The Register

Nifty XRISM plasma-spotting scope to ride the same Mitsubishi Japan's Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has named August 26 as its intended launch date for a lunar lander it hopes will improve humanity's ability to touch down on other worlds - as well as an astronomical observation that might help us understand how they form....

Addresses criticisms raised by sections of the community and recent controversies The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the regional internet registry for 56 economies across the region, has announced significant governance changes....

The likes of WeChat and Weibo suddenly have a lot of work to do - including turning off the money tap The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has announced new requirements for platforms, to prevent accounts that spread fake news or misinformation from monetizing their content....

Data here, model there, Virtzilla's usual abstraction principles in between VMware has teased looming announcements outlining how it will enable generative AI to run on it stack, drawing on resources housed across multiple clouds....

As allegations of forced labour circulate, CATL goes for a jolt of social responsibility Chinese battery company Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), which makes around a third of the world's EV batteries and supplies the likes of Tesla and BMW, announced on Tuesday it had joined the United Nations Global Compact, an initiative that sees CEOs make non-binding commitments for sustainability and social responsibility, including human and labor rights....

Making it easy to exit subscriptions will just baffle everyone, FTC told The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering whether to make it easier for folks to cancel deliveries and subscription services. People should be able to simply click on a page or in an app to exit a subscription, and not have to go through a maze of bureaucracy, it's suggested....

Facebook messages, obtained via valid warrant, help make case against women A Nebraska mother pleaded guilty on Friday to giving her 17-year-old daughter pills for an abortion last year and to helping her dispose of the 29-week-old fetus....

Plus: Apple bungles another rapid security response; important ICS updates land; and more Patch Tuesday Microsoft today addressed 130 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its products - and five of those bugs have already been exploited in the wild....

How much NUC would a Pat G chuck if a Pat G could chuck NUC? The sun is setting on Intel's Next Unit of Computing, the chipmaker's tiny PCs better known as NUCs by devotees....

UK left as a final stumbling point to Redmond's gaming ambitions The FTC's attempt to stall a merger between Microsoft and gaming behemoth Activision-Blizzard has been struck down by a US federal judge, who is unconvinced the mega-acquisition would harm competition....

If it walks like a duck... Unhappy with its inclusion in what the EU calls a list of Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), Amazon has sued to have the designation under the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA) stripped....

You gotta spend money to make money - and where are all the staff? Datacenter operators are confident demand for their services will continue to increase, but worry about the high cost of energy, their ability to source UPS hardware and cooling units, and crucially, being able to hire staff with requisite skills in a competitive market....

Here's a hint: Leaders are putting laptop orders on ice PCs were once the hottest tech item of the pandemic, yet these days most of the big brands are still struggling to find new homes for their aging inventory that isn't a shelf in a distributor or retailer's warehouse....

Despite attempts to inform customers, some say they never got the memo InfluxData has lost the data of customers using its services in Australia while users in Belgium are struggling to figure out if they can restore the last 100 days....

Redmond confirms new round of layoffs in WARN notice The 10,000 jobs Microsoft said it would prune from the corporation in January are done, but fresh filings with US state officials show the bloodletting continues....

34% of those surveyed are on stimulants including amphetamines During the first half of 2023, which included job losses and share price pressures, tech execs turned to drink and drugs to help them cope, at least according to one research firm....

MongoDB joins joins Cassandra, PostgreSQL and SingleStore in implementing AI-friendly features Last month MongoDB announced its public preview of Vector Search among the updates to its developer platform of its Atlas database-as-a-service. The move means document database MongoDB joins Cassandra, PostgreSQL and SingleStore among the systems supporting similar features as the interest in putting large language models (LLMs) into production gathers pace....

It's where the cool kids are at... and 'international harmonization' is important Brit telecoms regulator Ofcom has kicked off a consultation over proposals that would see both mobile networks and Wi-Fi users have access to frequencies in the upper 6GHz band, if appropriate mechanisms can be agreed to make it work....

'We already have various legal options in the drawer,' says Max Schrems, lawyer who killed the first two deals The European Commission has adopted an agreement with the US, reopening transatlantic data flows between America and EU nations as soon as the decision takes effect on July 11....

BlackCat pounces on 7TB of data and theatens to release it Staff at one of the UK's largest hospital groups have spent a nervous week wondering if private data, stolen from their employer's IT systems by a ransomware gang, is going to be splurged online after a deadline to prevent publication passed....

Departure won't hurt a bit, insists IT minister, as JV partner presses ahead Taiwanese tech manufacturer Hon Hai Technology Group, aka Foxconn, said on Monday it is withdrawing from a $19.5 million semiconductor and display manufacturing joint venture with Indian mining and power generation company Vedanta....

Sonic the Hedgehog unsure NFTs are golden rings worth collecting Sega's co-COO Shuji Utsumi has said the Japanese gaming giant still hasn't figured out what blockchain is good for, and may not make it part of a flagship "supergame" slated for a 2026 release....

The work is hard to spot - which is bad for science, but good for paranoia Chinese researchers published 850 papers pertaining to artificial general intelligence (AGI) between 2018 and 2022, indicating Beijing's efforts to create a thinking machine are real and active - possibly including research on brain/computer interfaces....

Let us borrow titles digitally from libraries like we can books and movies, say 'puter historians Many of the games released in the USA that we grew up with and love are out of print, which is a bummer for those keen to preserve and chronicle the nation's computing past....

Another kind of supply chain attack that can quietly mess up bots and apps French outfit Mithril Security has managed to poison a large language model (LLM) and make it available to developers - to prove a point about misinformation....

Big Blue is just a gold digger, says avid auditor of software licenses Oracle claims IBM is trying to kill open source competition among Linux distributions to boost its bottom line, and has pledged to keep distributing Oracle Linux source code for free....

Relax, says chip giant, it's an easy fix Anyone running Intel's 4th-Gen Xeon Scalable processors should be on the lookout for a firmware update to address the issue that briefly forced the x86 giant to halt shipments of mid-core-count chips....

Presumably Red Hat feels it hasn't alienated enough people recently The Fedora Project is considering a proposal to introduce some limited usage telemetry in a future release. Predictably, quite a few users are not delighted with this development....

The light pollution problem is so 2022 Nevermind the light pollution - the ever-growing swarm of Starlink satellites orbiting Earth are creating a fresh unknown problem for astronomers: They're leaking electromagnetic radiation....

X Corp boss invokes spirit of 'Cops arrest man for burning Burning Man man' Elon Musk is suing the lawyers who were representing Twitter when it sued him for trying to abandon his $44 billion takeover offer in 2022. Now the bill is due for suing himself, Musk, as owner of the social media platform, says it is too damn high....

Network issues caused by nature's hilarious prank A freak summer storm in the Netherlands is being blamed for causing network issues in Microsoft's Azure West Europe region last week, according to a preliminary post-incident review by the company....

Ive got a bad feeling about this There must have been a time when Apple thought that anything Sir Jony Ive touched turned to gold. Now luxury hi-fi manufacturer Linn will be hoping the same - with a 50,000 ($64,000) turntable dreamed up by Cupertino's former design whiz....

When we sanction you, it's for national security. When you sanction us, that's just spiteful US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has attempted to reset US/China relations, while also framing recent tech-related measures imposed by Beijing as inappropriate....

FTTP builds? 25M homes target on track. 68% coverage of 5G in UK. Mega redundancies programme initiated. He's off BT's CEO Philip Jansen today fired the starting gun on the race to find his successor by confirming he intends to stand down from his role inside 12 months, ending what some have branded a rollercoaster" tenure....

UK benefits department forced to use 'legacy bridge' to help reduce error after underpaying people by c 1B The UK's government has upped its estimate of the number of people hit by a state pension underpayment related to errors caused by a complex mesh of legacy systems dating back to the 1980s....

Ofcom takes quick glance, says: It's off to the CMA with you The cloud infrastructure market should be referred to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for investigation, says telecoms regulator Ofcom in a freshly filed interim report....

Plus: Adobe is limiting how staff can use external generative AI tools, and the Pentagon is testing different large language models In brief Award-winning novelists Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, and, separately comedian Sarah Silverman and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued OpenAI and accused the startup of training ChatGPT on their books without consent, violating copyright laws....

War is obscene but it's also responsible for many technological advances Opinion Every week there are so many stories about different things but with a common theme....

Health service techie learns what happens when you brute-force a bureaucracy Who, Me? Ah, dear reader, it's so delightful to have your company once again for Who, Me? in which fine upstanding Regizens like yourself regale us with tales of tech gone not so much right as ... the other thing....

Doing the dirty work for Australia's Woodside Energy will help prepare bot for work in space NASA announced on Friday its humanoid robot, Valkyrie, is headed to Western Australia, where Perth-based Woodside Energy will put it through its paces with a view to "remote caretaking of uncrewed and offshore energy facilities."...

ALSO: Shell fails to learn from past leaks; hundreds of solar plants found open to Mirai; and this week's crit vulns In brief With riots rocking the country, French parliamentarians have passed a bill granting law enforcement the right to snoop on suspects via "the remote activation of an electronic device without the knowledge or consent of its owner."...

Expect the saga of this release to stretch out a bit over northern summer Linux kernel overseer Linus Torvalds has delivered the first release candidate for version 6.5 of the kernel, but warned this release may not go entirely smoothly....

Alibaba's valuation of its fintech outfit now way below numbers touted ahead of cancelled 2020 IPO China's crackdown on web giants Alibaba and Tencent appears to be over, with the two to pay a combined $1.4 billion in fines to atone for past sins as Beijing moves on to "normalized" supervision....

ALSO: Google Cloud extends support in Korean and Mandarin; Cambodia lashes Meta; MSFT India boss bails; and more Asia In Brief Microsoft last week announced its consistent global pricing policy means Australian and New Zealand customers will soon pay more for its wares....

Rulings on affirmative action and free speech may not play nicely with diversity initiatives Analysis The US Supreme Court has issued two decisions that threaten to upend efforts by tech companies to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive....

Slow June, people voting with their feet amid this AI craze, or something else? Global traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT website fell by an estimated 10 percent between May and June, marking the first time the number of visitors to the conversational large language model has decreased since it was launched in November....

Snafu blamed on config change GitLab, a hosted git service not unlike Microsoft's GitHub, was down for some users as of Friday morning, Pacific Time....

It's certainly not the country's 'first homegrown open source desktop operating system' Version 1.0 of the openKylin Linux distro for the domestic Chinese market is here - and it works pretty well in English, too....

If it works, the X-59 could enable a new era of commercial supersonic travel that doesn't shatter windows NASA's mission to create a supersonic aircraft that doesn't rattle windows and vibrate teeth is one step closer to reality as the experimental X-59 aircraft dubbed the "Son of Concorde" may soon be ready for its first test flights....

Big Blue's top brass either don't get it or don't care Opinion What is Red Hat thinking?...