The Register

Want a low-cost machine? Agree to be bombarded and the Windows giant could have a solution for you In a world where global sales of PCs are declining and more work is shifting to the cloud, what can the maker of the world's ubiquitous operating system do to keep money coming in?…

Let's just go get a pint and wait for it to blow over As Elon Musk gets a rapid crash course in running and moderating a social network used by millions of angry people, major advertisers are reportedly advising their clients to pause ads on the tycoon's Twitter platform until brand safety can be assured.…

Up 188% on 2020 but could be because financial institutions were encouraged to report incidents Banks in the US paid out nearly $1.2 billion in 2021 as a result of ransomware attacks, a marked rise over the year before though it may simply be due to more financial institutions being asked to report incidents.…

Statcounter says Number 10 is still Number 1 in the Windows world Much of the Windows world has yet to adopt Microsoft's latest desktop operating system more than a year after it launched, according to figures for October collated by Statcounter.…

Here's hoping it doesn't come with factory-installed rattling for added authenticity What is a Porsche fan to do when sitting on the couch, separated from their beloved ride by the confining walls of home, unable to gaze upon the beauty of the vehicle's… tailpipe? The answer: ogle this $12,000 soundbar with a Porsche 992 GT3 exhaust system strapped to it instead.…

You're paying too much for too much, and the providers know it Comment Much of the IT community has been willing to tolerate – even encourage – magical thinking about cloud, and plenty of us believed.…

As with the Destroy Huawei manual, US to pressure other countries to devise semiconductor sanctions The US is trying to persuade allies to limit China's access to advanced semiconductor technologies, in a replay of its previous heavy-handed tactics against countries deploying Huawei kit in telco networks.…

Nefarious schemes included harvesting motherboard components and selling them back to Apple A one-time Apple employee working as a buyer within the iGiant's supply chain department has pleaded guilty to mail and wire fraud charges spanning multiple years, ultimately costing the company $17 million.…

Pining for Windows XP? Update to the last major release can do that Zorin OS 16.2 is a friendlier and more feature-rich distro than its parent Ubuntu 20.04, with a lot of updates and bundled apps.…

Much-loved but outdated hardware could be consigned to tech history UK communications regulator Ofcom is consulting on whether it should end the requirement for telecommunications companies to support the services necessary to send faxes.…

Jury still out on whether any kind of metaverse is strictly necessary Researchers at MIT and the IBM Watson AI Lab have created a machine learning model to predict what a listener would hear in a variety of locations within a 3D space.…

Device sales hit the floor as vendors look to Windows PCs Huawei was the only major tablet maker to grow shipments in Q3 on the back of demand in China and Russia as the rest of the top five manufacturers reported shrinking sales to retailers and distributors.…

Think I got some dust in my eye The Mars InSight lander is preparing to drift off to an eternal slumber beneath a blanket of solar-panel-obscuring Martian dust, as its power is set to run out within the next few weeks. …

Surely only a blockhead would pay these prices? Blockheads with $3,000 burning a hole in their pockets and a desire for a new coat can now blow their dough on a Minecraft-themed garment from high-end fashion brand Burberry.…

Deal could 'upend the entire cyber-insurance ecosystem and make it almost impossible to get meaningful cyber coverage' Mondelez International has settled its lawsuit against Zurich American Insurance Company, which it brought because the insurer refused to cover the snack giant's $100-million-plus cleanup bill following the 2017 NotPetya outbreak.…

Beijing nose best, wants VR to work in sport, tourism. industrial sims, at 8K with 60fps China's government has published a plan for the nation's virtual reality industry and included a suggestion to promote research in "odor simulation" – suggesting Beijing has decided the time has come for the Internet of Smell.…

It's not how many qubits you've got, it's how you use them What happens when you plug what's said to be a quantum computer into Europe’s most powerful supercomputer? That’s just what researchers at Finland's government-sponsored technical research institute VTT aims to find out.…

Faster than the others, 600m structures now in a public DB AI researchers at Meta say they have developed the largest protein-folding model of its kind to date, and that it is capable of predicting the structure of more than 600 million proteins.…

Don't the factory workers of China know that the season of huge shopping sprees starts next week? One of the plants at which Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn makes Apple's iPhone is experiencing an outbreak of COVID-19, potentially imperilling supply.…

Also testing digital cash tied to specific purposes – like only letting kids spend allowances on school supplies Singapore aims to eliminate the use of checks, beginning with corporate checks, by the year 2025. The phase-out was announced by the city-state’s deputy prime minister Lawrence Wong at the Singapore FinTech Festival Wednesday.…

$276 million in fines will do that to a monopolist India’s Competition Commission last week fined Google a combined $276 million for monopolistic practices in the markets for app stores and mobile operating systems, and called for the company to open its Play store to third-party payment systems or risk further regulatory wrath.…

Totally not about trying to keep customers in the ecosystem. Okay, maybe a lot about that VMware says it will help pay for your enterprise to move workloads to the cloud.…

PC chip slump forces break-even non-profit impression for a few months AMD's PC chip revenue have taken a major hit, but the Ryzen designer still managed to grow sales in the double digits in the third quarter of this year, thanks in good part to continuing demand for its Epyc server processors.…

Personal info and data safe, stolen code not critical, apparently Dropbox has said it was successfully phished, resulting in someone copying 130 of its private GitHub code repositories and swiping some of its secret API credentials.…

Classified mission will █████████ for ████ in █████████ until ███████████ █████ The most powerful operational rocket flying today – SpaceX's Falcon Heavy – blasted multiple military satellites into orbit on a classified mission for the US Space Force on Tuesday, marking its fourth flight since 2019.…

Relax, there's more chance of Babbage coming back to life to hack your system than this flaw being exploited OpenSSL today issued a fix for a critical-turned-high-severity vulnerability that project maintainers warned about last week. …

Bets on where the Long March 5B will land now? China's third and final space station module, Mengtian, has docked with the Tiangong space station after launching on Monday from a Long March 5B rocket at Wenchang Space Launch Center.…

If we want to launch craft beyond the Moon, we're going to need a better way to know where they are NASA has enlisted a cadre of volunteers to track the Artemis I mission, due to launch later this month. If successful, their efforts could help improve spacecraft tracking for future missions beyond the Moon.…

x86 giant offers January launch, AMD eating its chips Intel said its next-generation Xeon Scalable CPUs will launch in January of next year, shortly after a report out of Taiwan stated that mass production of the server chips was delayed to 2023.…

As with all good things, it won't last forever Analysis It's been a rough month for big tech. Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) all reported slowing demand across their core businesses, made worse by a less than rosy outlook on the future.…

Copying text now works without issue, so naturally pasting is getting iffy Windows 11 and Firefox users who have experienced months of browser freezes when copying text, rejoice: there's finally a patch that eliminates the problem, which has been persistent since May.…

Snapdragon giant warns of dramatic shift in business model Analysis Qualcomm has hit back at Arm with explosive allegations that the British chip designer has threatened to phase out CPU design licenses for semiconductor companies and instead charge device makers royalties for using Arm-compliant processors.…

One of the more popular Ubuntu-based flavors for new migrants from Windows Linux Lite 6.2 is the latest version of this increasingly inaccurately named distro. In effect, it's a niftily customized remix of Xubuntu 22.04.1.…

Home Secretary 'nominally in charge' of nation's security apologizes for breach of tech protocols The UK's Home Secretary – the minister in charge of policing and internal security – has been forced to apologize for breaching IT security protocols in government.…

It's enough to make you want to sploot If you're reading from Britain – or anywhere else in the world – you might have already uttered Collins English Dictionary's Word of the Year to describe the revolving door of feckless political leaders, skyrocketing energy prices, the cost of living, and the unstable geopolitical situation.…

Performance boost down to fresh processes, new materials, and more advanced equipment Micron is shipping samples of memory chips fabricated with its 1β (1-beta) production node, claiming it delivers better performance, bit density, and power efficiency, while remaining coy about the exact dimensions involved.…

HPE to start shipping Genoa-equipped systems in December – Intel's 4th-gen Xeons, eventually In the latest blow to Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise execs tell The Register its 4th-Gen Xeon Scalable-equipped systems won't ship before AMD's Epyc 4.…

Improvements to storage engine follow DataStax update to API gateway NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has updated the storage engine for its managed service claiming a fourfold increase in speed while using a tenth of the memory.…

Nice NAND industry you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it Attempts to reorganize supply chains to cut out China and foil its attempts to build a high-tech chip industry will be costly and may simply cause the Middle Kingdom to redouble its efforts, says memory maker Kioxia.…

Larger and smaller reactors carry risks, island nation failed to keep pace with nuclear fleet closure Electricity shortages appear inevitable for the UK due to the decommissioning of the nation's aging estate of nuclear power stations, according to evidence submitted by industry to politicians.…

But will Kwon show up in court? Probably not. Terraform Labs and its fugitive CEO, Do Kwan, face a looming court date in Singapore on Wednesday November 2 as the company confronts a $57 million claim from investors.…

FAT ain't dead, and the modern version can get big. Really big In case you thought the FAT filesystem died out with Windows ME – and good riddance – we have bad news for you. Several versions of it are alive, well, and essential to modern PCs, cameras, phones, fondleslabs, and more. The good news is, you'll soon be able to fix the FS with Linux.…

AWS warned for burning customers, Azure for 'punitive' licensing, while Google's losses are a worry Analyst outfit Gartner has published its annual Magic Quadrant assessing the world's leading Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services providers, and in 2022 Oracle and Huawei were the big movers.…

One may but unlikely to hit Earth. One could whack Venus. This is good or bad news, depending on your outlook Astronomers have spotted an asteroid of sufficient size and orbit to cause Earth-wide destruction – if it were to ever strike our planet. And that's a mighty big if.…

Deutschland im Deep Web destroyed A 22-year-old student German federal police believe to be the administrator of one of the largest German-speaking, dark-web forums has been arrested. …

This means personal info will be captured but not used – unless you're a suspected crim The governor of the People's Bank of China, Yi Gang, has delivered a speech in which he outlined the concept of "controllable anonymity" for the nation's digital currency.…

Broken code signature? LGTM, says Microsoft OS A cybersecurity firm has issued another unofficial patch to squash a bug in Windows that Microsoft has yet to fix, with this hole being actively exploited to spread ransomware.…

Local media say they're China backed, Ministry only mentions organized crime India's Home Ministry has asked state governments to crack down on illegal lending apps it says have led to "multiple suicides by citizens owing to harassment, blackmail, and harsh recovery methods."…

Boss denies any wrongdoing as Feds reportedly stick a probe in, too Self-driving truck biz TuSimple fired co-founder and CEO Xiaodi Hou on Monday amid what's reported to be US federal investigations into whether he inappropriately assisted and shared blueprints with Chinese startup Hydron.…

NLRB told to crack down on tech that tramples right to organize America's labor watchdog says it intends to crack down on the growing use of technology by bosses to closely monitor and measure staff, as it is feared this software may be used to thwart efforts to organize and unionize.…