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What is dead may never die, and it's all thanks to Jim Hall Retro Tech Week The last mainstream DOS-based OS was Windows ME, which went out of support 20 years ago. And yet, thanks to free software, DOS lives on. We spoke to FreeDOS founder Jim Hall about how the project started and how it's progressing.…

And no more geofencing around health clinics either A bill proposed by Washingston state lawmakers would make it illegal for period-tracking apps, Google or any other website to sell consumers' health data while also making it harder for them to collect and share this personal information.…

Study says this would give old power units years of useful life once unsuitable for cars EV batteries could help meet short-term electricity grid storage demand by as early as 2030 in most parts of the world, scientists are claiming.…

But tech research giant Gartner says spending still rosy despite job loss clouds Some enterprise tech CEOs suffered a degree of over-optimism in their hiring strategies during and coming out of the pandemic, according to a senior Gartner soothsayer.…

Remaining Redmonites told they need to ‘raise the bar’ Microsoft will cut the jobs of 10,000 employees by September. The move follows smaller rounds of layoffs at the software company last year as cloud growth slows due to the worsening economic situation.…

US research agency paying $42.4m for working full-scale aircraft that ejects air out of its surfaces DARPA has awarded Boeing research arm Aurora Flight Sciences a contract to build a full-scale demonstration aircraft for the experimental Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) project.…

Still no date for breaking ground, as chip giant reportedly confirms it will build once 'funding' worked out Intel has said it remains committed to the construction of its planned chip manufacturing plant in Germany, just weeks after a company spokesperson said the project was on hold.…

Discovery could provide better protection for power stations, airports and launchpads Video Scientists have for the first time demonstrated that a laser can act as a lightning rod to disperse these dangerous atmospheric discharges.…

Cloud sprawl will easily become bill sprawl if you don’t take active steps to clean up Sponsored Post The flexibility and convenience of having high speed, scalable compute infrastructure resources at our fingertips delivers huge benefits. But that instant, on-demand accessibility can be a problem for companies when software engineers constantly spin up new cloud instances to meet their business goals but create heartburn for the finance department by not tracking the rapidly accumulating bill.…

Cooperation could cost Netherland's ASML a billion + in sales US President Joe Biden brought his concerns over the threat of China's semiconductor industry to Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte during a White House meeting Tuesday.…

They gotta keep the fluffy white stuff running, right? Dell has lifted the covers off 13 freshly laid PowerEdge server systems, including models featuring Intel's 4th Generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, some tailored for cloud service providers, along with updated deployment and monitoring tools.…

Business case and competition said to be helping to close the shortfall One of the UK's top civil servants has claimed the government is closing the £100 million funding gap created by the Treasury when it offered £300 million for a vital ERP refresh in the November 2021 spending review.…

Two years in the clink proposed for not thinking of the children Leaders of social media companies could face up to two years in jail if they repeatedly fail to protect children from harmful content online, under the latest amendments apparently added to the UK's Online Safety Bill.…

There's still a place in the world for good old-fashioned human intelligence Column The rise of large language models (LLMs) built on huge stores of data and driven by artificial intelligence may seem frightening. Paradoxically, it may be the best thing in decades for the progress of human intelligence.…

Cambridge researchers say 89 percent of study patients reported spending less time managing their condition Medical researchers from Cambridge University have completed successful trials of an artificial pancreas that they say is nearly ready for commercial use by outpatients with type 2 diabetes – and it's even automated.…

Until Tuesday, when the former Portuguese colony was added to the 'You Shall Not Pass' list Amendments removing the exclusion of China's Special Administrative Region (SAR) Macau from US technology export restrictions on China went into effect on Tuesday, addressing concerns that the territory was used as a back door through which banned goods could make their way into the Middle Kingdom.…

Contractual mess has players wondering if preserving progress in Warcraft, Overwatch, and StarCraft will be possible Gaming giant Blizzard is about to stop operating some of its games in China, leaving players of multiplayer affairs like World of Warcraft fearing for the future of characters in which they have invested many hours of their lives, often in the company of friends they don't "see" in other "places".…

Classy: slips obviously conflicted idea in alongside changed gaming rules on last day of consultation period India's government has proposed to make itself the arbiter of what is true and what is not on social media.…

Avast issues a free decryptor so victims can get their data back Cybersecurity firm Avast has released a free decryptor for victims of BianLian – an emerging ransomware threat that came into the public eye in last year.…

W3C's techies have a few choice words for the Chocolate Factory Google's plan to reinvent ad targeting for the postponed post-cookie era has again been complicated by privacy concerns.…

And if so, what are we gonna do about it? Foreign adversaries are expected to use AI algorithms to create increasingly realistic deepfakes and sow disinformation as part of military and intelligence operations as the technology improves.…

Securities fraud lawsuit reloaded Special report IBM, along with 13 of its current and former executives, has been sued by investors who claim the IT giant used mainframe sales to fraudulently prop up newer, more trendy parts of its business.…

Scriptkiddies rush to machine intelligence to make up for lack in skills Cybercriminals are famously fast adopters of new tools for nefarious purposes, and ChatGPT is no different in that regard. …

Still waiting for that Ultra... Apple unveiled its next-generation M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs Tuesday alongside a refreshed MacBook Pro and Mac Mini lineup.…

Global revenues grew just 1.1% compared to 25% the year before Worldwide semiconductor revenues grew just 1.1 percent during 2022, a far cry from a year ago when the annual increase was more than 25 percent, showing quite how bad chipmakers are having it at the moment.…

Rumored product looks like part of a larger effort to compete with Cupertino's Find My network Google leaks point to the Android maker working on an Apple AirTags competitor, news of which could indicate a broader effort to compete with Apple's Find My network.…

'I believe they made this change deliberately' claims researcher The Secure Boot process on almost 300 different PC motherboard models manufactured by Micro-Star International (MSI) isn't secure, which is particularly problematic when "Secure" is part of the process description.…

Like crude oil and water, cowboys and EVs don't mix No, Wyoming lawmakers didn't get their bill backwards. A group of them led by Republican state senator Jim Anderson actually introduced a resolution last week to ban the sale of electric vehicles in the Cowboy State by 2035.…

Steve Revill of RISC OS Open chats to us about taking the project into the future Retro Tech Week The mid-1980s codebase for RISC OS, the original native OS for the Arm processor, is still run on present-day hardware and actively maintained and developed. We spoke to RISC OS Open boss Steve Revill about its 26-bit origins, working to bring it to newer 32-bit Arm chips, efforts to update its BSD-based network stack, and more.…

Bringing OS version into sync with Enterprise and Education editions Microsoft wants to bulk up the security in Windows Pro editions by ensuring the SMB insecure guest authentication fallbacks are no longer the default setting in the operating system.…

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of your actions Comment Like whack-a-mole, it seems that for every issue Elon Musk believes he has fixed in his pursuit of Twitter 2.0 paradise, another one pops its head up. In this case, the unintended consequences of Musk's actions are that Taliban 2.0 has bought Twitter Blue subscriptions.…

So long, SODIMM – or that's the idea, anyway The JEDEC standards body is set to adopt the CAMM module format as the next memory standard to supersede the long-standing SODIMM for laptop memory, according to reports.…

Wordtune Spices is more like an AI-powered Grammarly Language model startup AI21 Labs launched Wordtune Spices on Tuesday – a generative AI tool that aims to enhance human writing rather than replace it with machine-churned text.…

Infrastructure company retorts that it is an 'essential' business and cites lack of medical records His former employer cannot "seriously" claim that he was unable to perform his job remotely when it fired him for refusing to work in person during the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, an engineer told a judge last week.…

How does Multifunctional Nanobarrier Structure sound for the bathroom wall? Researchers say they have developed a coating that can protect spacecraft and satellites from solar radiation while also allowing possible harvesting of heat energy from sunlight.…

Don't expect to see any more big AIX news. This means the last Unix left is… Linux It's the end of an era. As The Reg covered last week, IBM has transferred development of AIX to India. Why should IBM pay for an expensive US-based team to maintain its own proprietary flavor of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its own FOSS flavor in Red Hat?…

Tens of millions up for grabs as institution needs to dump legacy code The UK's University of Leeds is looking for a systems integrator to help move its ERP system from an ageing SAP installation dating back to 1999 onto the German vendor's latest S/4HANA platform.…

Attrition woes subside as workers stop shifting, producing pleasing cost savings India’s top four IT outsourcers, Wipro, HCL Technologies Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) all reported reasonably rosy results for their final quarter of 2022. the quarter rounding out 2022, despite global economic uncertainty.…

Well whaddya know, the crypto ecosystem did the right thing by stiffing the WannaCry bandits Two cryptocurrency exchanges have frozen accounts identified as having been used by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group.…

A couple have already been jailed, others shown the door for embezzling or arranging sham contracts Chinese web and gaming giant Tencent has admitted it fired more than 100 people in 2022 for various forms of corruption – some so serious it reported them to local police.…

Addition of the chatbot everyone's talking about, and to, comes as Azure OpenAI goes GA Microsoft has promised it will "soon" offer the ChatGPT AI chatbot as a service from its Azure cloud.…

After eighteen month exile, it's allowed to recruit new customers Chinese ride-share provider DiDi Chuxing announced on Monday that after a year and a half of being banned from registering new riders, the Cybersecurity Review Office has allowed it to resume recruitment of customers.…

They're not the meal deal they might seem to be, claims audit expert The quickest way to save money on Oracle licences is to get off its Unlimited Licensing Agreements, a well placed Big Red audit expert claims.…

Techies forced to mop up after update caused ASR rules to detect false positives, wiping icons and apps shortcuts Techies are fearing the worst in efforts to recover from Microsoft's bug laden Defender for Endpoint pre-weekend rollout after updates removed icons and applications shortcuts from Windows 11 and 10 desktop, Taskbar and Start Menu.…

Lawyer known for GitHub Copilot case to argue artists' legal struggle On Friday three artists filed a proposed a class action suit against major AI image generating companies – Stability AI, Deviant Art and Midjourney – alleging they infringed on copyright laws through the use of collage tool Stability Diffusion.…

Mr Microsoft bares all in his 11th Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist and top pick of conspiracy theorists looking for the center of their bullshit storms, spent time interacting with the great unwashed of Reddit in an Ask Me Anything thread last week.…

US export controls having an effect, but semi industry in for a rough ride everywhere Taiwanese semiconductor exports rose during 2022 despite economic and other woes, highlighting the nation's vital importance to the global technology industry. Meanwhile, China's imports of integrated circuits fell for the first time in many years, as US sanctions bite.…

Plus: How much would you pay for ChatGPT? And British AI drug biz gets snapped up for half a billion In Brief An AI language model is apparently going to be used during an upcoming legal hearing to defend someone in a real case. The goal is to demonstrate that AI can replace lawyers, according to the CEO of the consumer rights-focused startup DoNotPay.…

After the security breach last summer, staying put is playing with fire Opinion For better or worse, we still need passwords, and to protect and organize them, I recommend the open source Bitwarden password manager.…

Though a household appliance should have a useful lifetime of 5-10 years, vendor support tends to be shorter... much shorter Buyers of high-end smart devices could find their shiny appliance loses some of its capabilities or becomes a security risk after a few short years when manufacturers fail to provide software updates, says Which?…