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No word on motivation but pair face up to 5 years in the cooler Two men this week confessed to deliberately bypassing testing protocols that are essential to keeping nuclear power plants safe. This happened not once, not twice, but 29 times....

UK regulator lists series of potential remedies for anti-competitive practices early on in probe The UK's competition regulator is drafting remedies that could have big implications for Microsoft and AWS, should behavior that prevents or restricts customers from switching and using multi-clouds be identified....

Palantir users' endorsement letter could lay the ground for Palantir win The controversial Federated Data Platform for England's health service looks set for more delays as the government body awarding the 480 million ($582 million) contract - for which Palantir is considered a frontrunner - failed to confirm the winner this week....

Mangled spreadsheets mean government was asleep on the job and should be held to account The Royal College of Anaesthetists is to consider whether it has confidence in the UK National Health Service's recruitment process, following revelations that it made serious mistakes in selecting candidates owing to inappropriate and poorly managed use of Microsoft Excel....

The difference is especially stark at 2:00 AM On Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's weekly column featuring readers' turbulent tales of their tech support troubles. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mal" whose first job in tech was programming a mainframe at a small mutual financial services outfit....

India's big four outsourcers scored record deals in Q2, but revenue didn't reflect those successes Infosys and Wipro have decided to skip hiring graduates this year as part of their "utilization optimization" strategies, after a quarter that brought both record deals amid continued macroeconomic uncertainty for India's big four IT services outfits....

Workstation CPUs hit 96 cores, high-end desktops get 64. Prices nearly as high as clock speeds AMD has launched 7,000-series Ryzen Threadripper processors, bringing its 5nm Zen 4 cores to high-end desktops and workstations....

Suggests modular interiors for the frequent flyer in a hurry to take off in their own 737 You know how it goes: you want a private jet, but all the fuss and bother of deciding how to furnish it is just so off-putting. We here at Vulture Central completely sympathize....

Also went after crypto-crooks who sought money to buy miners for fake token Acting on information from Microsoft and Amazon, India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has raided alleged fake tech support operators and other tech-related crims across the country....

100+ diagnostic tests from a single drop of blood - sound familiar? A Silicon Valley exec who claimed to have invented a revolutionary technology that could perform diagnostic testing using a single drop of blood from a pricked finger has been sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the multi-million-dollar fraud scheme....

Authentication portal to match snaps on existing IDs with user-provided snaps The US General Services Administration (GSA) plans to support facial recognition through its Login.gov authentication service, after declining to do so last year....

Public gallery invites you to have a scroll and wonder where the hours went If you fancy a scroll among the stars, an atlas of nearly 400,000 of our galactic neighbors has been captured in new levels of detail and accuracy and is freely accessible to anyone wanting to get a new look at strange new galaxies....

Datacenter GPUs and some consumer cards now exceed performance limits Analysis With the latest round of trade restrictions on AI chips, the Biden Administration is poised to all but cut off the Chinese market from high-end GPUs and accelerators - not just in the datacenter, but at home as well....

Crooks broke into the ClassPad server and swiped online learning database Japanese electronics giant Casio said miscreants broke into its ClassPad server and stole a database with personal information belonging to customers in 149 countries....

SBF comes up like a bad penny Updated New York's Attorney General Letitia James is going after cryptocurrency shenanigans and the Gemini Trust Company, set up by the Winklevoss twins who claimed to have inspired Facebook, is one of those in the firing line....

Regulator twiddled thumbs for Intel and Tower Semi, it could happen again China may yet throw a spanner in the works of Broadcom's imminent takeover of virtualization supremo VMware as payback for the latest in line of export restrictions imposed on it by Washington....

But look over there: A Cybertruck release date! Just please 'temper expectations,' Elon begs Tesla's Q3 2023 earnings missed Wall Street expectations, sending stocks tumbling after-hours, but hey - we finally have a Cybertruck delivery date....

Group will be remembered as staunch negotiator and a bullier of critical infrastructure orgs Law enforcement agencies have taken over RagnarLocker ransomware group's leak site in an internationally coordinated takedown....

Class action lawsuits abound after mega breach A cybercriminal claims they've uploaded a second batch of stolen profile data from biotech company 23andMe, posting it to the same cybercrime forum that hosted the first batch two weeks ago....

Isn't that what it said last time? Premium chips are picking up ... no really TSMC has posted another double-digit year-on-year revenue drop, yet is again banking on a pick up in the near future in what is virtually a re-run of the chipmaker's financial results for the previous quarter....

Seafaring cybercrim's wife faces similar sentence next month A former IT manager for the US Navy is facing a five-and-a-half year prison sentence for selling thousands of people's personal records on the dark web....

Profits plunge, sales down in Q3. Multi-year cost cutting drive means staff will be decimated Nokia, one of the world's largest telecommunications kit makers, is erasing up to 14,000 jobs after a plunge in net profit was caused by jittery customers delaying spending amid a slowing economy and rising interest rates....

Plus: Working from home is 'detached from reality' says world's richest man Comment Elon Musk is said to be toying with the idea of withdrawing access to X in the European Union rather than go to the effort of complying with the bloc's Digital Services Act....

American selfie-scraper shakes off $9M privacy fine as the 'actions of a foreign state are out of scope' A British tribunal yesterday ruled US selfie-scraper Clearview AI would not have to pay a 7.5 million ($9 million) privacy fine....

'Their future is murky at the moment' Database industry observers are slamming MariaDB's decision to ditch two of its core products as it restructures the business in the face of financial challenges....

OV-103 was there for Hubble and the assembly of the ISS Never one to ignore a bit of history, NASA this week marked the 40th anniversary of Space Shuttle Discovery's public debut during a rollout at the Palmdale manufacturing plant in California on October 16, 1983....

Aims to lower costs and broaden appeal of system popular with devs Redis, the go-to in-memory database used as a cache and system broker, is looking to include disk as part of a tiered storage architecture to reduce costs and broaden the system's appeal....

Open Source or Source Available? Does anyone really care? Interview Controversial cloud wrangler HashiCorp came out swinging last week at its San Francisco HashiConf shindig when the topic of licensing came up....

Multiple orbiters failed to find a crater matching rumble. Boffins now blame Red planet's internal problems Mars doesn't have tectonic activity but still manages to have marsquakes, according to a paper that probed a 2022 shake detected by the InSight lander....

Smaller, quieter, and expected to deliver millions of packages in coming years Amazon on Thursday released photos of its newest delivery drone, the MK 30, and announced will expand its Prime Air drone delivery operations to Italy, the UK, and an unnamed American city in 2024....

Big Blue in early talks to advance local RISC-V designs India's pursuit of a slice of the world's semiconductor industry has seen it court three major players - Intel, Tower Semiconductors, and IBM - on a single day....

Advise turning off and never using remote desktop protocol, prohibiting private VPNs, not trusting recruiters' due diligence US and South Korean authorities have updated their guidance on how to avoid hiring North Korean agents seeking work as freelance IT practitioners....

Suggests bodycam footage should replace paperwork for simple arrests San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, has proposed drone surveillance and cameras on public buildings to curb the city's crime problems....

Arson case produces a very tricky precedent for anyone who values digital privacy The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that police can use Google search histories to identify suspects in criminal investigations, leading digital rights orgs to warn the ruling has broad privacy implications for anyone using search engines....

Incidentally, Windows 11 has native rar support now If you needed another reason to keep your installation of venerable decompression app WinRAR updated, Google's Threat Analysis Group says it has spotted a vulnerability patched in August being actively abused by multiple state-backed threat actors....

Or, at least, information that can drive profits anyway Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn plans to build so-called "AI factories" with the help of Nvidia....

'My god, it's full of aerosolized metals!' A group of scientists studying the effects of rocket and satellite reentry vaporization in Earth's atmosphere have found some startling evidence that could point to disastrous environmental effects on the horizon....

Time to close those active sessions Updated Bad news for anyone using Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances: miscreants have been exploiting a critical information disclosure bug in these devices since late August - almost two months before a patch was issued....

Spending needs to double to $600B by 2030 if we want to stay within 2C warming Renewable energy investments continue to rise, but a key component of our planned zero-carbon future is being ignored, and could endanger the future of Earth: Energy grids....

Games developer latest to row back on WFH flexibility. 'Zoom fatigue is real,' says bigwig The CEO at gaming biz Roblox Corporation has given employees two stark choices: haul their asses to the company's HQ offices three days a week, which means relocation for some, or find a new employer....

And it's going to suck... up more power too Total capacity of hyperscale datacenters is set to grow almost threefold over the next six years on the back of AI demand, substantially increasing the amount of power required by those facilities....

A space station, Venus, and Mars also on the cards but the budget is TBD Flushed with robotic lunar success, India says it has plans to send a crew to the Moon by 2040....

Time to rethink Windows 10 support cycle then? Windows 11 is consistently failing to capture hearts and devices, if recent figures are to be believed....

Who knew 3 million actually means 700 in cybercrime forum lingo? D-Link has confirmed suspicions that it was successfully targeted by cyber criminals, but is talking down the scale of the impact....

Over a million licenses for office software to be used by corporate and frontline workers Amazon has reportedly taken out more than a million licenses for Microsoft's 365 productivity suite....

Actually it might give you a brief edge on those weird morning people If on waking your first instinct is to smash that snooze button, new research may encourage you to let sleeping dogs lie....

Musk's mega-app-in-waiting goes from chopping headlines to profile URLs An ethical hacker has exploited a bug in the way X truncates URLs to take over a CIA Telegram channel used to receive intelligence....

It was a gas while it lasted but 'no public policy' to replace natural gas for heating The UK should abandon its efforts to replace gas boilers for heating homes with hydrogen systems, an independent advisory commission says....

Allege that 'greed and hubris' led Mike Lynch and co to 'pretend Autonomy thrived' The lengthy legal story of Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch took another turn this weekend as prosecutors snapped back at attempts to have criminal charges thrown out of court....

Singapore summit hears how private sector's constant security sins create risk for sovereigns Senior politicians gathered at Singapore International Cyber Week (SICW) this week to discuss the current state of cybersecurity have articulated their discomfort with finding themselves dependent on Big Tech....