The Register

Cloud backup outfit finds that older HDDs fail more – who knew? Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has released a report on its hard drive failure rates for 2022 which appears to verify that the age of a drive is a key metric for predicting potential failure.…

Not complete yet, but getting closer to welcoming Mac migrants and systemd scorners After almost a year, version 0.8 of the helloSystem is here: an easy-to-use graphical distribution based on FreeBSD 13.1 aiming to offer a different way forward for people looking to leave Apple's macOS – or contemporary Linux.…

210,000+ people in IT now lost their job since start of 2022 NetApp is laying off roughly eight percent of its workforce following the downturn in customer spending, adding to the employment bonfire raging across the tech industry.…

Welsh city of Wrexham has a reputation to uphold You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than British McDonald's branches, so the burger joint is trying a new tactic to curb its patrons' bad behavior – by blasting classical music at them.…

Beijing watching developments closely as death knell rings for company's foreign supply chain The US government is reportedly going to halt all Amercian technology export licenses to Huawei as the Biden administration inflicts a total ban on the sale of goods to the Chinese business.…

Discounts coming to clear inventory as device makers hit by inflation, interest rates and conflict in Ukraine Businesses are likely to sweat device assets for longer this year as they spend conservatively in a weakening economy, and this along with shrinking demand from consumers is leaving manufacturers in a tight spot.…

X2 eVTOL doesn't have wheels but paves the way for sedan-like X3 HT Aero, a subsidiary of Chinese automaker XPeng, says the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has granted it a flight permit for its two-seater electric "flying car," the XPeng X2.…

Hardened versions of apps and services can handle classified information for government Microsoft's Office 365 Government Secret cloud – a special SKU of the suite that was first talked about almost a year ago when it was being reviewed by the US government for accreditation – has become generally available.…

Bet is to use UAV to plug not-spots in mobile coverage with 150Mbps across 15,000 square km BT is helping to test out antenna technology for a company planning to deliver 4G and 5G coverage from high-flying aircraft. The system is intended to provide connectivity in remote areas that are not well served by terrestrial networks.…

Record income for foundry business offers sole bright spot Samsung Electronics has posted nasty Q4 results and suggested that premium products and a surging foundry business are its way out of a slump.…

Turns out even MI5 has to comply with retention rules An independent tribunal has blasted British spy agency MI5 for "serious failings in compliance" and "unlawful" data collection of British subject dating back to 2014.…

Also, JunoCam malfunctioned again, time to get new kit up there NASA has formally ended the Geotail spacecraft's 30-year mission studying the Earth's magnetosphere after months of repeated attempts to repair its last data recorder failed. …

Well what do you know – plenty of hard-nosed regulation by central authorities actually protected investors Collapsed crypto exchange FTX's Japanese outpost has told customers it will permit them to withdraw assets in February.…

It's listed alongside issues like tackling gang violence, drugs, and sex crimes South Korea's Ministry of Justice will create a "Virtual Currency Tracking System" to crack down on money laundering facilitated by cryptocurrencies, and rated the establishment of the facility among its priorities for the year.…

Chips were just Epyc, but now they're the bomb and Intel's inside the tent too AMD will join Intel in supporting Sandia National Lab's efforts to develop novel memory tech for use in Department of Energy (DoE) nuclear weapons simulations.…

Market shifts from volume-driven to value-driven Worldwide mobile phone shipments continue to decline, but India and China, two of Asia's major economies, are bucking the trend when it comes to premium handsets.…

We're not the bad guys in this, Azure empire says with a straight face Attorneys representing Microsoft, its GitHub subsidiary, and OpenAI have asked a judge to throw out a copyright case against GitHub's programming assistant Copilot, on the grounds the challenge against them lacks standing.…

Entity List proves to be a non-entity once Beijing's buyers get busy The Chinese agency responsible for developing and maintaining nuclear weapons has reportedly been powered by Intel and Nvidia silicon for at least two years, despite spending over a quarter of a century under a trade ban meant to prevent their use by foreign militaries.…

You are the product A lawsuit claiming Meta ran tests that deliberately degraded performance of its apps in ways that ran down smartphone batteries has been withdrawn after the social network reminded the ex-staffer who brought the case that his contract requires him to take the case to arbitration.…

Schools' laptops are out if this one gets around, tho beware bricking Users of enterprise-managed Chromebooks now, for better or worse, have a way to break the shackles of administrative control through an exploit called SHI1MMER.…

Salary report shows OKish pay, plus the possibility of getting ripped off and the whole prison thing Malware developers and penetration testers are in high demand across dark web job posting sites, with a few astonishing - but mostly average - wages.…

Ah, the 2020s, in which we fund public roads and schools with Dogecoin A state legislator in New York has introduced a law bill that would make it legal for state agencies to accept payment in cryptocurrency for taxes, fines and other "financial obligations." …

Perhaps a good time to check for unwelcome visitors The operators of the Windows Gootloader malware – a crew dubbed UNC2565 – have upgraded the code in cunning ways to make it more intrusive and harder to find.…

Model developed using TensorFlow and Keras sifts through data for 'technosignatures' from alien worlds Scientists have developed a machine learning method they think could help filter out interference and more efficiently spot unusual radio signals from space, contributing to the ongoing search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.…

Thanks in large part to the Inflation Reduction Act, the dirty fuel has even fewer things going for it now If it wasn't clear before that the coal age is over, there is now just a single, solitary coal-fired power plant in the US that would be more economical to not replace with renewables, say analysts. …

European Commission says findings about payments intended to prevent sales of rival products still stand Intel may still face a fine from the European Commission (EC) after the trade bloc's General Court annulled a historical antitrust verdict and its associated penalty last year because it seems some findings from the original case were not overturned.…

No payment details exposed in breach, says retailer, but shoppers told to be 'vigilant about potential scams' Sports fashion retailer JD Sports has confirmed miscreants broke into a system that contained data on a whopping 10 million customers, but no payment information was among the mix.…

Gaming critters wreak havoc after Pokémon attempt crashes A monkey sitting at a typewriter for infinity will almost surely rattle off the complete works of Shakespeare, but can fish complete Pokémon video games on a much shorter timescale?…

Command line not vetted using full qualification process, says Redmond. We think it involved chewing gum somewhere The global outage of Microsoft 365 services that last week prevented some users from accessing resources for more than half a working day was down to a packet bottleneck caused by a router IP address change.…

Slack said to be worth fraction of price paid, new hires not as productive amid downturn Salesforce has pushed through boardroom hires in response to moves by activist investors to wrest greater control of the global CRM giant, which was forced to cut 10 percent of its workforce earlier this month.…

Plus: Google builds text-to-music model but won't release it, and more In brief Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay, made headlines for claiming an AI chatbot was due to defend a man in an upcoming court hearing, but has pulled out of the stunt.…

Guy's and St Thomas' in London spent two months getting back on its feet after heatwave fried datacenter Last summer's datacenter outage at one of the UK's largest hospitals took two months to completely rectify because of the complexity associated with 371 legacy IT systems, a new report has found.…

Don't throw the open source baby out with the bathwater Opinion The European Union has a commendable love for the safety of its citizens. Armed with the keys to a market of 300 million of the world's richest consumers, the EU has merely to scent danger to bravely regulate. Food, consumer goods, financial markets and data processing: if it can bite the punter, the EU has a legal muzzle to hand.…

Thankfully a veep with a sense of humor pulled the rug out Who, Me? Welcome once again dear readers to Who, Me? in which we recount the heroic (and sometimes less so) antics of Regizens in the workplace.…

MAME adapted to bring your favorite TI and HP graphing machines back to life The Internet Archive has delivered a nostalgic treat in the form of a collection of 14 vintage emulated calculators, now available to play with online.…

Did Pathfinder get lost in Intel's sea of red ink? Or is Chipzilla becoming RISC averse? Intel has shut down its RISC-V Pathfinder – an initiative it launched less than six months ago to encourage use of the open source RISC-V CPU designs.…

But the first rule of Chip Fight Club must be observed. Meanwhile Beijing may have its own shadow bans The talks between the US, Japan, and the Netherlands over wider bans on exports of semiconductor technology to China have reportedly seen the three agree to concerted action.…

Also: a week of leaks; Riot Games says 'LoL' to source code ransom demands; and Yandex source also appears online in brief Russian hackers have proved yet again how quickly cyber attacks can be used to respond to global events with a series of DDoS attacks on German infrastructure and government websites in response to the country's plan to send tanks to Ukraine.…

PLUS: NTT’s haptics advance; Australia cracks down on influencers; Korean Uni websites hit by Chinese protestors; and more Asia In Brief China has stopped recognizing online study at overseas institutions and called on students to get on a plane and resume face to face study.…

Who said workforce development was just for humans? Comment The lucid ramblings and art synthesized by ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion have captured imaginations and prompted no shortage of controversy over the role generative AI will play in our futures.…

'I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that' Those using Chrome on Windows and other platforms may have trouble storing files over a network.…

What's allowed for Cupertino is verboten for everyone else Apple has again been sued for promising privacy and allegedly failing to provide it.…

Man seized in Morocco is now presumably sleepless in Seattle A French citizen was scheduled to appear before a US court on Friday on a nine-count indictment related to his alleged involvement in the ShinyHunters cybercrime gang that trafficked in identity and corporate data theft and sometimes extortion.…

Remote Desktop, domain controllers giving you gyp? Gamble on these fixes Microsoft has fixed a problem caused by the Windows 11 version 22H2 update that crashed the Remote Desktop application on some systems.…

Because this is necessary, definitely can't go wrong The California Department of Motor Vehicles doesn't want anyone to think it's a technological dinosaur - that's why it's announcing its own cutting-edge NFT project to digitize vehicle titles. …

If you want to keep the miscreants out, put the updates in, Redmond says Microsoft is urging organizations to protect their Exchange servers from cyberattacks by keeping them updated and hardened, since online criminals are still going after valuable data in the email system.…

New meaning to sweetening the pot Uncle Sam has put up a $10 million reward for intel on Hive ransomware criminals' identities and whereabouts, while Russia has blocked the FBI and CIA websites, along with the Rewards for Justice site offering the bounty.…

Yes, the Chinese will never think of doing something like this, muhaha The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has enlisted a group of technology companies to help research the next generation of semiconductors.…

Work isn't original if it was taken from a plagiarism engine like ChatGPT Science and Springer Nature, two leading academic journal publishers, introduced new rules addressing the use of generative AI tools to write papers in their editorial policies on Thursday.…

And that, kids, is why we don't play the Emergency Alert System tone on TV Despite being a well-known illegal sound that many film and television productions have been fined over, US media titan Fox stands accused of playing the Emergency Alert System attention tone to promote an NFL show on dozens of TV channels.…