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Industry lull good for tech, but human toll is grim reading The 7.6 preliminary magnitude earthquake that hit Japan on New Year's Day is forcing Ishikawa Prefecture chip and electronics companies to temporarily shut their doors, with affected companies including Toshiba, GlobalWafers, Murata and others....

The most successful compile-it-yourself Linux distro now has compiled, packaged executables Gentoo now offers 20-plus gigabytes of pre-compiled binaries, from desktops to office suites, to speed up installations and updates....

Details sub-CPU allotments, performant Iceberg tables after Microsoft, Databricks bring market noise Feature Last year was a big one for data analytics and ML in the cloud. Two of the biggest players, Microsoft and Databricks, both overhauled their platforms, with the former also managing to launch products....

With the average demand hitting $1.5 million, something's gotta change Emsisoft has called for a complete ban on ransom payments following another record-breaking year of digital extortion....

Meanwhile, ISRO chief sets sights on next crewed mission India kicked off the new year with the launch of an X-ray polarimetry space observatory to research cosmic radiation....

Meanwhile: Fidelity downgrades social network's valuation by 71%, so far Links to articles and pages on the web made sense again on X, for a short while at least, as headlines and titles returned to preview cards shown in tweets in the digital land formerly known as Twitter....

Arizona and Texas are ahead in terms of regulating autonomous vehicles Driverless cars are not subject to traffic citations in California even if they violate driving laws under the state's current rules....

Justice Roberts thinks ML can help in legal cases, if humans keep their hands on the tiller US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts believes that artificial intelligence will play an increasingly important role in the legal process, but he expects "human judges will be around for a while."...

Now every miscreant is jumping on Big G's OAuth account security hole Security researchers say info-stealing malware can still access victims' compromised Google accounts even after passwords have been changed....

Updates for the 1% of holdouts halt Valve rang in the New Year by dropping Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 support on its Steam gaming platform, giving your gaming grandparets yet another reason to upgrade....

No, you aren't special - we're probably all visual learners Scientists say they have discovered the neural coding system our brains use to transform images into memories, suggesting we're all visual thinkers deep down....

Dutch photolithography giant claims export control not hurting its bottom line Washington reportedly pressed chipmaking equipment giant ASML to cancel some deliveries to China ahead of updated restrictions coming into force, but the company itself is declining to confirm if this is the case....

'Magnificent' image shows violent volcanic surface New images of Jupiter's moon, Io, were this week released by NASA following the flyby of the Juno spacecraft on December 30....

From legal proceedings to potential YouTube fodder The court system of Victoria, Australia, was subject to a suspected ransomware attack in which audiovisual recordings of court hearings may have been accessed....

December figures give Redmond little reason to cheer ahead of OS changes to meet EU law Many users are still steering clear of Windows 11 as Microsoft continues to shovel AI into its flagship operating system and prepares updates to mollify regulators....

Yields could double next year - provided the budget is passed To say 2023 was a big year in the world of fusion research would be an understatement....

Ice, ice maybe - water-seeking lunar trundlebot overcomes iffy connectors NASA's much-delayed Moon rover, VIPER, is progressing toward a 2024 launch, with its project manager declaring the trundlebot half-built....

Former British state telco claims only tiny percentage of voice and data traffic passes over kit The deadline for UK telcos to remove Huawei equipment from their core networks has now passed, with BT admitting 2G and 3G services are still served by infrastructure that is not compliant. Yet it isn't clear what measures, if any, BT may face for this....

Health org that previously promised it learned its lesson on transparency will , , and NHS England picked the last working day before Christmas to publish a heavily redacted contract for the controversial Federated Data Platform, which it awarded to US spy-tech firm Palantir in November....

Which is all about privacy and encryption, apparently Mozilla closed out 2023 with a report that dodges its flatlining browser market share and Mozilla.social beta in favor of calls for a faster pace from its highly paid CEO....

Loads of chips from Nvidia, AMD, Intel on the way - and very probably some surprises along the way as well Comment The new year is already shaping up to be one of the most significant in terms of datacenter silicon we've seen in a while. Every major chip house is slated to refresh their CPU and/or GPU product lines over the coming twelve months....

Recognizing what's unique about AI will give us the tools to keep it in check Opinion All the worries and fears about AI boil down to one. How do we know how well it's working?...

Right to repair meets right to recycle The UK government hopes to make it easier for folks to reuse and recycle electrical goods rather than consign old gear to the landfill....

Eighth charge related to campaign contributions would just take too dang long US prosecutors do not plan to proceed with a second trial of convicted and imprisoned crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), according to a Southern District of New York court letter filed on December 29....

Redmond's AI assistant bounds onto Android and iOS without Bing branding First Look While many readers enjoyed holiday downtime, Microsoft was busy bringing its Copilot AI to Android and iOS....

Compute, networking and storage are key, and global sales are still possible - despite, y'know, controversy Huawei chair Hu Houkun has prepared the Chinese tech giant for 2024 by suggesting its datacenter offerings are the key to success in the new year....

Less than you might imagine, thankfully The US Coast Guard has advised that a ship carrying around 800 tonnes of Lithium-Ion batteries - some of which caught fire - is out of danger after its crew handled the situation admirably....

And don't get us started on what it's like to work around high explosives On Call: Dirt File All good things must end, even the holidays - and with them On Call's Dirt File, a special festive edition of our reader-contributed tech support trauma tales dedicated to the filthiest places techies have been asked to toil....

Artist Agnieszka Pilat tells The Register how she gets Spot to paint, not pant Boston Dynamics' "Spot" robot dog has been deployed as a tour guide, a police officer, and a warehouse worker. At the National Gallery Of Victoria's Triennial in Melbourne, Australia, it's now doing duty as an artist....

As we argue over freeing ourselves from fossil fuels, can SRM buy us time to develop green energy we need? In-depth At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting (AGU23) in San Francisco the other week, the 25,000-plus science folks in attendance pretty much all agreed on one unequivocal fact: the Earth is warming and it's warming quickly. Discussions centered not on "if" - that's been settled - but on how to best measure that rise, how to best model it, and what best to do about it....

The predictions that turned out correct ... and the ones we wished were right Systems Approach The end of the year is often a time for people in tech to make predictions, but rather than making our own, today we'll look back on some of the bold predictions of the past - specifically the inaugural Outrageous Opinion session held at SIGCOMM in 1995....

5G networks won't have the capacity to cope by end of the decade Comment If you think 5G networks have failed to live up to their promise, you're not alone. But the tech is still early on in implementation, although some in the mobile industry are already looking to what might come next....

Cleaning up after hackers is easy compared to surviving the politics of consultancy On Call It's the last Friday of 2023, but because the need for tech support never goes away neither does On Call, The Register's Friday column in which readers share their tales of being asked to fix the unfeasible, in circumstances that are often indefensible....

E-tail giant seeks profitability for its vid-streaming service and a classic Big Tech dominance play Analysis Amazon.com has emailed subscribers to its Prime Video service, in America at least, to advise them ads will start to appear in their movie and TV streams as of January 29 - unless they pay more....

Google accused of tracking you even when you think it won't The lawsuit brought against Google by netizens upset Incognito Mode in Chrome did not fully anonymize their activities looks set to settle before going to trial....

For now Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is back on sale in China - in a less capable configuration version designed to comply with US restrictions on exports into the Middle Kingdom....

Io, Io, it's off to work we go NASA's Juno mission is to close out 2023 with a low pass over Io, one of Jupiter's many moons....

What can be learned from MGM's and Caesars' infosec moves Feature The same cybercrime crew broke into two high-profile Las Vegas casino networks over the summer, infected both with ransomware, and stole data belonging to tens of thousands of customers from the mega-resort chains....

'This is no ordinary vulnerability' sec pros explain Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) has exposed a previously unknown "feature" in Apple iPhones that allowed malware to bypass hardware-based memory protection....

Suppliers don't know much about what's going on. Which leaves users in limbo, too Broadcom has told VMware partners the virtualization champion's channel program will end in early 2024....

Readers share more filthy tales of cruddy computers, including a potentially explosive airport issue ON CALL: DIRT FILE The On Call mailbag is bulging with contributions from readers who want to add to The Register's Dirt File, a seasonal spin-off of our weekly On Call column about tech support nightmares that focuses on the dirtiest, nastiest, grottiest, and filthiest environments in which readers have been asked to work....

Home of the .asia gTLD has had a challenging year Special report DotAsia, the organization that runs the .asia registry, has reconstituted its board after its most recent election was disputed, then conducted anew....

Foundry site due to open in 2028 ... assuming it's not, y'know, delayed or cancelled The government of Israel has agreed to contribute $3.2 billion in grants to support the construction of a $25 billion fab at Intel's Kiryat Gat site in the country....

Stick WMR next to 3D TVs, Segways, and maybe soon generative AI Microsoft has admitted what the rest of the tech world has long suspected: Windows Mixed Reality has no future at the IT giant, and the platform will be yanked from a future release of the operating system....

'A business model based on mass copyright infringement' The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming the duo infringed the newspaper's copyright by using its articles without permission to build ChatGPT and similar models. It is the first major American media outfit to drag the tech pair to court over the use of stories in training data....

'Our licenses aren't working anymore,' says free software pioneer Interview Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement....

Leftover Christmas dollars burning a hole in your pocket? Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches vanish from shelves Updated The game of patent ping-pong over the Apple Watch and Ultra 2 has continued as the phone maker filed an appeal over an import ban of the devices into the US....

Large language models one day may automate your day-to-day work chores - without getting you fired, we hope Comment Large language models seem poised to evolve from AI chatbots generating synthetic content on your screen to virtual agents that are capable of performing actions on your PC right at your desk....

PLUS: Fujitsu Japan spins out servers, storage, and PCs; Japan's moonshot on track; Samsung reportedly delays Arizona fab opening Asia In Brief Infosys has lost a ten-year, $1.5 billion deal it announced just three months ago in September 2023....

Turing Award winner whose research and startups broke ground for five decades, tells The Reg he has more up his sleeve Interview What if we built the operating system on top of the database instead of the other way around? It sounds like an idea from an undergraduate student after one microdose too many, except it's not. It's a serious idea from someone who has already upended the computing industry and whose influence has spread into familiar products from Microsoft and Oracle....