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Free Forever, or Free Until We Decide It Isn't policy criticised in filing A putative class action lawsuit has been filed against Google in California by early adopters who are unhappy about the ads company's decision to demand fees for its Workspace productivity suite.…

Stock market losses lead to write-downs at Vision Fund, but chip designer IPO a ray of light Chip designer Arm booked record revenues for the Q1 ended June 30 and was one of the bright spots in an otherwise loss-heavy start to fiscal 2023 for Japanese parent SoftBank's Vision Fund.…

Users who created shared invitation links for their workspace had login details slip out among encrypted traffic Did Slack send you a password reset link last week? The company has admitted to accidentally exposing the hashed passwords of workspace users.…

Google says this is ‘modern’ computing – if so it feels like a backward step I spend a lot of time in a browser – for years I've used half a dozen pinned tabs to provide easy access to web apps like The Register's CMS and TweetDeck. But when I tried Google's browser-centric ChromeOS Flex I immediately lamented the lack of apps and came to despise Chrome.…

Git back, git back, git back to where your files belong GitLab is chewing on life's gristle. The problem, we hear, is that deadbeat freeloaders are sucking up its hosting lifeforce. The company's repo hive is clogged with zombie projects, untouched for years but still plugged into life support. It's costing us a million bucks a year, sighed GiLab's spreadsheet wranglers, and for what? …

Almost taking the fall for another person's mistake Who, Me? Brickbats and bouquets are the way of things in the world of IT. Consider today's Who, Me? entry where our hero nearly fell on his sword when a bug bounty might have been more appropriate.…

Company declares operations are normal and rebuts allegation Beijing crimped component deliveries Taiwanese electronics manufacturer and Apple supplier Pegatron has issued a statement on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSWE) to refute reports it was forced to suspend operations after Chinese authorities stopped supplies reaching its facilities.…

Minister laments Dell, HPE and pals have the market locked up and little incentive to change India will tweak the incentive scheme it offers to manufacturers of enterprise hardware after disappointing uptake.…

Nascent platform provides miscreants an easier and cheaper way to launch remote access, DDoS, and other attacks A platform that makes it easier for cyber criminals to establish command-and-control (C2) servers has already attracted 3,000 users since launching earlier this year, and will likely expand its client list in the coming months.…

Satellites end up in 'unusable' orbit India's small satellite launch vehicle (SSLV) made a spectacular debut launch on Sunday, but the mission fell short of overall success when two satellites were inserted into the incorrect orbit, rendering them space junk.…

Baidu gets the fare in Chongqing and Wuhan China has issued two licences for robot taxi operations, according to local tech giant Baidu.…

Chinese phone makers' tax deals probed; PayPal back in Indonesia; Boeing seeks sustainability in Japan; and more Asia In brief India's parliament will this week debate a bill that would see the nation's competition regulator add officers with technology industry expertise to its ranks, and gain the power to review and veto takeovers.…

Plus: Meta launches prototype AI chatbot, and cities reverse facial recognition bans In brief The UK's Home Office and Ministry of Justice want migrants with criminal convictions to scan their faces up to five times a day using a smartwatch kitted out with facial-recognition software.…

Plus: That Twitter privacy leak, scammers send Ubers for victims, critical flaw in Cisco gear, and more In brief DuckDuckGo has finally mostly cracked down on the third-party Microsoft tracking scripts that got the alternative search engine into hot water earlier this year.…

And if you train your own AI model for it, you can worry less about licensing Updated GitHub Copilot, one of several recent tools for generating programming code suggestions with the help of AI models, remains problematic for some users due to licensing concerns and to the telemetry the software sends back to the Microsoft-owned company.…

What it's like bargaining with criminals ... and advising clients suffering their worst day yet Interview The first rule of being a ransomware negotiator is that you don't admit you're a ransomware negotiator — at least not to LockBit or another cybercrime gang. …

Find it next to the Cybertruck, Boring tunnel maps, Twitter acquisition and my sense of commitment If Elon Musk's claims made during Tesla's shareholder meeting this week are accurate, get ready for that humanoid robot he promised, some self-driving software update, and an overhauled Cybertruck. Then again, this is Elon we're talking about.…

That's the way the Cook he crumbles Apple, which celebrates its self-professed commitment to free expression and human rights, has reportedly told its suppliers in Taiwan to label their components so they describe Taiwan as a province of the People's Republic of China (PRC).…

Yeah, they do have a habit of being in places where they are no longer welcome Russia's space agency has signaled it may well continue maintaining its chunk of the International Space Station to potentially as far out as 2030. Or as early as 2025.…

The Feds may see things differently Cryptocurrency bridge Nomad sent a message to the looters who drained nearly $200 million in tokens from its coffers earlier this week: return at least 90 percent of the ill-gotten gains, keep 10 percent as a bounty for discovering the security flaw, and Nomad will consider this a "white-hat" hack, as opposed to plain old theft, and not take legal action.…

Can Pat stop the rot – or is the chip giant facing a Kodak moment? Comment Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's carefully assembled house of cards is collapsing around him. And it's not really that surprising when you look at the hand he's been dealt.…

DEF CON may be about to blow lid off security hole The US government is warning of critical vulnerabilities in its Emergency Alert System (EAS) systems that, if exploited, could enable intruders to send fake alerts out over television, radio, and cable networks.…

Two lightweight distros get updated after extended pauses Slax, one of the lightest-weight Linux distros around, and Peppermint OS, a web-centric Debian remix, both put out new versions this week.…

Bezos empire continues to clean up, but did it pick the proper postulates? Updated Megacorp Amazon wants to buy iRobot, a company that is best known for its Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner.…

Folk of flash meet in person as Compute Express Link 3.0 debuts Flash Memory Summit The Flash Memory Summit 2022 was held as an in-person event again this week for the first time since 2019, at the Santa Clara Convention Center San Francisco, showcasing the latest developments in memory and storage.…

Set hyperdrives for the Chorizos system ... oh actually it's baloney A French scientist's spicy tweet fooled the internet into believing a slice of chorizo was a detailed picture of a star captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. …

Suspected cyberattack at Advanced takes down part of server estate that hosted range of apps Tech services provider Advanced has taken part of its infrastructure offline as it tries to contain a suspected security incident, with a range of hosted applications not available to health customers, including NHS 111 emergency services.…

Buys up land to train and entertain space tourists when they do start Virgin Galactic (VG) is once again delaying its commercial service, shifting the expected launch of well-to-do space tourists from the first three months of 2023 to Q2, amid widening losses for the business.…

Chip giant's efforts to building production capacity outside of Asia gains steam Updated Intel is preparing to close a deal worth at least $5 billion that will see the chip giant build a semiconductor plant in Italy.…

Beijing-backed PR firm is behind at least 72 ersatz web titles, Mandiant says A Beijing-backed PR firm has been accused of being behind at least 72 fake-news websites and social media accounts pushing pro-China propaganda and criticizing the US and its allies. …

An app will always find a way to interrupt what you’re doing Something for the Weekend Mme D and I are in the cellar, listening intently. Nothing.…

I have bigger problems than where you put our code On Call Be careful where you install stuff, and who is doing the installing. Welcome to an On Call in which normal service is interrupted by a military intervention.…

Stanford academics peeved over LaMDA chatbot brouhaha AI chatbots are not sentient – they have just got better at tricking humans into thinking they might be, experts at Stanford University conclude.…

At least Switchzilla thinks they're salvageable, unlike the boxes it ordered binned back in June Cisco has revealed four of its small business router ranges have critical flaws – for the second time in 2022 alone.…

Moon probe will play BTS to test space internet. Also for fun South Korea's first lunar orbiter, which is about to test disruption-tolerant, network-based space communications, successfully made contact with its Australian ground station after launching on Thursday.…

Years after the company quit server virtualization, but may be handy for hybrid work Citrix has added a development stream to its hypervisor that promises fast and frequent enhancements, plus a cloud service to deliver them to users.…

Starts chasing industrial digitization as its next big opportunity Alibaba's cloud operation thinks it's reached market saturation among China's big internet companies, but sees a new wave of demand coming from industrial outfits.…

Now makes vague pledge to shove inactive repos into slow object storage Updated GitLab has reversed its decision to automatically delete projects that are inactive for more than a year and belong to its free-tier users.…

I got played via the Play store Last October, California resident Jacob Pearlman downloaded an Android version of a cryptocurrency wallet app called Phantom from the Google Play app store.…

Licencing snafu sends American invention overseas When US national laboratories develop a new technology, Uncle Sam is supposed to ensure it is commercialized in America. But that's not what happened with what's said to be a breakthrough battery design. …

Like a Geiger counter but for surveillance cameras With an estimated billion surveillance cameras capturing people's daily activities, chances are you're regularly recorded if you live in a densely populated area.…

These might be the 5nm Zen 4 desktop processors due to land this quarter AMD's Ryzen 7000 desktop processors will reportedly top 5.7 GHz in the case of the Zen giant's top-of-the-line 7950X, when they launch later this quarter.…

There'll be a welcome in valleys of Wales for language translation It's been a busy week for Microsoft Teams, as the Windows giant unveiled a version of the platform optimized for Apple Silicon as well as simplified human language translation for scheduled meetings.…

More expensive than a Pi but with a lot more oomph, platform to be embedded in devices at the edge Nvidia is rolling out a production module of its Jetson AGX Orin platform, designed to be embedded inside devices and enable AI acceleration for a variety of applications such as robotics and edge computing.…

If you're on the HWE stack, you'll get the Jammy kernel Ubuntu 20.04 is nowhere near end of life, but 22.04 is starting to hit its stride.…

Kyndryl and DXC Technology report declining revenues and worsening bottom line Infrastructure service providers Kyndryl and DXC Technology are off to an inauspicious start in their new financial year, recording double digit revenue declines as cloud giants continue to eat into their sales.…

Alleges Oracle did not register the patches it claims were infringed Hewlett Packard Enterprise has come out swinging two months after a $30 million verdict against it in a long-running case, saying claims by Oracle it directly infringed copyrights in the Solaris OS are not backed by enough evidence.…

The next server you buy will support it, but what's it good for? After more than three years of development, compute express link (CXL) is nearly here. The long-awaited interconnect tech will make its debut alongside Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids and AMD's Genoa processor families.…

Bit barns threatened by malware flingers, but fire, storms, or bad guys arriving at the sites are also bad news Proposed legislation in the US will seek to ensure greater protection for government datacenters from the threat of cyberattacks, but also physical dangers such as natural disasters and terrorism.…

Controversial visit to Taiwan continues to reverberate through cyberspace, the real world, and the semiconductor industry Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense confirmed it was hit by a DDoS attack on Wednesday in what has been an eventful week for the island nation, US-Sino relations, and semiconductors.…