The Register

Take it Huawei? Not if they don't think Feds will refund them FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel has warned US Congress that telco networks and service providers are not going to start projects to rip and replace kit made by ZTE and Huawei unless they are assured of federal reimbursement.…

Young mother only 10 million years old appears to have twins The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered evidence of planets emerging from a disk of dust and gas surrounding a young star nearly 200 light years from our solar system.…

IRIS² program aims to get the EU off other countries' infrastructure A bunch of European space and telecoms companies have banded together to answer the EU's call for a satellite constellation to guarantee "communications sovereignty" for the region.…

How to appease antitrust regulators by looking like you're doing something Microsoft is putting forward a plan to charge customers different prices for Office if it does or doesn’t come with Teams - the latest twist in its campaign to head off an EU antitrust probe at the pass.…

Putin FOSS to work when Microsoft et al abandoned pariah state Russia tops the global table for downloads of open source software over the last quarter, according to a survey tracking around 2,000 FOSS projects.…

Weeks after outsourcer admits 'cyber incident' more warnings issued Capita is telling pension customers that some data contained within its systems was potentially accessed when criminals broke into the outsourcing giant's tech infrastructure earlier this year.…

A preview of what Uranus Orbiter and Probe might find in the 2040s NASA revealed on Thursday that four of the largest moons of ice giant Uranus likely contain a layer of water beneath their surface.…

LLVM champ Chris Lattner is at the helm, so consider us intrigued Modular, an AI startup with above-average technical cred, has unveiled a programming language called Mojo that aspires to combine the usability of Python with the speed of C.…

National Savings & Investment contracting for massive tech deals as customers complain of 2FA failure Updated The UK National Savings and Investment bank is being bombarded with complaints over failing online security and authentication features which customers say have locked them out of their accounts.…

Jumping Jack had a gas, gas, gas when his wires crossed at the worst moment On Call The "P6 rule" states that Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. So as you prepare for the imminent weekend, The Register invites readers to run an eyeball over another edition of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support chores that involve another P – as in "going pear-shaped."…

Slack GPT and Einstein GPT for Salesforce users currently under development Slack previewed generative AI tools on Thursday, aimed at helping boost worker productivity by automatically summarizing text in channels users might miss, or even drafting messages of a specific tone or length. …

Indian software giant thinks you’ll ignore that in favor of the many tracker-killers India's Zoho has decided the world needs a more secure and private browser, so has created one called Ulaa.…

Two years ago the big four hired 243,000 workers. Last year that fell to 82,000 Having spent 2022 struggling to retain workers in the face of high staff attrition rates, India's top four IT outsourcers have since slowed hiring and are worried their workers may not have enough to do.…

Pot, meet kettle, both containing weak sauce The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center of China and local infosec outfit 360 Total Security have conducted an investigation called "The Matrix" that found the CIA conducts offensive cyber ops, and labelled the United States an "Empire of Hacking".…

Who would have thought there was anything dodgy about selling pictures of cartoon apes? The former head of product at OpenSea, the largest online marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has been convicted of wire fraud in the US Department of Justice's first-ever prosecution for insider trading of the digital assets.…

Exec begged judge for leniency – and it worked Joe Sullivan won't serve any serious time behind bars for his role in covering up Uber's 2016 computer security breach and trying to pass off a ransom payment as a bug bounty.…

Don't let the robots take your money! That's the IRS's job A bipartisan group of US senators has urged the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to "use all the tools at its disposal to counter AI-generated tax scams," and protect American taxpayers from money-grubbing crooks using chatbots and deepfakes to dupe marks.…

NVMe storage should mean better performance for data-intensive workloads, says tech giant Microsoft is rolling out two larger memory-optimized Azure instances that offer faster response times and throughput for remote storage operations, making use of both Azure managed disks and Intel's Xeon "Ice Lake" processors.…

Just like turning 40, eh Arvind? IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna, isn't telling his employees that they have to return to the office, but he did warn that continuing to work remotely could mean being passed over for promotion or career advancement. …

Review will also look at barriers to entry where hyperscalers hold all the cards Britain's competition watchdog is to cast an eye over the development and use of AI, saying it wants to ensure that innovation in the field proceeds in a way that benefits consumers, businesses and the wider UK economy. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears to be thinking along similar lines.…

Thanks for your service, now push off Web commerce platform Shopify on Thursday announced a 25 percent increase in revenue followed by a 20 percent decrease in staff.…

Twelve-year interaction ended with a bang Scientists have concluded that an unexplained optical burst from the Milky Way galaxy provides evidence of a star eating up its local giant planet.…

For the event itself, it's like the COVID-19 pandemic was all just a long-gone bad dream RSA Conference The 32nd RSA Conference is done. The halls are now empty, bars and restaurants are thankfully free of tech bros, and attendees have dispersed back to their homes.…

Deals between Zuckercorp + FTC in 2012 and 2020 are being ignored, so time to get stricter, says commish The US Federal Trade Commission is preparing to take action against Facebook parent company Meta for a third time over claims it failed to protect user privacy, as required under a 2020 agreement Meta made with the regulator.…

That's certainly one of the stranger headlines we've written Cult dad rockers the Pixies have apologized to a Google Pixel owner for repeatedly turning off their smartphone's alarm in the morning, presumably when they have important stuff to do.…

Lawyers quip: 'The definition of hell is European legislation with American enforcement' A major decision on GDPR compensation rights includes what looks like a nasty surprise for many businesses: there is no threshold that non-material damage needs to pass before data subjects can make a claim.…

And $70B in share repurchases didn't calm matters Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai's bumper 2022 pay award and the company's plan to repurchase shares amid a ferocious cost-cutting campaign is upsetting some in the workforce.…

Yes, maybe ChatGPT can write them a better earnings report next time Qualcomm's top line sagged further during the second quarter of the chipmaker's fiscal 2023 with the slump in demand for smartphones set to continue.…

For those envious of Rust and Cargo The recent debut of a Python tool called Rye has raised hopes that the programming language's long standing setup and packaging shortcomings may be solvable.…

Paper details previously unknown step in process of converting light energy to chemical energy Photosynthesis – the process by which plants and some other organisms convert sunlight to food – is complex, and scientists don't fully understand how it works. But a team of researchers led by the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory reckon they're closer to solving the mystery – they captured an image of the atoms inside cyanobacteria undergoing photosynthesis just as the tiny organism released oxygen.…

Climbing the software stack, new owner sees IBM and ServiceNow as rivals Interview It is nearly three years since Micro Focus recorded a $1bn plus loss, owing to COVID-19 disruption and the fall-out from the $8.8bn acquisition of HP Software in 2017. None of this stopped content management and enterprise integration vendor OpenText from paying $6 billion for the company in August 2022.…

It's 2023 and tech giants have discovered email and unified dashboards You might think that the biggest players in the information technology industry might be good at providing their customers with important and timely information, but tragically you would be misguided in that belief. Thankfully, on Wednesday Microsoft and Amazon Web Services both announced fixes to their surprisingly unsophisticated factoid feeds.…

And a reminder that experience points matter a lot Python is still a top choice for software developers, beating out other programming languages, according to a widely respected industry poll.…

Digi-dollars are toxic in many ways and the administration wants the sector needs to clean up its act The Biden Administration on Tuesday detailed a proposed tax designed to counter the environmental and economic effects of cryptocurrency mining.…

UK not included, too busy enjoying Brexit's sunlit uplands instead A collaboration between TSMC, NXP Semiconductor, Bosch, and Infineon would see the construction of a new fab in Saxony, Germany valued at as much as $11 billion (€10 billion).…

Hock Tan thinks hybrid multicloud can be made much easier to use Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has promised to spend $2 billion a year on research and development at VMware.…

Buy now, even services or second-hand kit, and pay in 2024 … if you feel lucky Cisco Capital, the networking giant's finance limb, announced on Wednesday it will sell you stuff for the next three months and not ask for any money until 2024.…

Human Rights Watch details mass surveillance and repression Authorities in the Chinese province of Xinjiang have conducted more than 11 million searches of residents' devices, to check for the presence of 50,000 items considered indicators of dissent or terror. Among them is the Quran – the central text of Islam.…

Two Limeys and two Yanks in immigration situation conversation Register Kettle The H-1B visa system, which is used by businesses to import skilled foreign workers into America, has seen a massive jump in applications. It's a big enough surge to get the attention of Uncle Sam.…

'But they're gonna take my thumbs' hits different in 2023 Google wants to take us further into a passwordless future by allowing personal account holders to login using passkeys rather than using passphrases and multifactor authentication (MFA).…

Who would have thought crims would try using Facebook to fool people? Meta says it has shut down over 1,000 links related to ChatGPT that lead its users to malware, as criminals seek to profit from the current craze for generative AI.…

VR headset maker and software dev clash over blame Drone-racing goggles from Orqa stopped working over the weekend due to what was alleged by the manufacturer to be a "ransomware time-bomb" embedded in the hardware's bootloader by a "greedy former contractor." Or as contractor put it, the code was provided under license, which had now expired, leading to the shut down of kit.…

'The get-out-of-jail-free card option has been removed' as one expert put it Merck's insurers can't use an "act of war" clause to deny the pharmaceutical giant an enormous payout to clean up its NotPetya infection, a court has ruled.…

Microsoft OS stutters with Japanese and Chinese languages If some of the applications on your Windows 11 systems are having problems with features like speech recognition and handwriting when using Japanese or Chinese languages, it's likely linked to recent updates to the operating system.…

As blue check marks start showing up in Gmail Logowatch Google plans to retire the padlock icon that appears in the Chrome status bar during a secure HTTPS web browsing session because the interface graphic has outlived its usefulness.…

We thought you loved us, cries someone in a fab somewhere, probably Worldwide shipments of silicon wafers slid nine percent during the first quarter of 2023 versus Q1 2021, and fell 11.3 percent from Q1 2022, the SEMI's Silicon Manufacturing Group's (SMG) reported this week.…

Anyone else still has to pay for once-free service to help social network pay its bills The paywall around Twitter's API has crumbled slightly, with the bird site U-turning for organizations providing a public service.…

Always Be Closing – deals to grab that sweet, sweet renminbi The US semiconductor industry wants to have its cake and eat it, or rather it wants to have continued access to the huge Chinese market despite Washington’s ongoing campaign to limit Beijing’s access to advanced chip technology.…

Neither war nor bad sensors nor a nautical journey will keep this probe from building a 3D map of space It's been a decade since it was announced, but the Euclid mission to build a 3D map of the universe is finally getting close to launch with the spacecraft landing in Florida ahead of an expected July liftoff.…

It's not an NFT either! Albert Einstein is – to put it mildly – a bit of a ledge so science fans will be interested to note that a handwritten essay by the granddaddy of modern physics is being flogged by Boston-based RR Auction.…