The Register

Public sector might want to 'wait a bit' before buying into bleeding edge, Sir Matthew Rycroft muses Opinion Earlier this year, the prime minister launched the UK government's plan to cement the nations place as "a science and technology superpower by 2030."...

It's hard to see, but when they rendezvous in orbit sparks ignite Tiny bits of space junk too small to track using current methods could be detected by a novel process using by ground-based radio dishes, according to the latest research....

550 million lawsuit seeks recompense for 'systemic and massive' disregard for privacy laws A group representing some of Spain's largest media outlets have sued Meta, demanding 550 million ($596 million) in recompense for Zuckercorp's "systemic and massive" disregard for EU privacy regulations that have left them at risk of collapse....

Report suggests Sellafield compromised since 2015, response seems worryingly ignorant of Stuxnet The government of the United Kingdom has issued a strongly worded denial of a report that the Sellafield nuclear complex has been compromised by malware for years....

I'm not a regular government, I'm a cool government China has introduced a program designed to make propaganda fun - an online knowledge competition that poses questions about the rules of proper socialist internet use and other cyber matters....

North claims it took photos of stuff. South points to success of homegrown booster A little more than a week after North Korea claimed to have launched its first indigenous military reconnaissance satellite, South Korea has done the same - then followed up by launching another sat on its own rocket....

Judge finds plaintiff's claim - that Amazon knew about illicit usage - credible enough for case to proceed Two years ago, a Brazilian minor came to the US as an exchange student in the US and stayed in a West Virginia home in which her host had placed a spy camera bought on Amazon.com....

Big Blue's roadmap prioritizes circuit size over qubit quantity IBM has unveiled the Heron - a quantum processor it claims has achieved "utility scale" - and a so-called modular System Two architecture that will employ it in production....

There's a war on and critical infrastructure operators are still using default passwords Iran-linked cyber thugs have exploited Israeli-made programmable logic controllers (PLCs) used in "multiple" water systems and other operational technology environments at facilities across the US, according to multiple law enforcement agencies ....

Startup Absci will turn to its generative AI algorithms to design synthetic protein Pharma giant AstraZeneca has signed a $247 million deal with Ai drug creation company Absci to develop an antibody designed to fight cancer....

University says ties to Meta execs and a $500 million donation played no role A former Harvard misformation scholar has filed a whistleblower complaint against the Ivy League university, alleging that its Kennedy School canceled her research into social media harms in order to protect a $500 million donation from The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative....

The never-ending IP story goes on Updated Intel has delayed paying $2.18 billion in damages for its alleged misuse of patents on Monday after a US appeals court threw out the case against the chip giant brought by VLSI....

Stalled self-driving car biz up to its axles in problems California's Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has threatened driverless taxi outfit Cruise with fines and sanctions unless it can prove it didn't withhold information and make misleading statements about an October accident....

Stealing Kit Kat maker's data?! Give me a break There's no sugarcoating this news: The Hershey Company has disclosed cyber crooks gobbled up 2,214 people's financial information following a phishing campaign that netted the chocolate maker's data....

30 years ago astronauts embarked on ambitious mission to fix Hubble ... and NASA's reputation Today is the thirtieth anniversary since NASA launched the first servicing mission for the stricken Hubble observatory, a record that lands just as the the space telescope faces a fresh round of fixes....

This despite hitting profit high note - and right on time for Christmas Spotify has announced its third and largest round of layoffs this year, cutting 17 percent of employees despite recently posting its first profitable quarter in more than 12 months....

Version 2.2.2 and also 2.1.14, showing that this wasn't a new issue in the latest release The bug that was very occasionally corrupting data on file copies in OpenZFS 2.2.0 has been identified and fixed, and there's a fix for the previous OpenZFS release too....

To blame? The usual suspect - AI's appetite for chips The semiconductor market is poised to return to growth next year, driven by AI increasing the volume of orders for memory and causing a spike in prices as demand catches up with the capacity of silicon manufacturers....

Final farewell show unveils the band's digital form After half a century of recording and performing, rock icons Kiss closed out "The End of Road" farewell tour on Saturday night. But the encore revealed something we all knew deep down to be true - Kiss is forever....

With more than 1,500 tokens exposed, research highlights importance of securing supply chains in AI and ML The API tokens of tech giants Meta, Microsoft, Google, VMware, and more have been found exposed on Hugging Face, opening them up to potential supply chain attacks....

Working rockets are needed, and only a direct rival can provide for now Amazon is signing a contract with SpaceX for three Falcon 9 launches to help "support deployment plans" for the Project Kuiper satellite broadband initiative....

Apache Foundation president David Nalley on Amazon Linux 2023, Free software, and more Interview AWS is wary of vendor-driven open source projects, performs business health checks on all its open source dependencies, and suffered impact on the development of Amazon Linux when CentOS as we all knew it was discontinued, The Register was told at the internet giant's re:Invent conference....

Fresh thinking and new approaches can only come from varied cohorts of people Opinion "My other car is a Porsche" was never the most convincing of claims you could make while out drinking on a Friday night, but it's as real as the Pope's Catholicism compared to the speaker list for the DevTernity developer conference. There, the otherwise pure male roster was de-bro-ed by "Anna Boyko, purportedly a staff engineer at Coinbase and Ethereum core contributor."...

Signs of the times: Linux's compatibility improves, while x86-32 recedes from Apple Valve Software's latest update announcement for the Steam client contains news for both Mac and Linux users - and the portents should concern not only gamers....

Funny how marketing messages change depending on the audience HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers, the result of a multi-year strategy to convert unprofitable business into something more lucrative, and says its subscription model is "locking" in people....

The legacy can still be felt today It is 40 years since Turbo Pascal revolutionized the coding marketplace with a slick (for the time) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and performance to spare. So why aren't we all using it today?...

JT-60SA produces largest volume of plasma ever made by humans, paves way for ITER Japan's joint fusion reactor project with the European Union (EU), the JT-60SA, was inaugurated in Naka, Japan on Friday, marking the start of experimental operations for the world's biggest and most advanced tokamak....

Unnecessary 'maintenance' turned into a fragging foul-up who, me? Brace yourselves, gentle readers, for we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the weekend is over, and you have to be back at work. The good news is that Monday brings an instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers entertain with tales of technical misfires....

PLUS: Montana TikTok ban ruled unconstitutional; Dollar Tree employee data stolen; critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief The European Union's Parliament and Council have reached an agreement on the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), setting the long-awaited security regulation on a path to final approval and adoption, along with new rules exempting open source software....

Ongoing investigation found evidence of stolen employee creds and social engineering Nine days after issuing a vaguely worded warning about a possible cyber security incident, web tracking and analytics outfit New Relic has revealed a two-front attack....

Penguin emperor ponders whether kernel contributors will code across the festive season, or humbug it 'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a coder was stirring, not even their mouse....

PLUS: Microsoft to invest 2.5B in UK datacenters to power AI, and more AI in brief Using a text-to-image model to craft an AI-generated image can require almost the same amount of power as that required to charge a smartphone, according to recent research....

PLUS: India's landmark digital law delayed; Singaporean banks de-digitize some accounts; AUKUS to unleash AI Asia In Brief China last week sank the first modules of an undersea datacenter....

Remote work is here to stay despite in-person mandates, this economist says Efforts to convince remote workers to return to corporate offices appear to have stalled, based on data from the government, academia, and private-sector organizations....

'Unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend' The council of Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, has approved legislation drafted by ChatGPT....

First he was speed-running moderation, now internet advertising. Welcome to the party, pal Kettle By now Elon Musk should be used to high-risk maneuvers. If it's not SpaceX landing reusable rockets or docking manned capsules in orbit, it's Teslas hitting the road under AI control....

iPhone maker tried to legally kill mobile browser, gaming probe by CMA The UK Court of Appeal has upheld the Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA's) decision to launch a probe into mobile browsers and cloud gaming, quashing an appeal by Apple to kill the process....

Although since it's the height of ridiculousness why not just Will Farrell? Although Musk: The Movie remains on the drawing board, we were delighted by the reader response to our question of who should play the part of the great man himself....

Senator Ron Wyden puts his foot down - for as long as he can Is the NSA buying up Americans' location and browsing data? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is tired of asking and has now moved to block the confirmation of a new NSA director until he gets answers....

Supply chain attacks: The gift that keeps on giving A ransomware infection at a cloud IT provider has disrupted services for 60 or so credit unions across the US, all of which were relying on the attacked vendor....

We're canceling our subscriptions, say librarians citing co-founder's views The Duke University Libraries have decided to stop using 37Signal's Basecamp project management software after almost a decade due to public statements from the supplier's co-founder and chief technology officer....

Legislation would eliminate TSA permission to use the tech, require database purge in 90 days The US Transportation Security Administration's plans to expand its use of facial recognition tech, already in use at several American airports, may be over before it begins if a newly introduced Senate bill becomes law....

Two CVEs can be abused to steal sensitive info or execute code Apple has issued emergency fixes to plug security flaws in iPhones, iPads, and Macs that may already be under attack....

Company counting on widespread business adoption to counter server declines HPE Discover EMEA Now that every big tech maker is jockeying for a bite of the AI revenue pie, HPE is pitching to remain relevant by adopting what CEO supremo Antonio Neri calls an "AI native" strategy....

Exploits bypass most secure boot solutions from the biggest chip vendors Hundreds of consumer and enterprise devices are potentially vulnerable to bootkit exploits through unsecured BIOS image parsers....

Legacy auto makers struggle with new tech, and upstarts suffer teething problems with first cars Consumer Reports' latest car reliability survey suggests electric vehicles (EVs) are causing owners more problems than their hybrid or conventional counterparts....

Mixing IBM's foundation models and proprietary data to discover novel antibodies Boehringer Ingelheim is the latest pharma company to turn to AI in the hunt for new treatments and therapies....

OpsRamp now natively available through IT-as-a-service platform HPE Discover EMEA HPE chief technology officer Fidelma Russo showed off an upcoming platform, codenamed Project Ethan, at the company's Discover event in Barcelona this week....

Now Microsoft has regulator breathing down its neck in three regions Google is asking Britain's competition watchdog to make a ruling over its allegations Microsoft abused cloud software licensing in an anticompetitive way, months after taking claims of its rival's monopolistic behavior to the Federal Trade Commission....

Hunt continues for the other elusive high-ranking members Another member of the Trickbot malware crew now faces a lengthy prison sentence amid US law enforcement's ongoing search for its leading members....