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YMMV, based on where you are Google has been gradually rolling out Chrome's "Enhanced Ad Privacy." That's the technology that, unless switched off, allows websites to target the user with adverts tuned to their online activities and interests based on their browser histories....

Deepfakes of underage girls set off alarm bells for legal eagles The National Association of Attorneys General, the body that all US states and territories use to collaboratively address legal issues, has urged Congress to pass legislation prohibiting the use of AI to generate child sex abuse images....

We're number one! We're number one! We're... It's generally accepted that security flaws in Microsoft's products are a top magnet for crooks and fraudsters: its sprawling empire of hardware and software is a target-rich ecosystem in that there is a wide range of bugs to exploit, and a huge number of vulnerable organizations and users....

There's something very familiar about all this Deja vu time: Elon Musk is threatening to sue another civil rights group for losing him money....

Getting strong FOMO vibes from devs - tho how ML is actually used among engineers may surprise you Almost a quarter of organizations are already using AI to augment human software development, and over two-thirds of them are planning to use such systems, according to a survey from GitLab....

Meanwhile, Arm suffers IPO financial muscle loss with low valuation Intel's bid to acquire Israeli foundry operator Tower Semiconductor may have collapsed, but that doesn't mean they can't still set up shop together in the US....

In Putin's Russia, the planet hacks you The power of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) to actually police the world's very large online platforms (VLOPs) has been tested in a new study focused on Russian social media disinformation....

Four seconds of fire and fury to be followed by eight minutes then... a launch in 2024? Arianespace's delayed Ariane 6 rocket is scheduled to take its next step toward launch today with a brief firing of the main stage Vulcain 2.1 engine....

Switch to Calamares aims to make setup simpler The forthcoming Asahi/Fedora distro for Arm64 Macs will use the Calamares installer - but the mainstream Fedora 39 might get a new, simpler installation program too....

Change your passwords. And maybe give the recycling a miss this time Freecycle, the charity aimed at recycling detritus that would otherwise be headed for landfill, has become the latest organization to suffer at the hands of cyber attackers and admit to a breach....

Authority effectively bankrupt as ERP car crash adds to equal pay liability Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from 20 million to around 100 million ($125.5 million)....

Bezo birds to provide a mobile backhaul. When they finally launch Vodafone has linked arms with Amazon's Project Kuiper to extend 4G and 5G services to more regions in Europe and Africa, despite Jeff Bezos' satellite constellation still lacking any spacecraft in orbit....

Simon Byrne faced backlash over FoI blunder, plus claims officers were 'punished' to appease Sinn Fein Northern Ireland's police chief, Simon Byrne, resigned last night after an emergency meeting of the Policing Board amid discontent in the rank and file over a data breach that exposed serving officers' info, as well as news he was considering appealing a court ruling linked to the Troubles....

Elecrow's dual-screen peripheral is more versatile and cheaper than the old Lenovo version CrowView is a 14-inch USB-C monitor with a cunning folding stand-cum-clamp system which allows it to attach to most sizes of laptop for some more pixels on the move....

UK tender hopes to boost beleaguered local bus services The UK's Department for Transport is promising a 24 million ($30 million) contract to a tech biz that can help set up a wide range of data services to provide information on local bus services....

If customers can slash bills by 'optimizing,' what does that mean for revenue? Opinion Snowflake should have been enjoying positive results at the end of last month. Revenue for the second for the quarter was $674.0 million, a 36 percent leap on the same period last year, albeit with an operating loss of $285.4 million, up from $207.7 million on Q2 2022....

All PaaS, including RedShift, gets a three-point bump. IaaS users outside the US get the nastiest numbers IBM has announced price rises for its cloud services, effective January 1, 2024....

Authorizes strike for voice and motion capture talent at major game studios The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has authorized its members employed in the interactive media industry at giant games studios - including Activision, Epic Games, and Electronic Arts - to strike....

The legacy lives on even though EC2-Classic and its flat network are no more Amazon Web Services has made good on its 2021 promise to retire EC2-Classic - the networking construct that underpinned its initial compute infrastructure-as-a-service offering....

You read that right: a speaker. Because merchants like music, electronic payments, and $8.50 hardware Indian payments outfit Paytm has launched a point-of-sale unit that incorporates, of all things, a speaker....

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk... not the bestest of buddies? An Amazon shareholder has filed a lawsuit on the company alleging it didn't do its due diligence when it awarded launch contracts for the company's Project Kuiper satellite constellation to Blue Origin and others....

One more reason to keep them short and sweet Microsoft has announced billing in public preview for Teams recording and transcription APIs, with pricing starting at 3 cents per minute for recordings....

Irony, not barbed wire, cuts the deepest The risk of running obsolete code and hardware was highlighted after attackers exfiltrated data from a UK supplier of high-security fencing for military bases. The initial entry point? A Windows 7 PC....

Hold onto your SQL Server, enterprise admins Microsoft has reminded users that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will soon be disabled by default in Windows....

When your '90s nostalgia craves a modern touch In the OS/2 world, ArcaOS 5.1 is a long-awaited release which enables this 32-bit OS from the late 20th century to run on modern PC hardware....

Came in wake of the force publishing their own people's data in botched FoI Nearly four weeks after the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) published data on 10,000 employees in a botched response to a Freedom of Information request, another two men, aged 21 and 22, have been released on bail after being arrested under the Terrorism Act....

Plus: AI luminary Douglas Lenat passed away, and US newspaper chain halts publishing of AI-generated articles AI In brief X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, updated its privacy policy this week stating that it may train its AI models on user posts....

Take up less CPU time and memory? What amazing tech is this?! Eggheads at Vrije Universiteit (VU) in the Netherlands recommend that people with Android devices use native apps rather than web apps when viewing popular sites like ESPN, Pinterest, Spotify, and YouTube because native apps are more energy efficient....

Open-book exams aren't nearly open enough Opinion Knowing when the universe is trying to tell you something is a core competency for many paths through life. You can't pass an exam in that, sadly, but perhaps we should consider what links these three stories: Microsoft moving to open-book exams for certification, ChatGPT passing law and other exams, and people are tearing their hair out trying to recruit an IT skilled workforce. Could it be that the way qualifications work doesn't pass muster?...

Could be among the first to come under new procurement rules next year The UK government has begun laying the groundwork for new technology buying arrangements which could become the vehicle for up to 12 billion ($15.12 billion) in spending....

All he did was follow the example of the boss. And fail to foresee obvious consequences Who, Me? Dear reader, is that you? Can it be? Why, that can only mean one thing: that yet again it is Monday, and therefore time for an instalment of Who, Me? - the column in which Reg readers confess the times they really didn't get things quite right....

Just three people were on duty in Australia when 'power sag' struck and software failures left them blind Microsoft's preliminary analysis of an incident that took out its Australia East cloud region last week - and which appears also to have caused trouble for Oracle - attributes the incident in part to insufficient staff numbers on site, slowing recovery efforts....

Solar roller on Australia-spanning race packs an Nvidia Jetson, radio link to an AWS edge box, and Starlink uplink Special Projects Bureau Revisited Long-time Reg readers may recall that in 2011 and 2013 The Register's Special Projects Bureau followed the World Solar Challenge - an event that sees solar-powered cars cross Australia from north to south over 3,000km of roads and some of the planet's least welcoming environments....

Microsoft ends development of free basic word processor bundled with Windows Microsoft has quietly deprecated WordPad, the bare bones word processor it's offered at no additional cost to users ever since including it with Windows 95....

ALSO: Brazilian stalkerware database ripped by the short hairs, a fast fashion breach, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief The latest round of Apple's Security Research Device (SRD) program is open, giving security researchers a chance to get their hands on an unlocked device - and Apple's blessing to attack it and test its security capabilities....

PLUS: China allows first wave of chatbots, India's sun-spotter soars; ASUS smacks down speculation it will quit smartphones Asia in Brief Samsung last Friday announced it has developed a 32-gigabit DDR5 DRAM die using its 12 nanometer-class process technology....

Turns out we can have nice things? The sudo command-line tool has been implemented in the Rust programming language to hopefully rid it of any exploitable memory-safety bugs....

Big blow to blighters' blow-by-the-boatload blueprint Video Efforts by cops to seize and shut down encrypted messaging apps favored by criminals, and then mine their conversations for evidence, appear to have led to more arrests - plus the seizure of about 2.7 tonnes of cocaine....

Memory-optimized beast prioritizes weapon-sim perf over flashy FLOPS figs After months of work unpacking, installing, and deploying the various subsystems and supporting infrastructure, Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) latest super, the Crossroads system, has been installed....

Japanese foundry startup also shipping engineers off to US to study IBM chip tech Japan's Rapidus broke ground on its IIM-1 plant in Hokkaido on Friday, kicking off a flurry of hiring as the foundry upstart races to bring its 2nm wafer fab online by 2025....

Can't have you finding the ghosts in those E-meter machines, now can we? Right to repair advocates have made significant gains across the US of late, but the latest challenge to the movement faces a challenge from a surprising place: the Church of Scientology....

Oktapus phishing campaign criminals are back in action Customers of cloudy identification vendor Okta are reporting social engineering attacks targeting their IT service desks in attempts to compromise user accounts with administrator permissions....

Analyst firm warns that users need to understand what it is they're buying One of SAP's preferred methods for migrating systems to the cloud risks IT departments losing control of operational running costs, Gartner has warned....

Stock prices shoot up thanks to tech flavor of the moment Dell and Samsung are the latest beneficiaries of the current frenzy of speculation surrounding anything AI related, with both vendors seeing a rise in share prices related to their future AI prospects....

UK emergency services organizations urged to consider alternatives What3Words, the website and app that translates physical coordinates into short memorable combinations of words, has been praised and criticized over the years....

Still, it's blisteringly fast and systemd-free too The latest release of antiX is Linux how it used to be, in the good way. It's not the friendliest, but it does everything - and, wow, it's fast....

'Pre-leasing' also on the up as customers try to grab space in bit barns as they're being built The global economy might be suffering from inflation and low growth, but that hasn't stopped the first half of 2023 from being the busiest on record for datacenter takeup in Europe, according to new research....

WebAssembly is getting a lot of hype, but is it the game-changer some think it is? Opinion Beginning in 1995 and for decades after, JavaScript was the only game worth playing when it came to web-based scripting. While incredibly versatile, JavaScript had its limitations, especially regarding performance-intensive tasks. As the web evolved, so did the demand for more power, speed, and flexibility in web applications. Enter WebAssembly (WASM)....

Engineer trumped angry user by pointing to the rulebook On Call With the weekend looming, The Register once again brings you an instalment of On Call, the weekly column in which sysadmins share stories of their eventual success....

The past seven years have seen improved mapping, AR and AI, and the developer's gotta catch 'em all ahead of Monster Hunter launch Niantic, the Google spin-out behind the smash success augmented reality game Pokemon Go, is set to release Monster Hunter Now - a game that even before launch is struggling in its predecessor's shadow....