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Phasing out epoxy resin laminate with biodegradable substrate might be costly, though Infineon Technologies will using recyclable printed circuit boards (PCBs) based on a material developed by a UK startup in upcoming demo boards....

We've dipped into the mailbag for more tales of rogue cabling and keyboard confusion On Call Some say that working for The Register is one never-ending holiday, but On Call - our weekly reader-contributed tale of techies being asked to endure atrocious emergencies, has taken a break. This week we therefore present some shorter tales from the On Call mailbag that were sent in response to an On Call from June 2nd, regarding ethernet cable strung through trees to avoid blowing the budget on a WAN, and an On Call from June 30th concerning the perils of international keyboard layouts ....

From Norman Cook to Tim Cook A patent granted to Apple this week suggests the iGiant is, if not actively working on, at least entertaining the thought of introducing some modular hardware into its lineup - including, bizarrely, an old-fashioned record player....

Pat on the back for Pat who's back in the black after getting costs whacked and demand stacked After racking up $3.5 billion in losses over the past two quarters, Intel managed to stanch the bleeding and return to profitability in the second quarter....

This tech is certainly full of something California's Attorney General is reportedly investigating complaints about the safety of Tesla's so-called self-driving features, as well as boasts made by the automaker about the technology in its marketing....

Sorry, FTC, didn't mean to step on you like that Two US Senators have proposed legislation to create a government commission to tame Big Tech, an often uttered goal on both sides of the political aisle that has yet to be realized....

'Gay furry hackers' say it's in response to 'attacks on human rights' and noooothing to do with Russia-Ukraine NATO is investigating claims by miscreants that they broke into the military alliance's unclassified information-sharing and collaboration IT environment, stole information belonging to 31 nations, and leaked 845 MB of compressed data....

Boffins build automated system to smash safety guardrails The "guardrails" built atop large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude to prevent undesirable text output can be easily bypassed - and it's unclear whether there's a viable fix, according to computer security researchers....

Maximus plus Deloitte and Chuck E. Cheese join 500+ victim orgs Accounting giant Deloitte, pizza and birthday party chain Chuck E. Cheese, government contractor Maximus, and the Hallmark Channel are among the latest victims that the Russian ransomware crew Clop claims to have compromised via the MOVEit vulnerability....

Will make regulating China's 5G telecom equipment look like a cinch Chinese made AI-enabled products should spark similar concerns to Middle Kingdom sourced 5G equipment and therefore be regulated, said think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on Thursday....

Plus: US warns domestic chip suppliers will feel the pain Prices of two vital chipmaking materials are rising ahead of export restrictions imposed by the Chinese government coming into effect next week....

Hey, at least this one isn't an actual bomb NASA's ambitions to speed up space travel are about to go nuclear, as its joint project with military boffinry unit DARPA has found a builder for an experimental nuclear thermal rocket vehicle, or X-NTRV: Lockheed Martin....

AI runs on chips, remember Despite yet another dip in wafer shipments, major chip shops are predicting a resurgence in the latter half of 2023....

Machine learning helps take fuzz out of thermal imaging A machine learning-assisted approach to thermal imaging could transform the night vision of autonomous vehicles and other nascent robots....

'The solution to the surveillance economy seems to be more surveillance' Vivaldi boss tells El Reg Google's Web Environment Integrity (WEI) proposal, according to one of the developers working on the controversial fraud fighting project, aims to make the web "more private and safe."...

Antitrust inspectors trying to figure out if Redmond has breached local competition laws Updated The European Commission has officially launched a formal investigation" into whether Microsoft flouted EU competition rules by bundling Teams with dominant productivity software suite Office 365 and Microsoft 365....

Come back Teams, all is forgiven No, your colleagues aren't just taking ages to respond, Slack is currently staggering to its feet after experiencing a global outage across all regions....

Utility to consider introducing restrictions Thames Water is considering measures to cut down the water used by some datacenters, including fitting flow restrictors or charging operators more at peak times....

Experts warn agreement needed and skills lacking in HMRC-led project The UK's major government projects experts have warned a programme to overhaul ERP systems in three central government departments is undeliverable in its current state....

It's OK to be skeptical if someone says they found the holy grail Three scientists in South Korea claim they've crafted a superconductor that works at both room temperature and ambient pressure - a revolutionary breakthrough if confirmed....

Men in Black snatched Little Green Men's spacecraft, allegedly Poll The US government has recovered alien spacecraft and bodies from crash landings on Earth, and is keeping the whole thing covered up, Congress was told on Wednesday....

Cripes, they actually sound serious Public companies that suffer a computer crime likely to cause a "material" hit to an investor will soon face a four-day time limit to disclose the incident, according to rules approved today by the US Securities and Exchange Commission....

First refresh of minimums in eight years for the country that invented the internet FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel thinks Americans deserve better broadband than the current minimum speeds of 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. She has thus proposed boosting these lower bounds at least fourfold, with the "long term" goal of upping this further to 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up....

It's just some if-then statements, no AI here, insurer sniffs Cigna has been sued in California based on allegations the US healthcare insurer unlawfully reviewed insurance claims using automated systems rather than relying on humans....

Sachkov faces 14-year stretch after 'unreasonably rushed trial' A Russian court has sentenced Ilya Sachkov, the founder of security research house Group-IB, to 14 years in a maximum-security prison after finding the executive guilty of high treason....

Bouyant jobs market and increased stress prompt exodus, says research A survey of 1,800 IT professionals and senior managers has found a quarter of tech workers in the UK are considering quitting their jobs in the next six months....

Plus: Did Xwitter just suggest stripping people of gold checks? Don't threaten us with a good time The website formerly known as Twitter is trying to win back advertisers yet again with half-off deals on certain ads - and reportedly threats to remove gold checks from company profiles if advertisers don't start spending money....

That could pay for 35 humans and their families' health insurance, says human Striking Hollywood writers and actors will be delighted to learn that Netflix, one of the powers perceived to be upending the entertainment industry, is advertising for an AI product manager with a salary up to $900,000....

Are you sure that's an exec on the line? Also, smart move distracting folks from revenue growth slowdown, profit slide AI was mentioned 175 times during Microsoft's conference call with analysts to discuss the megacorp's Q4 financial results - it seems there will be no let-up to the hype in an industry already bursting at the seams with marketing bluster....

Some big changes are afoot Intel has revealed two sets of extensions coming to the x86 instruction set architecture, one to boost the performance of general purpose code and the second to provide a common vector instruction set for future chips....

It has a meaning in mathematics, and even more interested parties than you might expect Logowatch Twitter's new logo isn't just an X, it's a very specific form of X, and not only does it have a meaning, it also has some history behind it....

Talk about all your eggs in one China-coveting basket TSMC confirmed on Tuesday that it is investing $2.87 billion in a chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging fab for AI chips in northern Taiwan....

BLISS this: Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail project wants to head into space on the cheap Boffins believe the future of space exploration may belong to small, affordable probes sailing away under the Sun's power....

EURIALO project aims to prove flights can be tracked in real time through multilateration The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded a contract to a US company to create a technology demonstrator for a proposed aircraft monitoring system using low Earth orbit satellites....

UK trusts serving 12 million people affected as vendor awaits results of forensic investigation Several UK NHS ambulance organizations have been struggling to record patient data and pass it to other providers following a cyber-attack aimed at health software company Ortivus....

Good thing these eggheads have created a database of patches Python security fixes often happen through "silent" code commits, without an associated Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifier, according to a group of computer security researchers....

Adverts said Onavo Protect user data would be kept a secret - just didn't say from whom On Wednesday, Australia's Federal Court ordered two Meta subsidiaries to pay $14 million after an over two and a half year legal battle instigated by the country's competition regulator found the pair misled users on the data collection of a now defunct VPN app....

Uncle Sam warns sysadmins to get patching as soon as possible A critical security flaw in Ivanti's mobile endpoint management code was exploited and used to compromise 12 Norwegian government agenciesbefore the vendor plugged the hole....

Inflatable heat shields, robot cable layers, and a furnace to burn lunar dust for minerals and oxygen NASA is distributing $150 million between 11 US organizations developing technology and infrastructure supporting long-term human exploration on the Moon for its Artemis missions and beyond....

Earnings calls from the Big Four show massive reskilling in progress India's top four IT outsourcers saw a quarter where clients were hesitant about everything except their desire to discuss AI, according to earnings reports from TCS, HCL, Infosys and Wipro....

Semi industry fears US will be short 70K engineers, technicians, computer scientists by end of decade Last week, TSMC postponed production at its under-construction Arizona chip fab until at least 2025 because it said it couldn't find enough skilled workers to complete the facility. This could be a sign of things to come....

If getting stuff right is such a deal breaker, why are we still so deep into this ML hype? OpenAI has taken down its AI classifier months after it was released due to its inability to accurately determine whether a chunk of text was automatically generated by a large language model or written by a human....

How quick y'all are to forget Nvidia-Arm Two high-profile defeats in court do not a failed strategy make, or so says FTC boss Lina Khan....

One spotted by Amnesty International - wonder what that was used for? Apple has released fixes for several security flaws that affect its iPhones, iPads, macOS computers, and Apple TV and watches, and warned that some of these bugs have already been exploited....

Just 6% of the water it consumed last year was replenished, report says Google's plans to go green are faltering - and its all AI's fault, the company claims....

The next version, 'Trixie', is starting to take shape and boasts an additional official CPU architecture The first point release in the Debian "Bookworm" series is here, but version 12.1 is a modest bugfix. It might be time for even the ultra-cautious to start taking a look....

US semiconductor manufacturer unhappy rival TSMC is bagging billions US semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries has criticized the German government's 20 billion ($22 billion) in semiconductor subsidies, claiming it will distort competition....

Inventory holding reduced in Q1, hunt for new CEO continues Logitech has reported shrinking sales across much of its portfolio but the rate of decline is slowing, causing interim CEO Guy Gecht to up sales and profit forecasts for the first half of fiscal 2024....

With 34 designs to pick from, you can choose your own ML adventure To encourage techies and engineers to try out its AI acceleration hardware, Intel has put together a bunch of software reference kits it claims will reduce the time and resources required to deploy machine learning systems on its silicon....

Turns out proto-Earths may bring their own drinks Astronomers have detected water vapor in the inner region of a protoplanetary disk - where rocky planets may be forming - for the first time, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope....