The Register

Customers also warned to look out for audits following M&As Inflationary pressures mean businesses have faced price increases of up to 24 percent from tech vendors attempting to claw back margins.…

As next-gen storage gets hotter, designs are getting wacky Feature As the latest generation of M.2 SSDs have trickled out to consumer platforms we've seen some wild and wacky cooling solutions strapped to them: heat pipes, 20,000 rpm fans, even tiny liquid coolers.…

Phone-hugging code can record calls, read messages, track geolocation, access camera, other snooping The Android Predator spyware has more surveillance capabilities than previously suspected, according to analysis by Cisco Talos, with an assist from non-profit Citizen Lab in Canada.…

Python package pile prefers protecting programmer privacy PyPI, the Python Package Index, began evaluating ways to reduce the amount of identifying information that it stores even before the US Justice Department came asking for data on suspect users.…

Hopefully this tech works better than his self-driving cars Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has said the US Food and Drug Administration has given permission for its first human clinical trials.…

Come for the Kubernetes, stay for the containers After using Azure Linux internally for two years and running it in public preview since October 2022, Microsoft this week finally made its distribution generally available.…

Uncle Sam confirms it's saying nothing The US International Trade Administration (ITA) has admitted it promotes the sale of American-approved commercial spyware to foreign governments, and won't answer questions about it, according to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).…

New beta versions of Thunderbird (and Firefox, while we're at it) to help set you up It's beta season in Mozilla land and some cool shiny stuff is on the way. Versions 114 of both the Firefox browser and its distant cousin the Thunderbird email client are heading our way.…

'We accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended...' Firefox…

World's largest laptop vendor releases whizzy x86 - but we could do with a better Windows rescue party The Thinkpad Z13 is quite different from any other Lenovo machine that we have seen recently. It's a similar thin, ultra-light design to the Arm-based X13S, but this is not an unusual RISC computer: this is in some ways a relatively conventional X86 laptop.…

Just a shade under the 25% threshold that would spark investigation, but he still doesn't want to take over, honest French telecoms billionaire Patrick Drahi has upped his ownership of the UK's BT Group to nearly a quarter yet he still insists he does not intend to make an offer for the entire company.…

Beware over promising benefits and underestimating complexity Opinion Around 20 years after the largest public sector technology disaster in UK history began a £12 billion contracting escapade, they're at it again.…

ERP giant losing points on execution and flexibility SAP's drive to move customers to cloud-hosted and SaaS systems is not being matched by its flexibility and operational sophistication, the user group representing the Americas has told The Register.…

Complexity also a problem across 115 funding streams, watchdog says Great Britain needs to at least double its low carbon investment if it is to reach the ambition of achieving net zero by 2050.…

Homebrew Infrastructure Processing Unit virtualizes networks and storage to make Sapphire Rapids Xeons sing Google Cloud has given itself a significant upgrade by introducing its latest Infrastructure Processing Unit – the same kind of kit that others call SmartNICs or Data Processing Units – in its first instance type powered by Intel's fourth-gen Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors.…

FBI warns jobseekers to be very skeptical of working holidays in Cambodia The FBI has issued a warning about fake job ads that recruit workers into forced labor operations in Southeast Asia – some of which enslave visitors and force them to participate in cryptocurrency scams.…

For $100 million it better beat an Nvidia A100 IBM plans spend $100 million to build a 100,000 qubit "quantum-centric supercomputer" allegedly capable of solving the world's most intractable problems by 2023 and it's tapped the Universities of Tokyo and Chicago for help.…

The road to hell is paved with good intentions Opinion We can all agree that securing our software is a good thing. Thanks to one security fiasco after another – the SolarWinds software supply chain attack, the perpetual Log4j vulnerability, and the npm maintainer protest code gone wrong – we know we must secure our code. But the European Union's proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) goes way, way too far in trying to regulate software security.…

In cloudy Yorkshire, a ray of light can become the enemy On call With Friday upon us once more, the weather forecast assumes outsized importance as we all hope for bright days that let readers make the most of their time off.…

It's a familiar story: Legislation versus rapidly evolving technology A sweeping European Union-wide AI regulatory bill is one step closer to adoption, with the European Commission's Internal Market and Civil Liberties Committees voicing their approval by an overwhelming majority. Should the bill become law, it could lead to tough times for AI operators in the economic bloc.…

But tribunal punts on whether data was intercepted in transit The UK's National Crime Agency has partially won an important legal battle in a case that challenged the warrants used to obtain messages from cyber crook hangout EncroChat.…

How complicated can cold fusion be, really? Fusion upstart Helion Energy has named Microsoft as its first customer, and claims the software giant should be able to use electricity made by mashing together helium atoms from 2028.…

In a weird way, we can blame this on AI being a better bet than blockchain India's IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar will ask WhatsApp to explain what's up, after the Meta-owned messaging service experienced a dramatic increase in spam calls.…

Judge won't toss out two key charges, software source slurping case is on The judge overseeing the lawsuit challenging the legality of GitHub Copilot, and its underlying OpenAI Codex model, "borrowing" people's code samples has refused to dismiss two claims in the case and sent most of the other allegations back for revision.…

Talk about going against the Grain Google recently changed the default setting for adding invitations to its Calendar service in a way that interferes with third-party products. The Big G said it's just trying to block spam while some in the industry are calling foul.…

HAVA go at breaking electronic ballot box security US voting machines would undergo deeper examination for computer security holes under proposed bipartisan legislation.…

We've got four words for you: Insert coin to continue The European Union and the United Kingdom are at odds again, this time over whether to approve the proposed $68.7 billion merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.…

The threat is coming from inside the supply chain Black Hat Asia Miscreants have infected millions of Androids worldwide with malicious firmware before the devices even shipped from their factories, according to Trend Micro researchers at Black Hat Asia.…

Messy system is forcing VA pharmacies to work overtime to deal with poor IT, committee told The US Department of Veterans Affairs' ill-fated electronic health record upgrade hasn't just proved a problem for clinicians - it's also causing serious disruptions at VA pharmacies that have led to veterans not getting needed medication.…

Database hygiene matters, says Percona expert With less than six months to go before support for version 5.7 of relational database MySQL runs out, it appears users are ignoring recommendations to upgrade.…

Potential meteorite excites everyone but the insurance company Residents of a home in New Jersey have been left shaken after a possible meteorite crashed through the roof, ricocheted off a hardwood floor, and dented the ceiling before coming to a rest.…

And what next for cooling, datacenter placement, and more – tune in and find out direct from our vultures Register Kettle This week Timothy Prickett Morgan over at our sister site The Next Platform wrote a fantastic in-depth analysis of the effect this latest AI hype is having on datacenter GPUs.…

Time for AWS and pals to start thinking about JVs? Cloud services providers that aren't based in Europe — like the Big Three — may have to team up with a cloud that is operated and maintained from the EU if they want ENISA's stamp of approval for handling sensitive data.…

Despite billions of dollars in profit, Satya Nadella points to those pesky 'macroeconomic uncertainties' Call it the endless drive to sate Wall Street types or sensible business planning in the face of a cooling economy – either way Microsoft says it will freeze the salaries of full-time employees this year.…

Official Cinnamon, Edubuntu reborn, and an updated Kylin The "Lunar Lobster" release of Ubuntu has welcomed two new official remixes, as well as the first updated Ubuntu Kylin in a year or so.…

But what about the Brits? A lawyer gives their take on the privacy minefield Analysis A new EU-US transatlantic data flow agreement is expected to be finalized by the spring of 2023. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework will enable the flow of personal data from "data exporters" in the EU to "data importers" in the US who have signed up to the agreement.…

He still gets paid 94 times what his median workers do It sucks to be Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's president and CEO, who could have made almost 25 million greenbacks in the latest financial year, but because of missed financial targets had to settle for a bit less.…

Wheels come off plan to explore Enceladus – in a good way Video The latest in high-concept automated space exploration tech from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory looks to have been screwed up and twisted – by design.…

Why sign up for ChatGPT when LLaMA and a multicore beast can do as well? Column This time last year the latest trend in computing became impossible to ignore: huge slabs of silicon with hundreds of billions of transistors – the inevitable consequence of another set of workarounds that kept Moore's Law from oblivion.…

Where feature phones remain prevalent, Spotify is not an option and the 'net is little use in an emergency India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has issued an advisory reminding mobile phone manufacturers they should include an FM radio tuner in their products.…

But it's up to NASA to approve a rescue mission. Cue Aerosmith Momentus and Astroscale, two startups specializing in space infrastructure and orbital debris, want to collaborate and help boost NASA's aging Hubble Space Telescope into a safe orbit.…

As protests roil, connectivity has been cut with no relief in sight Pakistan has blocked internet access across much of the country – perhaps indefinitely – as protests erupt over the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan.…

‘To further strengthen and diversify the supply chain’ which is just what India loves to hear Cisco announced on Wednesday it will start manufacturing some hardware in India.…

WebGPU, Chrome extensions, Android, Dart, Flutter, and more Google's developer keynote at its IO show on Wednesday focused on Android and on web technology, which suddenly looks much more capable thanks to WebGPU, an API that allows web applications to tap into local GPU hardware.…

30 days with three other people in a double-width shipping container built by a crypto billionaire. What's not to like? Aerospace startup Vast has announced plans to launch the world's first commercial space station atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.…

Just a small experiment – for now? YouTube has begun showing a pop-up to some viewers warning them that "ad blockers are not allowed" on the video-sharing site.…

We sat through the Chocolate Factory's PR blitz so you don't have to At its downsized developer conference on Wednesday, Google showed off present and planned Pixel hardware – a foldable Pixel among them – and PaLM 2, a large language model that follows in the footsteps of last year's initial Pathways Language Model (PaLM) and now whispers to various Google products.…

Workers slam 'horrendous' handling of layoffs that left even 'engineering managers in the dark' Exclusive Software supply chain management biz Sonatype has laid off 14 percent of its global workforce, according to internal documents seen by The Register.…

Updates said to be rolling out now... if your gateway hasn't already bricked itself An expired security certificate is threatening to wreak havoc with Cisco customers' wide-area networks. For a change, turning the equipment off and back on again will only make things worse.…

Teams gets a bot, OneNote gets a bot, PowerPoint gets a bot, Outlook gets a bot, everybody* gets a bot! Two months ago, Microsoft sprinkled AI-powered Copilot-branded features all over its 365 cloud service, and worked with 20 enterprises including Goodyear, General Motors, and Chevron to get feedback on the digital assistants and work out some of the kinks.…