The Register

CMA admits Sony deal might change the battlefield The UK's markets watchdog has reopened a consultation on the $69 billion tie-up between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft months after it blocked the proposed sale on the back of competition concerns....

Big Blue scores 54.7M project, taking business from Fujitsu as Home Office consolidates work The UK's Home Office has handed IBM a 54.7 million ($70 million) contract to work on the biometric matcher platform to support its police and immigration services in identifying suspects against a database of fingerprint and photo data....

Not all heroes wear capes - some are 50-year-old antennas A signal from Voyager 2 has been detected by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) over a week after communications with the distant probe were lost, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Tuesday....

Chips based on the tech could boost efficiency of electric vehicles Scientists at Japan's Chiba University claim they've developed a method that uses lasers to create diamond wafers that could one day power next-gen semiconductors....

WeChat accused of 'contempt for Parliament' as transparency rules floated for platforms An Australian Senate Committee has recommended banning Chinese social media apps in the land down under, on grounds the Communist Party of China uses them to spread propaganda and misinformation....

Current boss bails for unspecified non-tech gig Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it had hired Puneet Chandok as its new leader for India and Southeast Asia. Chandok's previous gig was president of AWS for India and South Asia....

Citrix's virtualization spin out goes a bit Musky by revealing its own X-centric logo XenServer, the Citrix spin-out that will offer a hypervisor and associated management tools for x86 systems, has teased a plan to lure VMware customers as well as a little more detail about its plans to operate as an independent entity....

Imagine your home's foundation was its own energy-storing supercapacitor Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black - a crystalline form of the element....

CEO, fresh with funds, lays out the dependency dilemma Interview Open source security biz Socket is extending its source code dependency checker, which previously addressed only JavaScript and Python, by adding support for checking Go code....

Don't worry, AI will fix everything, predicts CEO Lisa Su AMD crawled back to profitability in the second quarter of 2023, reporting net income of $27 million - a drop of 94 percent from this time last year, but a sight better than the $139 million loss the chipmaker sustained in Q1....

Does that include Zuck or? The chatbot craze isn't slowing any time soon. Google is understood to be injecting generative AI features into its digital assistant. Meanwhile Meta is said to be planning to launch virtual agents with various personas....

Are we out of touch? No, it's the charity that's wrong Twitter, lately known as X Corp, is suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for allegedly harming its advertising business by documenting vitriol on the social network....

Westinghouse's 2017 bankruptcy almost ended the Vogtle 3 reactor It's more than half a decade late coming online and has cost billions more than estimated, but Georgia Power's Vogtle Unit 3, the first US nuclear reactor built from scratch this century, has finally come online....

ESA is testing that pink stuff from your dirty bathtub as an antimicrobial Moon suit lining European space researchers are turning to an interesting place to find new antimicrobial coatings to keep the insides of future space suits from becoming stinky, bacteria-laden biohazards: the bacteria themselves....

Collide+Power vulnerability leaks secrets bit by bit - but could take months or years to learn a useful secret Boffins in Austria and Germany have devised a power-monitoring side-channel attack on modern computer chips that exposes sensitive data, but very slowly....

Crypto bad boy's appeal denied, despite recent Ripple Labs ruling A Manhattan judge ruled on Monday that a lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon will continue as planned....

Sleeping giant says no sign yet personal info was stolen Tempur Sealy, among the world's largest providers of bedding, has notified the Securities and Exchange Commission of a digital burglary by cyber crims that forced it to isolate parts of the tech infrastructure....

Scientists explain how the new HelioLinc3D software works to The Register Astronomers have spotted a potentially hazardous asteroid thanks to a new algorithm that will be deployed in the upcoming Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is currently under construction....

French IT supplier to complete split by selling non-Eviden bits to investment outfit Ailing French IT supplier Atos is looking to complete its 'transformation' by selling off the remaining half of itself to EP Equity Investment for an estimated 2 billion ($2.20 billion)....

Open source image-massage works ... up to a point Computer scientists claim they've come up with a way to thwart machine learning systems' attempts to digitally manipulate images and create deepfakes....

Bringing automatic window tiling to the mainstream could be big - but what is it and how do you use it? The GNOME desktop is considering adding support for automatic window tiling. This could be a significant productivity boost for the most common Linux desktop environment - as well as further afield....

Notably stretching the target requires 'a credible pathway towards its delivery,' says committee The British government is hoping to hit 24 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity by 2050 as well as roll out a new nuclear reactor every year. But these targets are more of a "wish list" rather than the type of strategic framework you'd need to actually build such capacity, according to a parliamentary committee....

Join Snowflake, Cloudera, Google as Apache format fans Cloud giant AWS has picked table format Apache Iceberg to extend the reach of its Redshift data warehouse to data lakes, in a move replicated by IBM's Netezza last week....

As if attacks from China weren't enough, one of the Air Force's own has reportedly gone rogue The US government is fighting a pair of cyber security incidents, one involving Chinese spies who potentially gained access to crucial American computer networks and the other related to an Air Force engineer allegedly compromised communications security by stealing sensitive equipment and taking it home....

If you need to trick a classifier into thinking a gun is a banana, just use these prompts Analysis A Google scientist has demonstrated that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM), despite its widely cited capacity to err, can help smash at least some safeguards put around other machine learning models - a capability that demonstrates the value of chatbots as research assistants....

Some say retaliation for sanctions, but Beijing says it just wants world peace China introduced restrictions on Monday that mean would-be exporters will require a license to ship certain drones and related equipment out of the Middle Kingdom....

Here's your metaphor for the state of the world: factory will be re-used to make EV batteries Panasonic has announced it has quit the Liquid Crystal Display business and will use the factory where it made the units to build batteries instead....

Not quite a controlled deorbit but not an uncontrolled one, either Video The European Space Agency's Aeolus weather satellite has reentered Earth's atmosphere after engineers sent their final commands to destroy the hardware. The machine, or whatever remains of it, was expected to crash into the Atlantic Ocean....

Looks like it's time for the territory to ramp up its SEO offensive again Hong Kong's High Court has rejected a government bid to ban online dissemination of a protest song that is often mistaken as the Special Administrative Region's national anthem....

Go ahead, spend up big. But be warned: many models 'will never make it to widespread use because they are quite frankly rubbish' Dell can't wait to tap into the frenzy of spending on ... er ... interest surrounding generative AI, so has cooked up hardware bundles and consulting chops to bring it on-prem....

Onsemi CEO says demand for silicon carbide surged - as investors pile in While chipmakers, memory vendors, and fabs collectively bemoan slow demand and excess inventories, one segment of the semiconductor biz appears to be weathering the storm better than most: silicon carbide (SiC) power circuits used in electric vehicles....

Some Ryzen Linux machines still stumble along despite efforts to fix it all Ongoing issues with Linux and AMD's fTPM - the chip designer's firmware-based TPM - appear to be wearing on kernel overseer Linus Torvalds' nerves, who has suggested switching off the module's random number generator altogether....

Waiting on that thumbs up from the FAA The US Air Force is dipping its toe into electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft by trialing a short-hop air taxi that has yet to get FAA certification to fly....

As expert panel suggests some tweaks to boost public's confidence in FISA The White House has weighed in on the Section 702 debate, urging lawmakers to reauthorize, "without new and operationally damaging restrictions," the controversial snooping powers before they expire at the end of the year....

Plus: Google DeepMind's latest visual-language model robot, and more AI in brief Four research papers this week concluded that users' political beliefs and behavior don't seem to be all that impacted by information amplified by Facebook's algorithms....

Neighbors say it's an eyesore, Musk's underlings won't let inspectors near it Updated A huge super-bright flashing X logo appeared atop the HQ of the company formerly known as Twitter on Friday, spurring complaints from neighbors and visits from San Francisco building inspectors that Elon Musk's underlings rebuffed twice over the weekend....

How they do it remains a mystery, say boffins in research paper Large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-3 can display the ability to solve complex reasoning tasks which humans crack using analogies....

Perhaps that'll focus your minds on speeding up your adoption of IPv6, eh? Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead....

GPU giant says you can't stop secondary sales, surveillance gear maker maintains innocence Updated Video surveillance equipment maker Hikvision was paid $6 million by the Chinese government last year to provide technology that could identify members of the nation's Uyghur people, a Muslim ethnic majority, according to physical security monitoring org IPVM....

In an industry that runs on hype, this might just live up to it Arc is a new Chromium-based web browser which shakes up the standard workflow that browsers have had ever since tabs were invented. It's good, but it will take some getting used to....

Got to keep up with those FTTP builds and the tens of thousands of staff that will leave BT, the former state owned telecommunications monopoly that is building Britain's fiber backbone, has confirmed current Telia Company president and CEO Allison Kirkby as its new boss from the end of January 2024....

Middle Ages maths to the rescue Future satellite navigation systems intended for Earth's Moon may be aided by a model of it developed with methods that go back to mathematician Fibonacci, who lived 800 years ago....

Clue: Nothing like what's on offer today Opinion "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today," fumed Admiral David Beatty during 1916's Battle of Jutland. Fair enough: three of the Royal Navy's finest vessels had just blown up and sank....

Techie installing an upgrade did everything right. But the user was already wrong Who, Me? Greetings and felicitations, dear reader-folk, and welcome to the soft landing to the working week that we at The Reg call Who, Me? in which we share tales of readers like you who found themselves in unfortunate circumstances - often of their own making....

Comms vendor's employee allegedly generated bogus licences and hijacked sysadmin accounts to make more A New Jersey man has plead guilty to selling pirated Avaya software licenses, allegedly generated and shopped by one of the vendor's system administrators....

Thankfully the probe regularly phones home to fix this sort of mess NASA revealed on Friday that its venerable Voyager 2 probe is currently incommunicado, because the space agency pointed its antenna in the wrong direction....

It might be the only non-boring thing about the release, which has Linus Torvalds celebrating Linus Torvalds has noticed a "weird numerological coincidence" during work on version 6.5 of the Linux kernel....

ALSO: Japan's government to write docs with AI; 5G boom coming; India denies infosec issues Asia In Brief Elon Musk's rebadged Twitter, X.com, has been blocked in Indonesia as the domain was formerly used to for websites containing content deemed unsuitable, such as - ahem - adult entertainment and gambling....

ALSO: China says US hacked it right back, BreachForums users have been pwned, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief US senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) thinks it's Microsoft's fault that Chinese hackers broke into Exchange Online, and he wants three separate government agencies to launch investigations and "hold Microsoft responsible for its negligent cyber security practices."...

Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix's guitars, Vader's helmet, Captain Kirk's chair, and more Paul Allen left more than just a tech legacy and billions of dollars behind when he died. The Microsoft co-founder amassed a sizable collection of unique artifacts from popular movies and music, which is now headed to a permanent home at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture....