The Register

South Korean authorities warned locals to avoid falling space junk, which probably splashed down harmlessly A defunct weather-monitoring satellite came crashing back to Earth over the weekend, and reentered the atmosphere over the Bering Sea, the US Department of Defense confirmed on Monday.…

BMW i4, i7 and iX drivers need a fix BMW is starting off 2023 with a recall of 90 percent of the EVs it sold in the United States in 2022 thanks to battery software that could cause loss of power while driving.…

British developer uses homegrown scanning tool to check for risks The Python Package Index, or PyPI, continues to surprise and not in a good way.…

NSO maintains that it's all legit The US Supreme Court has quashed spyware maker NSO Group's argument that it cannot be held legally responsible for using WhatsApp technology to deploy its Pegasus snoop-ware on users' phones.…

American ambassador to Japan wants a unified front against the Middle Kingdom US efforts to starve China's semiconductor and tech industry of chips has entered a new phase: pressuring its allies to join its cause.…

The poles have ice but it's freezing up there, so why not grind gems for cocktails? A study of old data from the Curiosity rover is causing scientists to reassess their belief that Mars' relatively temperate equatorial region is devoid of water. …

Time has run out for users of legacy operating systems: will you upgrade or buy a new PC? Changes are imminent for users running legacy versions of Windows operating systems on their machines.…

Measures have been described as an answer to the US CHIPS Act Taiwan has become the latest nation to offer financial incentives to encourage semiconductor manufacturers to invest in facilities and new technologies within its territory, passing extra rules to let companies flip research and development costs into tax credits.…

Models 3 and Y are up to 24% cheaper than last year, and buyers said to want compensation Tesla owners in China took to the streets in protest this weekend over another round of price cuts they claim means they overpaid for their model Y and 3 vehicles. …

Virgin Orbit set to help UK county put pasty-munching image behind it In what is believed to be the first satellite launch from Western European soil, a hefty Boeing 747 is set to take to the skies from a regional airport on Cornwall's north coast tonight and deliver a payload capable of climbing into orbit.…

Is that a Google Home in your toilet? CES It wouldn't be CES without the introduction of gadgets that no one asked for.…

Holy cow! Memorandum of Understanding to give farmers access to 'diagnostic tools' and documentation In what looks like a victory for farmers in the United States, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) has struck a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with equipment vendor John Deere regarding the repairability of its machines.…

Settlement 'without admission of liability' followed court challenge to Microsoft mega-deal The UK government agreed to pay Atos £24 million ($29 million) in an out-of-court settlement following a challenge to its decision to award an £854 million ($1 billion) Met Office supercomputer contract to Microsoft.…

PM reportedly trying to twist CEO's er, arm The UK government is reported to be trying once again to have the London Stock Exchange play a part in the public offering of chip design company Arm, following delays to the process that are likely to see it go public later this year.…

Plus: Apple using fake AI voices to help indie publishers release audiobooks In brief OpenAI is building software capable of detecting whether text was generated by its ChatGPT model after New York City education officials announced it was blocking students from accessing the tool in public schools.…

Zhurongs don't make a right and suggest the mission may not have survived winter China’s Zhurong Mars rover may be struggling to emerge from sleep mode, a feat it was expected to accomplish around December 26th.…

Citation needed? Opinion There may be little to agree on in these fractured, fractious times, but nobody can deny the fact of progress. We see it in tech up close and personal: news keeps coming thick and fast from medicine, material science, energy, cosmology, palaeontology, environmental sciences, you name it. The speed of change is just breathtaking.…

Dark deeds are no way to close a deal Who, Me? Happy New Year, gentle readers, and welcome once again to Who, Me? – The Reg's regular roundup of rapscallions and rascals committing tech atrocities and (sometimes) getting away with it. This week it's got a sci-fi twist because the disaster in question involves lasers.…

Sees collaborationware as its route into foreign markets Would you be happy staging a Teams-powered videoconference on a hefty Android-powered touchscreen commercial display?…

'Corporate governance optimization' sees founder's role reduced, but not in pursuit of a listing Ant Group, the financial services biz spun out of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, said on Saturday that its founder Jack Ma would give up control of the org.…

PLUS Tesla China price cuts spark protests; Japan boosts cyber-defences; Google can’t overturn Indian fine Asia In Brief Singapore's tech community is in mourning – along with many around the world – after the sudden passing of Creative Technology co-founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo. The brand was behind the popular "Sound Blaster" range of PC sound cards and a significant force in the digital media revolution.…

Also, LastPass faces class action, and Louisiana says that, while the internet may be for porn, ID is still required In Brief The Federal Communications Commission plans to overhaul its security reporting rules for the telecom industry to, among other things, eliminate a mandatory seven-day wait for informing customers of stolen data and expand the definition of what constitutes an incident.…

Near-term vulnerability of RSA-2048 keys not so near, says quantum boffin Scott Aaronson Briefly this week, it appeared that quantum computers might finally be ready to break 2048-bit RSA encryption, but that moment has passed.…

Connected cars. What could possibly go wrong? Multiple bugs affecting millions of vehicles from almost all major car brands could allow miscreants to perform any manner of mischief — in some cases including full takeovers — by exploiting vulnerabilities in the vehicles' telematic systems, automotive APIs and supporting infrastructure, according to security researchers.…

Content analysis system scans data stored on its Creative Cloud services Adobe automatically analyzes user content stored on its Creative Cloud services to train AI algorithms unless people opt-out of the service.…

So that must be why the Russians might have hacked the DoE, right? In his cult classic "Ender's Game", Orson Scott Card imagined a world in which Earth's brightest, and tragically youngest, tacticians could command armies across vast distances instantaneously using a device called the ansible.…

Slowing demand and economic pressures are a drag, but AI waits at the end of the rainbow The next two years are going to be tough on a tech industry that is seeing demand ginned up by the COVID-19 pandemic leveling off and an increasingly volatile global economy, according to Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.…

Technology has the potential to make life better. This isn't it. As the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show winds down, it's once again time for the Worst in Show Awards, an enumeration of ill-conceived tech products as determined by various technology advocates.…

Criminals hit 1,800 victims across 71 countries to the tune of $100m+ An international law enforcement effort has released a decryptor for victims of MegaCortex ransomware, widely used by cybercriminals to infect large corporations across 71 countries to the tune of more than $100 million in damages.…

Chatbot might let unskilled criminals launch attacks, if the code works Cybercriminals are beginning to use OpenAI's wildly popular ChatGPT technology to quickly and easily develop code for malicious purposes.…

Analysts believe company may cut back on production like Micron and SK hynix Samsung has released earnings guidance for its fourth quarter, and the prelim figures are sobering. The Korean tech giant said it expects an operating profit of ₩4.3 trillion ($3.4 billion) – a 69 percent drop from Q4 2021.…

We buzz around new version of the other-other-other FOSS-xNix-that-isn't-Linux Dragonfly BSD 6.4 is here, with various updates and new features, including a better hypervisor, improved support for AMD GPUs, and more.…

Maybe humans could learn a thing or two about how modern medicine can prevent the spread of disease Honeybees are fascinating. They make Winnie the Pooh's meal of choice, they perform about 80 percent of pollination worldwide, and one-third of the global food supply relies on them.…

Ensures future security stuffups will take extra effort Amazon has taken the hint regarding security of its cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3) and updated it so that all newly added objects are encrypted by default. The move comes after the cloud giant announced new default bucket security settings in December.…

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear Analysis Mobileye, Intel's autonomous driving unit, offered a rather rosy outlook on the company's advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), with CEO Amnon Shashua claiming more than $17 billion in bookings through 2030 during his CES keynote this week.…

Malware testers spot attempt to attack Macs. But (try not to weep for the bad guys) there are still compatibility issues with MS exe files A variant of the bad penny that is Dridex, the general-purpose malware that has been around for years, now has macOS platforms in its sights and a new way of delivering malicious macros via documents.…

New family of carbon super-structures discovered for futurologists to fizz over Graphene, that much-hyped super-material yet to transform industry, has competition on the block in the form of a related 3D carbon structure made up of linked balls.…

In trouble somewhere remote with patchy cell coverage but able to see the sky? You can text for help CES Satellite messaging via mobile phone appears to be the in-thing at this year's CES show in Las Vegas, with the launch of two services from comms chipmaker Qualcomm and UK-based smartphone company Bullitt Group.…

German automaker gets deeper into the GPU giant's hardware and software ecosystem CES Mercedes-Benz thinks it can create accurate digital twin simulations using Nvidia's Omniverse software to streamline automotive manufacturing operations.…

Asking us to 'submit a receipt for consideration' just doesn't cut it, claims would-be class action The nationwide systems meltdown at Southwest Airlines should have prompted a quick return of funds to ticketed customers after thousands of flights were cancelled between December 24 to January 2, according to a freshly filed lawsuit.…

Because it's all going so well for Tesla and co Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 million in autonomous vehicle startup Gatik, a move in line with its strategy of supporting companies in the industry rather than launching its own competing product set from scratch.…

After promising to return Covid-era data to NHS, UK govt ploughs on with extension, expansion Campaigners have warned publicly funded healthcare system NHS England that extending its contract with Palantir without meaningful consultation with patients could lead to a challenge in court.…

Don't masquerade with the guy in shades, oh no A New York federal judge told JP Morgan Chase Bank this week that he would not toss a lawsuit accusing the bank of ignoring red flags when cybercrooks stole $272 million from the New York account of the company that makes Ray-Bans in 2019.…

The natural enemy of the IT pro is the builder – they’ll cover you in dust, hose you down, or worse On Call Well, look at that: the clock says it's Friday morning so it must be time for a new installment of On Call, The Register's weekly column describing readers' triumphs over adversity, mendacity, and stupidity.…

If only there were some way to avoid...oh, there is? RTFM Security researchers at have identified multiple vulnerabilities arising from careless use of the Rust Hyper package, a very popular library for handling HTTP requests.…

Dangerous without a data protection law in place, says rights org An announcement from Indian government-owned telecom company, RailTel, detailing efforts to monetize existing free railway Wi-Fi in partnership with a private company has drawn criticism that it will lead to data collection, breaches, unwanted ads and more.…

Not all of these concepts will end in tires If you want more proof that electric vehicles are taking over, just look to CES 2023, which had been overrun with EV concepts cars on the floor and teased vehicles to be revealed.…

Is machine text plagiarism? Officials chairing this year's International Conference on Machine Learning event have banned academics from submitting papers containing text generated by large language models and tools like ChatGPT, and they aren't alone in banning such material.…

Miscreants would face the wrath of Khan The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday proposed a rule to ban non-compete agreements in employment contracts, a prohibition already in place in some US states.…

Play gang blamed, ProxyNotShell cleared and hosted Exchange doomed Rackspace has confirmed the Play ransomware gang was behind last month's hacking and said it won't bring back its hosted Microsoft Exchange email service, as it continues working to recover customers' email data lost in the December 2 ransomware attack.…