The Register

No backdated pay, no allowances, no substantial rises for all grades, 'we feel it falls falls way short of your expectations' The Greater London Combined Branch of the CWU, the communications union, is urging BT workers to vote against the pay deal ahead of the crucial ballot scheduled for 15 December.…

Mask apparently addresses urban pollution and noise, but doesn't even seal to the face If you've ever thought "I wish my incredibly expensive Bluetooth headphones were double the price and included a detachable mask that shot purified air at my face," Dyson has the product for you.…

Comrade offered 'monitoring' tool to keep an eye on the workers On-Call Welcome once again, comrades, to On-Call, The Register's celebration of the tech proletariat's struggles with oppression by bourgeois bosses – and the eventual triumph of the workers!…

If he offers you a piece of the Chocolate Pi, be suspicious A former technical surveillance officer at the UK's Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU) – a team charged with tackling serious organized crime and terrorism across seven local police forces – has joined the Raspberry Pi Foundation and expressed his professional admiration for the organization's single board computers when pressed into service on police business.…

It's not our fault, says Civil Aviation Authority Virgin Orbit's plan to launch a rocket into space from the UK has been delayed.…

Colosso-conglomerate Tata Group also wants some of Delhi's substantial silicon subsidies Electronics manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd – better known as Foxconn – will invest $500 million in India to expand its manufacturing presence on the subcontinent – including a venture to make semiconductors.…

You won't see 'Agent of vile murderous autocracy' on their CVs. Or their faces on vid chats North Korean IT pros are using freelancing platforms to earn money that the nation's authoritarian government uses to fund the development of missiles and nuclear weapons, according to South Korea's government. Seoul therefore wants gig platforms to impose stricter checks to restrict its enemy's activities.…

Unavoidable variable safety coming in version 3 When the third major release of the Dart programming language debuts in mid-2023, null values will no longer be allowed where they're not expected.…

What, you thought green tech shift will come from the good of their hearts? Assessing the sustainability credentials of your company's colocation provider is currently not so simple as they don't all report the same information. However, a move to support best practices will have an advantage in future when the regulatory noose tightens.…

CentOS tossed AlmaLinux, a somewhat popular free Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), received a vote of confidence on Thursday from the European and American science communities.…

Watchdog answers its call of duty, fears serial monopoly abuser will strike again The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to block Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of video game studio Activision Blizzard, claiming the merger would suppress competition.…

If safety regulations are written in blood, what are security policies written in? Sweat and cursing? Australian health insurance company Medibank will take all of its IT systems offline and close its branches over the weekend as part of its ongoing efforts to improve security and recover from a massive data security breach in October.…

4.18 the first update of lightweight, minimalist UNIX gear since 2020 Xfce is the slow-moving, sensible Linux desktop option, and new versions only appear every year or two. Version 4.18 is coming soon, and you can try it in the early test builds of Xubuntu 23.04.…

Blocking us would be a big mistake. Huuuuge Updated Microsoft execs are making an all-out push this week to convince US regulators to support its proposed $69 billion bid for game maker Activision Blizzard, even getting a boost from a labor union that claims the deal would be good for workers.…

Single market's worth $95.12 billion to Apple, so it's not like it had a choice OEMs, start your assembly lines as the European Commission (EC) has published its USB-C rules, and an official date for enforcement has been set for December 28, 2024.…

Plus: CFO says Chips ACT cash might continue because US govt will be competing with Asia Intel's CFO has admitted to certain "inefficiency in the fab" that is logical when "you're a monopoly" but "just doesn't make sense anymore," as he looks to carve out billions in overheads from the chip maker.…

For one so young, it's oddly not into heavy metal A nearby galaxy – dubbed Peekaboo because it has long been hidden behind a star – has finally come into view enough for NASA to discover that it's more than just a tease. It offers a glance into the early universe, despite being one of the youngest galaxies ever detected.…

Too bad the RAM is baked on Packing a 35W CPU onto a board barely larger than a Raspberry Pi might sound like a bad idea, but that's not stopping Asus' Aaeon product division.…

Ex-COO of failed blood testing startup will report to prison 6 weeks before fraudster CEO Former Theranos COO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani was sentenced to 12 years and 11 months in federal prison and three years' probation on Wednesday over a July conviction on 12 counts of fraud.…

A sober reflection on the industry as supply chains bifurcate in the East and West Comment Caught in the middle of an escalating trade war between the US and China, the founder of Taiwanese contract chip-making giant TSMC has stated that globalization and free trade are "almost dead" as his company expands in the US for the first time in over 20 years.…

It's the Ice Age/Jurassic Park crossover we've been waiting for Scientists have recovered the oldest DNA samples yet, in sediment left over from the Ice Age in Northern Greenland, according to research published in Nature.…

Nice. They went after vulnerable people and folks over 60 who opted out of marketing calls Britain's data watchdog has slapped financial penalties totaling £435,000 (c $529,000) on five companies it says collectively made almost half of million marketing calls to people registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).…

Better late than never to catch up with AMD's Ryzen star Intel claims it has hit a key technology milestone for its next generation of Core processors for PCs, heralding a major change in how its client chips are designed and manufactured.…

I'm the smartest guy in the room, I'm sure the message from IRS refunds is legit Scammers have scammed their fellow cybercriminals out of more than $2.5 million on three dark web forums alone over the last 12 months, according to Sophos researchers.…

It does most things well, some things right, and a few things bafflingly badly Desktop Tourism HP's Elitebook 1040 x360 g9 is an anonymously solid laptop that packs one of Intel's Alder Lake CPUs – but doesn't feel special as a result.…

Boeing … Boeing … gone An aviation era has come to an end as Boeing's last 747 has taxied out of the Everett, Washington factory, punctuating the jumbo jet's 54-year production run.…

Evil, pure and simple North Korea has hit a new low, using the death of over 150 people to exploit a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer.…

Kakao discovers the importance of resilience after fire wiped out its services South Korean web giant Kakao, a twelve-year-old company that boasts tens of millions of users and enjoys a central place in local life, has decided the time is right to develop operational resilience resources and processes.…

Schrems strikes again European privacy regulators have determined that Meta's use of personalized advertising in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatApp violates data protection laws.…

Texas bucks app off government devices as Indiana takes social media biz to court Two more US states have launched aggressive action against made-in-China social media app TikTok.…

And remember CSAM scanning plan? Forget that was ever a thing Apple says it will provide end-to-end encryption for most iCloud services, having abandoned its previously announced – and then quietly shelved – plan to check the legality of on-device photos prior to cloud synchronization.…

Begun, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability has. Ended, the Sequel to JEDI has The US Department of Defense has announced contracts for cloud computing services valued at up to $9 billion to AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle.…

SQL sequel needed for ODBC apps Applications using the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface may fail to connect after installing the November Patch Tuesday Windows updates, according to Microsoft.…

But we already gave them back $62m, web bazaar shrugs Amazon again stands accused of stealing delivery drivers' tips, and using the money to cut into workers' pay, this time in a lawsuit filed by Washington DC's Attorney General Karl Racine on Wednesday. …

German financial giant aids GPU maker's vision of vertical integration German financial giant Deutsche Bank is backing Nvidia's ambitions to someday make hundreds of billions from software that enables a variety of services and applications running on its GPUs.…

They thought they'd grokked short and long types.... then an awkward third kind came along Once the data looked straightforward, at least in terms of bursts of gamma rays from outer space. The high-energy electromagnetic radiation was classified into two types: short bursts of less than a second, thought to come from two merging neutron stars in a binary system; and long bursts of a few seconds or more from the collapse of a massive star.…

I'll be back, or perhaps not San Francisco legislators this week changed course on their killer robot policy, banning the police from using remote-control bots fitted with explosives. For now.…

Trojan horse could bring more users to Teams, grow advertising, because Windows users just looooove MS ads Microsoft officials have reportedly batted about the idea of a smartphone "super app" that would combine a range of mobile consumer services to fuel advertising and drive users to products including Bing and Teams.…

Good news, everyone! Er, someone. Anyone? Bueller? Linux kernel 6.2 should contain fixes for some problems handling floppy disks, a move which shows that someone somewhere is still using them.…

Green tech will be largest power source by 2025, says IEA, but even accelerated rollouts might not stave off disaster The International Energy Agency is revising its predictions for renewable energy growth upward by 30 percent, and reckons renewables like wind and solar will overtake coal to become the largest energy source on the planet by 2025.…

And all that energy feeding those humming servers isn't free either Organizations are overspending on containerized workloads in the cloud by overprovisioning the resources needed, and could potentially cut costs by as much as 60 percent.…

You can check out any time you like, and you can eventually leave. Right? Right? When Elon Musk told his Twitter engineers to go hardcore or go home, those who remained were clearly up for some marathon sessions, although perhaps they weren't signing up for a situation that looks like a reenactment of the Eagles' classic "Hotel California."…

7.5 megawatt digs on the murky waters of Marseille and Los Angeles A company that builds floating, sustainable datacenters has signed leases for two new 7.5 megawatt facilities, one in Marseille in France and another in Los Angeles, California.…

Move follows award swallowed up by legal fees The British government has announced a fresh scheme to compensate victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, which saw sub-postmasters wrongfully prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud because of errors in a Fujitsu-built finance system.…

Latest offshoot of Illumos project continues development of FOSS version of Solaris The OpenIndiana project has opened the gates on "Hipster", its latest release and the first this year, and it includes MATE 1.26, LibreOffice, and more.…

US FCC Commissioner praises Taiwan’s security decision as US state governments follow suit Public sector bans of Chinese platform TikTok on the grounds of national security have arisen in both Taiwan and additional US states following last week’s ban in South Dakota.…

Tens of thousands of engineers and call center staff can vote on negotiated pay settlement on 15 December CWU, the communications union, says the pay award negotiated with BT Group is the best employees can expect and "strongly recommends" it is approved at a ballot scheduled for mid-December.…

There's an iCatch or two: Spare parts expensive, available for few devices People in Europe and the UK can buy spare parts on Apple's Self Service Repair Store to fix their own iPhones and laptops, the tech goliath announced on Tuesday.…

Where's the Night's Watch when you need them? Microsoft has warned Europe to be on alert for cyber attacks from Russia this winter, just as a series of attacks hit Russian organizations – including the country's second-largest bank.…

'Magnetic' design framework, already deployed in Meraki kit, will make it to other products in coming years Cisco has created a design framework that will in coming years be applied to the user interfaces for all its security products.…