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Elon Musk's social network provided no response - or junk - to official inquiries about its safety practices Australia's e-safety Commission - the education and regulatory agency devoted to keeping Australians safe online - has warned Google and fined X/Twitter for inadequate responses to inquiries on how the platforms detect, remove and prevent child sexual abuse material and grooming....

PLUS: TSMC chips away at export restrictions; Singapore's COVID model challenged; Japan's banking and ID systems wobble India's government has stepped away from its plan to require manufacturers of PCs, tablets, and servers to secure an import license....

Check for 'cr' bubble in pictures if your app supports it, or look in the metadata if it hasn't been stripped, or... Microsoft, Adobe, and other big names this week pledged to add metadata to their AI-generated images so that future compatible apps will flag them up as machine-made using a special symbol....

Bit of a Blizzard of news for Redmond Kettle It has been a busy week for Microsoft, with a $29B bill for back taxes from the IRS, revelations about the costs of its Copilot AI service, and the news that the UK has dropped its objections to the Activision merger deal....

The bull has escaped Minos' labyrinth, and El Reg follows the thread The last interim Ubuntu release before next spring's LTS is out. Some editions are seeing big changes, others very small ones....

And engineer and girlfriend among those held hostage by Hamas Mellanox founder Eyal Waldman's daughter Danielle and her boyfriend Noam Shai were among those killed by Hamas militants while attending the Supernova music festival on the Israel-Gaza border Saturday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a letter to staff....

Probably not a threat to ASML's EUV tech just yet, analyst tells El Reg When it comes to producing the most advanced chips, Dutch semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker ASML has had the market on lock. However, fresh lithography tech from Canon may soon challenge that position....

What could possibly go wrong? American public water systems could be safe from cybercriminals and spies - we may not actually know until these systems are compromised, now that the Environmental Protection Agency has pulled the plug on a rule requiring US states to conduct cybersecurity evaluations after being sued by Republican states and water industry groups....

Won't stop supply of nerfed export-friendly accelerators The Biden administration's next round of sanctions could close a loophole that has enabled Chinese companies to buy export-controlled technologies, including AI processors, through outside suppliers and subsidiaries....

Will players press start to continue with this outfit? Shadow, which hosts Windows PC gaming in the cloud among other services, has confirmed criminals stole a database containing customer data following a social-engineering attack against one of its employees....

Early attempt to exploit latest Progress Software bug spotted in the wild An early ransomware campaign against organizations by exploiting the vulnerability in Progress Software's WS_FTP Server was this week spotted by security researchers....

38 people now accusing Apple of negligence over stalking, assaults and murders enabled by Bluetooth trackers A lawsuit filed in December that accuses Apple of negligence over its failure to prevent AirTags from being abused by stalkers has been amended to add 36 plaintiffs from 20 US states who claim they were victimized by abuse of the Bluetooth trackers....

Strategic DBaaS and distributed back end jettisoned after years of promotion MariaDB is ditching strategic products and cutting 28 percent of the workforce as it struggles to overcome the financial challenges its faced since floating on the stock market. The company also announced access to a new $26.5 million loan facility....

Two years on and Microsoft refuses to address the issue Perceived weaknesses in the security of Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE are being raised once again this week with a fresh single-click exploit....

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and for open source this is a well meaning cluster fudge Opinion When I was in Bilbao recently for the Open Source Summit Europe event, the main topic of conversation was the European Union's (EU) Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Everyone - and I mean everyone - mentioned it. Why? Because pretty much everyone with an open source clue sees it as strangling open source software development....

The suggested change is the first step in desktop environment becoming Wayland-only The two changes are just proposals at present, but GNOME's Wayland-only future is on the horizon. Whether that's a good or bad sign is less clear....

Or it could, just as soon as they figure out how to make the networking work Analysis In the mad dash to capitalize on the potential of generative AI, Nvidia has remained the clear winner, more than doubling its year-over-year revenues in Q2 alone. To secure that lead, the GPU giant apparently intends to speed up the development of new accelerators....

Not quite a pound for every one of the 13.8 million affected UK citizens, and it could have been more The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Equifax a smidge over 11 million ($13.6 million) for severe failings that put millions of consumers at risk of financial crime....

Crumbs compared to the billions thrown about in US and Europe The UK government has announced the ChipStart program as part of its National Semiconductor Strategy, which will see a dozen silicon startups share 1.3 million ($1.58 million) in funding....

'Tactics employed by Microsoft are no way to engage with us' Britain's competition regulator finally waved through Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of games developer Activision Blizzard today, ending a 15-month saga that turned more than a little tetchy at times....

Con: You won't get a Menlo Park salary. Pro: You won't have to meet Zuck UK government is trying to hire a "Deputy Director for AI International," a policy leadership role for someone willing to work for a relative pittance compared to research scientists in the field....

CEO claims bug had millions-to-one chance of disrupting supply - but it did The small island of Jersey's natural gas supply is still switched off five days after a software problem caused its main facility to failover to a safety mode, leaving engineers struggling to reinstate supplies to homes and businesses....

Nobody minded for 20 years or so, until another student took action On Call Many a Friday arrives with a feeling that the previous four days of toil occupied more than 96 hours, which is why The Register always marks the day with a new instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed tales of fun times delivering tech support....

Given they're still trying to fix the capsule's parachute the astronauts better say their prayers NASA announced on Thursday that the first-ever crewed test flight of Boeing's much-delayed Starliner spacecraft will launch no earlier than mid-April, 2024....

They know they're being watched and don't mind - maybe because Beijing says it improves safety Chinese residents are generally comfortable with widespread use of surveillance technology, according to a year-long project conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and an unnamed non-government research partner....

There's enough overlap that the deal works already. Next: cloud networks and maybe a storage push Cisco has become Nutanix's closest hardware partner - meaning integration of the hyperconverged upstart's stack and Cisco's UCS servers will be stronger, sooner, as their partnership gathers steam....

Imagine a Jira bug report with an embedded video explaining the situation Atlassian has announced the acquisition of asynchronous video outfit Loom, for $975 million....

Vice-presidents, engineers among those scheduled to have a rotten Christmas Chip designer Qualcomm has revealed it intends to shed over 1,000 California-based employees, delivering on previously foreshadowed plans to address its economic woes....

Parts reportedly geared toward high-performance compute and leverage advanced packaging A mystery US company has tapped Samsung to fabricate datacenter chips using its 3nm manufacturing process....

We'd like to say don't panic ... but maybe? 35 vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy remain unfixed more than two years after being found and disclosed to the open source project's maintainers, according to the person who reported them....

Looking for a bright spot? Well, it's easier to beg the Feds for cash now, say researchers Hopes that the venture capital market would recover in the latter half of 2023 can be considered well and truly dashed, with a report finding VC spending in Q3 reached its lowest level in six years....

'If you are challenged, we will assume responsibility' Google has joined the ranks of AI services providers willing to offer its customers limited indemnity against copyright infringement claims....

Turns out secrecy doesn't breed security The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) may open source the proprietary encryption algorithms used to secure emergency radio communications after a public backlash over security flaws found this summer....

Quest for control as AEI alleges Meta's monopolistic missteps A VR development collective has filed a $353.2 million antitrust lawsuit against Meta, accusing the platform of conspiring to kill a fitness app developed for Quest devices once it learned it would also be available for Apple and Pico headsets....

Almost a quarter of SoftBank-owned chip designer's total revenue comes via Middle Kingdom, um, arm China could prove problematic for Arm once more, amid claims key staff from its local subsidiary have left to form a server chip design biz with government backing, and are eyeing up ex-colleagues to help....

Just melt it with lasers, say researchers in Germany Researchers in Germany's proof-of-concept study shows solar energy could be harnessed to turn lunar dust into paving for landing pads and roads....

Hacks, physical tricks could turn headsets into vomit extractors, but tests already show no ops needed for that DARPA is launching a program to head off "cognitive attacks" for mixed reality headsets that could, in theory, cripple future warfighters when deployed....

Dodgy weather results in a launch postponement NASA has pushed its billion-dollar Psyche mission back to October 13 thanks to bad weather at the launch site....

The ransomware gang changes identities more than Jason Bourne The Everest ransomware group is stepping up its efforts to purchase access to corporate networks directly from employees amid what researchers believe to be a major transition for the cybercriminals....

Slated to work with existing 4G phones, though space rivals still trying to shoot it down SpaceX's Starlink is advertising a Direct to Cell satellite phone service due to start next year and which it claims will work with existing phones and eventually provide access to text, voice, and data....

Simpson Manufacturing yanks systems offline, warns of ongoing disruption Simpson Manufacturing Company yanked some tech systems offline this week to contain a cyberattack it expects will "continue to cause disruption."...

eBPF project jumps from 'just a network plugin' moves to begin wide adoption The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has awarded a graduated sash to Cilium, a validation of the maturity and future of the eBPF project....

Mangled mismatch of formats, macros, and VLOOKUP practice hits wannabe anesthetists Exclusive Computer errors, bad technology choices, and flawed processes have disrupted the recruitment of trainee anesthetists in England and Wales....

Interested parties invited to speak now or forever hold your peace Britain's Competition and Markets Authority is asking the mobile industry for feedback on Vodafone's local merger with Three to determine if the agreement could negatively impact rivals, customers, or both....

OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo chatbot defenses dissolve with '20 cents' of API tickling The "guardrails" created to prevent large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo from spewing toxic content have been shown to be very fragile....

And in full swing by next October Google has decided to kick third-party cookies out of its Chrome browser for one percent of users in early 2024, and to banish the web trackers entirely by Q3 of the same year....

1.5 trillion needed in the next five years - some to turf Huawei - and nobody's quite sure where to find it The European Commission's consultation on the future of the bloc's telecoms sector has concluded, and revealed majority disinterest in the idea of making big tech pay to access networks....

57 flights past expected lifetime and still improving NASA has scheduled the 62nd flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and given it the job of achieving a new speed record for rotorcraft on Mars....

One has the talent, one has the money - both want more tech The gulf states and former Soviet nations of central Asia are set to become a new hub of tech activity, according to Anatoly Motkin, president of Strategeast - a non-profit that operates in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, and works to develop their digital economies....

House always wins, er, wait ... As more details emerge from September's Las Vegas casino cyberattacks, Caesars Entertainment - the owner of Caesars Palace - has disclosed more than 41,000 Maine residents alone had their info stolen by a ransomware gang....