The Register

Slack said to be worth fraction of price paid, new hires not as productive amid downturn Salesforce has pushed through boardroom hires in response to moves by activist investors to wrest greater control of the global CRM giant, which was forced to cut 10 percent of its workforce earlier this month.…

Plus: Google builds text-to-music model but won't release it, and more In brief Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay, made headlines for claiming an AI chatbot was due to defend a man in an upcoming court hearing, but has pulled out of the stunt.…

Guy's and St Thomas' in London spent two months getting back on its feet after heatwave fried datacenter Last summer's datacenter outage at one of the UK's largest hospitals took two months to completely rectify because of the complexity associated with 371 legacy IT systems, a new report has found.…

Don't throw the open source baby out with the bathwater Opinion The European Union has a commendable love for the safety of its citizens. Armed with the keys to a market of 300 million of the world's richest consumers, the EU has merely to scent danger to bravely regulate. Food, consumer goods, financial markets and data processing: if it can bite the punter, the EU has a legal muzzle to hand.…

Thankfully a veep with a sense of humor pulled the rug out Who, Me? Welcome once again dear readers to Who, Me? in which we recount the heroic (and sometimes less so) antics of Regizens in the workplace.…

MAME adapted to bring your favorite TI and HP graphing machines back to life The Internet Archive has delivered a nostalgic treat in the form of a collection of 14 vintage emulated calculators, now available to play with online.…

Did Pathfinder get lost in Intel's sea of red ink? Or is Chipzilla becoming RISC averse? Intel has shut down its RISC-V Pathfinder – an initiative it launched less than six months ago to encourage use of the open source RISC-V CPU designs.…

But the first rule of Chip Fight Club must be observed. Meanwhile Beijing may have its own shadow bans The talks between the US, Japan, and the Netherlands over wider bans on exports of semiconductor technology to China have reportedly seen the three agree to concerted action.…

Also: a week of leaks; Riot Games says 'LoL' to source code ransom demands; and Yandex source also appears online in brief Russian hackers have proved yet again how quickly cyber attacks can be used to respond to global events with a series of DDoS attacks on German infrastructure and government websites in response to the country's plan to send tanks to Ukraine.…

PLUS: NTT’s haptics advance; Australia cracks down on influencers; Korean Uni websites hit by Chinese protestors; and more Asia In Brief China has stopped recognizing online study at overseas institutions and called on students to get on a plane and resume face to face study.…

Who said workforce development was just for humans? Comment The lucid ramblings and art synthesized by ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion have captured imaginations and prompted no shortage of controversy over the role generative AI will play in our futures.…

'I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that' Those using Chrome on Windows and other platforms may have trouble storing files over a network.…

What's allowed for Cupertino is verboten for everyone else Apple has again been sued for promising privacy and allegedly failing to provide it.…

Man seized in Morocco is now presumably sleepless in Seattle A French citizen was scheduled to appear before a US court on Friday on a nine-count indictment related to his alleged involvement in the ShinyHunters cybercrime gang that trafficked in identity and corporate data theft and sometimes extortion.…

Remote Desktop, domain controllers giving you gyp? Gamble on these fixes Microsoft has fixed a problem caused by the Windows 11 version 22H2 update that crashed the Remote Desktop application on some systems.…

Because this is necessary, definitely can't go wrong The California Department of Motor Vehicles doesn't want anyone to think it's a technological dinosaur - that's why it's announcing its own cutting-edge NFT project to digitize vehicle titles. …

If you want to keep the miscreants out, put the updates in, Redmond says Microsoft is urging organizations to protect their Exchange servers from cyberattacks by keeping them updated and hardened, since online criminals are still going after valuable data in the email system.…

New meaning to sweetening the pot Uncle Sam has put up a $10 million reward for intel on Hive ransomware criminals' identities and whereabouts, while Russia has blocked the FBI and CIA websites, along with the Rewards for Justice site offering the bounty.…

Yes, the Chinese will never think of doing something like this, muhaha The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has enlisted a group of technology companies to help research the next generation of semiconductors.…

Work isn't original if it was taken from a plagiarism engine like ChatGPT Science and Springer Nature, two leading academic journal publishers, introduced new rules addressing the use of generative AI tools to write papers in their editorial policies on Thursday.…

And that, kids, is why we don't play the Emergency Alert System tone on TV Despite being a well-known illegal sound that many film and television productions have been fined over, US media titan Fox stands accused of playing the Emergency Alert System attention tone to promote an NFL show on dozens of TV channels.…

Insight could lead to better conflict resolution between our feline overlords Seeking insights into cat behavior, scientists turned to the internet and discovered that domesticated felines exhibit either "playful", "agonistic" or "intermediate" behavior.…

DIY store didn't get 'valid consent,' says Canada's regulator Canada's Home Depot has stopped using Meta's "Offline Conversions" tool, it confirmed to a regulator dealing with a man's complaint after he discovered his visits to the home improvement shop had been recorded.…

Uncle Sam well aware of strategic importance of lithography industry crucial to production nodes The Netherlands and Japan may be about to introduce tougher restrictions aimed at curbing China's ability to produce advanced semiconductors, egged on by pressure from the US.…

Join the queue, eh? AWS, Google and Microsoft are among creditors owed money after the FTX crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy in November.…

As per employee model replaces old subscription, user bills could soar Oracle stands accused of "predatory" licensing tactics after making changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model that could force businesses to pay tens of thousands of dollars more each month for running the same software.…

Nothing good – the recent layoffs hit its best and brightest leaders hard Opinion Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be Evil"? I do. Even though Google dumped that phrase from its code of conduct in 2018, many of us still thought Google was a bit better than other companies.…

Even with instructions staring them in the face, this genius couldn't get it right On-Call In last week's edition of On Call, The Register's weekly column dedicated to readers' days being damaged by demands to deflect needless disaster, we wondered if the inevitabilities of death and taxes should be joined by meaningless managerial interventions. This week, we have a new candidate to join lists of iconic inevitabilities: users ignoring instructions and then complaining when their own actions create complications.…

What a tease A box-truck-sized asteroid has made one of the closest approaches by a near-Earth object ever recorded, brushing past our home world at a distance of a couple of thousand miles on Thursday. …

Welcome to the real world, kids. And for the rest of us, a future at which Meta is gulp! – better at large-scale analytics Here’s one from the “welcome to the real world, kids, we have no sympathy for your plight” files: social media giant Meta’s engineering team has bemoaned the complexity of migrating from legacy technology.…

Nice people on LinkedIn want to harvest logins from politicians, boffins, and defense types The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned of two similar spear-phishing campaigns, one originating from Russia, the other from Iran.…

U OK Pat? Asking cos client sales are down, server sales are down, and your forecasts are grim Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has expressed confidence in the company's trajectory despite posting a $700 million net loss on revenues that plunged 32 percent during the fourth quarter of FY 2022, to a measly $14 billion.…

If you yell 'death to America' and no one watches the video, does it make a sound? Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has burned more than 50,000 spammy fake news stories and other content posted by the pro-China 'Dragonbridge' gang.…

As much cash went into low-carbon as fossil fuels last year, apparently The world has reached a major tipping point in the transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy: 2022 was the first year global investments in low-carbon technologies matched spending on the fossil fuel industry.…

California-based chipmaking kit-maker Lam hit by DRAM decline, inability to export to Middle Kingdom The Biden administration's policy of restricting Chinese chip makers from accessing vital manufacturing equipment has caused damage at home, with California-based wafer fabrication equipment supplier Lam Research announcing it would layoff 1,300 employees, or about seven percent of its global workforce, as the company prepares for billions in lost revenues during the 2023 fiscal year.…

The irony, it burns On Tuesday, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) failed to open properly, disrupting and invalidating auction trading for more than 250 securities.…

Elon conflates 'popularity' on unrelated platform with successful year for EV maker Never mind the headlines. 2022 was Tesla's best year ever, Elon Musk claimed in the automaker's Q4 2022 earnings call this week.…

DARPA's Blake Bextine talks us through taking inventions commercial Interview You've heard of some of the world-altering technologies that have come out of the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, because you might not be reading this otherwise.…

Pinging search services in the US, China, Russia perhaps not ideal for privacy This just in: smart appliances are still not a bright idea for those who care about privacy.…

Uncle Sam doles out decryption keys to 300+ victims amid sting op The FBI said it has shut down the Hive's ransomware network, seizing control of the notorious gang's servers and websites, and thwarting the pesky criminals' ability to sting future victims.…

Intriguing move – just look at the software companies it has ditched... Dell is reportedly buying cloud orchestration company Cloudify for an estimated $100 million to give its own cloud services biz a shot in the arm and appeal more to organizations investing in DevOps.…

Maybe it'll be different this year as clamors of 'I told you so' accompany the proposal The US House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to advance a bill that would create a task force to improve the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system that was at the heart of the nationwide flight grounding earlier this month.…

Look, a semiconductor manufacturer that isn't whining about weak demand Chipmaker STMicroelectronics appears to be bucking the industry trend by beating analyst expectations and delivering revenues towards the upper end of guidance, driven by demand from the automotive and industrial segments, the company said.…

Nobody expects the British Inquisition. (This is a joke. Everybody expected it) A month after the EU decided to stick a probe into semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom's proposed buy of virtualization juggernaut VMware, the UK has said it will do the same.…

Calls to avoid C/C++ and embrace Rust grow louder Memory safety, a longstanding concern among serious software developers, has finally met with mainstream stardom.…

Tech behemoth says it will appeal 'certain aspects' of the decision Google appears to be ready to abide by an Indian court's antitrust verdict that it was exploiting its dominant position on Android, and will allow OEMs to license individual apps for pre-installation on devices and let users select their own default search engine.…

'Targeted restructuring' could have been worse, analyst points out SAP is targeting its CRM business with 3,000 job cuts despite full year 2022 revenue of €30.9 billion, up 11 percent.…

Last (failed) attempts at such an endeavor happened a decade ago, but AstroForge thinks it can do better Cast your mind back to the year 2012 and you might stumble upon a very similar story, but this isn't a flashback: There's a new startup in town that wants to mine asteroids, and this one claims to be ahead of the game.…

Software to support 46,000 users as group part of £900m program to simplify central government back end The UK government has kicked off procurement of an ERP system for eight Whitehall departments which consolidates nine different software systems – a project potentially more complex than a snake's wedding.…

Human Capital leaves the building IBM is the latest tech company to jump on the layoff bandwagon, with news it would reduce its workforce by around 3,900.…