The Register

Staff forced to make their own purchases after suppliers walk away due to payment failures The University of Edinburgh has launched a review into its disastrous go-live of an Oracle finance system as it admitted suppliers have walked away over stalled payments.…

Broadband plumber's BT Group parent is determined to cut costs Openreach, the infrastructure arm of UK telco giant BT, looks set to prioritize existing projects rather than starting new buildouts of its fiber broadband network as it seeks to control costs amid surging inflation.…

After a mysterious pause in crackdowns, it looks like the Beijing everyone knows is back China's antitrust watchdog, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), has proposed a revision of the nation's competition law that targets tech firms.…

Alexa, how does Amazon decide when the grand plan for conversational commerce has failed? Comment Black Friday is nearly upon us, but the annual online price-drop frenzy seems to be losing its shine. Numerous reports highlight that discounting may not be all it seems, and buyers would be best to shop around.…

An Apple a day keeps the doctor away, but too many might be a burden on the planet. Opinion Apple's Mac hardware keeps getting thinner and lighter, and its iPads keep becoming more and more capable. I'm hardly the first to observe that the two products are getting closer together - but if Apple's environmental claims mean anything the products are now so close it's irresponsible they don't overlap.…

Microsoft playing chicken with regulators, making it cheaper on Azure Microsoft last week made SQL Server 2022 generally available, and this week started to advise of price hikes for the database.…

Apple doesn't want to bite The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a market investigation into cloud gaming and mobile browsers after its study found Apple and Google constitute a duopoly that controls the mobile ecosystem.…

Korea's antitrust org to develop a platform to respond to Big Tech’s sneaky ways According to South Korea's Fair Trade Commission, Apple said it will correct an oddity that sees local developers charged even more than the usual 30 percent Cupertino demands for sales of software in its App Store.…

‘Portfolio optimization’ plan aims to cull some PCs, sell more pricey subscriptions HP Inc. has announced it will lay off between 4,000 and 6,000 staff as part of a cost-cutting drive aimed at adding $1.4 billion to its bottom line in coming years.…

Nothing says 'We love open source and want it to be available in Windows' like only delivering updates from a closed digital tat bazaar Microsoft has made its Store the home of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WLS).…

We knew Wasp 39b was rich in CO, but now we have the full molecular picture The James Webb Space Telescope keeps opening the world to new science. This time it's the first molecular and chemical profile of an exoplanet's atmosphere, complete with signs of active photochemical reactions. …

AI agent proves better than most people in classic game of trust and betrayal Meta researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system called Cicero that can play the classic strategy game Diplomacy at a level comparable to most human players.…

'We allege these fraudsters bled dry each of their victims' of $10m The US government seized seven domain names used in so-called "pig butchering" scams that netted criminals more than $10 million.…

Users of the sports betting site rolled the dice on reusing passwords and lost A credential stuffing attack over the weekend that affected sports betting biz DraftKings resulted in as much as $300,000 being stolen from customer accounts.…

Datadog security researchers found the flaw before miscreants did Amazon Web Services (AWS) fixed a cross-tenant flaw in AWS AppSync that could allow miscreants to abuse that cloud service to assume identity and access management roles in other AWS accounts, and then gain access to and control over those resources. …

Pay for features like SGX through OEMs Updated Intel's software-defined silicon service will let organizations pay money to enable features that are hardwired into future Xeon server processors such as Intel Software Guard Extensions, signaling a major shift in how users pay for computer chips.…

ACLU agrees that the only way to protect consumers is to control what can be collected Attorneys General from 33 US states are urging the Federal Trade Commission to take a practical step toward reining in commercial surveillance of consumers and minimize the data companies are authorized to collect.…

EFLOW makes the open source OS a full partner of Windows at the far reaches of the cloud Microsoft is rolling out the latest iteration of a tool that lets anyone using a Windows IoT device in Azure to also run containerized Linux workloads.…

Why I yotta... be happy there's somewhere to ronto when I need to express 10^−27 The range of prefixes used within the International System of Units (SI) has been expanded with new names covering very large and very small numbers, driven in part by the ballooning requirements of data storage in some sectors such as data science.…

But keen to avoid any mf bespoke software on the mf planes (and other hardware) The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has opened a commercial information technology contract to potential bidders including hardware and perpetual license software worth up to $10 billion.…

Court lands on less than the millions asked for after sailors made copies of 3D modeling suite 'hundreds of thousands' of times In 2016, The Register highlighted the irony of the US Navy being accused of being pirates after it was sued for making "hundreds of thousands" of copies of 3D modeling software without purchasing licenses.…

It's all kicking off around company's CICS service IBM has filed a lawsuit against Micro Focus, alleging the enterprise software company copied and reverse-engineered its CICS mainframe service to develop a rival product, the Micro Focus Enterprise Server.…

Meanwhile, Microsoft eyes subcontinent for cloud growth On Monday, AWS launched a new infrastructure region in Hyderabad with three availability zones, making it the second region for the datacenter clusters in India.…

'This store of confidential data is a national treasure that must never be compromised or treated carelessly' As the UK government plans to launch the procurement for a national patient data store, the legal guardian of NHS data has issued a coded warning concerning trust and transparency in health data usage.…

Got the boot from Musk or Zuck? Automaker has 800 techie vacancies to fill Jaguar Land Rover, the famed UK-based automaker, is looking to fill a long list of tech and engineering vacancies by appealing to victims of the recent round of Silicon Valley layoffs.…

Hey, teacher, leave those apps alone The French minister of national education and youth has said that free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workplace should not be used in schools – a position that reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules.…

Pre-exascale system will be officially inaugurated at the Bologna Technopole in Italy on November 24 Europe's Leonardo pre-exascale system is set for its official inauguration this week following its confirmation as the fourth most powerful supercomputer on the Top500 list at the recent SC22 conference.…

Preserves pre-2017 servers on its newer Nitro hardware Amazon Web Services has shown it's willing to operate legacy workarounds for some customers of its elastic compute cloud (EC2).…

Remember that one time the Linux kernel couldn't cope for a moment? That sort of thing should be behind us now The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) has made a decision, and declared that the world can do without leap seconds.…

And ponders subsidies to attract big datacenter and content delivery network builds India's government has delivered a flurry of announcements about data – where it should reside, how it should be regulated, and how it should be paid for.…

Microsoft moves IP Protection into public preview An new Azure service aimed at protecting smaller businesses from the growing threat of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is now in public preview, according to Microsoft.…

Yet another cautionary tale of diving into crypto investment opps Two Estonian men were arrested yesterday for their alleged roles in running a series of cryptocurrency and money laundering scams that bilked $575 million from "hundreds of thousands of victims" while the suspects used their ill-gotten gains to buy real estate and luxury cars.…

Homegrown chips remain behind for now, but for how much longer? China is set to get its hands on homegrown processors next year that purportedly rival the performance of AMD and Intel chips released over the past two years…

Emergency out-of-band updates to the rescue Microsoft is rolling out fixes for problems with the Kerberos network authentication protocol on Windows Server after it was broken by November Patch Tuesday updates.…

We're back - for the first of many missions to come NASA's Orion spacecraft has arrived at the Moon, and even swung around the dark side, as it prepares to settle into an orbit around Earth's biggest satellite that will take it further from home than any (eventually) manned spacecraft before it. …

Congratulations on the twins! By the way, our discrimination laws are 'subject to interpretation' A former IBM product manager has sued Big Blue alleging that the company discriminated against her for going on maternity leave to have twins.…

That's where the money is Phishing attempts targeting victims in the Middle East increased 100 percent last month in the lead up to the World Cup in Qatar, according to security shop Trellix.…

When a grain of sand moves fast enough to crack a mirror, it's best to put your back to the wind After several months of discussions, NASA optics and micrometeoroid experts working on the James Webb Space Telescope have figured out how to reduce micrometeor damage to the $10 billion machine: turn it around.…

Randhir Thakur led Intel’s big bet to take on Asian foundry giants TSMC and Samsung Exclusive The head of Intel's revitalized contract chip manufacturing business plans to step down, The Register has learned, creating a setback for the x86 behemoth's big bet to take on Asian foundry giants TSMC and Samsung as part of its comeback plan.…

Next-gen chip plant could appeal to customers for supply chain, national security reasons Analysis TSMC founder Morris Chang has confirmed the Taiwanese foundry giant's plan to build a 3nm chip manufacturing plant in Arizona alongside its 5nm fab that is slated to open in 2024. …

We need more transmission capacity, and we needed it yesterday The US electric grid badly needs to modernize, and the Biden administration says it's ready to give as much as $13 billion to organizations willing to make it happen.…

GAO says 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster will look like a walk in the park The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has warned that the time to act on securing the US's offshore oil and natural gas installations is now because they are under "increasing" and "significant risk" of cyberattack.…

This is despite a wealth of evidence showing the value of having two in the cockpit Regulators are pushing the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to examine ways of making single pilot operations the eventual norm in commercial flights.…

Just look at the 'state' of them, says UK semiconductor designer, but says float will still happen The troubled public offering of Brit chip designer Arm looks set to be delayed until sometime next year, amid fears that worsening economic conditions may make investors reluctant to buy into the company.…

Plus: He ran a poll 51.8% in favor of overturning Donald Trump's ban... but some must be bots, right Elon? Twitter CEO Elon Musk is considering more layoffs – including sales and commercial partnerships – as whoever remains following an exodus of software engineers enjoyed a "hardcore" weekend helping the tech industry veteran in a "code review" of the social media platform.…

Very keen to unhook infrastructure from 'third countries', private biz after Ukraine crisis brings situation into focus Europe is constructing its own satellite constellation to guarantee communications services for the region, following an agreement between the European Parliament and EU member states to invest €2.4 billion ($2.481 billion) in the program.…

Does spy-tech supplier have a head start in bidding for the controversial deal it considers a 'must win'? Documents from NHS England show services provided by Palantir – which began in the COVID-19 emergency – will become part of the controversial £360 million ($429 million) Federated Data Platform, a move critics argue gives the US spy-tech biz an unfair advantage in the competition.…