The Register

Converged environment formerly known as Unity 8 breaks free from Ubuntu – and indeed, from tablets Some significant news about what was Canonical's next-gen desktop: it now works well enough on Debian to be its developer's "daily driver."…

There's always a catch if you blame it on trawlers Opinion It was once just an annoyance, even a relief. Now it's paralyzing. "The internet's gone down" signals a halt to all actions, all plans, except the desperate search for reconnection. That's just if it's personal: the consequences for businesses can be much worse. As for entire islands, military alliances or global markets: barely one step away from stone axes.…

Ignoring the manual led to near-failure of mission to escape with precious pile of verified DVDs Who, Me? Wait, what? Is it that time again? Time for Who, Me? in which we invite readers to share stories of the less-brilliant moments of their workplace lives, and how they were caught out – or narrowly escaped.…

Customers are keen on the lower cloudy database prices available after dropping x86 VMware's open source app packaging outfit Bitnami has started offering images ready for deployment on Arm-powered clouds, citing customer demand for the lower prices offered by the likes of AWS, Azure, and Google compared to their x86-powered instances.…

Perhaps just in time to give H-1B holders affected by US tech layoffs somewhere to go other than home German chancellor Olaf Scholz has expressed his country's intention to import more qualified IT workers from India.…

Not keen on crypto, either – and looking forward to consistent language on cyber incidents Finance ministers from the G20 bloc have put their names to a document that expresses concern financial services industries have become worryingly reliant on Big Tech, and their resilience could suffer as a result.…

Beijing has filed the paperwork for its LEO constellation, but SpaceX is already there Chinese defence boffins have suggested aggressive countermeasures against SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service.…

PLUS: Australia to appoint cyber-coordinator; FTX Japan resumes operations; India's PC market bucks trend with growth; and more Asia in brief Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy last week weighed into the debate about the propriety of tech workers moonlighting in second gigs, opining that it's not just wrong – it hurts India's drive to modernize.…

Trust us, we're no monopolists Analysis Microsoft President Brad Smith has spent this week in Europe trying to convince EU and UK regulators - and a gaming rival - to support the company's $69 billion bid for Activision Blizzard.…

Software giant takes some files and processes off the exclusion list Microsoft is recommending that Exchange server users scan certain objects for viruses and other threats that until now had been excluded.…

Plan to scan encrypted content to protect children could drive businesses away Encrypted chat service Signal says it will stop operating in the UK if the British government goes ahead with its Online Safety Bill.…

Beware the Dark Side Dutch police have arrested three men for their alleged involvement with a ransomware gang that stole sensitive data and extorted hundreds of thousands of euros from thousands of companies.…

Plus: Lensa AI app maker sued for wacky app photo collection, Supreme Court debates chatbots In brief Meta released its Large Language Model Meta AI, torturously dubbed LLaMA, which promises to perform just as well if not better than similar systems containing billions of more parameters.…

At least we know who isn't going to suffer Stockholm syndrome Ericsson is planning to cut 8,500 workers, or about eight percent of its 105,000-strong workforce.…

$50k buys you '1,000 unique repositories' that may or may not be legit Canadian communications giant Telus is investigating whether crooks have stolen employee data and its source code, all of which is being offered for sale on a criminal forum.…

Don't blame the kids! Ex-city employee charged with $17k power theft Pics A Massachusetts man accused of using his job as a city's assistant facilities director to hide a cryptocurrency mining operation in the crawlspace of a school has surrendered himself to authorities on Friday morning after skipping his Thursday arraignment. …

rm -rf'ing staff chat logs can't go unpunished, says Uncle Sam The US Department of Justice (DoJ) asked the judge hearing its antitrust case against Google to sanction the search advertising giant for destruction of evidence.…

Uncle Sam still wants lawyer to vet EV tycoon's meme emissions Having been found not liable for securities fraud stemming from a 2018 tweet saying he had funding to take Tesla private, Elon Musk is trying yet again to get out of his "Twitter sitter" consent decree. America's financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, is having none of it. …

It's all about being 'aware' of effect power consumption has on energy networks Microsoft looks set to expand a battery energy storage project piloted at its Dublin datacenter to other bit barns operated by the company.…

Promises 6,000km without regeneration – cutting down on transponders MWC Fujitsu is preparing to ship an optical transport platform designed for terabit networking over long distance, claimed to be capable of lowering power consumption and reducing CO emissions across the network.…

NASA is used to dealing with extra guests: just sleep on the ceiling With SpaceX's Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station set to lift off Monday, and three astronauts trapped up there by a malfunctioning Soyuz capsule, it's about to get pretty crowded on the orbital outpost.…

Watchdog reverses Trump era decision upholding ability to stop ex-staffers talking smack about you A US federal agency has made an employee-friendly ruling that affects laid-off staffers: if your company has given you severance pay, it can't insist you keep its skeletons in the closet in exchange.…

Plus Bluetooth gadget that gives your Android or iPhone the same ability MWC Ruggedized handset maker Bullitt Group has lifted the lid on its first smartphone with satellite messaging ahead of MWC next week, as well as a Bluetooth dongle from Motorola that provides the same capability for any iOS or Android phone.…

System caused issues in fitting electronic tags to dozens of criminals after new tech rolled out The UK courts service failed to see the benefits of a £1.3 billion ($1.56 billion) case management platform after a rethink led to a £22.5 million ($27 million) write-off, says a government watchdog.…

Twin cities? There’s an app for that Sponsored Feature Technologists have been attempting to create digital worlds since the dawn of computing. The industry has been entranced then left feeling deflated by digital environments ranging from The Sims™ to Second Life™, to virtual reality headsets, and arguably, the initial variants of the Metaverse.…

Some investors and creative pros may cheer, but Photoshop giant's not done yet Some investors felt Adobe’s purchase of Figma was overvalued, creative types that used the web-first design collaboration startup's wares were nervous about its takeover, and it seems the US Department of Justice is too.…

Representative even given opportunity to pitch tech to government during science committee hearing Microsoft chose a UK parliamentary hearing as the venue to slam the EU's efforts to regulate the development and introduction of AI.…

Developers and, more to the point, the companies that employ them Opinion Even now, I run into those who think Linux and open source software is made by people living in their parents' basement and writing the code out of the goodness of their hearts. Wrong. So, so wrong.…

Customer with a magnetic personality also had a significantly magnetic wristband On Call Welcome once more to On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we retell readers' stories of being asked to fix contraptions that display confounding, confusing, or cockeyed behavior.…

Cyber Europe cyber worried about cyber threats, doesn't cyber use the other C word (China) The European Commission on Thursday banned the use of the TikTok short video app on corporate devices and on the personal devices of employees enrolled in the commission's mobile device management service.…

Labelling scheme offers developers easy loopholes to play down personal info spreading The Mozilla Foundation has accused Google of incorrectly labelling apps as "Data Safe" as much as 80 percent of the time in its Play digital bazaar – with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter among the misdescribed software.…

There’s no HumOR in cyberattacks At last year's Ignite show, Microsoft talked up a capability in its 365 Defender that automatically detects and disrupts a cyberattack while still in progress, hopefully stopping or reducing any resulting damage. Now it's extending that to include additional criminal areas.…

Continental bloc also greases the skids to usher in the gigabit age in two or three years The European Union yesterday decided it's time to start "laying the ground for the transformation of the connectivity sector" in the region with three initiatives – one of which codifies the idea that Big Tech should pay for the networks that carry its traffic.…

Wi-Fi not? It boosts Aruba's portfolio, single wireless nets are a way off, and everything-as-a-service is hot right now HPE announced on Friday it has acquired an Italian outfit called Athonet that specializes in private 4G and 5G cellular networks.…

Study: Old pacts ditched the moment Moscow moved in The so-called "brotherhood" or Russian-speaking cybercriminals is yet another casualty of the war in Ukraine, albeit one that few outside of Moscow are mourning.…

Multilateral trade actions also aim to stop China and Russia using biotech to create 'super soldiers'. Really! The USA's ban on certain semiconductor tech reaching Chinese shores will likely see it set quotas for non-Chinese chipmakers that build their products in the Middle Kingdom, according to Alan Estevez, undersecretary of commerce for industry and security at the Department of Commerce.…

Comic sans Midjourney images would be eligible for IP protections Images generated by Midjourney and other AI text-to-image tools are not protected by US copyright law since they "are not the product of human authorship", according to the nation's Copyright Office.…

Dariy Pankov accused of infiltrating systems, selling tool and passwords to other miscreants A Russian national accused of developing the NLBrute brute-force hacking tool has made his first court appearance this week in Florida over accusations he used the tool to spawn a criminal empire.…

And jobs shift offshore, says source Merative, known until last year as IBM Watson Health, is laying off an estimated 10 percent of its staff, according to a source familiar with the matter.…

Yes, we have no bananas, and things aren't looking peachy on the salad front Irish agricultural megacorp Dole has confirmed that it has fallen victim to a ransomware infection that reportedly shut down some of its North American production plants.…

Fake donors allegedly padded politicians' pockets, both Republican and Democrat FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's eight-count indictment related to the collapse of his crypto empire has been superseded by a new 12-count indictment unsealed in New York which provide graphic details about the extent the defunct biz paid off politicians. …

AWS, Google and Oracle may benefit as Microsoft blames the Pentagon and the Pentagon blames Microsoft A hole in a US military email server operated by Microsoft left more than a terabyte of sensitive data exposed to the internet less than a month after Office 365 was awarded a higher level of government security accreditation.…

Still not quite as fast as it was in the halcyon days of 2021 SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband service has shown a modest peformance jump in some regions from Q3 to Q4 of last year, although speeds are still down from 2021 before the rapid increase in subscriber numbers.…

Software allegedly rejects applicants based on 'race, age, and/or disability' Workday stands accused of building algorithms that have resulted in bias against Black applicants in their 40s, according to a lawsuit.…

You can add Snap's rival cross-distro packaging format back in yourself Canonical has issued an official edict: the approved Ubuntu remixes must remove Flatpak support as of the next release.…

Aim is to bring entry fee down to tens of thousands of dollars, if you have that lying around Japanese startup Iwaya Giken has pulled the sheets off a two-seater airtight sphere that it plans to hook to a helium balloon and send space tourists into the stratosphere.…

You're going to have your cloud-native infrastructure and you're going to like it Dell will showcase kit for the comms industry at next week's Mobile World Congress, with more infrastructure choices, PowerEdge servers for telecoms, Private Wireless network options, and a new lab for punters to validate network configurations.…

'If we did one of these calculations in our lab, we are talking weeks or months' Supercomputer-power calculations have helped to uncover how certain variants of the COVID-19 virus "improve" – ie, become more contagious – through their binding energy with human cells.…

From free message therapy and on-site gyms to alternating desk days with fellow Googlers Google Cloud employees stateside are being asked to share a desk with a colleague in the latest cost curb as real estate is rationalized in line with efforts outlined by management, and mass redundancies is realized.…

Of course the company that figured out chiplets says the answer is more chiplets Within the next 10 years, the world's most powerful supercomputers won't just simulate nuclear reactions, they may well run on them. That is, if we don't take drastic steps to improve the efficiency of our compute architectures, AMD CEO Lisa Su said during her keynote at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week.…