The Register

Beijing's dreams of producing advanced semiconductors could take much longer than hoped China may be rethinking its approach to the ongoing semiconductor wars with the US and looking to other ways to boost its chipmaking industry than simply trying to match Washington's costly investments and subsidies.…

And the largest such group in the gaming industry, says Communications Workers of America Quality assurance testers at ZeniMax Studios – home of The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom gaming franchises – have voted in a "supermajority" to form Microsoft's first labor union in the US.…

Facebook, Insta told to pay up, make changes to data slurping process within 3 months A legal saga between Meta, Ireland and the European Union has reached a conclusion – at least for now – that forces the social media giant to remove data consent requirements from its terms of service in favor of explicit consent, and subjects it to a few hundred million more euros in fines for the trouble. …

At least it was Ctrl C, Ctrl V and not ChatGPT Google is challenging a $161 million antitrust fine issued by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) based on accusations that 50 instances within the ruling were lifted from a European ruling for similar charges.…

Consumer motherboard tech will reside in unit that's left behind Taiwanese OEM Gigabyte has split itself in two, spinning off its enterprise solutions business as an independent but wholly owned subsidiary that will focus on the development and sale of servers and server motherboards, while Gigabyte will continue to manufacture consumer motherboards and other technology.…

System data was exfiltrated during attack, but an anonymous person says it was a research project gone wrong An unknown attacker used the PyPI code repository to get developers to download a compromised PyTorch dependency that included malicious code designed to steal system data.…

CRM specialist to 'reduce operating costs, improve operating margins' as pandemic catches up with tech industry Salesforce has announced drastic restructuring plan to cut 10 percent of its workforce at a cost of around $1.4 billion to $2.1 billion.…

Foxconn targets EV portfolio growth and brings Nvidia along for the ride Hon Hai Technology Group, the electronics manufacturer and iPhone part maker better known as Foxconn, will use Nvidia chips in its autonomous vehicle platforms, it announced Tuesday ahead of CES 2023.…

US spy-tech firm's controversial work with patient data pushed out 6 months due to delayed data platform procurement NHS England has extended its contract with US spy-tech biz Palantir for the system built at the height of the pandemic to give it time to resolve the twice-delayed procurement of a data platform to support health service reorganization and tackle the massive care backlog.…

Happy New year mum... no I'm calling from the landline An issue with payments and credits for Skype subscribers remains ongoing, days after The Register was first informed by readers that it was broken.…

San Francisco is highest salaried city for tech pros (if you can afford to live there) If a new year means a new job, it might be worth taking a peek at the 2022 Levels.fyi salary survey, which reveals that principal engineers are getting up to $1 million, and even entry-level engineers can expect more than $250,000 in the highest paying tech firms.…

Freeze, Muskhole! A Tesla driver was fast asleep at the wheel with Autopilot engaged during a 15-minute pursuit by police, the cops claim.…

All right, C/2022 E3, we know what you're thinking – and we can explain everything, kinda Get a look while you can: a comet that last graced Earth's sky tens of thousands of years ago is back, and may now be visible to the naked eye – or at least those with binoculars – later this month and into February.…

House always wins India's Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has released draft rules for public consultation on its gaming industry that include a proposed self-regulating system for select registered online gaming companies.…

Beijing could dent Yank efforts to colonize Moon if it gets there first NASA Administrator Bill Nelson believes China could control territory and resources on the Moon if it lands astronauts and builds critical infrastructure before the US.…

Blame it on the affiliate Notorious ransomware gang LockBit "formally apologized" for an extortion attack against Canada's largest children's hospital that the criminals blamed on a now-blocked affiliate group, and said it published a free decryptor for the victim to recover the files.…

Suspected purse snatcher snatched 'in error' A US man was arrested and thrown in jail for nearly a week due to an alleged false facial-recognition match.…

Look folks, we need the business - there's a recession on Intel is cutting billions in costs amid a downturn in sales, but the show must go on, so the x86 giant is hoping it can rekindle interest in the PC market with the first 24-core chips for laptops and more affordable desktop CPUs.…

Prices blowing up makes a change from, well, you know If your phone, iPad, or MacBook is in need of a new battery, you might want to make your way to the Apple Store before the end of February. Apple plans to increase the cost of battery replacements for most out-of-warranty devices by $20-$50. …

10-7, there buddy, sorry An anti-government protest by truckers in Canada has been called off following "multiple security breaches," according to organizers, who also cited "personal character attacks," as a reason for the withdrawal.…

We wish you a very merry chemo and a happy new year Askern Medical Practice, a general practitioner surgery based in Doncaster, UK, managed to muddle its Christmas holiday message to patients by texting them they'd been diagnosed with "aggressive lung cancer with metastases."…

How many more straws can you fit on an electric car company's back? Tesla has finished 2022 with a dismal fourth quarter that saw it fail to meet analyst vehicle delivery predictions, fall short of its 50 percent growth objective and watch its stock rappel downward, shaving billions from the electric car maker's market value.…

Despite its name and looks, this is quite the radical departure for a Linux distro The first release of Vanilla OS is based on Ubuntu 22.10, but a slightly different desktop conceals much more dramatic changes under the hood.…

Nothing to do with Washington and Beijing butting heads, says US giant HPE intends to sell its remaining interest in China-based joint venture H3C, despite professing itself pleased by growth in the Chinese market just a few months ago.…

Wildly popular Call of Duty game at the center of the antitrust tussle The battle over Microsoft's controversial $69 billion bid for game-maker Activision Blizzard is due to shift to the courtroom Tuesday for the first pre-trial hearing in the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit to block the deal.…

$29.5 million and we don't have to admit wrongdoing? Where do we sign? Google has settled two more of the many location tracking lawsuits it had been facing over the past year, and this time the search giant is getting an even better deal: just $29.5 million to resolve complaints filed in Indiana and Washington DC with no admission of wrongdoing.…

Large chip manufacturers may be offered tax credits of up to 15% to invest in the country South Korea is prepared to offer big tax breaks to semiconductor manufacturers and other technology companies in a bid to boost its cutting-edge industries and the broader economy.…

Aircraft maker Airbus linked with IT services provider's security, digital and big data unit Atos is holding "exploratory talks" with potential investors - believed to include Airbus - over taking a minority shareholding in the IT services group's breakaway security, digital and big data businesses.…

Owner of our SF digs sues for $140,000 While we all enjoyed a brief holiday season of not having to think about Twitter or its new owner, one landlord has alleged that Elon Musk's cost-cutting campaign at the company has extended to not paying rent.…

New Year's Day debacle strands thousands of passengers, attributed to decade-old tech While weather and workforce strikes have affected air travel in Europe and the US this holiday season, Southeast Asia experienced disruption of its own due to a New Year's Day power outage at Manila's Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) that shut down both flights and airspace.…

After 10 month’s deliberation, abandons current competition as ERP support deadline looms City, University of London has abandoned procurement of a new £17 million ($20 million) ERP system following a 10-month-long competition exercise after it initially failed to understand the complexity of its own requirements.…

Using a gigahertz-class computer to get an 36MHz computer onto the internet – or even just printing Code whizz and tinkerer Kian Ryan's ingenious "Sidecar" is a self-contained, battery-powered Wi-Fi-to-RS232 bridge that enables his elderly Psion 5MX PDA to access a little bit of the modern internet.…

Adopted by Snowflake, Google and Cloudera, we look at why the Netflix-developed table format is important Feature By 2015, Netflix had completed its move from an on-premises data warehouse and analytics stack to one based around AWS S3 object storage. But the environment soon began to hit some snags.…

A pose by any other name would pay as sweet Opinion Information technology has a long tradition of making up new job titles to emphasize how futuristic we all are. Who can forget IBM's Worldwide Head Of Objects?…

Need a New Year's resolution? How about stop paying for memory you don't need We're all used to dealing with system memory in neat factors of eight. As capacity goes up, it follows a predictable binary scale doubling from 8GB to 16GB to 32GB and so on. But with the introduction of DDR5 and non-binary memory in the datacenter, all of that's changing.…

Can it even do that? And does FOSS deserve an exemption to sanctions? Opinion In 2022, information technology collided with geopolitics like never before. After Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, many nations decided that Vladimir Putin's regime and populace should be denied access to technology and even to services from the companies that make and wield it.…

ActivityPub isn't just what we've been doing over the Christmas break Systems Approach Toward the end of 2022, we joined the masses of people leaving Twitter for Mastodon. The fact that Mastodon, building on some earlier ideas for federated social networking, is a decentralized approach, has renewed our interest in, and hope for, the decentralization of the internet.…

The answers aren't much fun either Would you like to use Edge as your default browser?…

Hopefully it comes with a 'new' competitive price, too Nvidia this week quietly, and perhaps unintentionally, revealed the previously canceled RTX 4080 12GB would be reborn as the RTX 4070 TI.…

Did someone say teenage mutant ninja servers? Datacenters use a lot of power and despite our best efforts, a big chunk of that still comes from burning fossil fuels. But what if instead of relying on local utilities for power, these facilities generated their own – maybe using a relatively itty-bitty nuclear reactor?…

Oh, Shapps Blocked by the British government from acquiring Newport Wafer Fab — Britain's largest chip factory — Nexperia has solicited the help of US law firm Akin Gump in the hopes of overturning the ban.…

Sometimes bringing your work laptop on a trip pays off On-Call Much of the world may be on holiday, but On-Call – The Register’s weekly tale of readers being asked to rescue tortured tech, is still hard at it.…

We can already imagine Louis R's reaction Video New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has approved a comprehensive right-to-repair law for tech products – the first of its kind for a US state – though not before some changes were made to the fine print.…

And Elon's still distracted by Twitter, yes? OK, that's probably for the best NASA is considering using SpaceX to bring three astronauts back to Earth from the International Space Station after the Russian spacecraft due to return the crew suffered a significant coolant leak. …

We'll have what Europe's having Smartphones and other mobile devices sold in India must have a USB-C charging port as standard by March 2025.…

Actions speak volumes Mass production of 3nm components has begun at TSMC's south Taiwan facilities, the silicon slinger announced on Thursday.…

There's more than one way to beat the heat – and save serious money Comment Hype around liquid and immersion cooling has reached a fever pitch in recent months, and it appears that the colocation datacenter market is ready to get in on the action.…

Turns out patent trolls don't like being outed by their lawyers Intel and SoftBank-backed VLSI Technology have agreed to end a $4 billion patent dispute, according to documents filed in Delaware District Court this week.…

Have they tried turning it off and back on again? Winter storms and staff shortages were only the tipping point that sent Southwest Airlines IT infrastructure over the edge, leaving thousands still stranded across the US, chief operating officer Andrew Watterson has explained.…

Having claimed North America and Europe, the cloud giants hope to add Latin America and Africa to their empires Opinion When the major cloud providers warned of slowing customer demand earlier this quarter, many expected them to pull back on their capex expenditures until the latest macroeconomic headwinds had blown over. Only, they didn't.…