The Register

What do you mean, you don't think historic handwriting is worth it? A "clean and unused" prototype Apple-1 that actually works has been put up for auction by purveyor of Cupertino relics RR Auctions.…

Microsoft releases out of box experience update to simplify and speed up migrations Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to nudge laggards toward Windows 11 amid a migration pace that company executives would undoubtedly prefer is rather faster.…

Not the first company in the game to chase cable-free charging dragon A wireless power startup has secured $30 million in funding to help develop its technology, with which it aims to "do for power what Wi-Fi has done for data."…

The intersection of computer science and physics RE:INVENT "It's very early days in quantum computing," Simone Severini, director of Quantum Computing at AWS tells The Reg.…

Britain's wallet-checkers suspect VAT avoidance from some of them – to the tune of 10,000-case tribunal backlog Britain's tax collection agency is clamping down on umbrella companies used by contractors to pay their dues, with 10,000 outstanding tribunal cases waiting to be heard.…

680x0: the CPU architecture that just will not die Feature A patch to add a new display driver for Linux is being reviewed. What's unusual is that it's for a machine released 30 years ago.…

Imagine there's no printer drivers. It's easy if you can... Long-term dot matrix printer maker Epson has just announced it is ending its 35 year long experiment in selling laser-powered printer hardware. From 2026, the company says it'll be inkjet only – although it will probably still sell you a new dot-matrix if you ask nicely.…

World's biggest radio telescope to have first parts up and running by 2024 After thirty years of development, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) announced Monday it has commenced construction of its radio telescopes in both South Africa and Australia.…

No crypto needed, just a project with a tough deadline that nobody minded missing who, me? Ah, dear readers, welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers confess the times their reach exceeded their grasp, technology-wise-speaking.…

Also, a Capone henchman lands behind bars, while nearly 9/10 DoD contract firms fail security standards In brief Certificate Authority TrustCor responded to its ejection from Mozilla and Microsoft's browsers by offering refunds for some customers, while leaving others to pick up the mess on their own.…

Hosting company has nothing to say on data loss, restore times, or root cause Rackspace has not offered any explanation of the "security incident" that has taken out its hosted Exchange environment and led the company to predict multiple days of downtime before restoration.…

Kernel devs offer emperor penguin early gifts of code for version 6.2 Linus Torvalds has announced an eighth release candidate for version 6.1 of the Linux kernel.…

Wanzhou Meng hasn't re-offended, so last possible charges have been dismissed The USA's case against Huawei CFO and chair Wanzhuo Meng has ended.…

PLUS: Eight million more outsourced jobs for India; Australia warns on IoT shoe risks; Equinix enters Malaysia Asia In Brief Microsoft has quietly announced big price rises for its software and services in India.…

Plus: DeepMind beats humans at Stratego In brief OpenAI has released a new language model named ChatGPT this week, which is designed to mimic human conversations.…

Warns recovery could take several days and pledges better support after customer complaints Updated Some of Rackspace’s hosted Microsoft Exchange services have been taken down by what the company has described as a “security incident”.…

Heat shield will be put to the test for the first time, what could go wrong? NASA's Orion capsule, designed to send the next crew of astronauts to the Moon, is heading back to Earth after spending some time in a distant retrograde orbit above the satellite's surface.…

'Digital bomber' will bring 'peace through deterrence' In Palmdale, California on Friday, Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden revealed a US Air Force warplane that had only been shown in artist renderings and is supposed to be seldom seen, the B-21 Raider.…

Economic headwinds, surging energy prices batter EMEA switch sales Improving supply chains coupled with unrelenting demand from cloud service providers kept the datacenter switching market on a positive trajectory in Q3.…

Plus Australia launches an investigation into insurer's data privacy practices Australian health insurer Medibank's prognosis following an October data breach keeps getting worse as criminals dumped another batch of stolen customer data on the dark web. …

Banishing memory safety bugs cuts critical vulnerabilities Google has been integrating code written in the Rust programming language into its Android operating system since 2019 and its efforts have paid off in the form of fewer vulnerabilities.…

Critical infrastructure attacks ramping up The US government has issued an alert about Cuba; not the state but a ransomware gang that's taking millions in purloined profits.…

We need more free money from the government say silicon salesfolks America's top booster for federal semiconductor aid is arguing that the country needs to spend tens of billions more in silicon incentives to ensure it doesn't lose leadership in chip design to other countries.…

Spend $500k and we'll double your money, but please ignore the trolls Twitter is reportedly trying to plug its drop in advertising revenues by concocting a series of inducements to convince some brands that have paused spending on the platform to reopen their wallets.…

Subject to conditions: offer only valid if you can get Starship off the ground The FCC has granted SpaceX permission to launch its Gen2 Starlink satellites, assuming it can adhere to a bevy of conditions, including ensuring Musk's expanded satellite constellation doesn't interfere with other space operations or become an environmental risk. …

'We're going to have lower power, but it's going to cost more' says chipmaker's CTO Chipmaker AMD has hinted that new transistor technology will keep Moore's Law alive for the next six to eight years, but as one might guess, it will cost more.…

Big Blue confirms DS8000 arrays, and various tape libraries and drives will all cost more IBM has announced it is to up the purchase price of a broad range of storage products from Jan 1, making a nice surprise to usher in the New Year for customers.…

Yep. The very same JPEG-XL that's just been axed from Chromium A new application of machine learning looks both clever and handy, as opposed to the more normal properties of being somewhere between privacy-, copyright-, or life-endangering. But before you get too excited, you can't have it.…

Months after CEO Benioff said return to office mandates don't work, a bunch told to come in three days a week, take half customer calls in-person Salesforce is calling some staff back to their corporate desk as it tries to counter slowing growth, despite CEO Marc Benioff saying at the start of the year that return to office mandates "don't work."…

Chipmaker confirms 'voluntary time-off programs' part of push to reduce costs Chipmaker Intel is offering staff in Ireland the opportunity to take three months' leave from their jobs, with the catch being that it is unpaid. The move is part of cost saving measures at the company.…

As for Twitter, politicians need to grow thick skins and stop mistaking it for advertisement Former British prime minister BoJo has used one of his first speaking engagements since losing that job to appear at a blockchain conference in Singapore, where his expert opinion on the subject boiled down to a belief the public needs to be convinced there's a reason for it to exist.…

Like fine wine, the longer it sits, the better it is A sophisticated and very patient threat group behind a global malvertising scheme is using so-called aged domains to skirt past cybersecurity tools and catch victims in investment scams.…

'There is no evidence to suggest that TrustCor violated conduct, policy, or procedure' says biz Mozilla and Microsoft have taken action against a certificate authority accused of having close ties to a US military contractor that allegedly paid software developers to embed data-harvesting malware in mobile apps.…

Rules haven't been decided yet but others are already kicking up a stink More than a dozen industry associations including the US Chamber of Commerce this week issued a joint statement warning the EU against adopting rules that would effectively exclude US cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft from doing business in much of Europe.…

Inventor of the spanning tree protocol gets heretical about blockchain, crypto, and why the broken internet is a blessing in disguise Internet pioneer Radia Perlman has argued in favor of centralized infrastructure, while speaking at the International Symposium on Blockchain Advancements in Singapore on Friday.…

Testing is your responsibility, not ours, says PCI-SIG Nvidia and other GPU makers have been urged to "ensure end user safety" by the consortium that created the specification for the 12VHPWR connector used in Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090, which has been the subject of multiple complaints of melting cables.…

No amount of resilience planning can defeat determined idiots whose devices are low on battery On Call Welcome once more to On-Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of IT pros being asked to fix things that should never have broken.…

A GreenLake future could reportedly be more cloudy Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) may have hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix on its wishlist this holiday season as the OEM reportedly weighs an acquisition bid.…

Record keeping rules might need a tweak to ensure content is preserved The United States Department of Justice is considering new guidelines for how businesses use messaging apps, so that they're not employed as a back channel to hide corrupt behavior.…

Microsoft is literally turning them off and on again, but things are getting worse and a root cause is proving elusive Updated Microsoft's flagship cloudy productivity services are down across the Asia-Pacific region.…

A watch that flips open to reveal tiny earbuds: what could possibly go wrong? Have you ever left the house with your smartwatch on, but forgotten your earbuds?…

Not a good look for Meta's content moderation team Just before the US midterm elections last month, researchers from non-profit Global Witness and New York University submitted ads containing death threats against election workers to Meta's Facebook, Google's YouTube, and TikTok.…

This is a Musk prediction, so don't get your hopes up After testing on monkeys and pigs, Neuralink may be able to plant its first chip into a human brain in six months, its founder and CEO Elon Musk claimed on Wednesday.…

Take a break from the gaming and fix these now Nvidia fixed more than two dozen security flaws in its GPU display driver, the most severe of which could allow an unprivileged user to modify files, and then escalate privileges, execute code, tamper with or steal data, or even take over your device.…

If at first you don't succeed try again. Then fail again. Video game maker Activision-Blizzard's attempts to stop a second group of quality assurance employees for unionizing has been slapped down by the National Labor Relations Board, clearing the way for an organizing vote at the company's Albany, New York offices.…

Your tax dollars at work US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "erroneously" posted names and other personal information belonging to more than 6,252 individuals seeking asylum in the US on its website earlier this week.…

Meanwhile NSO faces new lawsuit over Pegasus flying onto journalists' phones Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said on Wednesday that its researchers discovered commercial spyware called Heliconia that's designed to exploit vulnerabilities in Chrome and Firefox browsers as well as Microsoft Defender security software.…

Intel's 'Ice Lake' and AMD's 'Milan' chips bump up speeds and feeds Microsoft is bulking up its Azure SQL database services on the back of Intel's "Ice Lake" Xeon and AMD's "Milan" Epyc server chipsets.…

Biden to join Tim Cook as well as AMD and Nvidia chiefs for an announcement from the semiconductor giant next week TSMC reportedly plans to make 4nm chips at its Arizona manufacturing plant when it goes online in 2024, a significant upgrade from the Asian foundry giant's previous commitment to focus on less advanced 5nm silicon at its first leading-edge US fab.…

Since high-capacity drives are increasingly sealed off, that makes them candidates for dunking Liquid cooling company Iceotope has conducted a study with Meta into the feasibility of using its technology to meet the cooling requirements of the high-density storage drives that are increasingly being deployed by hyperscale datacenter operators.…