The Register

Contractual mess has players wondering if preserving progress in Warcraft, Overwatch, and StarCraft will be possible Gaming giant Blizzard is about to stop operating some of its games in China, leaving players of multiplayer affairs like World of Warcraft fearing for the future of characters in which they have invested many hours of their lives, often in the company of friends they don't "see" in other "places".…

Classy: slips obviously conflicted idea in alongside changed gaming rules on last day of consultation period India's government has proposed to make itself the arbiter of what is true and what is not on social media.…

Avast issues a free decryptor so victims can get their data back Cybersecurity firm Avast has released a free decryptor for victims of BianLian – an emerging ransomware threat that came into the public eye in last year.…

W3C's techies have a few choice words for the Chocolate Factory Google's plan to reinvent ad targeting for the postponed post-cookie era has again been complicated by privacy concerns.…

And if so, what are we gonna do about it? Foreign adversaries are expected to use AI algorithms to create increasingly realistic deepfakes and sow disinformation as part of military and intelligence operations as the technology improves.…

Securities fraud lawsuit reloaded Special report IBM, along with 13 of its current and former executives, has been sued by investors who claim the IT giant used mainframe sales to fraudulently prop up newer, more trendy parts of its business.…

Scriptkiddies rush to machine intelligence to make up for lack in skills Cybercriminals are famously fast adopters of new tools for nefarious purposes, and ChatGPT is no different in that regard. …

Still waiting for that Ultra... Apple unveiled its next-generation M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs Tuesday alongside a refreshed MacBook Pro and Mac Mini lineup.…

Global revenues grew just 1.1% compared to 25% the year before Worldwide semiconductor revenues grew just 1.1 percent during 2022, a far cry from a year ago when the annual increase was more than 25 percent, showing quite how bad chipmakers are having it at the moment.…

Rumored product looks like part of a larger effort to compete with Cupertino's Find My network Google leaks point to the Android maker working on an Apple AirTags competitor, news of which could indicate a broader effort to compete with Apple's Find My network.…

'I believe they made this change deliberately' claims researcher The Secure Boot process on almost 300 different PC motherboard models manufactured by Micro-Star International (MSI) isn't secure, which is particularly problematic when "Secure" is part of the process description.…

Like crude oil and water, cowboys and EVs don't mix No, Wyoming lawmakers didn't get their bill backwards. A group of them led by Republican state senator Jim Anderson actually introduced a resolution last week to ban the sale of electric vehicles in the Cowboy State by 2035.…

Steve Revill of RISC OS Open chats to us about taking the project into the future Retro Tech Week The mid-1980s codebase for RISC OS, the original native OS for the Arm processor, is still run on present-day hardware and actively maintained and developed. We spoke to RISC OS Open boss Steve Revill about its 26-bit origins, working to bring it to newer 32-bit Arm chips, efforts to update its BSD-based network stack, and more.…

Bringing OS version into sync with Enterprise and Education editions Microsoft wants to bulk up the security in Windows Pro editions by ensuring the SMB insecure guest authentication fallbacks are no longer the default setting in the operating system.…

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of your actions Comment Like whack-a-mole, it seems that for every issue Elon Musk believes he has fixed in his pursuit of Twitter 2.0 paradise, another one pops its head up. In this case, the unintended consequences of Musk's actions are that Taliban 2.0 has bought Twitter Blue subscriptions.…

So long, SODIMM – or that's the idea, anyway The JEDEC standards body is set to adopt the CAMM module format as the next memory standard to supersede the long-standing SODIMM for laptop memory, according to reports.…

Wordtune Spices is more like an AI-powered Grammarly Language model startup AI21 Labs launched Wordtune Spices on Tuesday – a generative AI tool that aims to enhance human writing rather than replace it with machine-churned text.…

Infrastructure company retorts that it is an 'essential' business and cites lack of medical records His former employer cannot "seriously" claim that he was unable to perform his job remotely when it fired him for refusing to work in person during the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, an engineer told a judge last week.…

How does Multifunctional Nanobarrier Structure sound for the bathroom wall? Researchers say they have developed a coating that can protect spacecraft and satellites from solar radiation while also allowing possible harvesting of heat energy from sunlight.…

Don't expect to see any more big AIX news. This means the last Unix left is… Linux It's the end of an era. As The Reg covered last week, IBM has transferred development of AIX to India. Why should IBM pay for an expensive US-based team to maintain its own proprietary flavor of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its own FOSS flavor in Red Hat?…

Tens of millions up for grabs as institution needs to dump legacy code The UK's University of Leeds is looking for a systems integrator to help move its ERP system from an ageing SAP installation dating back to 1999 onto the German vendor's latest S/4HANA platform.…

Attrition woes subside as workers stop shifting, producing pleasing cost savings India’s top four IT outsourcers, Wipro, HCL Technologies Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) all reported reasonably rosy results for their final quarter of 2022. the quarter rounding out 2022, despite global economic uncertainty.…

Well whaddya know, the crypto ecosystem did the right thing by stiffing the WannaCry bandits Two cryptocurrency exchanges have frozen accounts identified as having been used by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group.…

A couple have already been jailed, others shown the door for embezzling or arranging sham contracts Chinese web and gaming giant Tencent has admitted it fired more than 100 people in 2022 for various forms of corruption – some so serious it reported them to local police.…

Addition of the chatbot everyone's talking about, and to, comes as Azure OpenAI goes GA Microsoft has promised it will "soon" offer the ChatGPT AI chatbot as a service from its Azure cloud.…

After eighteen month exile, it's allowed to recruit new customers Chinese ride-share provider DiDi Chuxing announced on Monday that after a year and a half of being banned from registering new riders, the Cybersecurity Review Office has allowed it to resume recruitment of customers.…

They're not the meal deal they might seem to be, claims audit expert The quickest way to save money on Oracle licences is to get off its Unlimited Licensing Agreements, a well placed Big Red audit expert claims.…

Techies forced to mop up after update caused ASR rules to detect false positives, wiping icons and apps shortcuts Techies are fearing the worst in efforts to recover from Microsoft's bug laden Defender for Endpoint pre-weekend rollout after updates removed icons and applications shortcuts from Windows 11 and 10 desktop, Taskbar and Start Menu.…

Lawyer known for GitHub Copilot case to argue artists' legal struggle On Friday three artists filed a proposed a class action suit against major AI image generating companies – Stability AI, Deviant Art and Midjourney – alleging they infringed on copyright laws through the use of collage tool Stability Diffusion.…

Mr Microsoft bares all in his 11th Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist and top pick of conspiracy theorists looking for the center of their bullshit storms, spent time interacting with the great unwashed of Reddit in an Ask Me Anything thread last week.…

US export controls having an effect, but semi industry in for a rough ride everywhere Taiwanese semiconductor exports rose during 2022 despite economic and other woes, highlighting the nation's vital importance to the global technology industry. Meanwhile, China's imports of integrated circuits fell for the first time in many years, as US sanctions bite.…

Plus: How much would you pay for ChatGPT? And British AI drug biz gets snapped up for half a billion In Brief An AI language model is apparently going to be used during an upcoming legal hearing to defend someone in a real case. The goal is to demonstrate that AI can replace lawyers, according to the CEO of the consumer rights-focused startup DoNotPay.…

After the security breach last summer, staying put is playing with fire Opinion For better or worse, we still need passwords, and to protect and organize them, I recommend the open source Bitwarden password manager.…

Though a household appliance should have a useful lifetime of 5-10 years, vendor support tends to be shorter... much shorter Buyers of high-end smart devices could find their shiny appliance loses some of its capabilities or becomes a security risk after a few short years when manufacturers fail to provide software updates, says Which?…

Look back in wonder Opinion Business IT is driven by the need for the new. Not necessarily your business's need, but certainly that of vendors and service providers desperate for new revenue, the dismissal of the old once it's done its real job, and the inevitable prying open of the corporate checkbook.…

Am I bid $50 for a a ten-foot neon logo? Or $25 for an @ symbol planter box? Twitter has arranged an auction rid itself of 631 "surplus corporate assets".…

No good deed escapes scripting SNAFUs who, me? Welcome once again to Who Me?, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which IT pros share stories of times their work spun off into eccentric orbits and they (mostly) brought them back for soft landings.…

Chinese developers are cashing in as the region buys in to TikTok and games Asian nations have been revealed as the primary drivers of the mobile ecosystem, according to data.ai – a mobile analytics firm previously known as App Annie – in its 2023 State of Mobile report.…

Reckons Dell kit could have stretched that dollar further David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of 37Signals – which operates project management platform Basecamp and other products – has detailed the colossal cloud bills that saw the outfit quit the cloud in October 2022.…

Optimistically suggests international collaboration – including on standards – will help it get there China's government has declared the nation's information security industry needs to grow – fast.…

PLUS ServiceNow makes Japan a discrete region; Alibaba Cloud’s Singapore hub; US snipes at Korean network policy; and more Asia In Brief Singapore-based superapp Grab has a client for its maps-as-a-service venture, GrabMaps: Amazon Web Services.…

Also: That Pokemon is actually a RAT, Uncle Sam fails a password audit In brief A US intelligence boss has asked Congress to reauthorize a controversial set of powers that give snoops warrantless authorization to surveil electronic communications in the name of fighting terrorism and so forth.…

And Windows updates from Microsoft, too People in Russia can reportedly once again download drivers and some other software from Intel and Microsoft, which both withdrew from the nation after its invasion of Ukraine.…

Sorry, when exactly are you going to sod off to Mars, mate? Numerous third-party Twitter clients stopped working on Thursday evening, Pacific Time, and as of Friday morning, they remained non-functional.…

Something something shareholders unhappy with the heft of CEO's package Apple CEO Tim Cook's 2023 compensation package has been slashed by 40 percent, Apple said, after the iBoss okayed the move in response to shareholder criticism of executive pay. …

The hope? To grease the security skids for internet-connected devices – and they need all the help they can get Developers can now use the Rust programming language when creating applications on Azure Sphere platform for internet-connected devices.…

She hoped to score thousands but laptop app had other ideas A woman in Canada failed in her claim for wrongful dismissal due to evidence from software designed to track her work time activity.…

Oh, great – another source of carbon fumes we forgot to factor in If widely adopted, self-driving cars are going to introduce another source of unaccounted-for carbon emissions that could surpass those of the world's current complement of datacenters: The computer brains that power them.…

We know it's an influential film but that doesn't mean it's an instruction manual Theft charges brought against a Washington state software engineer claim he took inspiration from the cult movie Office Space when he allegedly diddled his former employer out of more than $300,000.…

Agrees measures to prevent streaks of light across the night sky in time-lapse observations SpaceX has entered into a coordination agreement with the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to attempt to mitigate some of the negative effects its Starlink satellite network is having on ground-based astronomy observations.…