The Register

Aerial photo scanning tool to be expanded to catch out other unreported home improvements AI software has detected more than 20,000 secret private swimming pools in aerial photography, helping French tax officials bag about €10 million (£ 8.6 million) in extra property levies.…

Indian residents will be able to buy their groceries through the chat app – for as long as the government is happy with the idea Meta's messaging service WhatsApp will launch its first end to end e-commerce service in India, through an alliance with giant conglomerate Reliance Industries’ digital business and mobile telephony subsidiary, Jio Platforms.…

Prices start at $300, but you'll also need a new motherboard, RAM, and PSU AMD has refreshed its desktop processors for the first time in nearly two years, revealing Ryzen 7000-series CPUs that boast clock speeds that can reach 5.7GHz and performance up to 29 percent better than their predecessors.…

Developers say this is not the privacy protection it's made out to be Google in November will prohibit Android VPN apps in its Play store from interfering with or blocking advertising, a change that may pose problems for some privacy applications.…

Judges just didn't buy Viasat's in-orbit prang fears Judges in the US have upheld the FCC's decision to allow SpaceX Starlink satellites to fly at a lower altitude.…

Which would be very problematic in this Post-Roe era The Federal Trade Commission has accused data broker Kochava of trampling over people's privacy by selling the "precise" whereabouts of hundreds of millions of mobile devices.…

Funnily enough, most of those hit were aged over 40, it is claimed Exclusive After announcing in January it was selling its Watson Health group to investment firm Francisco Partners, IBM assured staff left behind from the sale that they would be redeployed within Big Blue.…

Yes, we're totally doing this as a favor for partners and not because we were being sued in Europe Microsoft has announced a major overhaul to its Windows licensing regimes that make it rather easier to use its operating system in the cloud – without highlighting the reason for the change is to get the European Union off its back.…

Snapdragon giant was accused of bribing Apple not to use rival modems The European Commission has reportedly called it quits in its bid to fine Qualcomm for alleged anti-competitive payments to Apple.…

Grab and deploy this backend update if you offer even repo read access A critical command-injection vulnerability in multiple API endpoints of Atlassian Bitbucket Server and Data Center could allow an unauthorized attacker to remotely execute malware, and view, change, and even delete data stored in repositories.…

Claims it has 'the world’s largest' OLED LG Electronics released a TV it is claiming is “the world’s largest” OLED.…

This science stuff is harder than it looks NASA's Space Launch System remained rooted to the pad this morning at the Kennedy Space Center on the US East Coast after its launch was scrubbed by controllers.…

Interconnect tech promises 96TB/s die-to-die communications Hot Chips As chipmakers look to scale compute to ever-greater heights, they’re increasingly turning to waferscale compute architectures to circumvent bandwidth and latency bottlenecks.…

A Reg reader comes to appreciate the value of paper Who, Me? In this modern era when massive amounts of storage can be had for pennies on the gigabyte, it's easy to forget that it was not always thus. Once upon a time, keeping business data safe was a cost- and labor-intensive process.…

Zuckerberg and Sandberg won't have to testify – worth much more than cash for Meta Meta's Platforms has reached an agreement to settle the consumer lawsuits brought as a result of Cambridge Analytica's unauthorized harvesting of user data – an outcome that means Facebook execs won't be required to testify in court.…

Something to thank Putin for … unless you’re the admin trying to implement buggy and fast-changing rules while avoiding Bork Germany has ordered overnight shutdowns for non-essential digital signage, to save its reserves of natural gas for more important purposes.…

PLUS: Trustwave's Singapore owners selling?; Pakistan's suspiciously political internet brownout; Indonesian data leaks; and more! Asia In Brief Senior execs at India's big IT outsourcers are debating whether it is appropriate for their staff to take on additional paid work outside the company.…

Plus: Changing call center workers' voices, why we need to do more to get women in ML, and more In brief A record label this week dropped an AI rapper after the biz was slammed for profiting from the virtual artist, said to be modeled on Black stereotypes.…

Why choose one when you can use them all? Hot Chips Over the past two years, AMD has steadily expanded its computing portfolio. This included the addition of FPGAs and smartNICs through the acquisition of Xilinx in 2020 and Pensando earlier this year.…

Also, Charming Kittens from Iran scrape email inboxes, France could fine Google again, and more In brief A survey of cybersecurity decision makers found 77 percent think the world is now in a perpetual state of cyberwarfare.…

Online shops sharing data about you with others qualifies as a sale in AG's book – and that means rules apply Sephora has agreed to cough up $1.2 million to settle claims it broke California's privacy law.…

On the bright side, top devs are getting hardware security keys The Python Package Index, better known among developers as PyPI, has issued a warning about a phishing attack targeting developers who use the service.…

If it ever gets built, that is US memory vendor Micron is seeking tax incentives to build a new semiconductor fab outside Austin, Texas, according to documents filed with the state.…

This same tech could someday help us discover strange, new – and habitable – worlds NASA is reporting another James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first as the orbital observatory has found clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.…

Double check who exactly you're sending your username and password to, eh? DoorDash has confirmed that "a small percentage" of its customers and delivery drivers' information, including names, email and delivery addresses, phone numbers, and order and partial credit card details, were exposed as part of a broad phishing campaign dubbed Oktapus.…

The memorial 'Enterprise Flight' later this year will also include ashes from other Star Trek alumni Late actress Nichelle Nichols, who for 25 years portrayed the USS Enterprise's communications officer Uhura, is set to be memorialized among the stars later this year.…

Chip giant aims to adapt existing processor architectures to close off vulnerabilities in memory access Hot Chips Arm used the Hot Chips conference to talk about its experimental Morello Program and how it implements the CHERI architecture, designed to address some of the memory access vulnerabilities underpinning attacks on computer systems.…

Companies claim that 'no modifications are required to the cellphone everyone has in their pocket today' T-Mobile US and SpaceX have announced plans to use satellites in low Earth orbit to provide cellphone coverage in remote locations across the US and perhaps globally using existing devices.…

Somebody set us up the bomb Electronic Arts stock has been volatile this morning on rumors that Amazon was preparing to put in an offer to buy the company that were quickly deemed questionable.…

Also: Smiling, eye tracking, and general 'social presence' baked into Project Cambria Facebook limited the visibility of the New York Post's story about Hunter Biden's laptop on the social media platform while it was being fact-checked after receiving warnings of disinformation campaigns from the FBI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Joe Rogan Experience on Thursday.…

Resting place of Novell – and one-time home to SUSE – finds new life in the Great White North Canadian software biz OpenText has bought UK tech stalwart Micro Focus in a deal worth around $6 billion.…

Wouldn't it be nice to have the features you want, rather than accept whatever's bundled by suppliers Systems Approach Edge routers have been an essential part of the internet for decades, connecting access networks – enterprise LANs, mobile and broadband networks – to the global backbone.…

The diagnosis? Ignorance is bliss, but educating users is hell On Call If it's Friday – and we have no reason to believe it is not – then it must be time for another instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly tale of techies who rise above the trivial troubles that colleagues demand be addressed with undue haste.…

And not the fake ones that just try to change their minds Google search results and Maps will clearly label healthcare clinics that provide abortion services, reducing the chances that women in crisis will be misdirected to "clinics" that don't in fact offer healthcare.…

Navigation tool still on the road ... for now Google is shutting down its Waze carpooling service apparently due to poor demand from workers commuting into the office – although road traffic has bounced back to levels from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. …

This, this is more like what we mean by a sophisticated cyberattack Criminals behind the cyberattack attempts on Twilio and Cloudflare earlier this month had cast a much wider net in their phishing expedition, targeting as many as 135 organizations — primarily IT, software development and cloud services providers based in the US.…

Move over, GitLab, this purge begins in October Heroku, Saleforce's platform-as-a-service biz, on Thursday said it will discontinue its free container and database offerings, and will purge inactive accounts because of ongoing abuse.…

Air board votes unanimously to approve wind down of gas guzzlers There's a popular adage that "as California goes, so goes the nation."…

Your passwords are still safe, biz says Internal source code and documents have been stolen from LastPass by a cyber-thief.…

Remembering Aaron Swartz Fourteen years after the late Aaron Swartz published his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto calling for the liberation of publicly funded scientific literature, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has called for taxpayer-funded research to be made available to the public at no cost.…

A small but functional quantum system accelerating science, not search Chinese search giant Baidu has unveiled its first quantum computing hardware and software capabilities during the Quantum Create developer conference in Beijing this week.…

Says it's already used Wujian 600 to pull up its own SoC China's Alibaba has released a development platform to help engineers building high-performance Systems-on-Chip (SoC) silicon based on the RISC-V open architecture, which is claimed to also include an optimized software stack to help speed product rollout.…

'Widespread' campaign hunts for multimillion-dollar transactions A business email compromise scheme targeting CEOs and CFOs using Microsoft Office 365 combines phishing with a man-in-the-middle attack to defeat multi-factor authentication.…

Researchers ran a current through vanadium dioxide and were never forgiven Researchers in Switzerland have discovered a compound that can "remember" its previous phase transition states, offering potential applications in computer memory and information processing.…

Big changes are afoot in a forthcoming version, but they're not fully visible yet A leading Chinese Linux vendor is polishing what may be its last Debian-based release, and preparing for the move to becoming a fully independent distro with its own new package format, Linglong.…

It turns out online chicanery aiming to destabilize foreign nations is a two-way street Well known for an abundance of anti-western troll accounts and propaganda, Twitter and Meta are reporting that they've taken down nearly 200 accounts that, for the past five years, have been amplifying pro-Western messages in the Middle East and Central Asia.…

But graphics giant foresees revenues falling even further in the next quarter as gamer GPU sales drop Graphics giant Nvidia plans to unveil the architecture for its next-generation consumer GPU, Lovelace, at its GTC conference in September, CEO Jensen Huang has said.…

Get the popcorn out for September 13 Former head of security at Twitter and whistleblower Peiter "Mudge" Zatko is scheduled to appear before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on September 13 to discuss allegations that his former employer made serious failures in protecting user data.…

Customers 'more measured' and this will continue, says CRM giant, but Snowflake lifts forecasts Salesforce said last night it was seeing sales cycles stretch and was taking a "very deliberate" approach to hiring after it missed analysts' expectations for revenue growth.…

Tension between anonymity and identity in web3 is being tested as firms seek a way to control rampant fraud Web3, blockchain, and decentralized finance (DeFi) technologies, with their famously libertarian users, seem like the last places you'd expect to see a credit-scoring system. But money talks, even in a DeFi world.…