The Register

Note to self: Lenders don’t need the contact list on your mobile device Almost 300 apps, downloaded by around 15 million users, have been pulled from the Google Play and Apple App stores over claims they promised quick loans at reasonable rates but then used extortion and other predatory schemes against borrowers.…

Cash flow is king, even in the cloud Cloudflare has announced what it claims are its first ever price rises.…

Is it too late to enter for Understatement of the Year? The former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman Fried (SBF), has defied the advice of his lawyers and given an interview in which he admitted "I made a lot of mistakes" that led to the collapse of his company and left investors with little prospect of recovering billions of dollars.…

Bret Taylor returns to entrepreneurial roots after losing his gig as chair of Twitter Salesforce has again unwound its CEO job share arrangement, with co-CEO Bret Taylor announcing he will leave the company in January 2023 – leaving Marc Benioff occupying the one remaining big chair.…

Hock Tan says hiring engineers is his strategy … but still won't explain plan for massive rapid profit increase Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan has again felt the need to state that his company's acquisition of VMware won't lead to price rises.…

Will also offer them as-a-service to other bit barn operators The Japanese operations of NTT Data will deploy datacenter-monitoring robots in 15 of its own facilities, then offer them as-a-service to customers.…

Don't worry, Redmond hasn't gotten its hands on the agency's coffers yet The future of meteorological simulation and forecasting may well be bound for the clouds — well, cloud datacenters anyway. …

PRC and chums see open-source chip architecture as safer alternative to Arm China is reportedly leaning on domestic tech giants Alibaba and Tencent to design RISC-V chips as part of the country's efforts to insulate itself from the effects of the United States' growing silicon sanctions.…

Telematics program doesn't just give you music, but a big security flaw Sirius XM's Connected Vehicle Services has fixed an authorization flaw that would have allowed an attacker to remotely unlock doors and start engines on connected cars knowing only the vehicle identification number (VIN).…

Lift-off postponed for 'additional pre-flight checkouts' SpaceX postponed the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a lunar lander and rover built by a private Japanese aerospace company and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency rover to the Moon, by one day.…

Rise of the explosive machines San Francisco police can deploy so-called "killer robots" following a Board of Supervisors' vote on Tuesday, clearing the cops to use robots equipped with explosives in extreme situations.…

No matter what, the cloud must grow Less than a month after Amazon froze hiring amid worsening economic conditions, execs are preparing to accept job applications within its public cloud business again to expand its datacenter footprint.…

MIT's hardware speeds up light manipulation by a factor of 10 A research team led by MIT has developed anovel piece of kit that can drastically increase the speed and capability of optical beam forming technology and that's easy to produce at scale.…

CPU roadmaps are fragmenting to serve a variety of needs. Time to do some homework Analysis Amazon Web Services has signaled that the future of cloud computing cannot rely alone on general-purpose chips with its new Graviton3E silicon, joining AMD and Intel in introducing specialized central processing units that are meant to perform certain applications faster and more efficiently.…

Protests in Zhangzhou may equate to 15-20 million fewer Pro models in Q4, says analyst Ming-Chi Kuo The Chinese city of Zhangzhou - home to Foxconn's largest iPhone factory - has lifted COVID-19 restrictions, but it could still be too late to help Apple bounce back from a serious holiday shortage of iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max devices.…

'Tis the season for plugging holes and bolstering security Microsoft is parcelling out new features and functions this week in updates to Windows and Defender.…

Orbiting sat suite includes machine learning models, cloud-managed edge runtime Amazon Web Services (AWS) claims to have delivered a first in operating a suite of machine learning software running on a satellite in orbit, as a testbed for others to collect and analyze data directly on orbiting satellites using its cloud.…

Redmond disputes report that 'it is not possible to use without transferring personal data to the USA' Germany's federal and state data protection authorities (DSK) have raised concerns about the compatibility of Microsoft 365 with data protection laws in Germany and the wider European Union.…

Being over budget, behind schedule, becoming obsolete, and impeding other projects isn't a way to get a green light NASA has cancelled its mission to launch a greenhouse gas-monitoring satellite called GeoCarb, but climate-conscious individuals shouldn't be worried it's giving up on tracking climate change, the space agency said.…

Tumbleweed rolling-release distro to need v2 of x86-64 – and drop x86-32 edition The future direction of openSUSE distros is firming up and has ramifications for its business-focused offspring SLE and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP).…

Company hopes future will be 'nearly impossible to navigate' without its wares HR and financial management platform provider Workday reckons that despite the uncertain economic climate, now more than ever businesses will need to overhaul legacy systems to manage changes ahead.…

Ex-moderation lead says he does not feel the platform is 'safe' under Musk Twitter under Elon Musk won't be taking down COVID-19 misinformation anymore, according to quietly updated policy pages.…

Project with shipping giant was once floated as ideal blockchain use case – but industry didn't buy in IBM and shipping giant Maersk have confirmed they are shutting down their blockchain-based trading platform, saying that its aim of full global industry collaboration had not been achieved.…

Governor bans platform and website from all state-owned devices that can connect to the internet The governor of South Dakota issued an executive order on Tuesday banning the use of Chinese social media platform TikTok for state government agencies, employees and contractors on state devices.…

Report concludes government needs to implement a chips strategy now – like the rest of the world The UK is missing out on investment in the semiconductor industry, according to a House of Commons Committee report, which said this is putting business in the country at risk as other nations seek to build greater resilience into their own supply chains.…

Move comes as National Grid decided not to go live on blackout prevention scheme last night The UK government today confirmed it would take a joint stake in the Sizewell C nuclear plant, allowing for "China General Nuclear's exit from the project," which it said was "set to generate reliable, clean electricity for 6 million UK homes."…

It's not clear whether the upstart had to abide by new US chip restrictions British AI chip designer Graphcore has wrapped its two-year-old, second-generation Intelligence Processing Unit in new packaging for China and Singapore amid recently reported financial woes.…

Urgent digital transformation in a war-torn country Re:Invent Ukraine's Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister and minister for digital transformation, spoke to press at Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, describing how emergency migration to the cloud is securing the country's digital infrastructure.…

Order books full and price cuts are coming as supply chains unkink Server buyers who shopped from Hewlett Packard Enterprise contributed to the storied vendor achieving its highest ever operating profit margin for its compute business: 14.7 percent for the fourth quarter of FY22, in contrast to historical rates of between 11 and 13 percent and 9.4 percent for the same quarter in 2021.…

Governments directly policing online content will put free speech at risk The UK government has dropped the requirement forcing social media companies to remove "legal but harmful" content from its Online Safety Bill, a week before the proposal is set to return to Parliament.…

Four participating banks, four cities, expansion to come The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced its first retail digital Rupee pilot will commence on December 1, 2022.…

Teams with locals to allow consistent security policy to make it through the Great Firewall Cloudflare has found a way to extend some of its services across the Great Firewall and into mainland China.…

Immersion has different problems: datacenters aren't strong enough to hold lots of liquids Datacenter giant Equinix knows it needs to offer liquid cooling to its clients, but is struggling to deliver because there are no standards for the design of servers.…

SEA-ME-WE-5 severed on land in Egypt Internet users across Asia appear to be suffering from degraded performance after a major submarine cable was severed.…

You might say they've Arm-ed their security suite for battle For years, Fortinet has leaned on its custom security and networking ASICs to compete against rival vendors like Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, and Cisco in the firewall space.…

The kids aren't alright US legislation that aims to protect kids' online safety and data privacy will have "damaging unintended consequences for young people," according to more than 90 privacy and civil rights groups.…

ICON will have to figure out how to build a machine that uses lunar regolith and operates in lunar gravity NASA has awarded a $57.2 million contract to ICON, a Texan 3D-printing startup, to build "space-based construction systems" on the surface of the Moon.…

Move towards applications could bring cloud giant further into competition with its customers RE:INVENT AWS CEO Adam Selipsky promised a "zero ETL future" in his re:Invent keynote on Tuesday in Las Vegas, introducing new integration between the Redshift data warehouse service and the Aurora relational database service.…

PSA: Don't download unknown apps even if they promise naked people Malware-slinging miscreants are taking advantage of a trending TikTok challenge — and viewers' dirty minds — to spread data-stealing malware via a phony app that's had more than one million views so far.…

Millions of people who bought apps since 2016 eligible for payout A California judge has cleared the way for a potentially massive class-action lawsuit against Google, which stands accused - again - of anticompetitive practices surrounding its Play store.…

Work to with Uncle Sam? Then source your hardware outside of the Middle Kingdom Two top US Senators are pushing a proposal that would bar the federal government from working with companies that use semiconductors made by firms deemed to be Chinese military contractors. …

Army civilian employees, that is, but aerospace biz says it could be used in the private sector, too Locheed Martin has bagged a government contract to train 17,000 remote US Army civilian employees on security readiness, and wants to also extend the offer to private entities.…

'Experimental operating system' it may be, but it's still Unix/Linux-like If the words "experimental operating system" don't scare you off, Redox OS is an impressive demonstration of both homegrown OS development and the Rust language itself.…

CEO claims platform threatened with expulsion from App Store, asks if device maker hates free speech Apple is the new target of billionaire Elon Musk's ire after the Twitter owner and CEO outlined his frustrations with the company in a series of tweets about it stopping advertising on the platform and more.…

Want to kick the tires early? You'll have to ask for an invitiation AWS has announced its first virtual machine instances powered by Intel's "Sapphire Rapids" silicon despite the chipmaker telling the world just a few weeks ago that its fourth generation Xeon Scalable CPUs would launch in January.…

Sustainable aviation will require something lighter than batteries An aviation first has been reached in the UK, with Rolls-Royce and easyJet saying they have conducted the "world's first run of a modern aero engine on hydrogen." …

It's about small teams, microservices, bias towards serverless, and having the creator of Java on standby re:Invent How does AWS develop software? It is all about small teams, according to a low-key but revealing session at the re:Invent conference under way in Las Vegas.…

While Justin Zhu admits to micro-dosing, he alleges that his ethnicity was an issue for investors The co-founder and former CEO of marketing tech startup Iterable is suing the company and some of its backers, claiming that losing his job was less about micro-dosing LSD at work and more about racial discrimination.…

Make a big FOSS for Ubuntu Touch OTA-24, Mir 2.10, and the return of Unity on Arch Linux Various parts of Ubuntu's cancelled desktop/fondleslab convergence project are all still ticking away – some officially and some thanks to user communities.…

Space agency releases report alleging falsified data, researchers who weren’t there, and improper data management The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has released details of an investigation that alleged the results of an experiment simulating life on board the International Space Station were fabricated with large amounts of altered data.…