The Register

Subscription fatigue is a thing and regulators are circling, but Korean giant reckons you're ready to cough up after buying hardware LG Electronics has outlined its ambition to grow revenue from $51 billion company to $78 billion over the next six and a half years, thanks in part to ads streamed to its tellies and subscription services for its appliances....

Avocado prep time could be cut in half, but it still won't change the price Unhappy with the speed at which human workers prep avocados, Chipotle has introduced a robot to get the guacamole going....

Software could be 'an emerging competitive threat' to luxury design SaaS maker, notes regulator Updated The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has decided to launch a full-blown probe of Adobe's takeover of web-first collaboration and software design house Figma after the companies failed to offer remedies to worries about the merger....

Will get involved from production to hydrogen engines, hopes for 5B turnover from tech by 2030 German engineering giant Bosch says it plans to invest 2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) in hydrogen technology, starting with fuel cell power modules to be used initially in trucks built by Nikola Corporation in the US....

There are only 1,300 souls left from 7,500 before Musk, complaint claims Former Twitter employee Courtney McMillian has filed a complaint claiming the company owes $500 million in severance pay to the thousands of people that were chopped from its once 7,500-strong workforce....

Ofcom launches investigation into whether telco is making it difficult for people to cancel services Virgin Media, which provides broadband, phone and TV services in the UK, is in hot water with regulators over allegations that the company is making it difficult for customers to cancel their contracts....

May be about to join systemd as the new tech for graybeards to scorn... but adopt anyway It has taken about 15 years to get there, but there is mounting evidence that the Wayland display server may soon topple X11 as the most common way to get a GUI on Linux....

Amazon, Microsoft and VMware make their moves in the game of machines IBM claims it can cut the cost for AI models in the cloud with custom silicon to cash in on the surge of interest in generative models like ChatGPT....

So much for that 'zero-gravity' cooling The SD card reader on Asus's Steam Deck competitor is failing due to excessive heat, the manufacturer confirmed this week....

Storm-0558 had access to accounts and mail - maybe even for senior US officials US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and other State and Commerce Department officials were reportedly among the victims of a China-based group's attack on Microsoft's hosted email services....

Fantasy sports bets put on the same footing as online casinos or a punt on the gee-gees India's GST Council seems to have declared war on online gaming - raising taxes on the endeavor to 28 percent, according to the country's Ministry of Finance on Wednesday....

Janus asteroid sats headed for That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case NASA's Box Full Of Old Tech It Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case (BFOOTISPHTOBKJIC) was already probably the world's coolest collection of such cruft, but is now set to gain a pair of fully functional space probes it's decided not to launch....

Improved service massively and slashed costs. Gulp Here's a story from the Department of Massive and Terrifying Irony: a startup Indian software developer struggled to afford its customer support team, so outsourced it - to an AI chatbot that was more efficient and cheaper....

We'll just take a look at the training data, oh... wait Updated In order to comply with data protection regimes, AI chatbots and associated machine learning applications will have to be capable of forgetting what they've learned....

Not even Uncle Sam can stand between x86 titan and its profits Intel has followed Nvidia's lead and will produce a modified version of its AI accelerator - specifically the Habana division's Guadi 2 - for the Chinese market....

With xAI, second time's the charm, eh, Elon? Register Kettle With so much uncertainty and hype surrounding artificial intelligence today, it's about time someone reliable, credible, and brilliant stepped forward....

Lawmakers, yet to pass a national privacy law, demand action on money Incredible as it may seem, US tax preparation companies using Google and Meta tracking technology have been sending sensitive information back to the megacorps, not to mention other tech firms, it is claimed....

Maybe bigger isn't better when it comes to complicated, error-prone space machines? China's private space industry took a giant leap past Musk, Bezos and everyone else today with the first successful orbital launch of a methane-powered rocket....

Hyperbole, scant information, ambition: Yep, it's an EM venture Elon Musk is founding of his own AI company with some lofty ambitions. According to the billionaire, his xAI venture is being formed "to understand reality."...

Multibillion-dollar lawsuit namechecks El Reg - twice Google, DeepMind and parent company, Alphabet, have been accused of "secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans" to build their own AI chatbot, Bard....

Ditching it after a decade? Devs warn of the hours to correct documentation and chaos it'll cause Microsoft is causing a stir among some tech pros after confirming it plans to rename Azure AD to Entra....

Building blocks for life could have been present for up to 2.6 billion years on the Red Planet, rover discovery shows The Perseverance Mars rover has found evidence of a range of organic molecules that suggest a more complex chemical cycle on the planet than previously thought....

Fancy seeing you here Nvidia is the latest company reportedly in talks to become an "anchor investor" in Arm's upcoming public offering, nearly 18 months after the GPU maker's bid to acquire Arm fell through....

Just think of the margins Salesforce has announced its first price hikes in seven years, increasing the price of software services used by businesses to support sales and marketing by up to ten percent....

Head of operations job ad requires 'healthy skepticism of the status quo' Ubiquitous billionaire Elon Musk is set to bring his devil-may-care management style to Britain's electricity grid....

Chip biz pledged to allow hardware interoperability The European Commission has granted conditional approval for the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom....

Potent greenhouse gas even worse for climate than too much carbon dioxide A methane tracking satellite that can calculate emissions of this potent greenhouse gas with extreme accuracy is due to go into operation next year, following the successful testing of its instrumentation aboard a jet aircraft....

NCAR's biggish iron will also explore wildfires, drought and solar storms In hopes of mitigating the effects of climate change, scientists working in collaboration with the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are using supercomputers to explore the risks and benefits of seeding the atmosphere with aerosols that would block sunlight and lower global temperatures....

The chameleon-rancher chooses a new, Rocky course SUSE is reconsidering the change of course it made at the beginning of last year: it is launching its own RHEL-compatible distro, or as it puts it, a fork of RHEL....

But people keeping jobs might find they are less boring, study shows An international policy think-tank has found 27 percent of jobs are in occupations under threat from AI and other forms of automation....

Nifty XRISM plasma-spotting scope to ride the same Mitsubishi Japan's Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has named August 26 as its intended launch date for a lunar lander it hopes will improve humanity's ability to touch down on other worlds - as well as an astronomical observation that might help us understand how they form....

Addresses criticisms raised by sections of the community and recent controversies The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the regional internet registry for 56 economies across the region, has announced significant governance changes....

The likes of WeChat and Weibo suddenly have a lot of work to do - including turning off the money tap The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has announced new requirements for platforms, to prevent accounts that spread fake news or misinformation from monetizing their content....

Data here, model there, Virtzilla's usual abstraction principles in between VMware has teased looming announcements outlining how it will enable generative AI to run on it stack, drawing on resources housed across multiple clouds....

As allegations of forced labour circulate, CATL goes for a jolt of social responsibility Chinese battery company Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), which makes around a third of the world's EV batteries and supplies the likes of Tesla and BMW, announced on Tuesday it had joined the United Nations Global Compact, an initiative that sees CEOs make non-binding commitments for sustainability and social responsibility, including human and labor rights....

Making it easy to exit subscriptions will just baffle everyone, FTC told The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering whether to make it easier for folks to cancel deliveries and subscription services. People should be able to simply click on a page or in an app to exit a subscription, and not have to go through a maze of bureaucracy, it's suggested....

Facebook messages, obtained via valid warrant, help make case against women A Nebraska mother pleaded guilty on Friday to giving her 17-year-old daughter pills for an abortion last year and to helping her dispose of the 29-week-old fetus....

Plus: Apple bungles another rapid security response; important ICS updates land; and more Patch Tuesday Microsoft today addressed 130 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its products - and five of those bugs have already been exploited in the wild....

How much NUC would a Pat G chuck if a Pat G could chuck NUC? The sun is setting on Intel's Next Unit of Computing, the chipmaker's tiny PCs better known as NUCs by devotees....

UK left as a final stumbling point to Redmond's gaming ambitions The FTC's attempt to stall a merger between Microsoft and gaming behemoth Activision-Blizzard has been struck down by a US federal judge, who is unconvinced the mega-acquisition would harm competition....

If it walks like a duck... Unhappy with its inclusion in what the EU calls a list of Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), Amazon has sued to have the designation under the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA) stripped....

You gotta spend money to make money - and where are all the staff? Datacenter operators are confident demand for their services will continue to increase, but worry about the high cost of energy, their ability to source UPS hardware and cooling units, and crucially, being able to hire staff with requisite skills in a competitive market....

Here's a hint: Leaders are putting laptop orders on ice PCs were once the hottest tech item of the pandemic, yet these days most of the big brands are still struggling to find new homes for their aging inventory that isn't a shelf in a distributor or retailer's warehouse....

Despite attempts to inform customers, some say they never got the memo InfluxData has lost the data of customers using its services in Australia while users in Belgium are struggling to figure out if they can restore the last 100 days....

Redmond confirms new round of layoffs in WARN notice The 10,000 jobs Microsoft said it would prune from the corporation in January are done, but fresh filings with US state officials show the bloodletting continues....

34% of those surveyed are on stimulants including amphetamines During the first half of 2023, which included job losses and share price pressures, tech execs turned to drink and drugs to help them cope, at least according to one research firm....

MongoDB joins joins Cassandra, PostgreSQL and SingleStore in implementing AI-friendly features Last month MongoDB announced its public preview of Vector Search among the updates to its developer platform of its Atlas database-as-a-service. The move means document database MongoDB joins Cassandra, PostgreSQL and SingleStore among the systems supporting similar features as the interest in putting large language models (LLMs) into production gathers pace....

It's where the cool kids are at... and 'international harmonization' is important Brit telecoms regulator Ofcom has kicked off a consultation over proposals that would see both mobile networks and Wi-Fi users have access to frequencies in the upper 6GHz band, if appropriate mechanisms can be agreed to make it work....

'We already have various legal options in the drawer,' says Max Schrems, lawyer who killed the first two deals The European Commission has adopted an agreement with the US, reopening transatlantic data flows between America and EU nations as soon as the decision takes effect on July 11....

BlackCat pounces on 7TB of data and theatens to release it Staff at one of the UK's largest hospital groups have spent a nervous week wondering if private data, stolen from their employer's IT systems by a ransomware gang, is going to be splurged online after a deadline to prevent publication passed....