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Auditors issue new deadline following ill-fated migration IT teams at Europe's largest local authority are being given less than two months to get their disastrous Oracle system fit to provide finance reports and close down accounts....

Ride-share app originally told man they'd charge him $20 for Tux's return One man's hunt for his cat captivated an entire town, and the internet, after a Lyft driver allegedly sped off with the kitty still inside on Saturday afternoon....

Security exec Mark Ryland spills the tea on hush-hush threat intel tool Interview AWS has unveiled MadPot, its previously secret threat-intelligence tool that one of the cloud giant's security execs tells us has thwarted Chinese and Russian spies - and millions of bots....

Skills shortage is also holding industry back, survey finds The datacenter industry is caught between conflicting demands: the pressure to deliver projects faster, while product and skills shortages lead to delays....

It's about time! Set your watches! Scientists have set the clock ticking for the development of a new generation of timepieces with accuracy of up to 1 second in 300 billion years or about 22 times the age of the universe....

How's he done? tl;dr - not very well Opinion Next month will see the first anniversary of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. The rest of the media will be full of analyses on what's gone right and wrong, and what it means for Musk and our perception of his business acumen....

Tech's second day on the job nearly saw his high-flying career grounded Who, me? What? Monday again? Didn't we just do one of those last week? Oh well, if we must, dear reader, we must. Welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers regale us with reports of righteous wrongness....

Plus: Mistral emits uncensored model, Meta expands Llama 2's context window, Alexa drills into your voice AI In Brief OpenAI is rolling out upgrades for GPT-4 that will, among other things, allow the AI model to answer queries from a user about a submitted image - and the super-lab has at least documented some safety risks involving that ability....

Consensus is cuts and spin-offs are coming, whether they'll help is another matter Broadcom's takeover of VMware is on track to conclude in just over four weeks, and while the semiconductor company's CEO Hock Tan has pledged extra cash for R&D to boost Virtzilla's multicloud offerings, The Register has also heard of looming job cuts, and noted silence on whether some of VMware's products figure in Broadcom's plans....

Taiwanese brand is a portability and productivity contender Desktop Tourism The Register has sensibly struck a deal with a global PC provider who dispatches machines to vultures wherever they work around the world. After spending time with the ASUS Zenbook S 13, I wish that supplier was ASUS because the machine does everything right....

No, that does not mean you can leave it at home just yet Last week the internet was abuzz with talk that Singapore's commercial Changi airport was no longer going to require passports for clearance at immigration. Although it is true the paper documentation will be replaced by biometric measures, it's not quite time to pack the document away....

Plus: Johnson Controls hit by IT 'incident', Exim and Chrome security updates, and more Infosec in brief Progress Software, maker of the mass-exploited MOVEit document transfer tool, is back in the news with more must-apply security patches, this time for another file-handling product: WS_FTP....

Google says Topics warning is anti-innovative fearmongering The Electronic Frontier Foundation has urged folks to switch off several Privacy Sandbox settings in Google Chrome to mask their online habits, or to consider switching to Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari....

Given it was first due to blast off last year, what's another week or so? NASA has pushed back the launch date of its Psyche asteroid probe to October 12 as engineers make sure the spacecraft's nitrogen gas thrusters work as needed....

We thought you people loved spending dollars, what gives? China has formally asked the United States to reconsider rules curbing investments in companies based in the Middle Kingdom....

From AI to just plain aaaiiiee! Microsoft introduced its Bing Chat AI search assistant in February and a month later began serving ads alongside it to help cover costs....

'Research purposes' excuse didn't fly A PhD student has been found guilty of building a potentially deadly drone for Islamic State terrorists, in part using his home 3D printer....

Now have a look at these third-party alternatives from our partners, says Chocolate Factory Customers aren't usually left with a mostly useless 55-inch Android tablet when Google sends another of its many services to the graveyard, but here we are. The Jamboard and its accompanying apps will cease to work in a little more than a year....

A changed RMS appeared at the GNU 40th anniversary event in Switzerland Richard Stallman has revealed he is undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of cancer of the white blood cells, but says thathis prognosis is good....

Like some sort of bizarro greatest hits album, the EEOC case sounds just like multiple previous suits The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit against Tesla alleging "widespread and ongoing racial harassment of Black employees," at the company's Fremont, California plant....

Fancy running Windows, Linux and Classic MacOS on your modern x86-64 or Arm64 Mac? Walk this way Friday FOSS Fest UTM is a handy hypervisor for Macs and Apple fondleslabs, but it's more than just that. It has some very particular skills. We are quite taken with it....

But Meta was just about to start asking people for their permission! Norway has told the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) it believes a countrywide ban on Meta harvesting user data to serve up advertising on Facebook and Instagram should be made permanent and extended across Europe....

Whatever the cause, MNVO customers not happy UK government orders to remove Huawei equipment from Britain's 5G networks have reportedly led to outages for customers of Sky Mobile....

NHS also launches 2M project to engage patients with data strategy The contract award for the 480 million ($588 million) NHS Federated Data Platform - a huge analytics project for one of the world's largest healthcare providers - has been delayed by a few weeks....

Or very right? Either way, it's not the usual atomic op we see in IT Kettle The growth of electricity-hungry datacenters is causing some operators to fear for their power security and consider the nuclear option. In this week's Kettle The Register discusses how practical this is....

Can the sleeping fox ever wake up? Comment Mozilla seems to be asleep at the wheel, when it once drove online activity and communications. We have some suggestions where it could go....

Or how one pesky press release ruined a vacation Interview One victim of HashiCorp's license change was the vacation of Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation....

A portrait of one medico's contorted digital landscape On Call "I hope you are well" is a standard but hopeless way to open an email - who, save for a few sociopaths, wishes illness and misery upon their correspondents? Silly question - every Reg reader knows that users and managers often seem to wish only the worst for their IT colleagues. Which is why every Friday we deliver a cathartic instalment of On Call, the column in which we feature your tales of making sure all's well that ends well when it comes to tech support....

Letting more advanced ML loose on the stock market? What could possibly go wrong? AMD has refreshed its Alveo field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), promising a sevenfold improvement in operating latency and the ability to run more complex machine learning algorithms on the customisable silicon....

Also optimizes routes and tames crowds, but can't stop that person who just reclined into your knees Infosys has sent a digital transformation platform for commercial airlines down the runway and claims it could reduce lost luggage by fifty percent....

Skipper caught on tape saying 'What have I done? My career is gone' after crashing into coral reef after a couple of whiskeys Japan's Transport Safety Board on Thursday judged that a cargo ship that spilled 1,000 tons of fuel oil into a pristine marine environment off the coast of Mauritius in 2020 was travelling off course in search of a cell phone signal....

Just in time to get Atlassian's latest cross-team collab bits Red Hat has revealed it's binned the Bugzilla defect-tracking system for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in favour of Atlassian's Jira....

30th birthday post reveals 2004 disaster movie continues to influence company strategy Supermicro's founder, president and CEO Charles Liang has suggested a fifth of datacenters - maybe more - will need to adopt liquid cooling in coming years....

OpenAI and Google might respect robots.txt but how about the others? Blogging platform Medium would like organizations to not scrape its articles without permission to train up AI models, and warned this policy may be difficult to enforce....

Influencers offer smouldering looks, analysts wonder if TSMC-fabbed silicon can take the heat Apple's iPhone 15 is so hot right now, just not in the way that Apple would prefer....

No classified systems involved apparently, but internal diplomatic notes, travel details, staff SSNs, etc Chinese snoops stole about 60,000 State Department emails when they broke into Microsoft-hosted Outlook and Exchange Online accounts belonging to US government officials over the summer....

AI accelerator maker suspected of potential anti-competitive tricks Nvidia's office in France was raided this week as part of an investigation by that country's Competition Authority into the graphics card sector....

So, a portable Alexa or Google Home-esque gadget? OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive are reportedly planning to spin up a startup with backing from Softbank to develop some kind of personal AI-powered hardware device....

FBI agents ought to get spy court approval before reviewing US persons' chats, board reckons A privacy panel within the US government today narrowly recommended that Congress reauthorize the Feds' Section 702 spying powers - but with some stronger protections for US citizens only....

That partial victory against Apple is seeming more pyrrhic by the day Fortnite founder Epic Games said on Thursday that it intends to lay off 16 percent of its staff, around 830 people, and has also sold its stake in Bandcamp and a marketing company focused on appealing to children....

So much for that free speech, huh? Yelp has sued Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton to prevent him from punishing the reviews website for labeling Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) to indicate that they do not actually offer abortion services....

Autonomous sub should recharge and resupply in perfect stealth, hopefully DARPA's extended-duration unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV) is having its first aquatic excursion to test if this naval drone has wings, er, fins....

There's no denying geopolitics is making it hard for multinationals in Beijing IBM services spinoff Kyndryl is reportedly preparing to separate its China-based business in the face of ongoing geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington....

One says it's dead, the other says it's growing, and we all know how grumpy Elon gets when contradicted It's only been a day since rumors began swirling that X, formerly Twitter, had disabled features allowing users to report election misinformation, and the confusion hasn't been cleared up by dueling statements from platform owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino....

ServiceNow and SAP join the genAI frenzy, but users advised to 'keep a human in the loop' There was barely a beat before he responded. "The simple answer is no," said Jon Sigler, ServiceNow Now Platform senior vice president....

Feds allege tat bazaar turned blind eye to folks buying more than 343k aftermarket defeat devices The DoJ is looking to hold eBay liable for the buying and selling of products on its platform that it alleges include emissions cheat components known as "defeat devices."...

Meta's annual conference sees the company playing catch-up to OpenAI but pulling ahead of Apple Not content to live off the fat of its advertising empire, Meta is still trying to make the metaverse a thing....

First Euro facility to use the next-gen lithography tech for commercial production Intel is preparing to kickstart high-volume manufacturing at its plant in Leixlip, Ireland with the Intel 4 process, its first production node using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography....

Device chief, who quit the beast of Redmond last week, takes similar role at arch rival Amazon has finally confirmed what many in the industry already suspected: that Panos Panay, Microsoft's recently departed veep for devices, is joining to run its own gadget and service biz....

Bid to break impasse where boards only see costs NTT Data Business Solutions, a global consultancy and systems integrator, has committed to buy back legacy and on-prem SAP ERP licenses from customers to ease the cloud migrations many find difficult to justify financially....