The Register

Like Clippy, but for snacks, booze, and cigarettes Lawson, a Japan-based chain of convenience stores with 17,600 outlets – 14,000 of them in the land of the Rising Sun – has opened its first store staffed almost entirely by avatars.…

Tiangong's population to double for a week after very, very, long commute, if rare very cold launch succeeds China's Tiangong space station will host six taikonauts for the first time, after a fresh crew reaches the orbital habitat this week.…

Maybe – just maybe – messages and calls from +91 might become more trustworthy India's Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) has announced a fresh crackdown on TXT spam – this time using artificial intelligence, after a previous blockchain-powered effort delivered mixed results.…

Elon Musk meanwhile muses whether Apple 'hate[s] free speech in America' because the company mostly stopped advertising on Twitter Twitter over the weekend was flooded with spam and suggestive ads in what appears to be an attempt to help the Chinese government hide news about rioters protesting coronavirus restrictions in China.…

x86 giant says it will tweak spending for Ohio, Germany plants based on ‘market needs’ Intel said it will continue building new chip manufacturing plants in the West despite a shrinking global economy because it's important to diversify supply chains and expand capacity for when it expects semiconductor demand to rebound.…

Company accused of allowing landlords to collude and artificially inflate rental prices AI rent-pricing software biz, RealPage, is reportedly being investigated by the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division over claims its algorithms allow landlords to collude with another to inflate prices.…

Pioneer Amazon union gets a boost, staffer still get the sack A federal judge has told Amazon to stop firing employees for engaging in protected activity at JFK8, the Staten Island distribution center that was the company's first - and so far only - to unionize. …

The US chip war on China could give India’s chip-making dreams a boost India's first chip manufacturing plant should start construction in February of next year as part of the country's drive to become a bigger semiconductor hub.…

Crypto lending biz wants its money back "as promptly as practicable" Crypto lending firm Block Fi declared bankruptcy on Monday, citing the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX Trading Ltd. and affiliates two weeks ago.…

Irish eyes aren't smiling Ireland's data privacy agency today said it fined Meta €265 million ($275 million) for failing to protect users' data after millions of Facebook users' phone numbers and other private info was given away online for free. …

That basically means more HO returned to the environment than is supplied AWS has joined the ranks of tech companies making commitments to become "water positive" – meaning they aim to return more precious HO to communities than is consumed in business operations.…

If we're going to go beyond the Moon, we'll need food, a way to build stuff, and health diagnostic technology SpaceX's 26th commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station arrived this weekend, bringing with it a bundle of scientific experiments to further prepare humans for life beyond Earth.…

Turing Award winner who helped spread the eight-bit byte Obit Dr Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr, leader of IBM's OS/360 project and the man chiefly responsible for the prevalence of the eight-bit byte, has died at the age of 91.…

Microsoft outlines a workaround while pulling together a fix to LSASS memory leak Updates to Windows Server released as part of this month's Patch Tuesday onslaught might cause some domain controllers to stop working or automatically restart, according to Microsoft.…

Meanwhile reports say more ad buyers are staying away Call it blind optimism, deployment of a reality distortion field or pure conviction that Twitter will ultimately flourish, but Elon Musk reckons his social media platform will have 1 billion monthly users within 18 months.…

Nine Chinese semiconductor companies have had IPO applications approved The US battle to halt China's growing semiconductor industry is having an effect, but risks hurting Western industries as well. Meanwhile, China is fighting back with new investments aimed at making its own industries more self-sufficient.…

You gotta fight... for your right... to not be an idiot "Fun" may not be a word many associate with the IT coalface but in the glamorous world of consulting it is mandatory, according to French court papers that absolve an employee of being an alleged party pooper.…

Manipulating users' feelings on a social media platform? That's our job! Meta scored a default judgment last week against a Belarusian developer who was alleged to have used a network of bots and Instagram accounts he controlled to deliver millions of automated likes to his customers' accounts.…

Decimeter-level uncertainty, sub-nanosecond time synchronization – but what happens when there's no signal? A recently published research paper proposes a system for terrestrial positioning that could give greater accuracy than the existing satellite-based systems, and could potentially be incorporated into future mobile networks.…

QC: Still not actually useful, but it's increasingly intriguing Opinion The UK's national broadcaster, the BBC, its R&D team and its entire 100-year, 15 million item archive are part of a new consortium investigating QNLP, Quantum Natural Language Processing, with the ultimate aim of automating the extraction of meaning from humanity's babble.…

Inkjet is the future, claims Japanese printer maker Japanese electronics and printer maker Epson announced this month that it will end the sale and distribution of laser printer hardware by 2026, citing sustainability issues.…

LiDAR, AI and sensors manage millions of plants, and have greatly reduced accidents Singapore is obsessed with trees. The island nation, population 5.45 million people, is home to around seven million trees – and manages many of them with an enormous Internet of Things monitoring scheme.…

How to make an IBM engineer hyperventilate, or get a promotion: see above. Who, me? Welcome once again, valued reader, to Who, Me? – The Register's weekly confessional column in which readers recount their tales of derring-do that derring-didn't.…

'Geopolitical environment' leads to spin-out of cloud, self-driving and other tech Russia's most prominent tech company, Yandex, has announced steps to move some of its intellectual property out of Putin country and dispose of the rest to local interests.…

PLUS: Criminal probe of Singapore crypto exchange; Bosch invests in China R&D; $2B APAC datacenter fund formed; and more Asia In brief Japan's space agency has successfully used water to propel a spacecraft and claimed it represents "the world's first successful orbit control beyond low-Earth orbit using a water propellant propulsion system."…

Predicts version 6.1 will need an eighth release candidate Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has warned contributors that the rhythm of the project's development cycle will clash with Christmas, so developers need to make sure they ready their work before the holiday season.…

Part bureaucratic box ticking, part crackdown that makes even Wi-Fi routers and smartphones off limits The United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has barred itself from authorizing the import or sale of Chinese telecoms and video surveillance products from Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications, Hikvision, and Dahua, on national security grounds.…

Supplier 'ethics' in the spotlight after Palantir makes multimillion competition a 'must-win' A family doctors' conference has called on the UK's medics union to help scrutinize bidders for the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract to ensure they have a positive track record on security, privacy and ethics.…

Using loan for expansion as political bloc pursues tech autonomy strategy French cloud operator OVHcloud has been granted dedicated funding for its expansion by the European Investment Bank (EIB), comprising a €200 million ($208 million) credit facility to help it open new datacenters.…

Goggles unhooked from Facebook login, but officials still watching for antitrust abuse Germany's Federal Cartel Office is claiming a win after Meta unhooked the VR glasses formerly known as Oculus from a Facebook login.…

Insertion burn scheduled to take place today then engineers have six days to see how spacecraft fares in deep space Nine days into its flight to the Moon and beyond, NASA's uncrewed Orion capsule is due to fire its engines for an insertion burn that will place the craft into a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) about 50,000km from the lunar surface.…

Also, Another red team tool at risk of turning to the darkside, and Meta catches the US military behaving badly In brief NordPass has released its list of the most common passwords of 2022, and frankly we're disappointed in all of you.…

'It remains to be seen to what degree of process depth the offer will prove itself in practice' SAP users have voiced concerns about the German enterprise application vendor's latest "low-code" offering, saying the company had yet to show the level of "process depth" it could demonstrate.…

Keeping things tidy is a thankless but critical task On-Call Give thanks, dear reader – the weekend is upon us and it's a lovely long one for readers in the US of A. But that's not stopping us from bringing you another instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tale of the thankless chores IT pros are asked to perform.…

23,000 applied, just 17 made the list of potential crew The European Space Agency (ESA) announced its intake of 17 astronauts for 2022 on Wednesday – including five career astronauts, 11 astronaut reserves and one selected from its November 2021 Parastronaut Feasibility Study.…

Promises restoration of suspended accounts, despite previous pledge to do no such thing Twitter CEO Elon Musk has decided to allow suspended accounts back onto the micro-blogging service.…

Plenty of top tech CEOs graduated from the country's unis, which are seen as a ticket to prosperity Amazon has quit India's market for online educational services.…

Agencies told to rip 'em off core networks and replace 'em whenever and wherever possible The United Kingdom has decided Chinese video cameras have no place in government facilities.…

Both announce green power purchase agreements for UK and Irish DCs as European worries over power continue Microsoft and Google have both unveiled new agreements for access to renewable energy sources for their datacenters as part of attempts to lower the carbon footprint of their IT operations.…

NASA's IXPE space telescope pays off with 'dazzling' observation of intergalactic X-rays Scientists have reported a "huge leap forward" in the understanding of light and other electromagnetic radiation emitted by black holes using NASA's newly deployed $188m space telescope IXPE.…

Leaders give unanimous support to unlocking €43 billion – but industry says it's nowhere near enough The EU is groping towards a consensus in order to allocate funding for its scheme to revitalize the European semiconductor manufacturing industry, with representatives of member states agreeing an amended version of the proposals.…

Scrapping 'temporary' measure will slash queue times at airports... but don't ditch your baggie yet, say officials Everyone remembers the indignity of having to toss water, shampoo, toothpaste because of some far-fetched airport security rules that flew over their head. But the days of clear plastic bags and the rush to buy "travel-sized" toiletries could be coming to an end.…

Didn't say they were good, though – covert ops apparently got 'little to no engagement' from targets In its latest quarterly threat report, Meta said it had detected and disrupted influence operations originating in the US, and it calls out those it believes are responsible: the American military.…

JAXA hopes second lost lander can be recovered for radiation experiments Japan's Equilibrium Lunar-Earth point 6U Spacecraft (EQUEELEUS), one of 10 cubesat payloads aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, has successfully sent back to Earth photos of the far side of the Moon.…

196MWh installation has capacity to power 300,000 homes for two hours Europe's largest battery energy storage installation has gone live in the UK with the capacity to store up to 196MWh of electricity, pointing the way towards greater use of the technology to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.…

Spoiler alert: court proceedings suggest crypto exchange was a mess and investors will be out of pocket The collapse of crypto exchange FTX has already been turned into a television drama.…

Says sanctions could even accelerate China's drive for silicon self-sufficiency Chinese AI and search giant Baidu has shrugged off the impact of the United States' ban on export of certain semiconductor technologies to the Middle Kingdom, saying it will not have any noteworthy effect on its AI business or autonomous driving operations, and may indeed accelerate China's drive for silicon self-sufficiency.…

DDoS started not long after Russia was declared a state sponsor of terrorism The European Parliament has experienced a cyber attack that started not long after it declared Russia to be a state sponsor of terrorism.…

Takes over presidency of global AI group, and uses G20 leadership to flex manufacturing muscle India's IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has called for development of global standards to ensure that artificial intelligence does not harm humanity.…

Suddenly discovers that game-adjacent tech has its uses – and it's a huge export industry China has declared victory over the scourge of teenage video game addiction.…