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Privacy: It's a Jersey Thing New Jersey cops must apply for a wiretap order - not just a warrant - for near-continual snooping on suspects' Facebook accounts, according to a unanimous ruling by that US state's Supreme Court....

Just in case you blurt out that L***x is better than Windows? (That was a joke, PR friends) Slinging the occasional expletive in casual conversations isn't so unusual these days - and online chinwags are no exception....

Working with industry 'critical' for boosting adoption, say chipmakers VMware has joined AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V community to work on an open and cross-platform framework for the development and operation of applications using confidential computing hardware....

Vendors have days to answer cost and innovation concerns, may face potential delay to merger... or worse Adobe's aim to complete its $20 billion purchase of web-first collaboration design startup Figma by the end of the year is less certain after Britain's competition regulator referred the deal for a deeper probe on concerns it'll reduce innovation....

The art world is up to shenanigans again A trendy Louis Vuitton handbag will set you back nearly $3,000 these days, but a scaled-down version has been sold for more than 20 times as much....

Chipzilla's not saying much other than 'commercial software' not affected Intel's 4th generation Xeon Scalable processors arrived behind schedule when the silicon, codenamed Sapphire Rapids, debuted in January 2023. Now the x86 giant has paused shipments of some chips in that family due to a fault with the components....

$940m agreement with one of world's largest employers is value for money, we are assured England's National Health Service has inked a 774.5 million ($940 million) contract with Microsoft to license its Office 365 and security software....

The skillful handiwork of merging bits from different kernels into one, and keeping it secure at the same time devconf.cz Maintaining the kernel of an enterprise distro is not only hard work, it also involves conflicting goals....

Conservative peer admits he can't tell between dogs and cats either Experts in technology law and software clashed with the UK House of Lords this week over whether it was technically possible to hand responsibility for battlefield decisions to AI-driven weapons....

Quelle tragedie - techie had to visit the city of lights twice to sort this one out On Call Hard-coded into The Register's week is that each Friday morning you'll find a new instalment of On Call, our reader contributed tales of tech support troubles....

Nobody else is using that nomenclature for planned updates to 5G Huawei has claimed it will offer everything a carrier needs to run a 5.5G network next year. Which sounds great - even if 5.5G is a little mysterious....

Overrules decision that Cambodian leader Hun Sen's threats of political violence were newsworthy Meta's Oversight Board - the quasi-independent body the social networking giant established to review content moderation decisions - has recommended a national leader be banned from Facebook and Instagram for six months for promoting political violence. It has overridden a decision not to take down videos in which Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen threatened his political opponents....

Yet another snafu for digital services push Fujitsu Japan is in the spotlight again for all the wrong reasons, after fumbling its attempt to fix the nation's troubled ID card scheme....

Claims he wants to stay in the music biz after time in a Sing Sing One of the two men who admitted stealing more than $23 million in royalty payments for songs played on YouTube has been sentenced to nearly six years behind bars for his role in what prosecutors called "one of the largest music-royalty frauds ever."...

Also: No comment on that choice of name for a wee leccy chopper America's Federal Aviation Administration has granted limited flight licenses to not one but two companies working on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) craft, one of which could even be considered an actual flying car....

It only took nearly 20 years and one death to get there Video Virgin Galactic today sent six people to the edge of space in its first-ever commercial flight....

Web giant also hits back ... right as YouTube steps up war on advert blockers Analysis Google is accused of misrepresenting the placement of YouTube video ads by playing them on low-quality third-party websites where they may never have been viewed. If so, that means Google has been taking millions if not billions of dollars from advertisers for video ads that perhaps no one actually watched....

Cough, cough, use Rust. Plus: Eight more exploited bugs added to CISA's must-patch list The most dangerous type of software bug is the out-of-bounds write, according to MITRE this week. This type of flaw is responsible for 70 CVE-tagged holes in the US government's list of known vulnerabilities that are under active attack and need to be patched, we note....

Malwarebytes and Trellix upgrades to the rescue Some Windows users are still feeling the fallout from apparent conflicts between recent OS updates and certain antimalware and antivirus software....

Blasted from the sky in February, device never transmitted photos, videos, or radar data it collected, officials say It's been months since "spy balloon" fever gripped the United States, but the headline-grabbing flying object -alleged to have been deployed by China - is back in the news. Preliminary findings from the US inspection of its wreckage show a whole bunch of commercially available hardware made in the States....

Enterprises want a single data platform for data lakes and warehouse, but tech's not there yet, say analysts Analysis With confirmation of support for table formats Apache Iceberg and Hudi this week, Databricks is striving to broaden the appeal of its approach to data lakes, strengthening its dominance in machine learning to branch out to data warehouse-type workloads....

Bizarrely, there's been no suggestion that the bout won't happen How many CEOs in their 50s require their parents to step in when they're being a little shit?...

Company eyes return to memory growth, but warns life on the China ban-list could be hard US memory chipmaker Micron is still experiencing revenue way below last year's highs, but the company believes the industry has bottomed out, meaning prices for buyers are likely to rise again as demand picks up....

Desktop Ubuntu, but without the nonsense It's been a while coming, but the beta of Linux Mint 21.2, codenamed "Victoria", is here with a new version of the Cinnamon desktop among other updated features to enjoy....

Survey says most would prefer a gentle request A recent report covering 9,500 employers and 6,650 employees across 17 global markets found that those who forced workers to come back to office buildings are paying a price, with 42 percent saying they'd subsequently lost more employees than expected....

Decision to adapt software now subject of an independent management investigation Birmingham City Council is running parallel systems to compensate for the troubled implementation of an Oracle system which will suck in 46.5 million ($58.81 million) in additional spending in the current financial year....

Boffins plan 'digital twin' to help hit deadline, recruit heavy-hitting partners The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has recruited Intel and the University of Cambridge for the compute resources it needs to develop Britain's prototype nuclear fusion reactor - including building a "digital twin" of the design to help with testing....

Not the iPhone maker's first think-of-the-children rodeo Apple has joined the rapidly growing chorus of tech organizations calling on British lawmakers to revise the nation's Online Safety Bill - which for now is in the hands of the House of Lords - so that it safeguards strong end-to-end encryption....

Ads and search giant also open sources offensive stereotype database, and gives Amazon a poke Google's Indian operation will test a feature that would offer navigation based on mentions of landmarks - kind of the way people do....

Forms a packaging posse to do the chiplet thing Samsung Electronics will commence mass production of a 2-nanometer silicon manufacturing process in 2025, the chaebol announced on Wednesday at its annual Foundry Forum....

Only for Ampere - but with a licencing twist that means Intel and AMD can't relax Oracle has certified its flagship Database 19c Enterprise Edition database for the Arm architecture, in the cloud or on-prem - provided it runs on an Ampere processor....

Group-IB spinout confirms Kislitsin is wanted by both Washington and Moscow A Russian network security specialist and former editor of Hacker magazine who is wanted by the US and Russia on cybercrime charges has been detained in Kazakhstan as the two governments seek his extradition....

Psst, some American user data still stored in China, too Five TikTok users who sued to overturn Montana's state-wide public ban on the video-sharing app have been getting secret support for their case from an unsurprising source: TikTok itself....

Where did they get the idea this bot was potentially spitting out personal info? Oh, from The Register Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies' AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent....

We'd sure like to see a bot unpick a failed update or handle users struggling to find the 'any' key Register Kettle We've seen a slew of claims lately once again predicting dire times ahead for IT system administrators: if they're not under threat from AI and outsourcing, they face an increasingly demanding work atmosphere....

A tale of emergency firewalling, a little bit of victim blaming, and workflow scripts gone berserk This month you may have noticed the servers used by the GMP project - an open source arithmetic library at the heart of GCC and other programs - slowed to a crawl. It was due to a deluge of network traffic, the source of which is quite surprising....

As we yearn for a return to a truly decentralized internet Systems Approach Next week I am heading to Edinburgh University, where I did my PhD back in the 1980s, to give a lecture as part of the events celebrating 60 years of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh....

Another win for Musk: Ford, GM, Rivian and Volvo have already announced plans to dump CCS The winds of EV charging standards change continue to favor Elon Musk, as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has confirmed plans to standardize Tesla's in-house car charging hardware....

Fraudulent cash cow milked investors for almost $9M The Eastern District of California has serious beef with a bloke whose cow manure green energy scheme turned out to be udder bull....

To protect against weapons or economic interests - either way, it's bad news for some vendors Washington is understood to be considering further restrictions on the export to China of advanced chips used for AI processing, moves which could dent the sales of companies including Nvidia and AMD....

Ripples rebounding and reflecting from Red Hat's rebuff of RHEL rebuilds The backlash against Red Hat's decision to stop distributing the source code of RHEL for free to non-customers continues to widen....

Police reported backlog of 999 calls after unspecified technical error Britain's communications watchdog is investigating former state telco BT over a "UK-wide disruption" that prevented some calls connecting with emergency services on 25 June....

The labs will look at AI and robotics for manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and cities European officials - who reached political agreement on the EU's new Data Act last night -have launched four labs to test AI applications before they're released to the general public....

NASA space suits provide inspiration to Swiss and Brit boffins Drones built to withstand extreme temperatures have passed initial testing in an effort to reduce risks to rescuers in fire emergencies....

Clunky, costly, literally sickening data silos just aren't better than the real world Businesses are not rushing to adopt the metaverse, according to analyst firm Gartner - because it's just not very good or useful....

Proof-of-concept study shows it's possible to bypass high levels of security The rise of off-the-shelf AI tools that can clone human voices has forced developers of voice authentication software to build an extra layer of security to detect whether an audio sample appears to be human or machine-generated....

There's gold in them thar mobes. Also copper, silver and cobalt The GSM Association (GSMA) and a dozen carriers have announced a plan to make a modest dent in the number of mobile phones that languish, unused, unloved, and unrecycled....

The 'upgrade' is free, yet an amnesty is needed despite months of warning Microsoft's bid to have customers of Teams Rooms hardware acquire corporate licenses is going so well - not! - that the software giant has extended the deadline to sign up by 90 days, even though the move involves price reductions....

They're vetted, almost acculturated, and will be booted from the US if they lose their gig Canada has launched a bid to attract techies working in the USA on the notorious H-1B visa, by offering them the chance to move north....

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....