The Register

Roses are rad, violets are lame, Taiwan's playing a very long game In spite of slowing semiconductor demand, particularly at the high end and for leading edge nodes, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) plans to plow an additional $3.5 billion into its Arizona fab sites.…

And growing abuse of cloud – because using hijacked Brazilian cable modems to down sites is so 2013 Dozens of companies over the weekend were hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, including the largest one yet recorded, or so Cloudflare says.…

Browser finally gone, but its memory, engine, wails of user and dev torment live on until at least 2029 This Valentine's day, Microsoft is quietly giving users the final gift of no more Internet Explorer by rolling out an Edge patch to most versions of Windows 10, finally killing the browser in all but IE mode.…

Aurora needs a break to get users off 11.x, says cloud giant AWS database downtime necessary to execute a migration has been described as "an embarrassingly low bar" for a managed service after the cloud giant announced plans for getting off PostgreSQL 11.x.…

Chocolate Factory's ad tech renovation is moving ahead, like it or not Google on Tuesday began rolling out a beta test of its Privacy Sandbox software for a small portion of Android 13 devices to learn how its purportedly privacy-protecting ad tech actually performs.…

Looks financially driven, says analyst, but don't rule out bigger moves in future Liberty Global has acquired a stake in British telecoms outfit Vodafone, but denied it has plans for a takeover bid. The US-based group is the parent company of Virgin Media, which merged with UK telco O2 in 2021.…

Quickly, Elon: Distract everyone from fact the platform can't support a single new thing you force on it Opinion As another potential revenue stream for Twitter is held up, Elon Musk still seems to be more concerned with his tweet view count, confirming Monday that he'd undone every block he ever placed on his account.…

How competitive will in-flight Wi-Fi be? Prices, quality among major headaches The European Commission is to probe more deeply Vista's proposed $7.3 billion buy of fellow satellite maker Inmarsat on the back of worries about the potential reduction of competition for in-flight Wi-Fi connectivity.…

Aim of the game is to match Intel and AMD on performance Google is understood to be developing its own custom Arm server processors, following in the footsteps of cloud rival AWS.…

The OS family isn't broken – so why are so many companies trying to fix it? Part 1 Some Linux veterans are irritated by some of the new tech: Snap, Flatpak, Btrfs, ZFS, and so forth. Doesn't the old stuff work? Well, yes, it does – but not well enough.…

Redmond's hype box and Google's Bard just as bad as each other Microsoft's new AI-powered Bing search engine generated false information on products, places, and could not accurately summarize financial documents, according to the company's promo video used to launch the product last week.…

Ride-hailing biz 'modernizes infrastructure' by using someone else's computer Ride-hailing platform Uber has struck agreements with Oracle and Google to shift workloads off its own datacenters and into the cloud.…

Google's finest via the what now? Plus: RISC-V-powered Chromebook isn't out of the question Column You probably knew Google's ChromeOS is a Linux distribution. But, now, it's running on more than Linux under the hood. I didn't, and I've been covering Chrome OS like paint since the day it arrived. Today, your newer Chromebook also depends on the open-source Zephyr Project Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). Here's Chrome OS's history and where Zephyr comes in. …

Amazon-owned biz puts its staff first Amazon's robo-taxi division Zoox will be using employees as guinea pigs after the company completed the first trials of its driverless vehicle on public roads.…

Promises tiny egress costs and a better way to do distributed microservices Akamai plans to turn Linode, the junior cloud it acquire for $900 million, into the platform of choice for developers of distributed Kubernetes applications, and those who have come to fear cloud egress charges.…

Where's the Brexit bonus? UK chipmakers are threatening to move their operations to the US or Europe if the British government doesn't get its act together and release its long-awaited semiconductor strategy.…

Bootleg ChatGPT mini-apps are already testing the limits of OpenAI's policies Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology said on Monday it will support enterprises in building large AI models that compare to ChatGPT, as China's tech giants rush to deliver their own generative AI chatbots.…

Lazarus Group’s favorite digi-dollar launderer may have risen again Notorious cryptocurrency anonymization service Blender, which the US Department of the Treasury last year sanctioned for helping to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets stolen by the North Korean-linked gang Lazarus Group, appears to have relaunched..…

As 13,000 officers managed their inboxes, a certain Chinese balloon floated across Montana … Thirteen thousand members of the United States Army were reportedly caught up in a Reply-All email storm in early February.…

Supernova will prove open source project is not dead – just pining for a complete overhaul The Thunderbird email client – once Mozilla's most prominent project other than the Firefox browser – is being completely overhauled ahead of a major July release 115, dubbed "Supernova".…

Danuri probe is ready to spend its planned year testing space internet, spotting radiation and/or water South Korea's Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, Danuri, which launched in August 2022, has sent back its first images of Earth's sole natural satellite, plus some shots of our home planet as seen from lunar orbit.…

Happy Valentine's Day! Now don't get fooled It sounds like the plot of a somewhat far-fetched romcom-slash-thriller Netflix series, maybe billed as You meets Your Place or Mine, dropping just in time for Valentine's Day.…

Trust us tovarishch, we're just going to do a few more checks Russia's space agency will hold off returning three astronauts from the International Space Station as it works with NASA to investigate a coolant leak issue that impacted an uncrewed freighter spacecraft last weekend.…

That's not what I like Crooks have breached Pepsi Bottling Ventures' network and, after deploying info-stealing malware, made off with sensitive personal and financial information according to a notification sent to consumers.…

A beefy 10GB one-time download that arrives in March Next month Microsoft will start offering on-prem Unified Update Platform (UUP), which promises to deliver smaller and faster uploads of Windows updates.…

Already decimated staff in September Twilio on Monday said it plans to cut 17 percent of its workforce and close additional office locations, having previously shed office staff in 2022.…

Or their parts, at least, which look decidedly skeletal for satellite struts When NASA's balloon-borne exoplanet-observing telescope EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE) takes to the skies this fall it'll be doing so with a scaffold and support struts with a unique feature: they were designed by an artificial intelligence algorithm.…

Officials are using government-issued devices much like a teenager would – and that has security implications The US Department of Defense has been rapped by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General for what amounts to pretty pisspoor management of government-issued smartphones.…

Appoints new CFO, CTO, chops 1 in 4 staffers Quantum startup Rigetti is to shed about 28 percent of the workforce as part of an updated business plan that includes revising its technology roadmap and focusing on nearer-term strategic priorities. The move follows earlier warnings that the company was in danger of being delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange due to a slump in its stock price.…

Kickstarter backers left empty-handed Mycroft AI, creator of a Linux-based virtual assistant, announced on Friday it would not be able to fulfill rewards for its Mark II Kickstarter campaign.…

Double counting share units led to mistake, 'we have corrected' the error, says ad search titan Google staff already reeling from the shock of mass layoffs now have another bitter pill to swallow: the shares due as part of their severance terms will, in some cases, be much lower than first thought.…

Blames 'third-party provider' as phishers drain Ethereum wallets Domain registrar Namecheap blamed a "third-party provider" that sends its newsletters after customers complained of receiving phishing emails from Namecheap's system.…

You wait years for unidentified aerial phenomena then three turn up at once It was a busy weekend in the skies over North America, with the US Air Force shooting unidentified aircraft out of the air on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.…

R&D engineers given marching orders in 14% headcount reduction Arm may be doing well, but its China-based joint venture has reportedly laid off a significant number of staff in the face of a challenging business outlook.…

Still no deal as new Science and Tech dept head claims Britain has 'global-facing alternative' in the wings Among her public first acts since becoming UK science minister, Michelle Donelan has said Britain is prepared to go it alone on scientific research as it struggles to reach an agreement with the EU on the UK's association with the lucrative Horizon programme.…

Also: Russian wiper malware authors turn to data theft, plus this week's critical vulns in brief The notorious LockBit ransomware gang has taken credit for an attack on the Royal Mail – but a deadline it gave for payment has come and gone with nothing exposed to the web except the group's claims.…

It's not yet reached alpha, but it's already breaking new ground FOSDEM Chimera Linux is a new distro under construction that is not only systemd-free, it's GNU-free as well. Its creator hopes to reach alpha testing this spring.…

Bad AI is bad, bad search is worse Opinion "The pleasure is fleeting, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable." Famously about sex but more probably about golf, this quote is now most accurately ascribable to AI-enhanced search engines. …

Unnamed platform boasts three times the application performance of its predecessor, Cobra Atos is building a new supercomputer for the Max Planck Society, an organization conducting research into the natural sciences, life sciences, and humanities, in a contract valued at €20 million ($21.3 million).…

Smart-alec worker found a way to avoid nasty, boring jobs – by doing what he was told Who, Me? Ah, gentle reader, welcome back once again to the comfortable backwater of The Register we call Who, Me? in which readers' tales of not-quite-rightness are immortalized for the ages.…

European Commission satisfied joint venture won't create competitive problems for locals In a world saturated with digital ads, four of Europe's mightiest telcos will soon ask citizens if they're willing to volunteer their phone numbers to a startup that promises to deliver targeted ads while also observing European privacy regulations.…

US Commerce Department can't just let red balloons go by The US Department of Commerce added six more entities to its blacklist on Friday on grounds of national security after an errant Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down over the US last week.…

Atlassian wants it used more widely … but probably not for reporting misinformation to social networks Atlassian's Jira tool last Friday received significant upgrades aimed at encouraging its use beyond development teams, a day after it was cast in a sinister role in the USA's culture wars.…

Emperor Penguin promised a relaxed seasonal development cycle and has delivered Work on version 6.2 of the Linux kernel will stretch into an eighth release candidate, despite emperor penguin Linus Torvalds now saying it isn't really necessary.…

Plus: Publisher using AI tools generated false health advice for men; how ChatGPT widens economic inequalities In brief Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been waiting for the chance to challenge Google's dominance of internet search, and just might have finally pulled it off this week with the launch of AI-powered Bing.…

PLUS: Toshiba acknowledges buyout bid; BTS member Jungkook's hat lands online seller in strife; and more Asia In Brief India's minister for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has insisted that the nation does not target Chinese apps for law enforcement action or bans.…

Neo4j v PureThink rumbles on Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, claims a California federal court has misinterpreted version 3 of GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3) by allowing it to be combined with the Common Clause software license.…

Valentine's Day is the moment to fall a little bit out of love with chatbots Opinion Valentine's Day could sour our romance with AI chatbots.…

Brit AI video tech caught up in pro-PRC disinformation campaign Deepfake videos online featuring AI-generated news anchors spouting pro-Chinese government propaganda are likely the creations of a prolific disinformation crew dubbed Spamouflage.…

You might say this thing sucks At first glance, TP-Link's Tapo RV10 looks a bit like a fallen Omada access point that's now leaking a mysterious substance on the floor. In reality, the white and black plastic puck is the company's entry into the robotic vacuum and mop arena.…