The Register

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.…

If you thought the '80s were cool, wait for the revival Opinion The first hints of an empire falling are only clear in retrospect. At the time they happen, they can look as if they are just part of existing trends. Crypto chaos as FTX falls apart like a giant rotting peach? The whole scene stinks. Everyone knows it, except the marks.…

Partial VM encryption enables the virtual TPMs Windows 11 guests can't live without VMware has refreshed its desktop hypervisors, adding native support for Apple's Arm-based CPUs as well as Windows 11.…

Running a theme park Help Desk was a non-stop roller coaster ride, and not in a fun way Who, Me? Welcome readers one and all to another instalment of Who, Me? in which we recount tales of technical troubles (and occasional triumphs) that our valued readers have been dying to get off their chests.…

'If your input continues to be monoculture, you can expect the same outcomes' Cybersecurity moves fast. New and bigger threats emerge all the time across an ever-expanding attack surface and there's not enough people to fill vacant jobs.…

Also, a phishing gang goes Royal, while another employee at Snowden's old haunt gets caught nabbing data In brief A security researcher whose Google Pixel battery died while sending a text is probably thankful for the interruption - powering it back up led to a discovery that netted him a $70,000 bounty from Google for a lock screen bypass bug.…

With next-gen chips pushing 700W, thermal is the hot topic SC22 It's safe to say liquid cooling was a hot topic at the Supercomputing Conference in Dallas this week. …

Even in Club Fed, that's a long time A federal judge on Friday sentenced former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to 11.25 years in prison and three years of supervised release for defrauding investors in the failed blood testing company.…

ACLU argues for the Fourth The American Civil Liberties Union on Friday asked the US Supreme Court to consider whether surveillance cameras placed on utility poles by police without a warrant should be allowed to watch people in their homes.…

FBI, CISA sound the alarm and detail IOCs Hive ransomware criminals have hit more than 1,300 companies globally, extorting about $100 million from its victims over the last 18 months, according to the FBI.…

Law firm wants class-action status, says issue poses 'serious electrical and fire hazard' A lawsuit seeking class-action status has accused Nvidia of misleading consumers over the safety of the company's GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards due to growing reports of melting cables.…

The point? To demonstrate the safety of lithium-ion power packs when handled properly If you've ever wondered how and why lithium-ion batteries in devices like smartphones and laptops combust, iFixit is here with an explosive video and some accompanying wisdom on safe battery-handling.…

Tells Economic Club of New York no one he knows is trimming IT budgets Corporations large and small are not yet showing any signs of clipping their enterprise technology spending says IBM's boss, despite mounting fears about the parlous state of economies around the world. Maybe it's wishful thinking.…

They look and behave a lot like those on Earth – except they're made of dust While Mars might have looked a bit like Earth once upon a time, these days they couldn't be much more different. One's a red dust bowl, the other is a beautiful blue marble containing all the life we know of. But ESA and NASA scientists have found some surprising common ground – clouds.…

New markets harder to convince, says analyst OpenStack is "alive and well", according to the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), claiming deployments grew 60 percent this year compared with 2021. However, much of the growth appears to come from a small number of existing users, many of which are telcos.…

Staff locked out as hundreds appear to say no to Musk's 'hardcore' ultimatum Twitter chaos continued overnight as employees were locked out of its offices following reports that hundreds have chosen to opt out of the ultimatum set by CEO Elon Musk to become "extremely hardcore."…

Antitrust scrutiny into one of the biggest deals for a private software developer The Department of Justice is closely inspecting Adobe's eye-wateringly expensive purchase of web-first collaboration design startup Figma after making a second request for information from the pair.…

Move for consumer welfare and preventable e-waste as nation seeks to ramp up electronics production India is on a path to require USB-C charging ports in almost all smart devices following actions taken by an inter-ministerial task force.…

Guarantees fixed monthly price – but staffers will have to leg it to the City Network operator Vorboss is offering London businesses a 100Gbit/sec service with a fixed monthly price set for the length of the contract, claiming it removes bandwidth constraints for the city's most data-hungry firms.…

There's a legal line between book borrowing and piracy Two Russian nationals accused of operating Z-Library – one of the largest online book piracy websites – have been charged with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering.…

Amazon and Cisco even managed to sneak Alexa and Webex on board After several delays, NASA's Artemis I mission has finally launched and the Orion spacecraft is on its way to an orbital date with the Moon. There aren't any human passengers aboard, but that doesn't mean the mission is only about stress testing a new crew capsule.…

Products tend to work best once removed from their packaging History, it is said, is told by the victors. Which is why The Register each week presents On-Call – tales of readers triumphing when delivering tech support to the clueless, unreasonable or just plain ignorant.…

Military says they'll save lives on both sides as tensions escalate Israeli fortifications in the West Bank are becoming a bit more faceless, as the military has reportedly deployed robotic turrets capable of firing stun grenades, less-than-lethal bullets, and tear gas at Palestinians protesting their presence.…

Corporate funds bought employee homes, no accounting department, uncertainty about who's an employee, and other baffling behavior John Ray III, CEO of FTX Trading Ltd, who succeeded disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried following the collapse of the once notionally valued $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange, told a Delaware bankruptcy court on Thursday that the company is a disaster unlike anything he has ever seen.…

Employee management tech raises eyebrows in the Big Apple Private security firms in New York City have co-opted public resources – specifically trees – to track their guards as they make their rounds.…

Solitaire and Minesweeper coming to Windows giant's software When a movie or TV director wants to show people wasting time at work, it invariably has them playing computer games. See Peter Gibbons in "Office Space" or the Dunder Mifflin employees in "The Office."…

In this race it's all about flops per watts SC22 There’s a new energy-efficiency king at the top of this fall’s Green500 ranking of the most green supercomputers in the world, and it's a tiny 31-kilowatt cluster powered by Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.…

Class-action lawsuit seeks $1 in nominal damages The Massachusetts Department of Public Health conspired with Google to secretly install a COVID-19 tracing app onto more than 1 million Android users' devices without their knowledge and without obtaining warrants, according to a class-action lawsuit filed this week by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.…

If your device is becoming unresponsive, there's a workaround Microsoft has fixed yet another problem in some versions of Windows 10, a bug that makes the taskbar and desktop temporarily vanish or causes the system to ignore you.…

Comment comes as CEO testifies in suit questioning $65b Tesla pay Elon Musk, disruptor extraordinaire of the social media platform he bought for $44 billion isn't planning to run Twitter permanently on a full-time basis and says a CEO will be hired.…

Is it a super or a cloud service? Users would string together components as required Microsoft and Nvidia say they are teaming up to build an "AI supercomputer" using Azure infrastructure combined with Nvidia's GPU accelerators, network kit, and its software stack.…