The Register

Pilotless plane said to be next generation of naval air power A large drone aircraft has been operated from one of Britain's aircraft carriers for the first time, indicating how the Royal Navy intends to expand its air power beyond the meager number of F-35 fighters it currently has at its disposal....

Software duo must respond with remedies - plus: closing deal in '23 likely a Figma of their imagination Updated The European Commission says Adobe's proposed $20 billion purchase of web-first design collaboration startup Figma will harm competition in the region unless the pair devise remedies to resolve this....

Crims post passport scans and internal forms up for 'auction' to prove it The Rhysida ransomware group says it's behind the highly disruptive October cyberattack on the British Library, leaking a snippet of stolen data in the process....

Worst season of Succession ever The story of Sam Altman and OpenAI took a twist this morning that even the most hallucinatory of chatbots would struggle to conjure: he and other OpenAI chums - including co-founder Greg Brockman - are off to Microsoft....

Elementary OS going full speed ahead, but Parachutist Parakeet considers a new, post-Enlightenment glide path Exclusive While Elementary OS commits to Wayland, the development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie's Wayland future....

The other big Chinese distro, after Kylin, seems to be thriving Leading Chinese Linux vendor UnionTech says it's reached an impressive milestone: it says it has three million users of its desktop edition, Tongxin UOS. Yep, million....

Size matters, and what you do with it. But keep it safe Opinion Quick question number 1. Do you trust Google? The Movement for an Open Web (MOW) doesn't. It's taking Big G to the UK's Big C - the Competition and Markets Authority - over the forthcoming Chrome IP Protection feature....

'Support monkey' turned network isolation job into a banana skin Who, Me? To quote the ancient philosophers: "Monday Monday, dah dah dah, can't trust that day." And so it is, dear reader, that we find ourselves yet again betrayed by the beginning of the working week and its requiremnet to spend the next five days exchanging your labour for currency. Fear not, though, for we can rely on The Reg to soften the blow with a dose of Who, Me? in which readers share their own tales of the treachery of tech....

Test, progress, or mishap - take your pick SpaceX judged the second launch of its Starship a success after the craft's two launch stages separated and one made it into space, but neither finished their mission....

After string of self-driving crashes, Kyle Vogt plans to 'spend time with my family and explore some new ideas' The CEO of self-driving cab outfit Cruise has parked his career and strolled off into the sunset....

Version 4.18 brings first ports to RISC-V and PowerPC, support for next-gen datacenter CPUs The Xen Project has quietly debuted version 4.18 of its eponymous hypervisor - the year's only release of the virtualization tool....

ALSO: FCC cracks down on SIM-swap scams, old ZeroLogon targeted by new ransomware, and critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief It's that time of year again - NordPass has released its annual list of the most common passwords. And while it seems some of you took last year's chiding to heart, most of you arguably swapped bad for worse....

PLUS: Tata orders staff to move cities; Singapore okays stablecoins; Australia trials CoPilot; and more ASIA IN BRIEF India has revealed Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo as having signed up for its manufacturing incentive scheme designed to attract manufacturers of laptops, tablets, all-in-one PCs, servers and ultra-small form factor devices....

Interim CEO appointed as rumours swirl about comebacks, doing a startup, or even hardware with Jony Ive Updated The shocking and sudden removal of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for not being "consistently candid in his communications" has spawned a set of theories as weird and colorful as ChatGPT at its worst....

Complaint alleges age discrimination harms certain retirees A former IBM enterprise salesperson has sued the mainframe titan claiming its recent healthcare benefit changes represents age discrimination....

Manifest V3 transition deemed 'far from terrible' and yet not great for content filters Special report Web advert blockers and other Chrome extensions will stop working by June 2024 unless they've been revamped to keep up with Google's changes to its ubiquitous browser....

Middle Kingdom can get its hands on hardware now - and still make better stuff later Kettle It's a transpacific Kettle episode....

We come in peace, or rather, pieces Last year, not one but two craters unexpectedly appeared on the Moon, leaving us all to wonder: what could have caused that?...

Chief gets upgraded to customer - LLMs may be coming for your job but the board came for his Updated OpenAI's board of directors just fired CEO Sam Altman for not being "consistently candid in his communications."...

Gatekeeper status under DMA? Don't you know who I am? The Court of Justice of the European Union on Friday confirmed it has now received four legal complaints - two from Apple plus one each from Meta and TikTok - against Europe's decision to treat the tech players and their apps as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act....

iPhones could still be running Snapdragons into 2026 Apple continues to struggle to develop a modem chip for the iPhone to replace those it buys from Qualcomm, and it may not be ready by the time the current agreement between the two expires....

We'll see when they reveal the prices Ampere Computing and French cloud operator Scaleway are pushing Arm-based servers as a more cost-efficient way of operating AI-based services, especially when it comes to inferencing....

Transmitting data from deep space, with a frickin' laser beam NASA has fired up its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) aboard the agency's Psyche spacecraft and received test data from nearly 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) away....

Cybercrime group worried over dwindling payments ... didn't they tell them to Always Be Closing? In response to growing frustrations inside the LockBit organization, its leaders have overhauled the way they negotiate with ransomware victims going forward....

Late-stage capitalism ... in spaaace Amazon is boasting a 100 percent success rate for its Protoflight mission, having demonstrated that a pair of prototype Project Kuiper satellites are capable of streaming video, conducting two-way video calls, and buying stuff on Amazon....

Twitter, meanwhile, tells us its brand safety controls are just as strong - or stronger - than other platforms IBM has paused advertising on X after reports emerged that its ads had been served alongside antisemitic content on the platform....

CEO Bob VanKirk makes near-20-year partnership official, teases big things coming to EMEA Channel-focused cybersecurity company SonicWall is buying Virginia-based MSSP Solutions Granted - its first acquisition in well over a decade....

Microsoft has listened, but only to people who like its AI assistant Despite Windows 10 users clamoring for Microsoft to change course on its avowed termination date for the operating system's support, the IT giant has instead chosen to spread AI far and wide with Copilot - whether you wanted it or not....

Britain's ICO claims tribunal misinterpreted law, wants case revisited Updated The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is looking to appeal against last month's decision by a tribunal that decided it wasn't legally authorized to fine Clearview AI over alleged privacy violations....

More Online Safety Act shenanigans as it urges nation to think of the children ... and free speech groups The UK government has unveiled a proposal aimed at creating a "super-complaint" to allow concerns over free speech and online safety to be raised directly with Ofcom....

Former Whitehall axe wielder wants Cabinet Office to undo his great work In a week when former prime minister David Cameron unexpectedly returned to UK government, another figure from those sunny coalition years has returned to British politics....

On the other hand, Europeans have to wait for Copilot If you've ever dreamed of a Windows free from Bing, Edge, and other built-in apps, Microsoft has decided to grant your wish - provided you're a resident of the European Union....

And why the UK cloud industry can't ape the energy sector and make it easier to swap suppliers Interview As Britain's competition regulator probes the behavior of the cloud giants, local supplier Civo wants to see an overhaul along the lines of the energy market where consumers or businesses can swap suppliers easily....

When users decline to answer 'have you tried turning it on?' surely no judge would fail to convict? On Call As the week powers down, The Register brings you another instalment of On-Call, our weekly column in which readers share memories of tech support messes....

One does not wish to slow innovation, Viscount Jonathan Camrose opines The UK government will not rush to pass new laws that regulate AI, to avoid hampering innovation and potential financial growth, the minister for AI and intellectual property Jonathan Camrose said this week....

Higher end SoCs for midrange mobes as Honor and Vivo sink it into their next devices Qualcomm has lifted the lid on its Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 series of mobile processors, which is intended to bring premium performance" to smartphones at a lower price point than top-end components....

Chaebol already the subject of suits for a pair of past indiscretions Updated The UK division of Samsung Electronics has allegedly alerted customers of a year-long data breach - the third such incident the South Korean giant has experienced around the world in the past two years....

Ordered enough Nvidia kit to keep evolving its AI and has plans to work around bans Tencent placed early, and large, orders for Nvidia GPUs, believes it procured enough of the hardware to evolve its AI for another two generations, and has plans to keep improving performance - even if US chip bans put GPUs off limits for the foreseeable future....

They'll have a top speed of 15km/h and need insurance before they roll Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the National Police Agency today opened applications for operators of mobile robots for patrol and delivery duties alongside pedestrians....

Coalitions battling Windows giant's software licensing are funded by AWS, report indicates Amazon has reportedly been financing trade groups to discourage the award of large government cloud contracts to Microsoft Azure....

Fake it (with a neural network) until you make it YouTube is experimenting with software that generates music using an AI model called Lyria built by Google DeepMind....

Absence of arrests doesn't mean nothing's happening, cyber-cops insist The FBI is applying "significant" resources to find members of the infamous Scattered Spider cyber-crime crew, which seemingly attacked a couple of high-profile casinos a few months ago and remains active, according to a senior bureau official....

If IT giant loses this lawsuit, it might just upset every plan in America HP Inc has been accused of improperly using funds set aside for retired workers....

Now that's the kind of current affairs we're into The Biden administration is splurging $3.5 billion to recharge the American battery industry and increase its manufacturing output, with the Department of Energy handing out the cash....

And that's not counting the incoming lawsuits. Thank goodness for insurance, eh? Rackspace's costs from last year's ransomware infection continue to mount. The cloud hosting biz has told America's financial watchdog, the SEC, its total expenses to date regarding that cyberattack have now reached about $11 million, though insurance has helped cover half of that....

A 'win' for Windows or just another pane in the glass? Ignite Microsoft is teasing a Windows App that provides a home screen for users of its cloud and remote PC services....

'Hello, our records indicate that you had an accident with a massively overhyped technology that wasn't your fault...' The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tightening the rules protecting cellular network users and has kicked off an effort to understand the impact of AI on robocalls and robotexts....

Export curbs strike again and stock prices come tumbling down The US government's unrelenting efforts to prevent China from accessing advanced chips or chipmaking equipment has scored another victim after Alibaba said the scheduled IPO of its cloud division is off due to the impact of CPU export curbs....

Yes, it's true, not everyone uses Azure - shock Ignite As far as Microsoft is concerned, AI is to be inescapable for its customers - even those who want to keep their software development and deployment confined to the PCs in front of them and their users. Welcome to the Windows AI Studio....

Final mission to space station revolutionized orbital labor management It's been 50 years since the final Skylab crew launched and docked with America's first space station for an eventful 84 days in space....