The Register

You're just giving manufacturers carte blanche to profit off personal data Updated Depressingly predictable research from Which? serves as another reminder, if one was needed, that furnishing your home with internet-connected "smart" devices could be a dumb idea if you'd rather try to preserve your privacy....

Two and a half years after Brexit, some cheer for scientists based in Britain. We're... baaaaxit (sorry!) UK scientists can once again pitch for chunks of the EU's 86 billion ($107 billion) Horizon program after the British government negotiated re-entry to the flagship fund following a Brexit-related hiatus....

But don't celebrate yet ... it has simply kicked the online safety can down the road, Westminster style Comment Sanity appears to have prevailed in the debate over the UK Online Safety bill after the government agreed to ditch proposals - at least for the time being - to legislate the scanning of encrypted messages....

Microsoft among in-memory AI chip startup's backers Generative AI infrastructure builds have given chip startups a hardware niche yet to be targeted by larger players, and in-memory biz d-Matrix has just scored $110 million in Series-B funding to take its shot....

Hat tip to the late Lester Clare Van Atta, whose array is behind the system A group of MIT boffins have successfully tested what they said is the first practically useful ultra-low power underwater networking and communication technology, and all it took was some nearly 70-year old technology to get it going....

Targeted ads require data usage consent under EU regulations A court in Oslo, Norway, has upheld the Norwegian Data Protection Authority's daily fines against Meta for delivering behavioral advertising in violation of data privacy rules....

Agreed bid prices in advance with local rival for work in Australian mining camps DXC has been named as a participant in a cartel that rigged bids for work in Australia....

So what? Smartphones are routinely restricted in, or excluded from, sensitive locations Analysis Chinese authorities have reportedly banned Apple's iPhones from some government offices....

Now for the hard part: testing its ability to pick a safe landing spot Japan's space exploration agency (JAXA) has successfully launched a rocket carrying the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) - an effort to test new technologies that allow spacecraft to pick their own landing locations....

Oh, what a foul-up as database maintenance created a mess Toyota has revealed a server running out of disk space after botched maintenance was the cause of an outage that forced it to shut down 14 manufacturing plants across Japan last week....

It's not all bad news. Poets are safe. And machines will take some jobs no human wants Generative AI will replace 2.4 million US jobs by 2030, and influence another eleven million, but other forms of automation will cost more jobs, according to a report from analyst firm Forrester....

Mistakes were made, lessons learned, stuff now fixed, says Windows maker Remember that internal super-secret Microsoft security key that China stole and used to break into US government email accounts back in July?...

What could possibly have attracted this tech titan to an all-day party zone? Google is moving its annual Cloud Next conference, which just finished wrapping up in San Francisco, to the quiet and modest streets of Las Vegas....

What? Yogurt Monster isn't really a legitimate customer's name?! A California man has admitted he failed to bake anti-money laundering protections into his cryptocurrency exchange, thus allowing scammers and drug traffickers to launder millions of dollars through the service....

Agreement will settle claims the company failed to compensate staff for all the hours they worked A federal judge in North Carolina has authorized a $5.9 million settlement agreement between Citrix and workers who launched a pair of consolidated unpaid overtime suits against the workspace software giant....

Perhaps the Chocolate Factory didn't feel like staring down 36 state AGs with two other competition cases pending Google's antitrust docket is one case lighter, as it's reached a tentative deal with 36 states and Washington, D.C. to settle a case alleging unfair practices in the Google Play Store....

NATS explains last week's UK chaos as bug delays 211 United Airlines flights It has been a bad few days for anyone with a fear of flying or, perhaps more accurately, a fear of getting to an airport only to find that flying is the last thing that will happen....

Is that a relieved sob from Google lawyers we hear? Margrethe Vestager is temporarily stepping down as European Commissioner for Competition to campaign for a job as President of the Management Committee of the European Investment Bank....

Did you potentially miss the love match of your life in week-long blackout? Nope, nobody could access it If you got snubbed by the object of your affections on dating app Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) in late August, don't feel bad, the company says its systems were down due to cyber baddies....

A glitch that makes the lives of users better? Where do we sign? An exploit for a bug in Windows appears to increase the performance of File Explorer in Microsoft's flagship operating system....

Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of Uncle Sam's actions Chinese netizens have been laughing at the expense of US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, who will be surprised to learn that she has been crowned unofficial Huawei brand ambassador despite her country's efforts to hobble the company and China's wider tech industry....

Company boards, on the other hand, aren't letting cybersecurity disturb their sleep as much Chief information security officers (or CISOs) see human error as the most significant risk to data protection compared to other UK board directors....

Forced sale of Britian's biggest semiconductor component maker creating uncertainty over its future Newport Wafer Fab (NWF), Britain's biggest producer of semiconductor components, has pointed the finger of blame at government restrictions for its decision to chop 100 employees amid uncertainty over future ownership....

As Asrock adds an AMD-powered 4"x4" not-NUC to its industrial lineup Those mourning the discontinuation of Intel's quirky little Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini-PCs can rest easy - Asus has officially taken over development of the product line. It's not exclusive, though, and already there's competition....

Schedule is unrealistic... it takes 2 years just to tender, protests board member The German-speaking SAP user group has called on the European software giant to extend support for a specialist industry solution based on its ageing ECC platform amid fears of disruption to hospital billing processes in Germany, Switzerland and Austria....

Replacement due more than a decade ago, Casework Information Database soldiers on as case backlog hits record highs Exclusive The UK's Home Office has failed to meet its own deadline for the retirement of a decades-old immigration database in a program vital to cutting the backlog of asylum claims, currently at historic highs....

Spacecraft scheduled to snooze until September 22 when it's hoped machines return to duty India's Chandrayaan-3 Moon mission has ended its first phase of operations, with the Pragyan rover and Vikram lander entering sleep mode to see out a long, long lunar night....

'Bugdroid' goes a bit 'Village People' to become 'as dynamic as Android itself' LOGOWATCH Google may have felt that 12,000 of its workers were surplus to requirements, but the search and ads giant has clearly kept plenty of designers on staff - someone at the Big G has found time to redesign logos for the Android operating system and associated frippery....

Meanwhile, Zoom boss calls on US authorities to consider adopting Europe's breakout policy Microsoft has told its partner community that unbundling Teams from its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites was a compromise - an alteration to the language it used when announcing the change....

Who needs India or China when ten booming economies form a gang? The Association of South East Asian Nations - the ten-country trade bloc that houses over 600 million people and accounts for around 6.5 percent of global economic activity - has started work on a Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) it hopes will result in seamless trade and data flows....

Does your vehicle really need to know about your bedroom antics? Privacy-invading data harvesting by smartphones, wearable devices, smart doorbells, and reproductive health apps are well known, but the Mozilla Foundation has found the worst threat to your privacy may be parked in your driveway....

YMMV, based on where you are Google has been gradually rolling out Chrome's "Enhanced Ad Privacy." That's the technology that, unless switched off, allows websites to target the user with adverts tuned to their online activities and interests based on their browser histories....

Deepfakes of underage girls set off alarm bells for legal eagles The National Association of Attorneys General, the body that all US states and territories use to collaboratively address legal issues, has urged Congress to pass legislation prohibiting the use of AI to generate child sex abuse images....

We're number one! We're number one! We're... It's generally accepted that security flaws in Microsoft's products are a top magnet for crooks and fraudsters: its sprawling empire of hardware and software is a target-rich ecosystem in that there is a wide range of bugs to exploit, and a huge number of vulnerable organizations and users....

There's something very familiar about all this Deja vu time: Elon Musk is threatening to sue another civil rights group for losing him money....

Getting strong FOMO vibes from devs - tho how ML is actually used among engineers may surprise you Almost a quarter of organizations are already using AI to augment human software development, and over two-thirds of them are planning to use such systems, according to a survey from GitLab....

Meanwhile, Arm suffers IPO financial muscle loss with low valuation Intel's bid to acquire Israeli foundry operator Tower Semiconductor may have collapsed, but that doesn't mean they can't still set up shop together in the US....

In Putin's Russia, the planet hacks you The power of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) to actually police the world's very large online platforms (VLOPs) has been tested in a new study focused on Russian social media disinformation....

Four seconds of fire and fury to be followed by eight minutes then... a launch in 2024? Arianespace's delayed Ariane 6 rocket is scheduled to take its next step toward launch today with a brief firing of the main stage Vulcain 2.1 engine....

Switch to Calamares aims to make setup simpler The forthcoming Asahi/Fedora distro for Arm64 Macs will use the Calamares installer - but the mainstream Fedora 39 might get a new, simpler installation program too....

Change your passwords. And maybe give the recycling a miss this time Freecycle, the charity aimed at recycling detritus that would otherwise be headed for landfill, has become the latest organization to suffer at the hands of cyber attackers and admit to a breach....

Authority effectively bankrupt as ERP car crash adds to equal pay liability Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from 20 million to around 100 million ($125.5 million)....

Bezo birds to provide a mobile backhaul. When they finally launch Vodafone has linked arms with Amazon's Project Kuiper to extend 4G and 5G services to more regions in Europe and Africa, despite Jeff Bezos' satellite constellation still lacking any spacecraft in orbit....

Simon Byrne faced backlash over FoI blunder, plus claims officers were 'punished' to appease Sinn Fein Northern Ireland's police chief, Simon Byrne, resigned last night after an emergency meeting of the Policing Board amid discontent in the rank and file over a data breach that exposed serving officers' info, as well as news he was considering appealing a court ruling linked to the Troubles....

Elecrow's dual-screen peripheral is more versatile and cheaper than the old Lenovo version CrowView is a 14-inch USB-C monitor with a cunning folding stand-cum-clamp system which allows it to attach to most sizes of laptop for some more pixels on the move....

UK tender hopes to boost beleaguered local bus services The UK's Department for Transport is promising a 24 million ($30 million) contract to a tech biz that can help set up a wide range of data services to provide information on local bus services....

If customers can slash bills by 'optimizing,' what does that mean for revenue? Opinion Snowflake should have been enjoying positive results at the end of last month. Revenue for the second for the quarter was $674.0 million, a 36 percent leap on the same period last year, albeit with an operating loss of $285.4 million, up from $207.7 million on Q2 2022....

All PaaS, including RedShift, gets a three-point bump. IaaS users outside the US get the nastiest numbers IBM has announced price rises for its cloud services, effective January 1, 2024....

Authorizes strike for voice and motion capture talent at major game studios The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has authorized its members employed in the interactive media industry at giant games studios - including Activision, Epic Games, and Electronic Arts - to strike....

The legacy lives on even though EC2-Classic and its flat network are no more Amazon Web Services has made good on its 2021 promise to retire EC2-Classic - the networking construct that underpinned its initial compute infrastructure-as-a-service offering....