The Register

When a grain of sand moves fast enough to crack a mirror, it's best to put your back to the wind After several months of discussions, NASA optics and micrometeoroid experts working on the James Webb Space Telescope have figured out how to reduce micrometeor damage to the $10 billion machine: turn it around.…

Randhir Thakur led Intel’s big bet to take on Asian foundry giants TSMC and Samsung Exclusive The head of Intel's revitalized contract chip manufacturing business plans to step down, The Register has learned, creating a setback for the x86 behemoth's big bet to take on Asian foundry giants TSMC and Samsung as part of its comeback plan.…

Next-gen chip plant could appeal to customers for supply chain, national security reasons Analysis TSMC founder Morris Chang has confirmed the Taiwanese foundry giant's plan to build a 3nm chip manufacturing plant in Arizona alongside its 5nm fab that is slated to open in 2024. …

We need more transmission capacity, and we needed it yesterday The US electric grid badly needs to modernize, and the Biden administration says it's ready to give as much as $13 billion to organizations willing to make it happen.…

GAO says 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster will look like a walk in the park The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has warned that the time to act on securing the US's offshore oil and natural gas installations is now because they are under "increasing" and "significant risk" of cyberattack.…

This is despite a wealth of evidence showing the value of having two in the cockpit Regulators are pushing the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to examine ways of making single pilot operations the eventual norm in commercial flights.…

Just look at the 'state' of them, says UK semiconductor designer, but says float will still happen The troubled public offering of Brit chip designer Arm looks set to be delayed until sometime next year, amid fears that worsening economic conditions may make investors reluctant to buy into the company.…

Plus: He ran a poll 51.8% in favor of overturning Donald Trump's ban... but some must be bots, right Elon? Twitter CEO Elon Musk is considering more layoffs – including sales and commercial partnerships – as whoever remains following an exodus of software engineers enjoyed a "hardcore" weekend helping the tech industry veteran in a "code review" of the social media platform.…

Very keen to unhook infrastructure from 'third countries', private biz after Ukraine crisis brings situation into focus Europe is constructing its own satellite constellation to guarantee communications services for the region, following an agreement between the European Parliament and EU member states to invest €2.4 billion ($2.481 billion) in the program.…

Does spy-tech supplier have a head start in bidding for the controversial deal it considers a 'must win'? Documents from NHS England show services provided by Palantir – which began in the COVID-19 emergency – will become part of the controversial £360 million ($429 million) Federated Data Platform, a move critics argue gives the US spy-tech biz an unfair advantage in the competition.…

If you thought the '80s were cool, wait for the revival Opinion The first hints of an empire falling are only clear in retrospect. At the time they happen, they can look as if they are just part of existing trends. Crypto chaos as FTX falls apart like a giant rotting peach? The whole scene stinks. Everyone knows it, except the marks.…

Partial VM encryption enables the virtual TPMs Windows 11 guests can't live without VMware has refreshed its desktop hypervisors, adding native support for Apple's Arm-based CPUs as well as Windows 11.…

Running a theme park Help Desk was a non-stop roller coaster ride, and not in a fun way Who, Me? Welcome readers one and all to another instalment of Who, Me? in which we recount tales of technical troubles (and occasional triumphs) that our valued readers have been dying to get off their chests.…

'If your input continues to be monoculture, you can expect the same outcomes' Cybersecurity moves fast. New and bigger threats emerge all the time across an ever-expanding attack surface and there's not enough people to fill vacant jobs.…

Also, a phishing gang goes Royal, while another employee at Snowden's old haunt gets caught nabbing data In brief A security researcher whose Google Pixel battery died while sending a text is probably thankful for the interruption - powering it back up led to a discovery that netted him a $70,000 bounty from Google for a lock screen bypass bug.…

With next-gen chips pushing 700W, thermal is the hot topic SC22 It's safe to say liquid cooling was a hot topic at the Supercomputing Conference in Dallas this week. …

Even in Club Fed, that's a long time A federal judge on Friday sentenced former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to 11.25 years in prison and three years of supervised release for defrauding investors in the failed blood testing company.…

ACLU argues for the Fourth The American Civil Liberties Union on Friday asked the US Supreme Court to consider whether surveillance cameras placed on utility poles by police without a warrant should be allowed to watch people in their homes.…

FBI, CISA sound the alarm and detail IOCs Hive ransomware criminals have hit more than 1,300 companies globally, extorting about $100 million from its victims over the last 18 months, according to the FBI.…

Law firm wants class-action status, says issue poses 'serious electrical and fire hazard' A lawsuit seeking class-action status has accused Nvidia of misleading consumers over the safety of the company's GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards due to growing reports of melting cables.…

The point? To demonstrate the safety of lithium-ion power packs when handled properly If you've ever wondered how and why lithium-ion batteries in devices like smartphones and laptops combust, iFixit is here with an explosive video and some accompanying wisdom on safe battery-handling.…

Tells Economic Club of New York no one he knows is trimming IT budgets Corporations large and small are not yet showing any signs of clipping their enterprise technology spending says IBM's boss, despite mounting fears about the parlous state of economies around the world. Maybe it's wishful thinking.…

They look and behave a lot like those on Earth – except they're made of dust While Mars might have looked a bit like Earth once upon a time, these days they couldn't be much more different. One's a red dust bowl, the other is a beautiful blue marble containing all the life we know of. But ESA and NASA scientists have found some surprising common ground – clouds.…

New markets harder to convince, says analyst OpenStack is "alive and well", according to the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), claiming deployments grew 60 percent this year compared with 2021. However, much of the growth appears to come from a small number of existing users, many of which are telcos.…

Staff locked out as hundreds appear to say no to Musk's 'hardcore' ultimatum Twitter chaos continued overnight as employees were locked out of its offices following reports that hundreds have chosen to opt out of the ultimatum set by CEO Elon Musk to become "extremely hardcore."…

Antitrust scrutiny into one of the biggest deals for a private software developer The Department of Justice is closely inspecting Adobe's eye-wateringly expensive purchase of web-first collaboration design startup Figma after making a second request for information from the pair.…

Move for consumer welfare and preventable e-waste as nation seeks to ramp up electronics production India is on a path to require USB-C charging ports in almost all smart devices following actions taken by an inter-ministerial task force.…

Guarantees fixed monthly price – but staffers will have to leg it to the City Network operator Vorboss is offering London businesses a 100Gbit/sec service with a fixed monthly price set for the length of the contract, claiming it removes bandwidth constraints for the city's most data-hungry firms.…

There's a legal line between book borrowing and piracy Two Russian nationals accused of operating Z-Library – one of the largest online book piracy websites – have been charged with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering.…

Amazon and Cisco even managed to sneak Alexa and Webex on board After several delays, NASA's Artemis I mission has finally launched and the Orion spacecraft is on its way to an orbital date with the Moon. There aren't any human passengers aboard, but that doesn't mean the mission is only about stress testing a new crew capsule.…

Products tend to work best once removed from their packaging History, it is said, is told by the victors. Which is why The Register each week presents On-Call – tales of readers triumphing when delivering tech support to the clueless, unreasonable or just plain ignorant.…

Military says they'll save lives on both sides as tensions escalate Israeli fortifications in the West Bank are becoming a bit more faceless, as the military has reportedly deployed robotic turrets capable of firing stun grenades, less-than-lethal bullets, and tear gas at Palestinians protesting their presence.…

Corporate funds bought employee homes, no accounting department, uncertainty about who's an employee, and other baffling behavior John Ray III, CEO of FTX Trading Ltd, who succeeded disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried following the collapse of the once notionally valued $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange, told a Delaware bankruptcy court on Thursday that the company is a disaster unlike anything he has ever seen.…

Employee management tech raises eyebrows in the Big Apple Private security firms in New York City have co-opted public resources – specifically trees – to track their guards as they make their rounds.…

Solitaire and Minesweeper coming to Windows giant's software When a movie or TV director wants to show people wasting time at work, it invariably has them playing computer games. See Peter Gibbons in "Office Space" or the Dunder Mifflin employees in "The Office."…

In this race it's all about flops per watts SC22 There’s a new energy-efficiency king at the top of this fall’s Green500 ranking of the most green supercomputers in the world, and it's a tiny 31-kilowatt cluster powered by Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.…

Class-action lawsuit seeks $1 in nominal damages The Massachusetts Department of Public Health conspired with Google to secretly install a COVID-19 tracing app onto more than 1 million Android users' devices without their knowledge and without obtaining warrants, according to a class-action lawsuit filed this week by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.…

If your device is becoming unresponsive, there's a workaround Microsoft has fixed yet another problem in some versions of Windows 10, a bug that makes the taskbar and desktop temporarily vanish or causes the system to ignore you.…

Comment comes as CEO testifies in suit questioning $65b Tesla pay Elon Musk, disruptor extraordinaire of the social media platform he bought for $44 billion isn't planning to run Twitter permanently on a full-time basis and says a CEO will be hired.…

Is it a super or a cloud service? Users would string together components as required Microsoft and Nvidia say they are teaming up to build an "AI supercomputer" using Azure infrastructure combined with Nvidia's GPU accelerators, network kit, and its software stack.…

But users still need to wait years for business benefits of migration from older systems TechEd Global ERP slinger SAP has relaunched its developer platform with a new name, and bundled it with its S/4HANA, its current generation in-memory application platform.…

Judge tells tale of two men, their lawyer, and a 'willful campaign... to mislead the court' A New York judge has issued a default judgment against two Russian nationals who are alleged to have helped create the "Glupteba" botnet, sold fraudulent credit card information, and generated cryptocurrency using the network.…

Nightly and Developer Edition users will be able to test the new cruelty Mozilla plans to add support for Manifest v3 browser extensions to its online store – addons.mozilla.org – so developers can have them cryptographically signed for distribution.…

Profit down in latest quarter but forecast for 2023 raised Cisco is forging ahead with restructuring that involves cutting jobs, moving headcount to priority divisions and consolidating real estate, despite raising its revenue forecast for the current financial year.…

Ming-Chi Kuo is prognosticating again Ming-Chi Kuo, the analyst with the uncanny ability to predict all things Apple, has said that while the iPhone 15 will ditch its Lightning ports for USB-C next year, only the two high-end models, the Pro and Pro Max, will support higher wired transfer speeds.…

Former BigQuery tech lead tells Reg about data-warehouse-on-your-laptop DuckDB Interview In analytical database systems, the story of the last ten years or more has been about building out. Only databases distributed over multiple nodes could cope with the scale required by so-called Big Data. Web and mobile data were driving demand for systems which scale out, rather than rely on more and more powerful single instances.…

Move over, Mastodon – bungling UK politician's platform finds thousands of new users amid Elon Musk chaos Cast your minds back to the Before Times and you may recall that Matt Hancock was not the UK's disgraced health secretary, but head of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. You may also remember that he took his portfolio so seriously that he had his own mobile app developed: "Matt Hancock MP".…

And it's been sending out hundreds of thousands of malicious emails a day The Emotet malware-delivery botnet is back after a short hiatus, quickly ramping up the number of malicious emails it's sending and sporting additional capabilities, including changes to its binary and delivering a new version of the IcedID malware dropper.…

Scientists have long been unsure of the 'when' of planetary formation – but that question may have been answered Astronomers have long known how planets form, but the when of it has always been unclear. If a Cambridge University team's conclusion from a study of white dwarf stars proves correct, that question has been answered.…

Frustrate enough users and your product will fall. Hint, hint, Elon Note-taking app Evernote, once a darling of busy tech aficionados, announced the end of its 14-year run as an independent company today with its sale to Italian mobile app company Bending Spoons.…