeted by cyber criminals, but is talking down the scale of the impact....

Over a million licenses for office software to be used by corporate and frontline workers Amazon has reportedly taken out more than a million licenses for Microsoft's 365 productivity suite....

Actually it might give you a brief edge on those weird morning people If on waking your first instinct is to smash that snooze button, new research may encourage you to let sleeping dogs lie....

Musk's mega-app-in-waiting goes from chopping headlines to profile URLs An ethical hacker has exploited a bug in the way X truncates URLs to take over a CIA Telegram channel used to receive intelligence....

It was a gas while it lasted but 'no public policy' to replace natural gas for heating The UK should abandon its efforts to replace gas boilers for heating homes with hydrogen systems, an independent advisory commission says....

Allege that 'greed and hubris' led Mike Lynch and co to 'pretend Autonomy thrived' The lengthy legal story of Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch took another turn this weekend as prosecutors snapped back at attempts to have criminal charges thrown out of court....

Singapore summit hears how private sector's constant security sins create risk for sovereigns Senior politicians gathered at Singapore International Cyber Week (SICW) this week to discuss the current state of cybersecurity have articulated their discomfort with finding themselves dependent on Big Tech....

Spies come in from the cold for their first public chinwag Intelligence chiefs of the Five Eyes alliance today warned that Chinese government spies stealing IP and other sensitive data from private companies pose an "unprecedented" threat to national security....

Researchers say ransomware could be on the horizon if success continues An uptick in cybercriminals masking malicious downloads as fake browser updates is being spotted by security researchers....

They never do tell you about the unexpected costs and overly complex implementations Three in every five software purchases are regretted by IT departments for a variety of reasons, including unforeseen costs....

AI Platform Alliance probably has Jensen Huang in tears...of laughter History is full of examples of smaller players coming together to take on larger competitors. With the launch of the AI Platform Alliance this week, Arm CPU vendor Ampere aims to do just that in a bid to challenge Nvidia's hegemony....

Lack of local clouds and inflexible offers see users depart. Maybe the new Compass' developer experience tool will be more to their liking The Register's Monday story about Atlassian's looming end-of-support deadline for its on-prem server products has turned up a nasty dilemma for UK users who need local data residency, because Atlassian doesn't offer it and may not do so before support expires....

'Afeela' packs Qualcomm kit, screens galore, runs Android and will have an app ecosystem Video Sony and Honda have unveiled Afeela - a software-defined vehicle the two present as a Qualcomm-powered entertainment system on wheels. Or you could use it for transport....

It's also shorter, lousy under pressure, and needs a dongle on the cheapest iPad Apple has found another reason to embrace USB-C - it's allowed the iCompany to make a cheaper digital pencil....

Annual fee won't be profitable, will require registration of phone number X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, has started a trial $1 fee for new users to cut down on bots Elon Musk blames for many of the platform's woes....

Wear OS is basically Android, so this effort may do some heavy lifting to evade Arm SoCs in future phones Qualcomm has announced it will develop a platform to power devices running Google's Wear OS, based on the permissibly licensed RISC-V instruction set architecture....

Chips cunningly designed to be less powerful and evade sanctions look to be in trouble The US Department of Commerce has extended sanctions against China - and now other countries - in its bid to block advanced semiconductors making it to the Middle Kingdom....