The Register

Oh, and pay boatloads for the privilege Microsoft believes that solving the world's most intractable problems – reversing climate change, for instance – will ultimately require combining supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.…

Ten-year deal to put Call of Duty on PlayStation shot down Microsoft has once again proposed a ten-year licensing deal with Sony to appease British watchdog concerns over the Windows giant's proposed $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard – but the PlayStation maker isn't having any of it.…

It looks like sanctions – and economic chills – are biting as total trade with EU, US and Japan declines China's imports of semiconductors and integrated circuits plunged year-on-year for the first two months of 2023, at a time when the country is exiting COVID restrictions and the US is enforcing industry sanctions.…

Heat shield sustained more damage than expected, but this shouldn't discourage astronauts NASA is ready to fly a crew of astronauts to the Moon next year after the success of the first test flight of its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule. …

Minister wants to protect Samsung, SK hynix, from having to give up the crown jewels to score subsidies The US government's plan to lure more chipmakers to the home of the brave has hit a snag in South Korea. That nation's trade minster is on his way to Washington with a message that some of the program's requirements don't sit well with the likes of Samsung and SK hynix.…

Island nation reworks digital infrastructure found to have slowed down pandemic response The Singapore prime minister's office admitted on Wednesday that it should have "been clearer" on plans to use data collected by its COVID tracking program from the onset, and that allowing the data to be used in police investigations had affected public trust.…

They've been lurking in networks since at least 2021 Suspected Chinese cyber criminals have zeroed in on unpatched SonicWall gateways and are infecting the devices with credential-stealing malware that persists through firmware upgrades, according to Mandiant.…

Clock is ticking for TikTok and other foreign natter-ware On Tuesday a bipartisan group of a dozen US senators introduced a bill to authorize the Commerce Department to ban information and communications technology products and services deemed threats to national security.…

Relativity Space relatively grounded The inaugural launch of Terran-1, built by aerospace startup Relativity Space from 90 percent 3D-printed parts, was cancelled Wednesday.…

Don't say you weren't warned Last year, around the Thanksgiving holiday, Ohio businessman Michael Larkin received a request for video from his Amazon Ring security system from Hamilton city police.…

Talk about off the back of a lorry Four men accused of stealing more than $1 million worth of products from Microsoft's cargo trucks in the US have been charged with multiple counts including felony grand theft. California state police arrested two of the suspects on February 2, and the other two remain at large.…

Remote PowerShell Protocol users must shift into PowerShell v3 module Microsoft shutting down RPS connections for new Exchange Online subscribers on April 1 as part of its ongoing push for more secure modern authentication methods.…

How will Elon conform to FTC decrees and EU laws? He probably doesn't know, either It turns out that, when you buy the internet's "town square" and fire most of the people who run it, governments on both sides of the pond want to have a talk with you about user safety and security.…

Like 'Bookworm' itself, software manager will have improved handling of non-free packages The forthcoming "Bookworm" release of Debian, version 12, will include a new version of the APT packaging tools, with better handling of non-free software.…

You want to take our place? Welcome to the real world, pal In January, at a Mark's apparel store outside Vancouver, Canada, a Sanctuary AI robot successfully performed assorted retail tasks that would normally be done by human workers.…

Harnessing a Small Modular Reactor could also power 30,000 surrounding homes, Bahnhof CEO claims A datacenter in Stockholm could be powered by a small nuclear reactor in future, if a Swedish internet service provider gets its way.…

German software giant opens analytics up to external sources SAP has opened up its analytics system to data outside the enterprise software vendor's environment, and penned partnerships with companies claiming to lead the charge in modern-day data management.…

Very world-beating funding With the noble goal "to grow the UK as a global space superpower," the UK Space Agency (UKSA) has scraped together a princely £1.6 million ($1.9 million) to be divvied up between eight research programs.…

Please, sir, we want some more Intel is said to be asking for an additional €4-5 billion euros in subsidies to build a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Germany, on top of the €6.8 billion ($7.3 billion) already agreed.…

If you want to use the diagram tool for the long haul, it's going to take a subscription Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.…

Developers of Apache Iceberg announce sign-up for their first product Developers of Apache Iceberg — the open-source project that originated at Netflix — have launched sign-up of their first product, a data platform for the open table format, which has won support from industry big hitters including Cloudera, Google and Snowflake.…

The F in F-Tile is for fast, right? You might not be able to get your hands on a Falcon Shores XPU for another two years, but Intel has some shiny new 400Gbps FPGAs for you to play with while you wait.…

Let's talk about what well-architected looks like Register Debate Welcome back to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument.…

Original mid-1980s OS is still alive and kicking A new update to AmigaOS 3, for the classic Motorola 68000-powered Amiga computers, has just been released: AmigaOS 3.2.2.…

Imagine humans … watching humans …watching TikTok … forever "I finally had enough," a friend recently confessed. "Lying in bed very late at night, watching one video after another on Instagram. Suddenly: midnight. How did that happen? I put the phone down, turned off the light. And couldn't sleep. Mind still whizzing after all those videos. Finally, I got up, turned on the light, reached for my phone … and deleted Instagram."…

That's a bit of a Reach Reach, the owner of the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues. …

China and Russia won't be jammin' US sats no more Boeing said on Tuesday its anti-jam ground-based satellite communications system had passed the necessary tests to validate it for use in the U.S. Space Force’s Pathfinder program.…

Minister wants to release 'one of the largest datasets in the world' India's ebullient tech minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, has teased the release of guardrails for AI, plus publication of "one of the largest publicly assembled datasets in the world" as part of a forthcoming IndiaAI program that will explain how the nation puts artificial intelligence to work.…

Contractors left hanging while principals splurged on luxury goods Three of the principals of an Australian scheme that offered free payroll services to tech contractors have been found guilty of conspiring to defraud the Commonwealth and conspiring to deal with the proceeds of crime.…

Leaders accuse Biden administration of neo-McCarthyism The Chinese government will take direct responsibility for technology development, as part of its push to end the nation's reliance on western technology and promote innovation at home.…

Don't worry... 'The good will outweigh the bad, by at least tenfold. Probably closer to 100x' LLaMA, Meta's latest large language model, has leaked online and is available for download, despite attempts to limit access for research purposes only.…

Customer info safe, or so we're told Acer has confirmed someone broke into one of its servers after a miscreant put up for sale a 160GB database of what's claimed to be the Taiwanese PC maker's confidential information.…

Workaround: Throw away kit? Hope there's a patch? If you're still using post-support DrayTek Vigor routers it may be time to junk them, see if they can be patched, or come up with some other workaround, as a malware variant is setting up shop in the kit.…

Second time before Congress a charm? A group of 16 US lawmakers today reintroduced a bill that would ban the nation's federal agencies from using facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technologies.…

Sorry, you're Zucked Meta Platforms, parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, architect of a metaverse, aggregator of eyeballs, is said to be preparing to layoff employees again.…

At a planned 25k square miles, it's said to be largest net of its kind yet The US Air Force has awarded a contract to build a massive 25,000 square mile mobile ad-hoc network spanning the region of the Great Plains that houses the country's fleet of intercontinental ballistic missile silos.…

This internet soap opera continues Updated A Twitter employee unable to work out if he still had a job - even after a call to the head of HR - took to tweeting CEO Elon Musk to resolve his employment status. It went about as well as expected - if not worse.…

That's one small step for upstart, with many, many more to go A US startup proposing to site datacenters on Earth's Moon has successfully closed its seed funding round, claiming it was oversubscribed.…

Does it have in-app purchases? You betcha Working on a Mac but preference or necessity driving you to Microsoft's Outlook? In an unexpected move, the software giant is making its native MacOS mail client free to use, meaning you won't need a subscription to Microsoft 365 or an Office license to fire it up.…

Collaboration with OpenAI tech also threatens AI-generated sales emails, Slack messages, customer Q&As Salesforce is attempting to jump on the ChatGPT bandwagon with a slew of product updates based on application of the language model to its CRM software estate.…

Desk-sharing scheme adds more bums on seats, claims CEO Google’s CEO described the office environment for its cloud staff in the US as a “ghost town” to explain why he is backing a desk-sharing pilot scheme for staff at five locations across the country.…

Break out the tinfoil hats: Boffins' experimental tech improves computer mind reading There's a lot of noise to signal in the machine-learning model world, but this demo is genuinely impressive – or scary, if you are given to recreationally climbing into MRI scanners.…

Playing catch-up with Western allies, federal government to initiate rip 'n replace for mobile operators The nation of Germany looks set to belatedly join the ban on Huawei and ZTE equipment being used in national telecoms networks, after years of stubbornly resisting pressure from the US to comply.…

'Firemode reset' sees Interstellar Boundary Explorer back on the job NASA engineers have managed to restore the Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft to working condition by using the oldest trick in the computing book.…

Admirer - said to be Baring Equity Asia - couldn't raise funds in current climate DXC Technology has ended discussions with a suitor that expressed interest in taking over the beleaguered infrastructure services and consultancy but was unable to raise sufficient funds in these uncertain economic times.…

DBs aren't just about theory – they are complex systems designed to perform demanding tasks Register Debate Welcome back to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument.…

Who needs deepfakes when you've got makeup and 'element of surprise'? Pro-Russian scammers using social engineering and impersonation to trick prominent western commentators into conducting recorded video calls have kicked these campaigns "into high gear" over the past 12 months, according to security researchers.…

Microsoft doesn't even want you to use these unstable releases, will migrate you to them anyway Microsoft has created a fourth channel for test versions of its Windows operating system and recommended Windows Insiders don't use it – even though they'll be migrated to it by default.…

Retirement of Windows 10 should eventually drive recovery in 2024 and 2025 The PC and tablet markets are in such a bad slump that analyst firm IDC has lowered its 2023 shipment forecast by 26 million.…

Software scans to give rovers a clue AI-infused algorithms developed to find signs of life in extreme terrestrial environments could help robotic rovers sent to other planets search for signs of alien life, scientists suggested in new research published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.…