The Register

As if you needed another reason to delete the app right now Video sharing platform TikTok and its parent company Bytedance are leakier than a sieve – and it has emerged that in an attempt to plug the holes, members of Bytedance's internal audit team tracked the physical location of journalists via their IP addresses.…

'No plans at this time,' it tells us, but won't rule it out amid reports execs are visiting Dresden, Germany TSMC told The Reg it has no "plans at this time" to site one of its factories in Europe but wouldn't rule anything out amid reports that the world's most strategically important chipmaker was sending senior suits to Dresden, Germany, to discuss the possibility of a factory there.…

Ideal if you're looking for something to play with over the holidays As the end of the year and the holiday season both approach, so do new previews of both SUSE's new enterprise Linux distro, ALP, and the NetBSD OS.…

Xbox maker responds to US regulator's lawsuit to block the acquisition Microsoft has put forward its argument against the US trade regulator's attempt to block its massive purchase of games dev Activision Blizzard from going through, claiming the deal would be good for consumers.…

Fintech, you're better than this. Time to concentrate on more helpful stuff Opinion With the quick one-two punch of FTX and Binance, crypto is finally losing its luster as the next revolution in money.…

'Plague' of ageing, inadequate data systems strikes again as state struggles to cut £22b maintenance bill The UK government has failed to get a grip on the management of its £158 billion ($190 billion) property portfolio because of a failure to replace an ageing database system.…

We really should have known better than to end up with siloed applications on different platforms Opinion Enterprise IT infrastructure has consistently given us worthy investments to make and jobs to do in the last 20 years.…

For one thing, an ignorant user could shut down all of IT On Call Welcome, dear reader, to On Call, The Register's regular column in which we share your stories of being asked to fix the ridiculous.…

Thankfully a well encrypted copy that could take an eon to crack, unless users practiced bad password hygiene Password locker LastPass has warned customers that the August 2022 attack on its systems saw unknown parties copy encrypted files that contains the passwords to their accounts.…

This has the ring of truth to it because Chinese giant has disclosed similar worries on earnings calls Tencent CEO Pony Ma has reportedly dumped on his own company in a company meeting, railing against corruption, low quality products, and failing business units being propped up.…

US investigators probe Bay Bridge multi-car smash A serious accident on San Francisco's Bay Bridge has been blamed on Tesla's "full-self-driving" software by the driver, and the US government is investigating.…

The hack wraps up a year of bad security incidents for identity Intruders copied source code belonging to Okta after breaching the identity management company's GitHub repositories.…

Lower demand? Bid adieu to 10% of workers and cut production American chipmaker Micron Technology plans to cut 10 percent of its workforce and significantly reduce capital spending next year as demand for its memory and storage silicon have reached lows not seen since the Great Recession in 2009.…

5 billion calls over three months. Was your phone spammed? US regulators want to fine the operators of a claimed massive robocall operation almost $300 million that made more than 5 billion pre-recorded calls over three months early last year.…

We don't have the power It turns out Meta isn’t the only one cancelling datacenters this month. Google has reportedly walked away from a $600 million bitbarn project under development in Becker, Minnesota.…

Upgraded threat, time to patch The Zerobot botnet, first detected earlier this month, is expanding the types of Internet of Things (IoT) devices it can compromise by going after Apache systems.…

Woohoo! Cameras on robot's belly confirm it isn't going to drive over it A titanium tube that looks a bit like a steampunk telescope has been dropped off by the plucky Perseverance rover, stuffed with a Mars rock sample that NASA astrobiologists are hoping might reveal traces of ancient microbial life.…

Asks Florida judge to sanction 'American-Latino centric version of Netflix’ for alleged fraud The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a media company based in Florida with defrauding investors about its ability to stream content on a functioning media platform, and accused its CEO of misappropriating over $450,000 of investor funds.…

Samuel Bankman-Fried in FBI custody to face court 'as soon as possible' Two members of Samuel Bankman-Fried's inner circle have pleaded guilty to defrauding equity investors in the moribund FTX cryptocurrency trading platform.…

First satellite to be launched into orbit from western Europe... when it takes off After some tension around a delayed launch of what will be the first satellite to go into orbit from British soil – or indeed from anywhere in western Europe – UK regulators have confirmed they've issued all licenses necessary for Virgin Orbit to deploy a rocket for horizontal takeoff from a modified Boeing 747 from Spaceport Cornwall.…

The term has become so ambiguous it's verging on irrelevance Opinion What exactly is the edge? What makes something an edge appliance? These are trickier questions than you might think, and depending on who you ask — and honestly, what they’re trying to sell you — the answers can vary wildly.…

The scam was lurking behind the content of an adult website Scammers using Google Ads, stolen blog articles, and a "popunder" ad scheme on adult websites pulled in more than $275,000 a month by generating millions of ad impressions every month.…

Activists note absence of VPNs ponder whether Apple may put revenue above human rights in some markets Apple has been accused of selling out human rights for the sake of profit by cooperating with authoritarian censorship demands in China and Russia, according to two reports issued on Thursday.…

So long and thanks for all the science As expected, NASA’s Mars InSight lander has run out of energy, leaving the space agency no alternative but to end the mission.…

But will be bigger than gaming consoles, so maybe this metaverse thing has legs Analyst firm IDC has crunched the numbers for sales of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets and found they’re not going to be a big seller any time soon – at least compared to conventional computing devices.…

Two test missions fly first, before Gaganyaan makes India just the fourth nation to put people into orbit India has named the fourth quarter of 2024 as the likely date for the nation’s first crewed space mission.…

No horse heads in beds...that we know of Crooks are using an Android banking Trojan dubbed Godfather to steal from banking and cryptocurrency exchange app users in 16 countries, according to Group-IB security researchers…

Nearly three weeks and no email for customers As the Rackspace email fiasco approaches week three with the company's hosted Exchange customers' data in limbo, Rackspace execs still won't put an exact number on how many customers were affected by the ransomware-induced email outage, or when — if — they'll be able to recover their old messages and contacts.…

No Girl Scout cookies for you A Girl Scout troop trip to see the Rockettes in New York City didn't go as planned for mom Kelly Conlon, who was turned away at the door of Radio City Music Hall because a facial recognition system pinned her as a prohibited person.…

Huawei to the chipless zone prediction Chinese telecom giant Huawei has reportedly run out of homegrown advanced chips for smartphones due to Trump-era US sanctions that were enacted.…

Designers' jobs to crash or GLIDE OpenAI has extended the capabilities of its text-to-image software from two dimensions into three with the release of Point•E, an open source project that produces 3D images from text prompts.…

Redmond accused of monopolising a market! How shocking First the FTC threw a legal wrench in the works, and now a group of gamers has filed a class action lawsuit in California to stop Microsoft from purchasing Activision Blizzard.…

The emergency OOB release should solve those frustrating failures Microsoft has pushed out an emergency fix for a problem in Windows Server caused by patch updates that made it impossible for some organizations to create virtual machines on Hyper-V hosts.…

More cash will still be needed to maintain service come spring, says Ukrainian deputy PM Ukraine's hunger for Starlink service continues unabated, and several EU countries have stepped in to help the war-torn nation foot the bill for an additional 10,000 terminals set to be delivered in the coming months.…

Tech IPOs down 85 percent on last year, research finds Analysis MariaDB has celebrated going public a few weeks before the end of a year which has seen a dramatic shift in the fortunes of tech companies raising money on the world's stock exchanges.…

Reporters work from home as publication promises Thursday's print edition will hit newstands on time UK broadsheet media outlet The Guardian has become the victim of a ransomware attack which seems to have taken out a large chunk of office-based systems.…

Good thing space agency doesn’t have any state secrets … oh, hang on The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) has published its annual audit of the aerospace agency's infosec capabilities and practices, which earned an overall rating of "Not Effective."…

It doesn't work for SAP and Salesforce but does work for Workday. For now Are two heads better than one or do too many cooks spoil the broth? For Workday, the answer is yes.…

A last-minute dose of festive FOSS freshness The latest Linux Mint, version 21, has had its first point release. If you were holding off upgrading from Mint 20, now is a good time. And it's not the only new distro for Yule.…

Security firm tagged with malware misrepresentation Threat researchers have found a rapidly updated malicious Python package on PyPI masquerading as a legitimate software-development kit (SDK) from cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, but actually contains malware designed to exfiltrate data from infected systems.…

Updates for multiple devices including PinePhone Pro and keyboard incoming Pine64's last update of 2022 brings word of a new version of its PineTab FOSS-driven tablet after chip shortages effectively killed the first generation.…

It's getting cold out there, better spin up a few more VMs Thousands of residents living in the Groningen region of The Netherlands will soon find their homes warmed by waste heat from local datacenters.…

The team needs a year to recover and figure out how not to stress supply chains before planning an upgrade If you’re hoping a new Raspberry Pi will pear in 2023, we have bad news: Rasbposs Eben Upton says work on a Raspberry Pi 5 won’t start until the second half of the year, meaning delivery is a way off yet.…

At the same time, tools like Github Copilot and Facebook InCoder make developers believe their code is sound Computer scientists from Stanford University have found that programmers who accept help from AI tools like Github Copilot produce less secure code than those who fly solo.…

Suggests VMware might not allow NICs and HBAs other than Broadcom’s, which would be a bizarre act +COMMENT The European Commission has opened what it describes as an “an in-depth investigation” into Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.…

DNA Center Appliances shipped since September may spoil Christmas with inaccurate reports of dead disks Sorry to do this to you, dear reader, but here’s another item for your pre-holiday to-do list: update firmware on any Cisco DNA Center appliances you’ve acquired since September.…

Will stay on as boss of servers and software – the fun bits, in other words Poll Elon Musk has made good on his promise to abide by the results of a Twitter poll that asked whether he should quit as CEO of the microblogging service – and delivered a resounding “YES” vote.…

20m downloads can't be wrong? Or can they? Parental control apps may do more harm than good, according to researchers who found 18 bugs in eight Android apps with more than 20 million total downloads that could be exploited to, among many nefarious acts, control other devices on the parents' network.…

Leader of the the world's largest contract chip manufacturer would like it if the two world powers could work out their differences As TSMC plans to spend $40 billion to build two chip manufacturing plants in the US, the Asian foundry giant's CEO is bemoaning the way America's growing rift with China has messed with the global semiconductor industry.…

At $349 it's a cheap computer and a not-very-expensive keyboard If you thought unicorn puke was the epitome of keyboard bling, Finalmouse's upcoming Centerpiece keyboard may see you rethink that assessment.…