The Register

Windows PCs in the cloud, spending Sony out of business, mobile woes, and more - and the files to read Microsoft's US legal battle to acquire gaming giant Activision Blizzard continued on Tuesday with courtroom testimony from Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, a company likely to be seriously affected if the deal goes through....

Packets you make at home or on mobile devices are in Switchzilla's sights, to make hybrid workers happy On the heels of Cisco's Accedian acquisition last week, the network giant has snapped up SamKnows to extend its ThousandEyes network performance monitoring (NPM) stack to remote and hybrid workers....

These expensive office buildings aren't for decoration - and that goes for the rest of ya, too Government employees of the US state of Ohio are in for a rude awakening - and commute - if the state's budget bill for the next year passes, as it includes an amendment that will limit those workers to one day a week of working from home....

Just as America's Supremes set a high bar for cyberstalking It's bad enough there's some Android stalkerware out there with the not-at-all-creepy moniker LetMeSpy. Now someone's got hold of the information the app collects - such as victims' text messages and call logs - as well as the email addresses of those who sought out the software, and leaked it all....

Or so the Europlod says Police breaking into and snooping on the EncroChat encrypted messaging network has led to 6,558 arrests worldwide and nearly 740 million seized in criminal funds, according to cops in France and the Netherlands....

Failure to match metadata with packaged files is perfect for supply chain attacks The npm Public Registry, a database of JavaScript packages, fails to compare npm package manifest data with the archive of files that data describes, creating an opportunity for the installation and execution of malicious files....

It's not the most accurate atomic clock in the world, but the NIST team behind it believes they can fix that There's a new atomic clock on the block over at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and while it's not as accurate as its predecessors it does have one big advantage: it's small enough to stick in your pocket....

Still the most profitable arm of Bezos's biz Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to spend $7.8 billion between now and 2030 expanding its datacenter operations in the US state of Ohio....

Submerge an Nvidia LLM 20,000 leagues under the data lake Snowflake Summit Nvidia and cloud data warehouse company Snowflake have teamed up to help organizations build and train their own custom AI models using data they have stored within Snowflake's platform....

Data sales 'can do real harm' Analysis The US Supreme Court's decision a year ago to overturn Roe v Wade has shone a light on the amount of personal, sensitive data that tech companies collect every day -and how that information can be used for nefarious purposes....

But can it run Crysis? The flexibility of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) makes them ideal for all kinds of applications ranging from smartNICs, telecom networks, and even for emulating retro game consoles....

Who are you calling a VLOP? asks German web fashionista Pick two massive platforms you'd think would be first to bring the fight to the EU lawmakers over the Digital Services Act... then forget both of them. Because it was German fashion retailer Zalando that filed a lawsuit today....

Conflicting feedback makes 2023 an especially difficult year to predict Changing priorities among enterprise and cloud providers are driving apparently conflicting trends, according to research outfit Omdia, with demand for compute resources remaining high, especially as ChatGPT has spurred interest in AI training, yet at the same time server shipments are declining....

Indian firm nabs 10-year contract, taking pensions wins to 1.73B On the back of a 1.5 billion contract win, Tata Consultancy Services is at it again, bagging a 234 million ($297 million) deal to administer the UK's Teachers' Pension Scheme (TPS)....

Next on the agenda: ClippyGPT, because why not? An anonymous developer has created a ChatGPT client for Windows 3.1, because some people like to keep one foot firmly in the past even as they explore the future....

James Webb scope finds CH - aka methyl cations - without which you probably wouldn't be reading this Astronomers wielding the James Webb Space Telescope have detected methyl cations - important precursor molecules needed to create proteins and DNA and therefore fundamental to carbon-based life forms....

Acquires Apptio and plans 'virtual command center' for multicloud IBM has announced it will acquire Apptio for $4.6 billion and use it to build a 'virtual command center' for spend management and optimization" of enterprise IT....

If the US or Europe dare criticize this deal, it would be rank hypocrisy The government of Japan's investment vehicle will acquire JSR Corporation, a key provider of chipmaking products and expertise....

Acquisition means for both parties get a shot at leading the roll-your-own AI market Analysis Databricks has announced it will acquire generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.3 billion, in a deal that will make it easier for private entities to train and run their own custom machine learning models....

Dr Evil would be proud Alphabet's plan to deliver high-speed internet service using helium-filled balloons may have been a bit too loony to work. Instead, the so-called Moonshot Factory has seemingly taken a page out of Dr Evil's playbook and started strapping lasers to buildings....

Tech tweaked ahead of rollout in July, Mozilla and Apple still not interested Google plans to ship its Topics API when Chrome 115 arrives on July 12. That's the API that's supposed to allow advertisers to target netizens with adverts tailored to their individual interests without impinging on people's privacy....

You get funding, you get funding, everybody gets funding On Monday the Biden administration announced a plan to divide up $42.5 billion for improvements to US broadband networks - and everyone from the largest states to the smallest territory is getting a piece of the pie....

Website can't use state contract law to police copyrights it doesn't own The US Supreme Court has refused to hear song lyric website Genius' web scraping claim against Google and LyricFind for copying its data in search results....

There's smartphone batteries to be mined, but at what cost? NASA's rights to a Nevada desert playa that's used for calibrating Earth-observing satellites is facing a challenge, as lithium miners say they need the land to develop the US battery industry....

Streaming biz terms and conditions searches jump 1,524% Searches for "Netflix terms and conditions" skyrocketed 1,524 percent after the streaming platform debuted Black Mirror season six....

Alleges he's still locked out and at risk of losing his licenses over missing comms A New Jersey attorney is suing Microsoft for $1.75 million, claiming it didn't fix a verification issue that has cut him off from his paid work email, and therefore from communications with judges and clients, crippling his ability to deal with his caseload and leaving him at risk of making ethical violations....

The American lithium-ion battery inventor has died aged 100 Obit American materials scientist and co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery John B Goodenough died yesterday, according to reports. He was 100....

Time to start practicing identity protection A vendor that operates a pilot recruitment platform used by maor airlines exposed the personal files of more than 8,000 pilot and cadet applicants at American Airlines and Southwest Airlines....

Self-contained immersion-cooled chassis aimed at telcos, 5G RAN deployments with HPE, Intel help The edge probably isn't the first place you'd expect to see liquid and immersion cooling tech, but Iceotope aims to put them there anyway....

'It will likely be unnoticeable for many consumers' says analyst Vodafone is claiming to be the first UK telco to provide 5G Standalone services to customers, but only in select locations and on certain devices. Experts question whether consumers will really notice any difference....

Also: a PII harvest at Dole's server farm, military members mailed mystery smartwatches, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief In a case startlingly similar to charges recently unsealed against one-term US president Donald Trump, a former FBI analyst has been jailed for taking sensitive classified material home with her....

Funds will focus on energy, transportation, astronomy, and healthcare The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency is investing 72 million ($91.7 million) to build infrastructure to support next-generation technologies in energy, transportation, medicine, and astronomy....

Fined $4m for Who-Me-esque mess, for which it blames unnamed archiving vendor's retention settings JP Morgan has been fined $4 million by America's securities watchdog, the SEC, for deleting millions of email records dating from 2018 relating to its Chase Bank subsidiary....

You are getting sleepy... very sleepy If you're working from home and there's been a lull in things to do, why not take a nap? Heck, even if you're in the office, find a nice quiet corner and close your eyes for 20 minutes because we have good news....

The root cause was a buffer error - but not the kind of buffer you're thinking of Who, Me? Ah, gentle reader, once again it is Monday and all that entails. But fear not, for The Reg is here with Who, Me? and another tale of things going not quite so well as might have been hoped. Perhaps this will lift your day....

Standards org's roadmap envisions three watt powerup and info sharing The NFC Forum, the standards body for Near Field Communication, has detailed its key plans and research efforts between now and 2028....

Also slaps Chinese backdoor entities shipping forbidden tech to Moscow The European Union has announced an eleventh package of sanctions against Russia for its illegal actions against Ukraine - and this time it's tried to tackle Moscow's key IT providers and entities established to evade export bans....

Plus: IBM builds AI commentator for Wimbledon; US regulator dithers on generative AI political ad policy AI in brief Nvidia's second-generation A100 GPUs, currently the subject of export controls that mean they're not for sale in China, can fetch up to $20,000 in black markets - double the regular price....

Latest cut of the kernel gets RISC-ier, moves towards Wi-Fi 7, ejects PCMCIA cards Version 6.4 of the Linux kernel has debuted, after an exemplary development push....

PLUS: US joins India's software diplomacy push; Suzuki to make flying cars; Indonesia's broadband bird Asia In Brief Singapore's central bank, the Monetary Authority (MAS), last week published a white paper that proposes the concept of "Purpose Bound Money" (PBM)....

Should you really believe the doomsayers? We're going to go with no +Comment The question over whether machine learning poses an existential risk to humanity will continue to loom over our heads as the technology advances and spreads around the world. Mainly because pundits and some industry leaders won't stop talking about it....

Version 12.5 brings in Finnish language support, traffic node path visualization and more The Tor Browser, which strives to provide anonymity online rather than the limited data sharing internet companies call "privacy," has reached version 12.5, a milestone that brings usability and accessibility improvements alongside attention to legacy issues....

Chocolate Factory paid a record $12m in 2022 Bug hunters who found security holes in Google - and also responsibly disclosed details of those flaws to the Chocolate Factory - earned more than $12 million in bounty rewards in 2022, marking a record year for the corporation's Vulnerability Reward Programs (VRPs) in terms of payouts and number of vulnerabilities found and fixed....

Getting around the rules was as simple as not declaring software was 'intended for children', lawsuit states Google on Thursday was sued for violating children's privacy through a program it designed to protect children's privacy....

Muscular system gets first update in two years with Epyc injection Oracle is promising a significant transaction throughput and analytics performance boost with Exadata X10M, the first upgrade to its hardware-engineered database system....

On the other hand, some old settings are set for a comeback Microsoft is investigating why recent updates to Windows 11 are causing systems to be more power-hungry than normal....

TeleSign and Belgian parent did almost everything wrong, alleges Max Schrems A US-based fraud prevention company is in hot water over allegations it not only collected data from millions of EU citizens and processed it using automated tools without their knowledge, but that it did so in the United States, all in violation of the EU's data protection rules....

From now on, only CentOS Stream's source code is available to all Comment Red Hat has decided to stop making the source code of RHEL available to the public. From now on it will only be available to customers - who can't legally share it....

Government could reveal details of new regulations by the end of month The Dutch government is expected to finally publish long-awaited rules covering extended export restrictions on technology to China next week, with ASML as a maker of advanced chipmaking gear likely to be one of those affected....

UK officials argue NHS patient details will only be available locally A UK health minister has for the first time admitted that information from family doctors is set to be uploaded to the controversial Federated Data Platform (FDP), a set of technologies under a 480 million procurement for which US spy-tech company Palantir is the incumbent supplier....