The Register

US tech giant's data analytics and cloud products for a slice of Brit market action Microsoft said this morning it expects to pull in $5 billion in revenue from a deal with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) to haul the British exchange operator's data platform into the cloud.…

If you are concerned about browsing discreetly, this makes it easier The latest Tor Browser is a specially packaged version of Firefox 102 ESR which does all the hard work of setting up a TOR connection.…

Fabless maker goes for open-source chip architecture, with actual chips schedueld to ship late 2023 RISC-V Summit British chip company XMOS has revealed its latest xcore high-performance microcontrollers are to be built around the RISC-V open standard instruction set architecture, in the hopes of opening up the silicon to a wider range of embedded system designers.…

It’s very good, and that's very bad There’s a new chatbot in town, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is a robot researcher with good communication skills; you can ask it to answer questions about various areas of knowledge and it will write short documents in various formats and in excellent English. Or write bad poetry, incomprehensible jokes, and obey a command like “Write Tetris in C.” What comes out looks like it could be, too.…

Confoundingly camouflaged control covered in cruft confounds careful contractor, crashes kit who, me? Ah, dear reader, once again it is time to greet the day with a tale from Who, Me? – the Reg's welcome to the working week in which readers spill the beans on tech stuff-ups that may or may not have been their fault.…

Also: Guri the air-gap guru strikes again, while pro-Ukraine hackers set up a proxy network in Russia In brief Let's start with the good news: according to a survey of security and business leaders, executives have become far more aware of the importance of cyber security in the past two years, better aligning security teams and leadership. …

Existing Nexus Dashboard to be recommended for sovereign clouds or air-gapped rigs Cisco is a few weeks, give or take a few days, from launching a cloudy management service for its Nexus switches – a move that will change the role of the Nexus Dashboard currently suggested as the best way to manage the devices.…

Japan and the United Arab Emirates launched landers, while JPL has a boring old satellite Humanity has retrieved one attempt to explore its natural satellite, and launched three more.…

'Deep synthesis service providers' otherwise free to create AI-generated humans in line with socialist values China's Cyberspace Administration has issued guidelines on how to do deepfakes the right way.…

Turns a $100 bottle of wine into a $4 soft drink to avoid tax, earning probe by major governments Tax authorities from Australia, Canada, France, the UK and the USA have conducted a joint probe into "electronic sales suppression software" – applications that falsify point of sale data to help merchants avoid paying tax on their true revenue.…

Kernel boss won't consider code that's late, or hasn't already appeared in Linux-next, for version 6.2 Linux kernel overseer Linus Torvalds has released version 6.1 of the project, and warned that "the merge window from Hell" has now opened.…

FTX Japan payment promise evaporates; VR/AR to boom across APAC; Google wins privacy case Asia In Brief Australia's home affairs and cybersecurity minister Clare O'Neill has given the nation a goal of becoming the world's most cyber secure nation by 2030.…

Turns out it's a bit more complex than throwing more GPUs at the math The US Department of Energy this week laid out how it intends to put its supercomputing might to work simulating the fundamental building blocks of the universe.…

We're about to find out if those parachutes and heat shield work NASA's crewless Orion capsule is all set to return to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, December 11 after spending nearly a month orbiting the Moon.…

In a weaker economy, investor scrutiny is increasing for these capital-intensive upstarts As the economic downturn brings the astronomical level of investor hype over semiconductor startups back to Earth, some venture-backed companies think now is the right time to build for the next boom period, while others stumble and crash.…

TIOBE or not TIOBE, that is the question Java is no longer among the top three most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Index, one of several not particularly definitive yardsticks by which such things are measured.…

Ah, the enterprise way GitHub has launched a business version of its assistive programming service Copilot that provides administrators with a way to prevent suggestions using public source code.…

Nothing like your medical files being taken hostage for millions of dollars Newish ransomware gang Royal has been spotted targeting the healthcare sector, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has said.…

Sure, go ahead and load APKs instead of using an app store. You won't enjoy the results Threat researchers have discovered an obfuscation platform that attaches malware to legitimate Android applications to lure users to install the malicious payload and make it difficult for security tools to detect.…

In a $3,000/month for a bedsit city, how many seconds do you think it took locals to call building inspector? Elon Musk's plans to allow some Twitter HQ employees to sleep on-site is running afoul of San Francisco building inspectors. Given Musk's responses to previous challenges to his authority, Twitter might be Texas-bound just like SpaceX and Tesla before it.…

Apache project focused on stability following previous major upgrade More than a year after its 4.0 major upgrade, Apache Cassandra is set to release its 4.1 iteration next week, promising pluggable schema management and new guardrails to help ops professionals keep those devs in line.…

Warplane project may include AI in the cockpit, and comes as tensions rise with China and Russia The United Kingdom, Japan and Italy will pool resources to build a sixth-generation warplane scheduled to be ready for deployment by 2035, with capabilities to rival never-before-seen tech on fighter jets built by China and Russia, although this wasn't stated explicitly.…

The 'Infinite Mac' is an astonishing demonstration of emulation and integration between some of the best tech of the '90s and the '20s Friday FOSS Fest Emulators make it easy to run vintage software in a window on a modern machine, but without specialist knowledge of obsolete systems, it can be hard to do much with them. It turns out, unexpectedly, that a good answer to this is… run them in a browser.…

Spoiler alert: just about all of them, all across the planet More than 70,000 websites belonging to Fortune 500 brands, government agencies, and universities share consumers' data with Twitter using data tracking code hosted on these other organizations' websites, according to research published on Thursday by Adalytics.…

The latest idea in the long gestation of the online harms legislation The UK government is putting forward changes to the law which would require social media platforms to give users the option to avoid seeing and engaging with harmful — but legal — content.…

Don't sob into your battered copy of K&R though, the shift will move slowly Opinion Linus Torvalds is happy to tell you that Linux release numbers aren't a big deal.…

Anyone who's ever been in the system will be very familiar with British medical professionals' complaints As the UK's National Health Service strains under the burden of the winter crisis, a new study has revealed that more than 13.5 million working hours are lost yearly in England's health service alone due to inadequate IT systems and equipment.…

No backdated pay, no allowances, no substantial rises for all grades, 'we feel it falls falls way short of your expectations' The Greater London Combined Branch of the CWU, the communications union, is urging BT workers to vote against the pay deal ahead of the crucial ballot scheduled for 15 December.…

Mask apparently addresses urban pollution and noise, but doesn't even seal to the face If you've ever thought "I wish my incredibly expensive Bluetooth headphones were double the price and included a detachable mask that shot purified air at my face," Dyson has the product for you.…

Comrade offered 'monitoring' tool to keep an eye on the workers On-Call Welcome once again, comrades, to On-Call, The Register's celebration of the tech proletariat's struggles with oppression by bourgeois bosses – and the eventual triumph of the workers!…

If he offers you a piece of the Chocolate Pi, be suspicious A former technical surveillance officer at the UK's Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU) – a team charged with tackling serious organized crime and terrorism across seven local police forces – has joined the Raspberry Pi Foundation and expressed his professional admiration for the organization's single board computers when pressed into service on police business.…

It's not our fault, says Civil Aviation Authority Virgin Orbit's plan to launch a rocket into space from the UK has been delayed.…

Colosso-conglomerate Tata Group also wants some of Delhi's substantial silicon subsidies Electronics manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd – better known as Foxconn – will invest $500 million in India to expand its manufacturing presence on the subcontinent – including a venture to make semiconductors.…

You won't see 'Agent of vile murderous autocracy' on their CVs. Or their faces on vid chats North Korean IT pros are using freelancing platforms to earn money that the nation's authoritarian government uses to fund the development of missiles and nuclear weapons, according to South Korea's government. Seoul therefore wants gig platforms to impose stricter checks to restrict its enemy's activities.…

Unavoidable variable safety coming in version 3 When the third major release of the Dart programming language debuts in mid-2023, null values will no longer be allowed where they're not expected.…

What, you thought green tech shift will come from the good of their hearts? Assessing the sustainability credentials of your company's colocation provider is currently not so simple as they don't all report the same information. However, a move to support best practices will have an advantage in future when the regulatory noose tightens.…

CentOS tossed AlmaLinux, a somewhat popular free Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), received a vote of confidence on Thursday from the European and American science communities.…

Watchdog answers its call of duty, fears serial monopoly abuser will strike again The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to block Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of video game studio Activision Blizzard, claiming the merger would suppress competition.…

If safety regulations are written in blood, what are security policies written in? Sweat and cursing? Australian health insurance company Medibank will take all of its IT systems offline and close its branches over the weekend as part of its ongoing efforts to improve security and recover from a massive data security breach in October.…

4.18 the first update of lightweight, minimalist UNIX gear since 2020 Xfce is the slow-moving, sensible Linux desktop option, and new versions only appear every year or two. Version 4.18 is coming soon, and you can try it in the early test builds of Xubuntu 23.04.…

Blocking us would be a big mistake. Huuuuge Updated Microsoft execs are making an all-out push this week to convince US regulators to support its proposed $69 billion bid for game maker Activision Blizzard, even getting a boost from a labor union that claims the deal would be good for workers.…

Single market's worth $95.12 billion to Apple, so it's not like it had a choice OEMs, start your assembly lines as the European Commission (EC) has published its USB-C rules, and an official date for enforcement has been set for December 28, 2024.…

Plus: CFO says Chips ACT cash might continue because US govt will be competing with Asia Intel's CFO has admitted to certain "inefficiency in the fab" that is logical when "you're a monopoly" but "just doesn't make sense anymore," as he looks to carve out billions in overheads from the chip maker.…

For one so young, it's oddly not into heavy metal A nearby galaxy – dubbed Peekaboo because it has long been hidden behind a star – has finally come into view enough for NASA to discover that it's more than just a tease. It offers a glance into the early universe, despite being one of the youngest galaxies ever detected.…

Too bad the RAM is baked on Packing a 35W CPU onto a board barely larger than a Raspberry Pi might sound like a bad idea, but that's not stopping Asus' Aaeon product division.…

Ex-COO of failed blood testing startup will report to prison 6 weeks before fraudster CEO Former Theranos COO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani was sentenced to 12 years and 11 months in federal prison and three years' probation on Wednesday over a July conviction on 12 counts of fraud.…

A sober reflection on the industry as supply chains bifurcate in the East and West Comment Caught in the middle of an escalating trade war between the US and China, the founder of Taiwanese contract chip-making giant TSMC has stated that globalization and free trade are "almost dead" as his company expands in the US for the first time in over 20 years.…

It's the Ice Age/Jurassic Park crossover we've been waiting for Scientists have recovered the oldest DNA samples yet, in sediment left over from the Ice Age in Northern Greenland, according to research published in Nature.…

Nice. They went after vulnerable people and folks over 60 who opted out of marketing calls Britain's data watchdog has slapped financial penalties totaling £435,000 (c $529,000) on five companies it says collectively made almost half of million marketing calls to people registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).…

Better late than never to catch up with AMD's Ryzen star Intel claims it has hit a key technology milestone for its next generation of Core processors for PCs, heralding a major change in how its client chips are designed and manufactured.…