The Register

Not a 'whiff of wrongdoing' here, says attorney now fighting off Uncle Sam The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has sued international law firm Covington & Burling for details about 298 of the biz's clients whose information was accessed by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group in November 2020.…

Is there a weight watchers for Hummers? As the popularity of electric vehicles grows, safety leaders are concerned that road injuries could increase due to how much heavier battery-powered cars are over their gas-guzzling predecessors.…

This may show a future direction for Linux desktops Endless Computers is preparing a new version of its Endless OS distro, an easy-to-use OS for computing novices of all ages. It's a unique distro which shows how desktop OSes may evolve.…

LHS 475 b same size as Earth, rocky, but hotter, and so close to its star it orbits in 2 days NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed its first exoplanet: a rocky, hot world with a diameter 99 percent the size of Earth that completes an orbit around its star in just two days. …

CEO 'disappointed' by prelim top and bottom lines for latest full quarter With PC makers cutting prices to spur demand and reduce inventory holdings in the channel, peripherals maker Logitech is facing its own share of commercial problems.…

One Hacker Band is a guitar, bass and drums that play themselves We all love a good engineering passion project here at The Register and hopefully guitar-oriented music too. With One Hacker Band, these realms collide with surprising tunefulness.…

Incoming corporate policy may lead to stress and burnout for staff, reduced costs for Redmond Microsoft is to allow US staff to take unlimited time off in a policy change that is supposed to give them more flexibility but, unsurprisingly, will also have a cost benefit to Redmond.…

Advanced chipmaking lifts world's biggest chipmaker, but softer demand, US trade issues lie ahead TSMC beat market estimates to turn-in higher than expected revenue for calendar Q4, however, its forecast for the start of 2023 is less optimistic and it expects to hold down capital investment spending in response.…

CRM slinger's annus horribilis continues as 'father of SSL' departs for VC fund The exodus of senior execs from Salesforce has continued with chief technology officer of security Taher Elgamal using LinkedIn to announce his departure.…

All traffic is equal but some traffic is more equal than others The European Commission could issue draft legislation calling for cloud providers and hyperscalers to offset traffic generated by their services by directly funding telco infrastructure as early as March.…

A $17,000 Xeon chip for less than a third of competing players Analysis After countless delays, Intel's long awaited Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processors are finally here, but who are they for?…

Worldwide expansion reliant on delayed Microsoft Dynamics project as Amazon deal beckons UK tabletop wargames maker Games Workshop's seemingly neverending battle with its own ERP implementation has entered another chapter, as global projects are delayed owing to the difficulty integrating the new system.…

Are flow sensors such a big deal? In any case, MP invokes National Security and Investment Act A UK Member of Parliament has called on government to review the purchase of a Cambridge-based fabless semiconductor biz which turns out to have been taken over by a Chinese organization with links to the state.…

Novel use of waste heat by UK company – but it's still in trial Heata has developed a novel way to use the waste heat generated by servers: mounting them on domestic hot water tanks to cut energy bills for homeowners.…

Are you really saying what I’m hearing? Microsoft researchers are working on a text-to-speech (TTS) model that can mimic a person's voice – complete with emotion and intonation – after a mere three seconds of training.…

Second time this week a satellite-ferrying vehicle has failed ABL Space Systems, a US rocket startup, failed to launch its RS1 payload during the startup's first-ever flight attempt this week.…

And that’s why aviation authorities don’t allow power banks in checked luggage A passenger's USB power bank caught fire as a plane taxied towards the runway on a flight from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport to Singapore's Changi Airport on Tuesday, causing the airplane to return to its gate.…

It's not the anthem – it's the algorithm After several failed attempts to get Google to stop referring people to a protest song when they search for Hong Kong's national anthem, the Special Administrative Region of China has decided to take measures into its own hands by improving its search engine optimization.…

Digital transformation is still a thing and Japanese giant wants to buy anyone that can do it Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has revealed a plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions.…

CEO of Citrix/TIBCO mashup says company has 'strong foundation' and rolls out the Broadcom playbook of focusing on 'top customers' The Cloud Software Group, the mashup of Citrix and TIBCO, has confirmed it made at least one thousand staff redundant yesterday.…

But even a short conflict would wreck the economy, which would be bad news for semiconductor supplies Three years from now, hypothetically, China launches an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. It does not go well, according to a top Washington think tank report.…

Around 80 positions moved to another continent, Big Blue stays silent The Register has learned that IBM has shifted the roles of US IBM Systems employees developing AIX over to the Indian office.…

Legislation also puts cryptocurrency farms in the crosshairs A law bill introduced in the Oregon state assembly has carbon dioxide emissions from crypto farming operations and datacenters in its sights.…

Don't go postal and call it a cyberattack because nobody knows (yet) what knocked out key system Royal Mail confirmed a "cyber incident" has disrupted its ability to send letters and packages abroad, and also caused some delays on post coming into the UK.…

Study warns tool could be used to create fake research papers for paper mills Academics can be fooled into believing bogus scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT are from real medical papers published in top research journals, according to the latest research.…

Open source org called out for ignoring own code of conduct Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct.…

Did a criminally minded robot write this? In part, yes. GPT-3 language models are being abused to do much more than write college essays, according to WithSecure researchers.…

New Budgie and Sway spins, Xfce 4.18, and initial support for Unified Kernel Images A Fedora Project meeting this week is starting to set the shape of the next release, Fedora 38, due in April.…

The coolant-deprived vessel that got them there will return to Earth alone Russian space agency Roscosmos has decided to send another Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station to rescue crew stranded by a coolant leak in their return ride. …

January Patch Tuesday update resolves issue caused by Patch Tuesday update late in '22 Included in the usual tsunami of fixes Microsoft issued this week as part of Patch Tuesday was one that took care of a connectivity problem for applications using the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface.…

Not transparent, not specific, and too easy to say yes to Google users don't have enough choice over whether – and to what extent – they agree to "far-reaching processing of their data across services," Germany's competition regulator says, adding that the tech giant should change its "data processing" terms and practices.…

Anything to avoid interacting with Elon Musk We must have all heard about "emotional support animals" by now – pets that provide comfort to people with psychiatric disabilities. They're also used as an excuse to try to take peacocks and more recently boa constrictors on airplanes.…

References to Palantir use cases, 'unique tools' litter the tender docs as critics mull legal action NHS England has kicked off the formal competition for its Federated Data Platform, giving suppliers just one month to bid for the increased contract value of up to £480 million ($581 million) over seven years, as rights groups threaten legal action.…

Air traffic resuming (but chaos remaining) after thousands of flights cancelled, 'no evidence of a cyberattack at this point' The US Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to "pause all domestic departures" this morning as it tries to deal with an outage in a critical computer system.…

Vendors lower prices to stimulate demand but inflation, fears of recession trump discounts Global PC shipments – desktops, notebooks and workstations – saw out 2022 with something of a whimper as sales volumes crashed to levels last seen before the pandemic.…

Part of a settlement with US Department of Justice after ads discrimination case Meta is rolling out a more open-minded AI-powered system that promises to reduce discrimination after it was sued by the Department of Justice for preventing Facebook users from seeing housing ads based on personal characteristics like their ethnicity, sex, and marital status.…

Open source reimplementation could be even better than the original in its prime Haiku is an open source OS with a few differences. The big one is that it's not a Unix. The next is that it's pretty close to being a realistic, usable alternative OS for ordinary, everyday use.…

Researchers see pandemic boom in computer-related tech spend England's public spending on information technology has at least doubled, to reach £17.3 billion ($21 billion) over the last five years, according to research.…

Complex software packages need ever gruntier specs... and Koomey’s Law awaits Comment A few months back, I wrote that buying software is a big lie. All lies have consequences, of course. The worst kind of consequences are the ones you didn't see coming. So let's look at some of those, and some other lies they conceal.…

At least the penknives are still secure A supposedly secure messaging app preferred by the Swiss government and army was infested with bugs – possibly for a long time – before an audit by ETH Zurich researchers.…

International Monetary Fund report suggests 'diffusion' - a kind of tech trickle-down - might sort things out Asia is the biggest user of industrial robots, its residents account for nearly 60 percent of the world's online retail sales, and the region's researchers created the same proportion of patents in digital tech before the pandemic. Yet a report published this week by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) asserts that the region is not digitizing fast enough to avoid a slowdown in productivity growth, and attendant economic unpleasantness.…

Wants around $10 a month for stuff you get free today, plus plenty more new features Microsoft has revealed that a Premium cut of its Teams cloudy collaborationware suite will debut in early February, and some features that are currently included in Microsoft 365 will move to the new – more costly – product.…

Future is cloudy at the Cloud Software Group After months of speculation, job cuts appear to have commenced at the Cloud Software Group (CSG) – the company formed by the odd couple merger of Citrix and Tibco.…

Zurich’s Japanese outpost also leaks a couple of million records Global insurer Aflac's Japanese branch has revealed that personal data describing more than three million customers of its cancer insurance product has been leaked online.…

Call metadata can be ferreted out Boffins based in China and the UK have devised a telecom network attack that can expose call metadata during VoLTE/VoNR conversations.…

Plus: Intel, Adobe, SAP and Android bugs Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed 98 security flaws in its first Patch Tuesday of 2023 including one that's already been exploited and another listed as publicly known. Of the new January vulnerabilities, 11 are rated critical because they lead to remote code execution.…

Union claims bosses are flying the biz into 'graveyard spiral' In the wake of a Christmas meltdown that saw it cancel some 16,700 flights, one would expect heads to roll at Southwest Airlines, but that's not the case.…

Boffins find Twitter foreign influence campaign didn't have much pull Russian disinformation didn't materially affect the way people voted in the 2016 US presidential election, according to a research study published on Monday, though that doesn't make the effect totally inconsequential.…

Could ChatGPT be Google's nemesis? Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 billion into OpenAI as it looks towards integrating ChatGPT into its web search engine Bing and Office products.…

Climate change, drugs and immigration behind semiconductors on White House priority list The US, Mexico, and Canada have renewed talks on semiconductor manufacturing supply chains during the North American Leaders Summit (NALS) in Mexico City which kicks off today.…