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Is this the engine maker's final continue? Game engine maker Unity on Friday walked back part of its controversial plan to charge developers a fee based on the number of game downloads installed....

Video watching habits and other data just handed over, lawsuit claims A lawsuit brought against IBM's Weather Company claims the website "knowingly and willfully disclosed its users' personally identifiable information - including a record of every video viewed by the user - to unrelated third parties, mParticle and AdNexus," now known as Microsoft's Xandr....

Holes in iOS, macOS and more fixed following tip off from Google, Citizen Lab Apple emitted patches this week to close security holes that have been exploited in the wild by commercial spyware....

Hey, ESA: Can Juice get there any faster? The search for alien life in our Solar System has heated up with the discovery of carbon dioxide on the surface of Europa, the Jupiter moon that is believed to house a massive, salty liquid water ocean beneath its frozen surface....

This surely can't be related to that crash debacle over the weekend, right? The reason a US Marine Corps pilot ejected from his F-35B stealth fighter jet last weekend remains unknown, but a government agency report on the dismal state of the F-35 fleet's maintenance provides a few clues....

Have you seen orbit? There's junk everywhere The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has proposed rules for commercial space launch companies to address orbital debris, a growing threat to spacecraft and satellites....

So much for sovereignty then The UK has used a statutory instrument to introduce new rules designed to allow the sharing of personal data between the island nation and the US in compliance with data protection law....

And Meta's tapping up Big B too - it's big bucks for this silicon giant Comment A now-challenged report that Google wants to end its reliance on Broadcom has drawn attention to the role the San-Jose-based electronics giant plays in the production of custom silicon for hyperscale clouds....

What a difference a year makes: in June '22 it was asking for half a billion in interest back after a successful appeal Updated The European Commission has re-imposed a fine of 376.36 million (about $400 million) on chipmaker Intel for abusing its dominant position in the x86 processor market. The move is the latest twist in an antitrust saga that has been now running for more than two decades....

Travelers told routine work being performed nationwide Updated Thousands of travelers are stuck at UK airports as the dual gremlins of "planned maintenance" for eGates and air traffic control restrictions led to delayed and canceled flights along with long queues at the border....

Meet gaming's power couple, with Ubisoft the third wheel. Now competition watchdog must ensure Windows biz keeps promises Microsoft is busy plumping cushions in anticipation of its new gaming bedfellow Activision Blizzard after the UK's Competition and Markets Authority said most of its concerns about the merger had been addressed....

A decade of support is a much better deal than what Microsoft or Apple will give you Opinion I run my computers until they die. I'm cheap that way and it's one reason why I'm a Linux fan. Thanks to Linux, I have PCs that are closing in on 20 years of useful life....

If you throw enough mud, some of it will stick ... and crash a server On Call Welcome once again to On Call, the Register column in which readers recall how they dug themselves out of holes while delivering tech support....

Alex Stamos: 'We don't really know what's gonna go wrong with AI yet' DataGrail Summit Generative AI is uncharted territory, and those wishing to explore it need to be aware of the dangers, privacy shop DataGrail warned at its summit this week in San Francisco....

SK hynix and Samsung do so much memory-making in China, ending sanction exemptions would be extraordinary South Korean and US officials met this week to discuss the future of Chinese export controls as the clock ticks down on exceptions enjoyed by Samsung and SK hynix....

IRIS oversight deal signed as constellation's schedule slips, and Ariane 6 hits another snag The European Space Agency has signed up to build and launch the European Union's Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite constellation....

Federated social network adds n00b-friendly features to the 'Fediverse' Mastodon, the open source Twitter-like federated social network server, has issued a major release that adds features aimed at making life easier for new users....

Fanboi numbers are well down - but Apple's queueing system, rather than apathy, is likely the cause First Fondle The iPhone 15 is predictably lovely - but the larger models may be too much to handle, and the smaller machines feel a little undersized....

Somehow still 'committed to providing the best possible reading and publishing experience' Amazon has given authors" who crank out books license to "write" and publish up to three tomes every day via its platform, even if they use AI, and asserts that limit protects its customers....

Staff with short 'runways' told to take off amid shift to corporate chatbots, it's claimed IBM, which last year insisted "there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination" at the mainframe giant, has again been sued for age discrimination....

National defense files can earn you $55K ... and espionage charges A US government worker has been arrested and charged with spying for Ethiopia, according to court documents unsealed Thursday....

Windows gets its own Copilot to help operate the operating system - Edge, Bing, Outlook, 365 not spared, either Microsoft on Thursday further co-opted its GitHub subsidiary's Copilot brand and heralded the arrival of its own Microsoft Copilot as "your everyday AI companion."...

Parents and players alike can now apply for a piece of the $245m pie The US Federal Trade Commission has opened up a website so that anyone who feels they were tricked into spending money in Epic Games' hit shooter Fortnite can ask for a share of a $245 million settlement pie....

Prolific info-thief strikes again Days after a miscreant boasted leaking a 3GB-plus database from TransUnion containing financial information on 58,505 people, the credit-checking agency has claimed the info was actually swiped from a third party....

'Even the most prominent collections are struggling to maintain demand' Just a couple of years ago you'd have no trouble finding some celebrity hawking a non-fungible token (NFT) project. But how quickly times change, as now, even websites dedicated to gambling with cryptocurrency are warning people to stay away from NFTs....

Hoping to bridge the dreaded 'lab-to-fab' gap where R&D dreams go to die The US Department of Defense is investing $238 million in 8 Microelectronics Commons regional innovation hubs as part of Washington's efforts to boost semiconductor production across the country, and in particular to bridge the so-called lab to fab" gap....

Makers won't be able to pull wool over consumers' eyes, though critics say it hasn't gone far enough Negotiators from the European Parliament and Council this week began the process of updating EU rules to ensure consumers are better informed about the lifespan and repairability of products before they buy them....

$157/share cash deal is the largest acquisition in networking titan's history Cisco is making its most expensive acquisition ever - by far - with an announcement it's buying data crunching software firm Splunk for $157 per share, or approximately $28 billion (22.8b)....

Ren Zhengfei says he still takes lessons from American rival An Apple fanboi has emerged in the most unlikely of places - Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO at Huawei, the China HQ'd giant whose latest flagship handset is going head to head at home with its US rival....

Watchdog claims it abused market position to leverage 'unfavorable' long-term parts supply contract Updated South Korea's Federal Trade Commision (FTC) has issued a $14.3 million fine to US chipmaker Broadcom for "unfair" practices against Samsung Electronics....

The roaming charges must be out of this world Vodafone is claiming to have made the world's first space-based 5G call placed using an unmodified handset, thanks to a test satellite operated by AST SpaceMobile....

Database service vendor based on open source DuckDB fattens up to $400M valuation Database service company MotherDuck has secured $52.5 million in VC funding and removed the waiting list from its platform....

Company accused of gross negligence by not updating app despite complaints A lawsuit was this week filed against Google in North Carolina following the death of a 47-year-old father of two who drove off a collapsed bridge....

Five businesses facing half a million in collective penalties for illegally phoning folk registered with TPS The UK data watchdog has penalized five businesses it says collectively made 1.9 million cold calls to members of the public, illegally, as those people had opted out of being menaced at home by marketeers....

Sure to lure in a few in the WFH crowd ... but no pricing yet UK network operator EE has hooked up with telecoms silicon supplier Qualcomm on a next-gen home Smart Hub that will bring Wi-Fi 7 support to its broadband customers....

This is about ending Nvidia's vendor lock-in, insists Greg Lavender Saddled with a bunch of legacy code written for Nvidia's CUDA platform? Intel CTO Greg Lavender suggests building a large language model (LLM) to convert it to something that works on other AI accelerators - like maybe its own Gaudi2 or GPU Max hardware....

Class action alleges pirated novels were fed into binary brainbox The Authors Guild, a trade association for published writers, and 17 authors have unleashed the dragons on OpenAI over its alleged use of their works to train its chatbots....

Global tech companies' Bharat offices attract the wrong sort of interest India is grappling with a three-and-a-half year surge in cyber crime, with analysis suggesting cities like Bengaluru and Gurgaon - centers of India's tech development - are also hubs of evil activity....

Pizza Hut Australia warns 190,000 customers' data - including order history - has been accessed Pizza Hut's Australian outpost has suffered a data breach....

WhatsApp gets better at taking money and so does Meta with verified accounts for biz Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has used a trip to India to announce more transactional features for his social networks....

Acquiring entity Japan Industrial Partners hasn't said what it plans for the sprawling conglomerate Troubled Japanese tech concern Toshiba has announced [PDF] the completion of a tender offer that will see it move into private ownership....

You can't not do GenAI in 2023, and 'Vancouver' release has gone there - but its detours may be more worthy Artificial intelligence might just cause IT departments to reconsider their success metrics - according to ServiceNow circa 2017. That's when the SaaS-y workflow specialist promised it would put AI to work automatically routing jobs to the most appropriate person in the "Kingston" release of its platform....

Dark patterns 'knowingly duped millions of consumers' The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has named three senior Amazon.com staffers accused of approving tactics designed to confuse people into signing up for the online souk's Prime loyalty scheme, then making it hard for them to unsubscribe....

Big G wheels out its old argument that its products are better - and look, there they are, pre-installed and in your face The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has used the first week of its much-anticipated competition case against Google to argue that the search ads giant violated antitrust law and stifled competition to maintain its market leadership....

Invasion of the data snatchers The Snatch ransomware crew has listed on its dark-web site the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs as one of its latest victims - as the Feds warn organizations to be on the lookout for indicators of compromise linked to the extortionist gang....

X3DH readied for retirement as PQXDH is rolled out Signal has adopted a new key agreement protocol in an effort to keep encrypted Signal chat messages protected from any future quantum computers....

Right as judges issued warrants against Putin The International Criminal Court said crooks breached its IT systems last week, and that attack isn't over yet, with the ICC saying the "cybersecurity incident" is still ongoing....

Services said to be returning to normal from downtime though Tableau Cloud still MIA Updated If you noticed something funky going on with Salesforce and its software-as-a-service empire today, it's not you: it's recovering from an hours-long outage....

And they're all tailored for efficiency Intel now says its "Sierra Forest" Xeons will actually offer 288 cores, twice as many as previously disclosed, when it launches in the first half of 2024....

Musk company gets FDA's OK for six-year assessment of its brain implants That was fast: Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain-computer interface implant company, only received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for human tests in late May, but it's already looking for participants in its first six-year trial program....