The Register

Not quite a pound for every one of the 13.8 million affected UK citizens, and it could have been more The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Equifax a smidge over 11 million ($13.6 million) for severe failings that put millions of consumers at risk of financial crime....

Crumbs compared to the billions thrown about in US and Europe The UK government has announced the ChipStart program as part of its National Semiconductor Strategy, which will see a dozen silicon startups share 1.3 million ($1.58 million) in funding....

'Tactics employed by Microsoft are no way to engage with us' Britain's competition regulator finally waved through Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of games developer Activision Blizzard today, ending a 15-month saga that turned more than a little tetchy at times....

Con: You won't get a Menlo Park salary. Pro: You won't have to meet Zuck UK government is trying to hire a "Deputy Director for AI International," a policy leadership role for someone willing to work for a relative pittance compared to research scientists in the field....

CEO claims bug had millions-to-one chance of disrupting supply - but it did The small island of Jersey's natural gas supply is still switched off five days after a software problem caused its main facility to failover to a safety mode, leaving engineers struggling to reinstate supplies to homes and businesses....

Nobody minded for 20 years or so, until another student took action On Call Many a Friday arrives with a feeling that the previous four days of toil occupied more than 96 hours, which is why The Register always marks the day with a new instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed tales of fun times delivering tech support....

Given they're still trying to fix the capsule's parachute the astronauts better say their prayers NASA announced on Thursday that the first-ever crewed test flight of Boeing's much-delayed Starliner spacecraft will launch no earlier than mid-April, 2024....

They know they're being watched and don't mind - maybe because Beijing says it improves safety Chinese residents are generally comfortable with widespread use of surveillance technology, according to a year-long project conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and an unnamed non-government research partner....

There's enough overlap that the deal works already. Next: cloud networks and maybe a storage push Cisco has become Nutanix's closest hardware partner - meaning integration of the hyperconverged upstart's stack and Cisco's UCS servers will be stronger, sooner, as their partnership gathers steam....

Imagine a Jira bug report with an embedded video explaining the situation Atlassian has announced the acquisition of asynchronous video outfit Loom, for $975 million....

Vice-presidents, engineers among those scheduled to have a rotten Christmas Chip designer Qualcomm has revealed it intends to shed over 1,000 California-based employees, delivering on previously foreshadowed plans to address its economic woes....

Parts reportedly geared toward high-performance compute and leverage advanced packaging A mystery US company has tapped Samsung to fabricate datacenter chips using its 3nm manufacturing process....

We'd like to say don't panic ... but maybe? 35 vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy remain unfixed more than two years after being found and disclosed to the open source project's maintainers, according to the person who reported them....

Looking for a bright spot? Well, it's easier to beg the Feds for cash now, say researchers Hopes that the venture capital market would recover in the latter half of 2023 can be considered well and truly dashed, with a report finding VC spending in Q3 reached its lowest level in six years....

'If you are challenged, we will assume responsibility' Google has joined the ranks of AI services providers willing to offer its customers limited indemnity against copyright infringement claims....

Turns out secrecy doesn't breed security The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) may open source the proprietary encryption algorithms used to secure emergency radio communications after a public backlash over security flaws found this summer....

Quest for control as AEI alleges Meta's monopolistic missteps A VR development collective has filed a $353.2 million antitrust lawsuit against Meta, accusing the platform of conspiring to kill a fitness app developed for Quest devices once it learned it would also be available for Apple and Pico headsets....

Almost a quarter of SoftBank-owned chip designer's total revenue comes via Middle Kingdom, um, arm China could prove problematic for Arm once more, amid claims key staff from its local subsidiary have left to form a server chip design biz with government backing, and are eyeing up ex-colleagues to help....

Just melt it with lasers, say researchers in Germany Researchers in Germany's proof-of-concept study shows solar energy could be harnessed to turn lunar dust into paving for landing pads and roads....

Hacks, physical tricks could turn headsets into vomit extractors, but tests already show no ops needed for that DARPA is launching a program to head off "cognitive attacks" for mixed reality headsets that could, in theory, cripple future warfighters when deployed....

Dodgy weather results in a launch postponement NASA has pushed its billion-dollar Psyche mission back to October 13 thanks to bad weather at the launch site....

The ransomware gang changes identities more than Jason Bourne The Everest ransomware group is stepping up its efforts to purchase access to corporate networks directly from employees amid what researchers believe to be a major transition for the cybercriminals....

Slated to work with existing 4G phones, though space rivals still trying to shoot it down SpaceX's Starlink is advertising a Direct to Cell satellite phone service due to start next year and which it claims will work with existing phones and eventually provide access to text, voice, and data....

Simpson Manufacturing yanks systems offline, warns of ongoing disruption Simpson Manufacturing Company yanked some tech systems offline this week to contain a cyberattack it expects will "continue to cause disruption."...

eBPF project jumps from 'just a network plugin' moves to begin wide adoption The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has awarded a graduated sash to Cilium, a validation of the maturity and future of the eBPF project....

Mangled mismatch of formats, macros, and VLOOKUP practice hits wannabe anesthetists Exclusive Computer errors, bad technology choices, and flawed processes have disrupted the recruitment of trainee anesthetists in England and Wales....

Interested parties invited to speak now or forever hold your peace Britain's Competition and Markets Authority is asking the mobile industry for feedback on Vodafone's local merger with Three to determine if the agreement could negatively impact rivals, customers, or both....

OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo chatbot defenses dissolve with '20 cents' of API tickling The "guardrails" created to prevent large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo from spewing toxic content have been shown to be very fragile....

And in full swing by next October Google has decided to kick third-party cookies out of its Chrome browser for one percent of users in early 2024, and to banish the web trackers entirely by Q3 of the same year....

1.5 trillion needed in the next five years - some to turf Huawei - and nobody's quite sure where to find it The European Commission's consultation on the future of the bloc's telecoms sector has concluded, and revealed majority disinterest in the idea of making big tech pay to access networks....

57 flights past expected lifetime and still improving NASA has scheduled the 62nd flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and given it the job of achieving a new speed record for rotorcraft on Mars....

One has the talent, one has the money - both want more tech The gulf states and former Soviet nations of central Asia are set to become a new hub of tech activity, according to Anatoly Motkin, president of Strategeast - a non-profit that operates in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, and works to develop their digital economies....

House always wins, er, wait ... As more details emerge from September's Las Vegas casino cyberattacks, Caesars Entertainment - the owner of Caesars Palace - has disclosed more than 41,000 Maine residents alone had their info stolen by a ransomware gang....

Just some building blocks for life - in a few billion years, who knows what could develop? Initial analyses of samples collected from the surface of Bennu reveal the ancient asteroid contains water and carbon-based molecules, vital materials needed to create and support life....

Says it has enough cash to foot the demand Microsoft today revealed the IRS last month sent the Windows maker a bill for $28.9 billion in back taxes - and has vowed to contest the charge....

Those are some fat vector registers SiFive today launched a pair of RISC-V CPU cores aimed at high-performance and AI/ML applications....

'Digital emancipation proclamation' praised by tech tinkerers, but info brokers aren't happy On Tuesday, California's Governor Gavin Newsom signed two law bills that give people more control over their devices and their data, the Right to Repair Act and the Delete Act....

Contractor blamed by watchdog for late SPIDER arm work A NASA plan to robotically repair and refuel satellites in orbit is way behind schedule and well over budget, says NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), with most of the blame falling on space tech contractor Maxar....

Worth it for 20 years behind bars? A US Navy service member pleaded guilty yesterday to receiving thousands of dollars in bribes from a Chinese spymaster in exchange for passing on American military secrets....

Added functionality follows BluBracket acquisition earlier this year HashiConf HashiCorp today revealed its latest front in the battle against secrets sprawl with new Vault functionality - plus a first look at the fruits of the company's BluBracket purchase....

Meanwhile, Exchange Online is on the fritz Microsoft has issued a fresh update to address an old vulnerability affecting Exchange Server 2019 and 2016 while its online service has problems of its own....

Meta also told to clean out election-bothering deepfakes from its empire - or face the music Updated The European Commission has publicly rebuked Elon Musk's X for what it says is its role in disseminating disinformation and illegal content surrounding the Hamas/Israel conflict. And the EC is threatening penalties under the Digital Services Act if the platform doesn't take measures to stop it....

Boffins estimate power needed if every Google search became an LLM interaction. Gulp The recent spike of interest in AI thanks to large language models (LLMs) and generative AI is pushing adoption of the tech by a wide variety of applications, leading to worries the processing needed for this will cause a surge in datacenter electricity consumption....

Can I use AI to write me a license that won't annoy the open-source community? HashiConf A host of Terraform features join HashiCorp's flagship product today, including testing and user interface tweaks aimed at cutting errors in infrastructure code....

Dust blocks light from Sun-like star as far-off worlds meet Evidence of a collision between planets outside our solar system was published for the first time today....

We still doubt any infosec leaders will be going without heating this winter The gap between the top and bottom-earning CISOs is growing wider, with the highest-paid execs having their salaries increased at three times the rate of those at the lower echelons....

Email is just so 20th century Comment Red Hat has closed its security advisories mailing list. It will still share the information, just via an RSS feed, with access free for all... at least for now....

IT folks look back on 20 years of what is now infosec tradition Feature Twenty years ago this month, Microsoft did something pretty revolutionary at the time when it formalized the Windows software release schedule....

Analysts 'put stake in the ground' to say tech will hit market in matter of years Smartphones with self-healing displays could be on sale within the next five years, according to the latest predictions from research outfit CCS Insight....

Bhargs Srivathsan also urges enterprises to ditch the tech Lamborghinis for efficient ride The use of generative AI is cutting down cloud migration efforts by 30 percent to 50 percent when done correctly, according to McKinsey's Bhargs Srivathsan, speaking at a conference in Singapore on Wednesday....