The Register

Faced with huge license cost increase, provider and customers were both happy to make migration a mission Exclusive Broadcom has lost another large customer for its VMware platform: Austrian cloud provider Anexia has moved 12,000 VMs, some of them rented by major European businesses, to an open-source system based on the KVM hypervisor....

PLUS: Data broker leak reveals extent of info trading; Hot new ransomware gang might be all AI, no bark; and more Infosec in brief Gravy Analytics, a vendor of location intelligence info for marketers which reached a settlement with US authorities last year over its alleged unlawful sale of location, has reportedly been hacked - potentially exposing millions of smartphone users....

I'm a software person with a soldering iron', he warns alongside release of Linux 6.13-rc7 Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has offered to hand-build a guitar effects pedal for one lucky kernel contributor....

Won't say if other nations will be hit, but will listen, learn, and improve' as buyers react - so far with anger Microsoft has advised users of its M365 suite in six Asian nations that they face big price rises when they renew subscriptions, and says the hikes are needed to ensure Microsoft customers are among the first to access powerful AI features in our apps"....

PLUS: China plans unified APIs; Singapore lets Police run scam victims' bank accounts; Fujitsu now too cool for aircon Asia In Brief Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has reported strong annual revenue growth....

El Reg vultures circle the Consumer Electronics Show Kettle The annual Consumer Electronics Show was held this week in Las Vegas - and for us the extravaganza felt a bit subdued for a change....

Meanwhile, tech titans are falling over themselves to help Trump Opinion We all know the US's incoming president, Donald Trump, has gone off-script in a way that is almost comical. Gulf of America? Make Greenland great again? Taking over the Panama Canal?...

Even better use for the Technic range than the Mars Rover - with one big caveat The original Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle had the look of something that had been strung together from an oversized Meccano set. It should, therefore, not come as a surprise to find a LEGO variant built from the company's Technic pieces....

Right as Uncle Sam pushes for Chrome sell-off, eh? While Google awaits a decision about whether it will be required to sell its Chrome browser as an antitrust remedy, the search giant has joined with the Linux Foundation to announce an initiative to support the open source Chromium project upon which the Chrome browser depends....

Gee, wonder why Beijing is so keen on the - checks notes - Committee on Foreign Investment in the US Chinese cyber-spies who broke into the US Treasury Department also stole documents from officials investigating real-estate sales near American military bases, it's reported....

All the consumer electronics weirdness you didn't want to see in person anyway CES As the gadget-filled spectacle that CES draws to a close, there's much to anticipate and just as much that leaves us completely baffled....

Struggling to connect to the cloud? You're not alone Microsoft on Friday warned Azure cloud service users may continue to experience "intermittent errors," blaming the problem on a US East regional networking service configuration change....

Now set for the day before SpaceX's next Starship test Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin has postponed the inaugural launch of its New Glenn rocket to January 12, the day before SpaceX hopes to launch another Starship test flight....

Details of afflictions and care plastered online BayMark Health Services, one of the biggest drug addiction treatment facilities in the US, says it is notifying some patients this week that their sensitive personal information was stolen....

Users of doomed operating system to receive unloved app via an update Microsoft's new Outlook will be automatically installed on Windows 10 machines as part of an upcoming monthly security release....

On the Fritz: German router maker AVM lets device rights case end after coughing up source code Sebastian Steck, a software developer based in Germany, has obtained the source code and library installation scripts for his AVM FRITZ!Box 4020 router, thanks to a lawsuit funded by the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC)....

Old deadline of January 2025 being used to push victims into paying up UK consumer champion Which? warns that scammers are using the ongoing phone line digital switchover program in Britain and Northern Ireland to trick customers into handing over their payment details....

Hastings has a mystery to solve - how did all those customers get offered refunds? UK insurer Hastings Direct had a few technical issues this week after some of its customers were told they'd receive refunds, only to have their hopes dashed by a hasty apology....

Investigation says scheme allegedly raked in 145k and sold nearly 2,000 fake records to the unvaccinated The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has taken its case against two Luton men further by charging them over the alleged distribution of fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination records....

Screenshot showed it wasn't a possible attack - unless you qualify everything Google does as a threat On Call Velkomin, Vaelkomin, Ho geldin, and welcome to Friday, and therefore to another edition of On Call - The Register's end-of-week celebration of the tech support tasks you managed to tackle without too much trauma....

World Economic Forum finds huge demand for brainbox skills, news for how it changes your role Think tank and advocacy org the World Economic Forum has predicted strong growth in jobs that AI can't replace, plus big demand for skills to automate those that can....

Did Zuck's definition of free expression' just get even broader? Meta allegedly downloaded material from an online source that's been sued for breaching copyright, because it wanted the material to train its AI models, according to a new court filing....

Everything in Australia is deadly, in this case giant eagles guarding eggs in places wireless broadband techs need to reach Australia's National Broadband Network has started building bird's nests....

Lenovo's already showing them off in a bonkers laptop CES Laptops with rollable displays that allow expanded screens are about to become a thing, thanks to Lenovo and Samsung....

Beware the IoT that doesn't get a security tag The White House this week introduced a voluntary cybersecurity labeling program for technology products so that consumers can have some assurance their smart devices aren't spying on them....

China faces outright ban while others vie for Uncle Sam's favor The Biden administration is reportedly weighing new limits in the ongoing US-China trade war, which would ban high-end AI accelerators to adversary nations and impose restrictions on AI models for others....

The honors are dubious, but boy, so is the tech ces The Consumer Electronics Show is back to showcase not just the cutting edge of innovation but also the worst of what's possible when modern tech collides with today's culture of capitalist excess....

Hey administrators - buckle up. 2025 is going to be a wild ride Administrators at Microsoft shops are in for a wild 2025 as Redmond prepares to deprecate and retire more than just support for Windows 10....

What could be the motivation for continuing to fight the case? Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a group of other top executives employed by the electric car company have launched an appeal against a series of court rulings that blocked his $56 billion pay package....

Simply the best FOSS desktop OS there is, outside of the Windows and Unix families Haiku still hasn't quite reached that magic Version One Point Zero line in the sand, in part because its developers are setting the bar much higher than that of any other FOSS OS....

Redmond claims cuts are performance based Microsoft kicks off the new year with more job cuts, as fewer than 1 percent of employees reportedly face the axe....

Factory resets and apply patches is the advice amid fortnight delay for other appliances The cybersecurity industry is urging those in charge of defending their orgs to take mitigation efforts "seriously" as Ivanti battles two dangerous new vulnerabilities, one of which was already being exploited as a zero-day....

Already inflated costs of NPU-based boxes set to jump on import tax The "progress" of AI PCs is being "overshadowed" by enterprises concerned about the state of the economy and US President-elect Trump's tariff threats for kit made in China, according to market watcher and number cruncher IDC....

Tricky attackers trying yet again to deceive the good guys on home territory Security researchers are once again being lured into traps by attackers, this time with fake exploits of serious Microsoft security flaws....

Collecting regolith samples with a blast of gas NASA is sending a "vacuum cleaner" to the Moon as a payload on next week's Blue Ghost 1 mission to land on the lunar surface....

Ex-politician in UK claims he's been defamed - and goes to court in US for answers A former deputy mayor in the UK has subpoenaed Cloudflare in the US to discover the identity of an anonymous British political blogger....

Deal supposed to end in 2017 continues to haunt HMRC procurement In the last five years, the UK's tax collector has spent 3.8 billion with tech suppliers - including 591 million without any outside competition - on top of a 10 billion project intended to end in 2017....

Not just making them, but sharing them too The UK government has promised to make the creation and sharing of sexually explicit deepfake images a criminal offence....

How much RAM does an enthusiast really need? The Raspberry Pi has come a long way from its early days, as demonstrated by the single-board computer maker's latest iteration of the Pi 5 in 16GB guise....

Linux Foundation Energy argues rapidly decentralizing electricity sector can't succeed with silos The energy industry needs to adopt open source AI software, and the collaborative processes used to create it, to satisfy demand for energy created by the growing use of ... artificial intelligence....

Good luck getting buyers and resellers excited about that Would you adopt software from a Chinese vendor? We ask because Microsoft has started helping Middle Kingdom developers to sell through its online marketplaces and channel....

MirrorFace' group found ways to run malware in the Windows sandbox, which may be worrying Japan's National Police Agency and Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity have confirmed third party reports of attacks on local orgs by publishing details of a years-long series of attacks attributed to a China-backed source....

Class act: Cloud biz only serves 60M-plus folks globally, no biggie A leading education software maker has admitted its IT environment was compromised in a cyberattack, with students and teachers' personal data - including some Social Security Numbers and medical info - stolen....

In colossal surprise, ONCD boss Harry Coker says more work is needed The outgoing leader of the United States' Office of the National Cyber Director has a clear message for whomever President-elect Trump picks to be his successor: There's a lot of work still to do....

Can't grow any more? Let's just invent engagement! Opinion Recently, some netziens noticed "AI managed by Meta" bots on their feeds, remnants of the Facebook and Instagram owner's 2023 chatbot initiative that was discontinued after low interest....

Crews battle to keep people, homes, science safe With several major wildfires raging out of control in Los Angeles County, fire crews are risking their lives to protect people, homes, and a key NASA facility....

3 CVEs added to CISA's catalog Cybercriminals are actively exploiting two vulnerabilities in Mitel MiCollab, including a zero-day flaw - and a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Oracle WebLogic Server that has been abused for at least five years....

D-Wave, Rigetti, others plummet nearly 50% after Huang says the obvious CES The quantum computing industry seems to be just as delicate as the qubits it relies on. Shares in some publicly traded QC companies saw steep declines today, following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's CES rather reasonable remark that practical quantum systems may still be 20 years away....

RUN/STOP Fitness app Garmin Connect got knocked down but got up again, after an unexplained outage that left fitness extroverts flummoxed....

Peach State already home to more than 50 bit barns Amazon's datacenter footprint in the US state of Georgia is set to swell, with an $11 billion investment proposed....