The Register

Not aimed specifically at China … just nations that behave a lot like China President Biden has issued an executive order that prohibits certain entities from investing in US organizations if it will give the investor access to certain information technologies and/or US data.…

Expert tells El Reg: 'It was unusual, a geometrical curiosity' Video The fireball spotted charging through the night-time skies of Scotland and Northern Ireland this week, initially thought to have been some fallen SpaceX hardware, was a meteor after all, according to the UK Meteor Network.…

Cough, cough, U, cough, kraine Akamai says it has absorbed the largest-ever publicly known distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack – an assault against an unfortunate Eastern European organization that went beyond 700 million packets per second.…

Requires five years of patching, 24 hour incident reporting, and proper security … for starters The European Commission has revealed a Cyber Resilience Act that will require manufacturers of connected devices to secure them properly before shipping, disclose and fix flaws promptly, and guarantee fixes will flow for five years.…

Wants swarms of small satellites that are harder to destroy – and outsourcing to improve cybersecurity The Biden-nominated chief of space operations for the USA's Space Force (USSF) rates China his greatest challenge, as the Middle Kingdom has developed technologies to destroy space assets.…

AWS and G Suite admin accounts likely popped, HackerOne bug bounty page hit, and more Uber is tonight reeling from what looks like a substantial cybersecurity breach.…

Texts, contacts, call logs, photos, and more centrally stored for years without a warrant in sight US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) "routinely conducts warrantless searches of Americans' devices" every year, in a number of cases downloading texts, photos, call logs, and more into a central database where it's stored for 15 years and searchable by some 2,700 federal employees.…

Get ready for face scans, expanded surveillance, violated rights, and more, say critics California Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed AB 2273, legislation designed to protect children's online privacy by demanding information from everyone.…

Power consumption plummets, too, so there's that The Merge, the moment Ethereum cryptocurrency abandons proof-of-work for proof-of-stake validation, has concluded. So far, all signs point to a success, though not without some footnotes Ethereum investors should note.…

That's nice, but what about Nv's H100? SambaNova says its latest chips can best Nvidia's A100 silicon by a wide margin, at least when it comes to machine learning workloads.…

Gotta keep those phone processors and GPUs coming, folks A US Senate committee has advanced a law bill that would provide billions in military support to Taiwan, the island nation that makes so many many of our chips and is being menaced by China.…

34 states and Puerto Rico sharing pot to fund chargers along interstate highways Electric vehicle charging is about to get a boost in 34 US states and Puerto Rico, as government officials have approved plans to start spending infrastructure bill money on building EV chargers.…

'Sharing of agricultural data can help develop solutions to some of the food system's most pressing challenges' Food security group CGIAR is working with the Linux Foundation to standardize data sharing about agricultural fields on a global scale.…

Bandwidth-starved researchers rejoice Starlink began testing its satellite internet access at McMurdo Station in Antarctica this week to the benefit of the area's researchers.…

Admits guilt, but claims he took files to jog his memory, afraid he'd not keep up with 'younger engineers' A former Broadcom engineer who pleaded guilty to stealing his ex-employer's trade secrets has asked the court not to give him prison time, saying he stole the files for reference, fearing he would "be unable to keep up" with "more technical and younger engineers" at a new startup.…

Planes unlikely to fall out of sky after December 31, 2029, El Reg can confirm Microsoft has released a (very) miniature rival to the Millennium Bug into the wild with a glitch in Outlook that takes the user instead back to the 20th century if they seek dates beyond December 31, 2029.…

John Chambers' Nile wants to remove humans from network management Tech veteran John Chambers says he wants to take on Cisco, the business he built into a multibillion-dollar beast, by launching a startup that intends to remove humans from the network management equation.…

That's quite the challenge to neutralize – making chips and electronics is hardly ecofriendly Global chip and consumer electronics biz Samsung has a blueprint to become carbon neutral by 2050 that includes investing 7 trillion won ($5.01 billion) to support energy efficiency and sustainability.…

Criminal charges, more sanctions, and a $10m bounty, oh my The US has issued indictments against three Iranians linked to the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for their alleged roles in plotting ransomware attacks against American critical infrastructure, and also sanctioned multiple individuals and two entities.…

Good thing Redmond has a brilliant track record with patches Microsoft says it has tweaked the way 365 Apps update themselves, by seamlessly and automatically applying changes while PCs are locked or idle so as to not disturb users.…

If you think customers were impatient before, this report won't soothe their worries The former owner of Newport Wafer Fab (NWF) is being linked with a buyback of the business that he sold to China's Nexperia, a sale currently being reviewed on grounds of national security by the British government.…

Unbundling of products, cloud shift, support for older ERP products make customers query inflation-based rise An SAP user group has voiced complaints about the increase in support fees for the popular enterprise software, pointing out inconsistencies with changes in the way SAP packages its solutions and makes them available to customers.…

Questions remain over Palantir's influence after consultancy role for former NHS England director revealed Competition for a "Federated Data Platform" (FDP) for the NHS in England has been delayed for a second time as details emerge of how Palantir – the US spy-tech biz hotly tipped to win the £360 million ($421 million) contract – has influenced the controversial procurement.…

In dust, we trust Astronomers have found a baby planet hidden in clouds of gas and dust swirling within a young solar system, by studying the accumulation of material around Lagrange points.…

Hopes to streamline market data movements, but as 11,000 institutions use SWIFT this is a bit of a moment The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has announced it will try to hook its 11,000 members to a blockchain – but not for its payment service.…

Terraform Labs CEO was boss of the TerraUSD and Luna crypto crash. South Korea wants him in cuffs South Korea has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder and CEO of troubled cryptocurrency company Terraform Labs, which is blamed for a massive crash in cryptocurrency values.…

The red rocket menace is real: Beijing's already sprayed the region this year The Philippines has closed some of its airspace and warned local seafarers not to ply their trade for fear of having bits of a Chinese rocket land on them.…

This may not be in the spirit of Beijing's many bans on blockheads A Beijing court has ruled that locals are permitted to trade cryptocurrencies – but not use them as a substitute for money.…

Super Cali goes ballistic, says it's all atrocious California's Attorney General sued Amazon on Wednesday, claiming the internet titan illegally stifles competition by punishing vendors for selling their products at cheaper prices on other online stores.…

Blast, manifesto railing against Zuck and AI may be an artifical reality A plastic carrying-case apparently exploded at Northeastern University's Boston campus on Tuesday night, injuring one staff member, in what may be a protest against virtual reality – or just a hoax.…

Developers, why not simply build flawless software, thus solving all our vulnerability worries The White House has published software security rules for federal agencies as part of a larger push to shore up America's IT supply chains.…

GPU giant still thinks Softbank-owned designs are worth the RISC Arm says Nvidia’s Grace processor will be among the first chips to use its upcoming Neoverse V2 CPU cores.…

Log4j being the main driver, this data science poll claims About 40 percent of industry professionals say their organizations have reduced their usage of open source software due to concerns about security, according to a survey conducted by data science firm Anaconda.…

As Patreon ditches nearly a fifth of its workforce Twilio has announced a restructuring effort that will end in an 11 percent cut of its workforce. …

'Cloud connectivity' hits different this time Microsoft has announced some movement within its two-year-old Azure Space program, which as the name suggests aims to offer cloud services to satellite operators.…

Understanding solar switchbacks is key to understanding solar winds, and scientists think they've got it Our star harbors one less scientific mystery thanks to data from the Solar Orbiter probe showing how "solar switchbacks" that cause the Sun's magnetic field to flip are formed. By furthering astronomer's understanding of solar winds, they hope the discovery will protect astronauts and equipment.…

Text Editor replaces GEdit for starters, though it's still very early days The beta version of Red hat's Fedora 37 is available for download – but it's still far from finished.…

Could it be third time lucky? The odds are not in space agency's favor NASA has once again pushed back the launch of the Artemis I mission to send the SLS rocket and Orion capsule beyond the Moon.…

To stay under threshold of 1.5°C of warming, the world needs to work seven times harder, says the UN's WMO The world quickly undid emissions reductions that were an unintended perk of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading a multi-organizational UN group to issue a bleak warning: We need to be working seven times harder to meet climate change goals.…

Search giant’s appeal lands flat as fine imposed for anticompetitive practice in Android search The European General Court has imposed a €4.125 billion (about $4.13 billion) fine on Google, largely upholding an earlier ruling on the ad-tech giant's anticompetitive practices in mobile search.…

Trump wanted a wall, Biden wants batteries The US and Mexico are reportedly joining forces on supply chains for electric vehicle production in a mutual aid pact.…

100k staffers and their beneficiaries to be looked after by Prudential Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance IBM will book a one-off non-cash pre-tax pension settlement charge of $5.9 billion in its calendar Q3 after handing pension duties to two life insurance businesses.…

The internal traffic-filtering tool can be used for much more than firewalls Linux Plumbers Conference The Linux Plumbers Conference in Dublin ends today and some of the talks have revealed interesting new uses for the eBPF functionality.…

Both search giant and Facebook parent claim they play by the rules, will challenge decision South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) has issued two large fines for privacy violations: a $50 million penalty for Google and $22 million for Meta.…

Competes with the A320 and 737, which Airbus and Boeing can't build quickly enough to satisfy demand Two recent flights of the China's domestically made single-aisle passenger jet, the C919, have lent credence to rumors that the nation's aviation authorities are set to issue it an airworthiness certification – and by doing so, give Boeing and Airbus some competition.…

Legal cases in Europe claim anticompetitive conduct, which Google denies Google owner Alphabet could face claims of up to €25 billion ($25.4 billion) in a case alleging anticompetitive conduct in relation to ad tech in Europe.…

There are beautiful, undisturbed places in the world. You do not have to catch 'em all Column Social media has made it easy to create large communities and to communicate with them instantly. The downside is that when those communities cross over into the real world, crowds of people can cause real harm regardless of their intent.…

It works for the FOSS community, but Red Hat's version adds an 'office vibe' and desk-free ‘neighborhoods’ IBM's FOSS unit, Red Hat, has revealed its staff don't need to come back to the office – ever. But if they do, they'll find collaborative "neighborhoods" await them.…

'Lonsdaleite' is even harder than normal diamonds and its genesis shows how we might make more A rare type of diamond that's even stronger than the usual form of the crystal was created when a large asteroid smashed into an ancient dwarf planet 4.5 billion years ago, researchers assert.…