The Register

Dark patterns at Amazon worthy of a Homeric epic? Surely not! The Federal Trade Commission today filed a lawsuit against Amazon for what it describes as a "years-long effort to enroll consumers into its Prime program without their consent while knowingly making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions."...

IMS Nanofabrication's expertise will only be more important - so why sell? Intel is selling a 20 percent stake in a key technology company it owns to investors Bain Capital, claiming the move will encourage more cross-industry collaboration once the chip giant loosens its grip on the venture....

Pales in comparison to to rival Intel's presence in Dublin... for now AMD plans to invest $135 million in strategic research and development projects in Ireland over the next four years, focused on what it dubbed adaptive computing research....

Users report they're still struggling to communicate ... and ask vendor to be more open Updated Reg readers who use Virgin Media email say they're still struggling to gain access to their messages after a multi-day outage....

Four disks believed stolen from Walldorf facility, at least one containing company data Exclusive An SSD disk missing from a SAP datacenter in Walldorf has turned up on eBay, leading to a security investigation by the German software vendor....

There's an old saying in business: Time, money, quality - you can have any two Workers tasked with improving the output of Google's Bard chatbot say they've been told to focus on working fast at the expense of quality. Bard sometimes generates inaccurate information simply because there isn't enough time for these fact checkers to verify the software's output, one of those workers told The Register....

This is totally not about China, commissioners claim The European Commission is considering measures to restrict member nations and companies from outsourcing sensitive technologies to countries of concern - namely China and Russia....

'Changing the world one PC at a time' sounds good to us Devconf.cz Uplifting positivity is not why The Reg FOSS desk went to Red Hat's Devconf.cz conference - but that's what we found....

Oh no, over there, look, the killer robots, OMG here they come - just pay no attention to us shaping the rules OpenAI - the maker of GPT-4, and other generative AI models - has been publicly calling for more AI regulation while privately seeking less of it....

Sends home snaps on third fly-by of six as it heads for orbit in 2025 The BepiColombo probe has completed its third fly-by of the planet Mercury and sent home some striking snaps of the tiny world's dark side....

At last you can pick a dedicated host to run your Amazonian workload Amazon Web Services has made a small change that causes its on-prem Outposts to behave a bit more like boring old on-prem servers....

We thought you'd like some terrible news in the comfort of your own home' was the gist of it Singaporean superapp Grab has revealed it will lay off 1,000 staffers, or eleven percent of its workforce - and did it with an after-hours email....

Near-flop of China shopping fest suggests cloud and AI are the priority growth engines Chinese tech champ Alibaba Group has announced a C-suite reshuffle that will see its CEO depart and take on the somewhat smaller - but perhaps more important - role as leader of Alibaba Cloud....

It's bingo for those who had LLMs on your card - but no word on how much it's going to cost HPE Discover HP Enterprise has extended its GreenLake subscription-based technology portfolio with a supercomputing-as-a-service offering it claims will make AI more accessible to enterprises....

Shifting those duties to Outlook set for next year - well, maybe Microsoft intends to shut down its at-times-maligned Mail and Calendar apps, fold their capabilities into a new Outlook for Windows, and use the opportunity to - unsurprisingly - bring in more AI....

50K-plus employees' personal info swiped after law firm rolled Mondelez International has warned 51,000 of its past and present employees that their personal information has been stolen from a law firm hired by the Oreo and Ritz cracker giant....

That ads to hurt American newspaper publisher Gannett is throwing its weight behind the hottest trend in digital advertising: suing Google for unfairly and abusively monopolizing the entire industry. Allegedly....

Crooks demand $4.5m to keep '80GB' of corp info private - and no API price hikes Reddit this week confirmed ransomware gang BlackCat, aka AlphaV, broke into its corporate systems in February....

It has enough air to last until Thursday, but if it isn't already on the surface rescue operations could be impossible Time and oxygen are both running out for the crew of an ill-fated expedition to the two-mile deep wreck of the Titanic, which lost contact with its parent vessel less than two hours after beginning its descent on Sunday....

But you'll need the right hardware to take advantage SUSE's latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) has a focus on security, claiming it as the first distro to offer full support for confidential computing to protect data....

Redmond says problems stemmed from a datacenter in Germany, though UK spared the worst of it Some Microsoft 365 users in Western Europe earlier today were reporting service problems today, though those in the UK seem to have avoided many of the issues....

Latest 24.9M 'transition' contract an attempt to bridge gap to contract UK.gov is due to award in September The NHS has awarded US spy-tech firm Palantir a 24.9 million ($31.7 million) deal to cover the one-year transition, from June 12, 2023, to a new 480 million ($611 million) data platform....

They're changing it wrong, aren't they Apple? The European Parliament has voted yes to replaceable battery legislation, putting Apple on a path to a second redesign just over a year after USB-C charging ports were mandated in the bloc....

Cybercrooks hoping users have whispered employer secrets to chatbot Singapore-based threat intelligence outfit Group-IB has found ChatGPT credentials in more than 100,000 stealer logs traded on the dark web in the past year....

Meanwhile, users are left to figure out how to cut their cloth A relative newcomer to the enterprise data and analytics world, Microsoft didn't hold back when it launched its Fabric platform last month....

Rotating sound bar sounds better in theory than in practice Desktop Tourism With working from home and bring your own device both now established practices in many workplaces, The Register's Desktop Tourism series decided it was time to take a consumer machine for a trip....

Geopolitics keeps CEO up at night, cashing on on EVs gets him up in the morning Foxconn chairman and CEO Young Liu believes the manufacturing megalith will be able to continue building components in China for use in electronics produced by US companies, despite testy relations between the nations' governments....

BlackCat attack sparks injunction preventing coverage of purloined docs An infosec incident at a major Australian law firm has sparked fear among the nation's governments, banks and businesses - and a free speech debate....

Singapore dollar snafu used to illustrate workaround SAP has admitted the cloudy cut of its S/4HANA service does not allow an organization to use currencies other than what a user's location suggests is appropriate....

Crypto villain's passports were as fake as his stablecoin Fugitive crypto villain Do Kwon has been jailed in Montenegro for falsifying documents....

Mobile network IP a compelling reason to ask folks to be FRANDs Updated Chinese telecoms giant Huawei may be looking to put the squeeze on small to medium companies for license fees on its sizeable patent portfolio as its bottom line continues to be hit by US sanctions and other restrictions....

From 'we are not Elon' to 'Elon was right' in a matter of days Comment Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has come out and said what legions of redditors feared - that a business plan to turn a profit by increasing the price of API access has been "reaffirmed" by a look at the Book of Musk....

Plus: Taiwan dangles investment in semiconductor production in EU - but there's a catch Intel has agreed a deal with the German government for 10 billion ($10.9 billion) in subsidies for a new chip plant in the country, despite Germany's finance minister saying just last week that it would not offer more cash....

Also: Hackers target security researchers, MaaS model flourishing, and this week's vulnerabilities Infosec in brief Remember earlier this year, when we found out that a bunch of baddies including at least one nation-state group broke into a US federal government agency's Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server by exploiting a critical three-year-old Telerik bug to achieve remote code execution?...

Why were they so easy to lift during the pandemic but not now? America's network regulator wants to "better understand" why ISPs still cap consumers' data usage even though they need more and providers have shown they have the "technical ability to offer unlimited data plans."...

Cybercrooks use abandoned AWS storage tool to deliver malware Miscreants are using expired Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets to place malicious code into a legitimate package in the npm repository without having to tinker with any code....

Web hosting company tells users to pay up or shift off, but users say they weren't warned in time Users of web hosting company 123 Reg are up in arms after it abruptly stopped supporting free email redirects and instead required customers to subscribe to a paid mailbox service or migrate to another service provider....

If Jesus was my Copilot, what would he do? Opinion Open source. It's open. You can look. Mostly, you can use. There's a clue in the name. Not so fast, claims a class action brought against Microsoft, OpenAI and GitHub. Copilot, an in-IDE AI-powered and open source trained suggestion bot, works by offering lines of code to programmers - and that, the class action suit alleges, breaks the rules, and is being sneaky in trying to hide it. A judge has ruled that some of the claims deserve their day in court. Dear lord, not another copyright battle.…

As the customers lined up with pitchforks and burning brands, the question in the cleanup meeting was 'Who, me?' Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle readerfolk, to the comforting haven that is Who, Me? – in which Reg readers share tales that show we're all just human underneath.…

Digital Competition Conf wants rift in markets to allow new app-slingers to spawn Japan has joined the list of nations determined to bust the dominance of Apple and Google over app stores on their respective mobile operating systems.…

Plans expanded fabs in boost to beleaguered PM and blow to protestors Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that Intel will invest $25 billion on semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the country.…

PLUS: Nuance voice AI startup hit with privacy lawsuit in California, and why OpenAI urged Microsoft to hold off releasing Bing AI in brief Google has warned its own employees not to disclose confidential information or use the code generated by its AI chatbot, Bard.…

PLUS: Crypto just isn't cricket in India; China's budget smartphone surge; Jack Ma is back, again; and more Asia In Brief US-based memory-maker Micron on Friday informed investors it's still unsure how China intends to act after warning its products had failed a security review.…

Previous claims its own software updates were the issue remain almost, kinda, plausible In the murky world of political and corporate spin, announcing bad news on Friday afternoon – a time when few media outlets are watching, and audiences are at a low ebb – is called "taking out the trash." And that’s what Microsoft appears to have done last Friday.…

Deal involving millions of domain names reportedly hits $180 million Google has sold off Google Domains – its side hustle selling and managing web domains – to Squarespace in a deal reportedly worth $180 million. The transfer means about ten million customer domain names will be looked after by Squarespace.…

$23 million set aside to compensate for leaking queries to websites Between October 25, 2006, and September 30, 2013, Google allegedly revealed searchers' personal information to third parties in violation of privacy promises.…

But police are allowed to fly them for 'public safety' missions Illinois Governor JB Pritzker on Friday signed HB 3902, which allows the US state's law enforcement agencies to use drones at some public events – but prohibits equipping them with facial recognition software or weaponry, with some exceptions.…

Millions of people's personal info swiped, Clop leaks begin with 'Shell's stolen data' Progress Software on Friday issued a fix for a third critical bug in its MOVEit file transfer suite, a vulnerability that had just been disclosed the day earlier.…

Germany negotiations reportedly back on track for Magdeburg fab too Intel will spend up to $4.6 billion building an assembly and testing facility located outside Wroclaw, Poland.…

The AI tentacles grab supply chain management, projects, and finance Microsoft plans to spread AI through more of its 365 ERP portfolio, including supply chain management, project operations, and finance.…