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Unwavering loyalty and devotion rewarded with termination Microsoft has decided to axe the Windows Insider MVP program, which is now scheduled to be discontinued at the end of the year....

Some loved it, some laughed at it, but it survived 26 years Microsoft's dedicated OS for embedded and pocketdevices, Windows CE, has reached the end of its support lifetime. People's reactions are very mixed, depending on where they're from....

Gen AI still in the pilot stage, despite government hopes to be world leader Despite the frothing hype around generative AI - and the UK government's hopes it will bring economic growth - only one in ten UK tech leaders have large scale implementations of any kind of AI, a figure that has not changed in five years....

User freedoms caught between network operators and big tech Ofcom says it is trying to strike a balance between user freedom while allowing operators to protect their networks and still offer "premium" services at a higher price, according to updated guidance on net neutrality rules....

That's what happens when you completely misread the market Opinion These are uncomfortable times for Intel and its investors. All the cool kids are talking about AI chips, an area where Intel has no real story to tell. Low power, embedded, and mobile have long been annexed by Arm. Now it looks like Arm is coming for Intel's most iconic territory - the PC....

The result is a very odd mechanical tour guide that thinks it has parents - sure, no problem Video Totally non-evil robot-maker Boston Dynamics has taught one of its "Spot" robo-dogs to talk, by using ChatGPT....

Sadly (?) that idyllic outcome didn't eventuate even after some very risky repairs Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle readerfolk, to the safe corner of The Register we call Who, Me? in which readers much like yourselves unburden themselves with stories that have been weighing on their minds - because they recall moments when things did not go quite according to plan....

Broadcom buy set to wrap any moment now - probably As the world awaits news of whether Broadcom's acquisition of VMware will close on the target date of October 30 - an outcome thought likely unless China's State Administration for Market Regulation intervenes - the virtualization giant has made a modest change to its practices by shuttering a site used for experimental software - or "Flings" in vSpeak....

Removes references to the NSA, adds KSMBD in-kernel server SMB networking After a typically calm development process, Linus Torvalds has given the world a new cut of the Linux kernel - version 6.6 to be precise....

ALSO: CISA begs for a consistent budget, Las Vegas school breach; Nigeria arrests six cyber princes, the week's critical vulnerabilities Security In Brief Notorious ransomware gang LockBit has reportedly exfiltrated a tremendous amount of sensitive data from aerospace outfit Boeing....

PLUS: Hikvision accused of targeting minorities; Australia's 'cyber-shield'; Huawei's superchip source revealed? Asia In Brief Fujitsu has decided to conduct an "absorption-type merger" of its public cloud operation....

Must try harder, D+ AI models can manage well enough when prompted with text or images, and may even solve complex problems when not making terrible errors....

History suggests Arm's place in the PC market will be anything but 'insignificant' Opinion Pat Gelsinger may not be worried about Arm-compatible PCs eating into Intel's profit margins, but, if recent history tells us anything, he probably should be....

In the name of the firewall, the server, and the home page default, amen The Pope has given his blessing to a free online learning portal aimed at encouraging children to take up software development, while he administers the spiritual kind....

Not exactly the MAC daddy Three years after Apple introduced a menu setting called Private Wi-Fi Address, a way to spoof network identifiers called MAC addresses, the privacy protection may finally work as advertised, thanks to a software fix....

I'll huff and I'll puff and Masimo will blow your sales down The Apple Watch is once again facing a possible US import ban again after the International Trade Commission determined the wearable violated patents held by Masimo for measuring blood oxygen levels....

Minimum of $15,000 per plaintiff, after lawyers' fees. Justice is done! After over seven years of legal battles, a group of former HP employees who claim the venerable firm discriminated against older staff when culling jobs has won a $18 million settlement....

Plus Linux Mint 22 to be based on Ubuntu 'Noble Numbat' The creators of Linux Mint and the Cinnamon desktop are experimenting with the Wayland protocol - and so is the original developer of Xfce....

Decision comes after CA revokes firm's driverless license and NHTSA signal an investigation Robotaxi operator Cruise's bad week just keeps getting worse: Now the GM-backed business has paused driverless operations across the entire fleet....

Fixes came earlier than scheduled as vulnerability became known to outsiders F5 has issued a fix for a remote code execution (RCE) bug in its BIG-IP suite carrying a near-maximum severity score....

First module of new space station to be launched in 2027 Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a project to build an Orbital Station following a meeting regarding the development of the country's space industry....

There's nothing new about HashiCorp leaving the principle behind Opinion At the Linux Foundation Members Summit in Monterrey, California, topic number one was artificial intelligence and open source. Number two was about HashiCorp dumping Terraform's Mozilla Public License (MPL) for the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1, the resulting OpenTofu fork, and how ticked off HashiCorp CEO David McJannet was about the Linux Foundation's support of OpenTofu....

Robust policies for renewables needed to increase energy mix to nearly 50% There could be ten times the number of electric cars on the road by 2030 and stronger renewable energy policies are needed not just to keep them powered, but cleanly....

Q3 sales below forecasts, profits up, and conversation centers on LLMs and GenAI Amazon's cloud biz disappointed analysts with lower-than-expected sales as customers generally continue to look for ways to cut costs rather than spin up new instances....

Gang thought to be behind attack on MGM Resorts has a skillset larger than most cybercrime groups in existence Microsoft's latest report on "one of the most dangerous financial criminal groups" operating offers security pros an abundance of threat intelligence to protect themselves from its myriad tactics....

Bugfixes for Windows 10, but 11 is where the Copilot action is Microsoft has rolled out updates for Windows 10 and 11 in the form of KB5031445 and KB5031455, respectively, which fix bugs in both and turn on new features in the latter....

It's now up to Ofcom to sort out this messy legislation With the assent of King Charles, the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act has become law, one that the British government says will "make the UK the safest place in the world to be online."...

Two new pieces of research suggest center is smaller than previously thought Two new studies from a NASA Mars probe suggest the red planet's core is surrounded by a layer of molten rock, and the core is smaller than previously thought....

Sure, go ahead, make more dust while I deal with a client who doesn't care about redundancy On Call With Friday upon us, the green-thumbed among you may have some gardening planned for the weekend. Before you dig into that chore, The Register presents another instalment of On Call, our weekly reader contributed tale of being asked to get into the weeds of malfunctioning tech....

Google offers AI-specific rewards, HackerOne sees more specializations Google has expanded its bug bounty program to include its AI products, and will pay ethical hackers to find both conventional infosec flaws and bad bot behaviour....

To move parts while making less CO, so it can build more planes that make plenty Airbus has decided to commission three ships powered, in part, by the wind....

Appears to have expanded coverage to at least 30 nations Microsoft has extended its spare parts program for Surface PCs by selling components at teardown artists iFixit....

Do it for India, says Narayana Murthy, seemingly unaware that China, Japan, and South Korea all have overworking problems Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has called for Indian youth to voluntarily work 70-hour weeks....

Chipzilla beats revenue guidance but datacenter biz is still in the dumps Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has downplayed the threat of rival chipmakers creating processors based on the Arm architecture for PCs....

So long as you don't mind that it's soldered down Memory vendors Micron and SK Hynix this week began shipping their first LPDDR5 memory modules capable of achieving speeds up to 9,600MT/s....

Because says nothing like quality medical care like an ad for the 'magical entry into another dimension' Meta has decided that some of its Oversight Board's objections posts related to intoxicating drugs aren't worth its time, so bring on the paid advertisements for ketamine....

Kaspersky first found this software nasty on its own phones Apple pushed several security fixes on Wednesday, including one for all iPhone and iPads used before September last year that has already been exploited by cyber snoops....

After a week of incidents, Register vultures pick over the innards Kettle In this week's Kettle the topic is one that's been much in the news this week - the much-underrated insider threat issue....

Not enough gourds in your product pics? Try the 'Pumpkin spice' theme Amazon on Wednesday said its Amazon Ads customers can begin beta testing the deployment of AI-generated images for pitching products on its sales platform....

Oh, and happy Twitter acquisition day eve to Elon. Will year 2 be better? Not if the bankers get ahold of him, it seems Don't want to start being bombarded by video calls from Xitter? Then you'd better disable this new "feature" added to the platform yesterday....

Nearly six years on from Spectre and Meltdown, novel method steals passwords, emails, texts University researchers have developed a novel exploit that can steal information from virtually all modern Apple Macs, iPhones, and iPads....

Why, what did you think they were for? US space agency NASA plans to run a technology demonstration for space lasers using the International Space Station next month, to test how this could be used to transmit terabytes of data back from science and exploration missions....

Mozilla's review-check firm acquisition to bear fruit really soon Firefox 119 is out with improved inter-device sync and PDF editing, but the next version looks likely to have a whole new ability....

6.9 injuries per 100 employees? Try 69 percent taking time off for injuries, exhaustion, survey concludes Amazon may have some serious explaining to do. A survey of workers at warehouses and other company facilities finds injury rates astronomically higher than those the online megastore has reported to government officials....

A towel is just about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry One spacewalking cosmonaut was hit on their visor by a contaminated tether as a pair of International Space Station crew members ventured outside the outpost a few hours ago to investigate a leaky radiator....

'The company is not agreeing to the deal at this time' Memory chipmaker SK hynix looks set to block the planned merger between Kioxia and Western Digital because the move would undervalue its own stake in Kioxia....

Vivaldi boss calls for browser choice and warns that Redmond might be deflating usage figures Exclusive The European Commission is looking into Microsoft's request to remove Bing, Edge, and Microsoft Ads from the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and at least one rival has claimed the company is not playing fair....

DBAs come in for beer but struggle to find a table, query imaginary world in wardrobe Newcomers to the tech industry may feel like they have entered Narnia, with its abundance of strange language, mythology, and clothing. Now its own King Aslan - Oracle founder Larry Ellison - has stepped into the story by investing in an Oxford pub where Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis and his mate JRR Tolkien shared pints....

Competition and Markets Authority needs more time to consider 'complex case', new deadline set for February 2024 Updated Britain's competition regulator is extending into 2024 its prolonged investigation of Adobe's $20 billion purchase of Figma, upending the software giant's plan to complete the transaction by the end of this year....