The Register

IARPA unleashes TEI-REX to better track nuclear sources The research arm of US intelligence has begun investigating methods for spotting low doses of ionizing radiation to better protect American service personnel and provide evidence of nuclear technology use.…

World's largest VRFB was built with inadvertent help from the Department of Energy The world's largest vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) has been connected to the grid in Dalian, China, where it was built using technology patented in the United States.…

Graviton2 processors trials with infrastructure vendors and telco as work on standalone 5G continues NTT Docomo and NEC have conducted tests that demonstrate Arm-based Graviton2 processors consume 72 percent less power compared to X86 chips while running NEC's 5G core software as part of the NTT Docomo 5G network.…

Google-owned Wing said it was a 'precautionary controlled landing' – right into 11,000 volts A delivery drone operated by Alphabet subsidiary Wing crashed into power lines in the Australian town of Browns Plains yesterday, knocking out power for more than 2,000 customers.…

Insert your Year of Linux joke here, we dare you Amazon WorkSpaces, the company's persistent desktop virtualization product, now offers Ubuntu as an option.…

Researchers mince 'digital gold' claims with study showing cryptocurrency's impact Far from being the "digital gold" some claim, Bitcoin's relative climate change impact is greater than the beef industry, and over seven times more than actual gold mining.…

Telescope hasn't been superseded by JWST, so why not try to keep it going? Though it may have been eclipsed by the launch of its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, long-lived Hubble continues to gaze deep into the universe.…

Despite having €4.2b reasons from Onepoint to ditch Evidian strategy and sell up Shape-shifting outsourcing biz Atos has rejected a joint bid of €4.2 billion ($4.09 billion) from tech consultancy Onepoint and Brit private equity fund ICG to buy its digital, big data and security divisions.…

Wafer starts cut back as slump in demand hurts bottom lines... especially Micron's Chipmakers are cutting back on production capacity and investment as demand for semiconductors continues to fall away, with Micron and Kioxia the latest to announce adjustments in light of the worsening outlook.…

Vendor and resellers offer conflicting advice about subs and upgrades, though vendor says it's been 'clear' SME accounting software vendor Sage stands accused of misleading customers following statements detailing when clients will be forced to migrate to subscription-based licensing, enraging the user community.…

The project with the thumbs up from CERN ... and China Red Hat has released the latest iteration of its OpenStack Platform 17, with a strong slant towards network operators building out modern infrastructure such as that needed to deliver 4G and 5G services.…

Made your old computer faster but too quiet? Here's a fun fix The best way to make a sluggish old computer quicker is to replace spinning rust with some flash chippery. The snag is that loses part of the experience: the sound.…

How to win friends and admit how you lost them earlier? Open Source Summit What's the difference between the Citrix Hypervisor and Xen? Well, one has quite a big crowd of upset current and former community members.…

Pack your bags, we're off to huddle on some alien ice caps. It beats Earth Liquid water may be lurking beneath the southern polar ice cap on Mars, according to fresh evidence reported in Nature Astronomy.…

Support chap braved fire and a mile-long run, only to find Windows 95 was the final hurdle On-Call Welcome yet again to On-Call, The Register's Friday festival of futility in which readers share their stories of being asked to fix foul-ups inflicted by fools.…

State-sponsored ZINC allegedly passes on malware-laden open source apps Microsoft has claimed a North Korean crew poses as LinkedIn recruiters to distribute poisoned versions of open source software packages.…

Can't even spin up the compute necessary to reply Digital Ocean has cloud capacity issues and won't say what the problem is.…

Remember this next time Microsoft talks about how seriously it takes security Security researchers have warned a zero-day flaw in Microsoft’s Exchange server is being actively exploited.…

Still to come: Civil RICO lawsuit against eBay and former top brass Two now-former eBay executives who pleaded guilty to cyberstalking charges this year have been sent down and fined tens of thousands of dollars.…

And no, the tiny fine print in search results doesn't cut it Google is still effectively directing women seeking abortions to anti-abortion centers that masquerade as legit abortion clinics.…

Top tip, don't give your secret login box the HTML form type 'password' For almost a decade, the US Central Intelligence Agency communicated with informants abroad using a network of websites with hidden communications capabilities.…

But overpriced, useless fighter jets? That's something we can get behind Discovering and reporting critical security flaws that could allow foreign spies to steal sensitive US government data or launch cyberattacks via the Department of Defense's IT systems doesn't carry a high reward.…

You even have until the end of the 2030s to get it done The US Department of Energy has announced plans to award up to $50 million in funds to private businesses to develop a working fusion pilot plant (FPP) by the 2030s. …

And bundles its best bits at bargain price in case someone wants you to work their way for a while Atlassian is plugging away at its version of the future of work with an eye on the needs of the admins who tend its software.…

When you combine it with DHCP, that spells TRACK ME Computer scientists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have found the interplay between the internet and local networks can be analyzed to reveal private data and facilitate tracking.…

We gave the cloud gaming service two years to live. It managed three Google on Thursday said it will shut down Stadia, its cloud-based game streaming service, because few people use it.…

Where we're going, we don't need efficiency cores. But we may need 1.21 jiggawatts Analysis At this week's launch of Intel's 13th-gen Core series, it appears staff accidentally left out on display a wafer of previously undisclosed 34-core Raptor Lake processor dies.…

Curb your enthusiasm – coal-fired power went up too In a global first, wind and solar energy combined to generate more than 10 percent of the world's electricity in 2021 – though coal-fired power plant generation and emissions jumped to new highs in the same period, too.…

An internet advertiser as your service provider – what could go wrong? Google is planning to offer much faster broadband speeds in the US areas where it operates its fiber networks, all the way to 100Gbps.…

Plus RHEL has fresh release goodies out too Red Hat has released betas of RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 while its parent company IBM is offering Linux mainframe instances in the cloud, although only in some regions.…

Office Insider? You might want to check refreshed email client Microsoft has a preview out for its "Unified" Outlook for Windows app for all users on its Office Insider program, and said it will be available for those on the Windows Insider program in the near future.…

Project with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries marks shift in policy since Fukushima disaster over a decade ago Japan is about to change course on energy policy following the Fukushima disaster in 2011 with a focus on developing safer nuclear reactors.…

Mandiant tracks back operators, finds ties to China Emerging covert malware can target VMware environments to allow criminals to gain persistent administrative access to hypervisors, transfer files, and execute arbitrary commands on virtual machines, according to VMware and Mandiant, which discovered such a software nasty in the wild earlier this year.…

IP director claims he was skipped over for merit-based retention bonus because of the retention part A 67-year-old director in Apple's Intellectual Property Enforcement unit is suing the company for age discrimination, alleging Apple unfairly took away a special bonus it uses to "retain key employees" in lead positions because of his age.…

Democratizing IT? The next biggest 3 in region are also US headquartered giants Six US titans are ruling the European cloud market, with AWS, Microsoft, and Google alone accounting for almost three-quarters of customers'spending in the region.…

Government fritters away homegrown technologies and has no strategy to lessen reliance on other countries Arm and Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser says the UK has "no chance in hell" of being technologically self-reliant, stressing the need for European countries to have their own access to critical technologies so they are not quite so dependent on the US.…

Not-a-cloud service can accommodate 'unique hosting requirements' - like cryogenic systems Quantum startup Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) claims it is set to deploy a quantum system in Cyxtera's Reading datacenter in the UK, with a view to making it available for customers to access.…

Peter Mattis on starting a multibillion-dollar company as serverless database hits GA Interview Cockroach Labs released the serverless version of its eponymous database for general availability last week. The Register took the opportunity to catch up with CTO Peter Mattis – a Google veteran who is also behind open source image editing software GIMP.…

Imagine the lawyer infomercials – Did a computer hurt you? Call (30) 555 1234... The European Commission put forward rules on Wednesday aimed at making it easier for Europeans to sue companies for damage caused by AI technologies going awry.…

Denmark takes top spot, Croatia improves fastest, Hong Kong flops Denmark has topped the International Institute for Management Development's seventh annual World Digital Competitiveness Ranking – an assessment of 63 nations' "capacity and readiness to adopt and explore digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in business, government and wider society."…

You wouldn't make this the butt of any jokes, right? Video Inspired by plants and fungi, scientists have devised a method to help so-called soft robots travel along tricky pathways by growing as they move.…

Video confs to add multi-sensory interaction and by 2040 maybe even brain/machine interfaces Chinese gaming and web giant Tencent has shared its vision of the techno-future, predicting "immersive convergence" is the coming thing.…

Claims kids unwittingly click up huge bills in games, only for their cash to fly offshore India's foreign exchange regulator, the Directorate of Enforcement, has investigated Singapore-based Coda Payments in connection with an ongoing operation related to the country's Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).…

Russia, China believe in more national control, maybe baked into standards. Resistance is fierce Every four years, the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU) stages a Plenipotentiary Conference at which member states decide how the organization will steer the development of communications technologies.…

Ironic that an ML lab with so many accelerators is such a slowpoke OpenAI on Wednesday made DALL-E, its cloud service for generating images from text prompts, available to the public without any waitlist. But the crowd that had gathered outside its gate may have moved on.…

Awoooogah – this is your one-year warning to switch over, enterprises Microsoft next month will start phasing out Client Access Rules (CARs) in Exchange Online – and will do away with this means for controlling access altogether within a year.…

You take the green pill, you'll spend six hours in a 'don't roll your own crypto' debate Four security researchers have identified five cryptographic vulnerabilities in code libraries that can be exploited to undermine Matrix encrypted chat clients. This includes impersonating users and sending messages as them.…

Or so Akamai is dying to tell us Akamai reckons that, in the first half of 2022 alone, it flagged nearly 79 million newly observed domains (NODs) as malicious.…

House of Zen just needs to convince machine makers to use them AMD put Intel’s low-power Xeon-D and industrial Core-series processors in its sights on Tuesday with the launch of its Ryzen Embedded V3000 CPUs.…

Beta-grade widget respects your privacy, we're promised Cloudflare has begun a public beta test of a CAPTCHA alternative that runs quietly in the background to automatically determine if the webpage visitor is an actual human. Its goal is to allow netizens to avoid having to complete those tedious prove-you're-not-a-bot tests on websites.…