The Register

Sundiver spacecraft could snap the first surface pics using solar lens It's time to stop hemming and hawing about the monetary and temporal costs of exploring the outer solar system and beyond, say an international group of boffins. We've all the materials we need to do it faster and cheaper by combining modern smallsats with solar sails, and the end result could be actual photographs of exoplanets.…

If all goes well, Europe will double its market share in a decade The European Union has finalized a €43 billion bid to bolster domestic semiconductor production.…

Is this the way to take China’s title as top tech manufacturer? Maybe yes, maybe no The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has delivered a damning verdict on India’s tech import tariffs, ruling they’re out of order and must end.…

vCentre will go straight to GA while vSphere still does a two-step tango VMware has debuted the first major update to version 8 of its flagship vSphere suite and tweaked the product release cycle for future releases.…

Manufacturer’s close ties to China match the party position, perhaps not the public mood Terry Gou, the founder and former CEO of Taiwanese contract manufacturing titan Hon Hai Precision Industry (aka Foxconn) is making a second attempt to become president and therefore head of state of the democracy.…

Another one bytes the dust Intel has quietly announced it will end sales of its cryptomining hardware chips, less than a year after entering the business.…

Also a bunch of Russians plus someone giving free trips to the Motherland Four US citizens have been accused of working on behalf of the Russian government to push pro-Kremlin propaganda and unduly influence elections in Florida.…

End of free money era and end of free data for building billion-dollar models In a move seemingly designed to stop being used as a free training library for large language models, megaforum Reddit said it's going to begin charging companies who make excessive use of its data-downloading API.…

Boris Eldagsen tells El Reg why he did it A photographer selected as a category winner of this year's international Sony Photography Awards has rejected the prize, saying his entry was actually generated using AI.…

Spying on foreign targets? That's our job! The UK and US governments have sounded the alarm on Russian intelligence targeting unpatched Cisco routers to deploy malware and carry out surveillance.…

Boffins foretell LLMs infiltrating finance and politics with confidently held views If you want a picture of the future, imagine asking a large language model for a prediction.…

Surprised there's no ChatGPT angle and that it's not called MalwareTotal Security researchers and analysts can now search Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Defender database using file hashes and URLs when pulling together information for network intrusion investigations and whatnot.…

'My computer locked up and a siren went off,' one mark tells Better Business Bureau Two execs and a multinational payment processing company must pay $650k to the US government, says the FTC, which accuses them of knowingly processing credit card payments for Microsoft-themed support scammers.…

More than a third of US states now party to the lawsuit, which aims to break up Chocolate Factory's advertising arm Nine additional states have signed on to a Department of Justice lawsuit against Google parent Alphabet for monopolizing digital ad sales, bringing the total number of states suing the search giant (in this case) to 17.…

US PIRG slams Google for selling schools short-lived, repair-resistant kit Updated Google Chromebooks expire too soon, saddling taxpayer-funded public schools with excessive expenses and inflicting unnecessary environmental damage, according to the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund.…

Chip designer has until September to float or it's on the hook for parent company's borrowing Brit chip designer Arm could be on the hook for an $8.5 billion loan made to its parent SoftBank if the company's initial public offering (IPO) is delayed or canceled.…

Latest £16.5 million Post Office deal among many deals awarded despite MPs' calls and ongoing investigation The UK Post Office’s latest decision to extend Fujitsu’s controversial £2.3 billion Horizon contract follows the award of £142 million in wider government work to the Japanese supplier since the statutory inquiry into the disastrous project was first announced.…

Officers didn't know software was saving personal data and neither did people on other end Several police forces in Britain are being put on the naughty step by the UK's data watchdog for using a calling app that recorded hundreds of thousands of phone conversations and illegally retained that data.…

Waning 5G deployments in response to economic uncertainty blamed Ericsson has reported calendar Q1 financial results largely in line with earlier forecasts, but repeated warnings of a rough ride ahead for the rest of 2023 as spending on 5G deployments slackens off in some regions.…

Plus: Signal, WhatsApp, and Viber also write online protest over Online Safety Bill back door The UK’s chartered institute for IT has slammed proposed legislation that could see the government open a “back door” to encrypted messaging.…

The average pay of how many human employees = one humanoid CEO? 91 Meta boss and human person Mark Zuckerberg was paid a nominal $1 in salary again in 2022 and took home no bonuses, yet he cost the company tens of millions in compensation to cover expenses including security and private jet travel.…

New CFO sees interesting in-tray at 20 percent year-on-year growth database company Database vendor MariaDB has cut a number of jobs and reiterated a "going concern" warning over its medium-term financial viability.…

Industry intervention alone can't deal with harassment Depriving online hate groups of network services - otherwise known as deplatforming - doesn't work very well, according to boffins based in the United Kingdom.…

No worries, outsourcer only handles government tech contracts worth billions Black Basta, the extortionists who claimed they were the ones who lately broke into Capita, have reportedly put up for sale sensitive details, including bank account information, addresses, and passport photos, stolen from the IT outsourcing giant.…

Rules proposed in EU AI Act are not enough to control 'very powerful AI' Legislators from the European Parliament believe new laws are needed to regulate general purpose AI systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, as the technology is unpredictable and progressing faster than expected.…

UK operators are sweating about price, Nordics chill thanks to low ambient temperatures European datacenter operators are finding it harder to secure reliable, cost-effective power, according to a report by British electricity biz Aggreko has asserted.…

Charges laid against 44, including officers of China’s Cyberspace Administration The United States Department of Justice has charged 44 people over schemes prosecutors allege were run by China’s National Police to silence opponents of the Communist Party of China.…

A rather nice beach in Australia now has a rather unusual and hopefully temporary feature An Australian military helicopter crash was reportedly caused by failure to apply a software patch, with a heft side serving of pilot error.…

Chinese tech giant claims better performance than competing GPUs Chinese social media, cloud, and entertainment giant Tencent on Monday revealed that it has started mass production of a home brew video transcoding accelerator.…

Kinda feels like living in the future we thought we'd have, for a change Stem cells could be manufactured in laboratories floating in space one day if, as is suspected, experiments show they're easier to grow in microgravity conditions than here on Earth.…

This is, we're told, a good thing Though Microsoft's mixed reality teams took a hit this year in terms of cost cuts and layoffs, the IT giant is pushing forward with its HoloLens 2 headset, with plans to upgrade it to Windows 11.…

Everyone else, tough luck Changes to US tax credits for buyers of electric vehicles and hybrids go into effect tomorrow, and the list of qualifying vehicles is quite short: only six US-based companies are present, and several manufacturers that previously qualified have even been cut under the strict new requirements.…

Please, no need to fix these problems LockBit has developed ransomware that can encrypt files on Arm-powered Macs, said to be a first for the prolific cybercrime crew. …

Should have wrapped proposed rules on name and logo use in unsafe {} ? The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes.…

Others are resigned to inevitability and argue it's better than a subscription Microsoft is looking for user feedback on ads it's putting into the Windows 11 Start Menu for its products and services. If responses on Reddit is any indication, the response hasn't been great.…

Mountain View may have nothing to fear, though – Microsoft's browser is still the underdog Google is hurrying to add AI to its search platform following Microsoft's debut of OpenAI tech in Bing – a major motivator being that Samsung and Apple might be looking to switch lucrative mobile search deals.…

14 projects canceled as Prime Minister Sunak fulfills a campaign promise The UK government has canceled all plans for new smart motorways, citing "cost pressures" and a lack of public confidence in the tech-enhanced highway stretches.…

But then opted for spreadsheets instead The UK government considered using technology from Palantir – the US spy-tech firm – to help manage the National Health Service while it was disrupted by severe industrial action. But it ultimately opted to use spreadsheets instead.…

Do you like American music? I like American music The German government is examining all Chinese technology in the country's 5G networks amid concerns about national security. The move follows reports last month that Berlin was planning to ban technology from Huawei and ZTE and even require telcos to replace kit already deployed.…

Another attempt is possible later this week, depending on how the troubleshooting goes Today's first orbital launch of SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy booster was canceled due to a pressurization valve malfunction in the first stage of the combined craft.…

Recruitment company fined £130,000 by data regulator for breaking PECR A recruitment business that sent out an eye watering 107 million spam emails is now nursing a £130,000 ($161,000) fine from Britain’s data watchdog.…

And what are they doing with them? YouTube, lots of YouTube Nestled in UK regulator Ofcom's thoroughly unsurprising report into childhood media literacy for 2023 are a couple of eye-opening stats revolving around device ownership.…

6.4 is based on Ubuntu 22.04.2 with a lot of the questionable aspects fixed Linux Lite version 6.4 is the latest point release from this Ubuntu remix aimed at new migrants from Windows.…

Old architectures just don't stack up Opinion Most data theft does clear harm to the victim, and often to its customers. But while embarrassing, the cyberattack against MSI in which source code was said to be stolen is harder to diagnose. It looks like a valuable company asset that's cost a lot to develop. That its theft may be no loss is a weird idea. But then, firmware is weirder than we give it credit for. It's even hard to say exactly what it is.…

Vows to regroup and come back stronger after failing in bid Palantir is pipped to win A UK consortium bid for the NHS Federated Data Platform — an ongoing competition worth up to £480 million ($595 million) — has fallen at the first hurdle.…

The punishment – Windows 98 administration chores – was far worse than the crime Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who Me? The Register’s confessional column in which readers admit to being the source of SNAFUs.…

Annual shareholder letter warns of ‘softening’ growth for cloud biz, likely lift-off for Kuiper satellite broadband Amazon Web Services sales and support teams are currently “spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy.”…

Which is just how Linus Torvalds wants it and who can argue after what he recommended you eat for Easter Version 6.3 of the Linux kernel is on track to debut next week after what emperor penguin Linus Torvalds has described a “nice uneventful release cycle’”.…

Plus: Elon Musk wants Twitter to develop generative AI, and ChatGPT bots are flooding Reddit In-brief OpenAI is not training a fifth version of its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) and is instead focusing on increasing the capabilities of its latest GPT-4 model, CEO Sam Altman confirmed last week.…

And sets a Martian height record for good measure NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was designed to fly just five times, but last week the little rotorcraft that could clocked up its 50th flight in the red planet’s thin atmosphere.…