The Register

Maybe start getting better at sorting your trash before these ML garbage bots gain sentience? If our AI robot slaves ever decide to revolt, they might start in the most thankless place possible: The municipal solid waste facilities where AMP Robotics is using them to sort recyclables from all the rest of the municipal solid waste (MSW) that us meatbags regularly fail to separate properly....

Carbon-14 decay could be coming to an implant in you Video The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the University of Bristol have built a diamond battery capable of delivering power, albeit a tiny amount, for thousands of years....

Edge-exclusive tool promises 'second set of eyes' for browsing Microsoft has rolled out a Copilot Vision preview that says more about how poorly websites are designed rather than justifying the need to bring more AI into users' lives....

Wine-tasting seems to be an essential part of an EU-friendly Azure Local Exclusive Microsoft and the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers of Europe (CISPE) trade body this week kicked off their technical summit to assess the Windows maker's progress in making available a version of Azure Local for hosters....

Fantasizing about leaving the mess at home behind? Pretty island packed with medieval ruins promotes itself as a venue for e-business The Isle of Man Government runs an annual conference to promote the tiny nation as a destination for online businesses....

Plus, xAI scores another $6B to fuel Tesla tycoon's war on OpenAI Elon Musk gave more than $270 million to political groups supporting Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and others on the American right running for office, according to donation figures released by the Federal Election Commission this week....

Microsoft's OS sure loves throwing your creds at remote systems Updated Acros Security claims to have found an unpatched bug in Microsoft Windows 7 and onward that can be exploited to steal users' OS account credentials....

Video slinger looks to Supremes for salvation, though anything could happen under Trump A US federal appeals court has rejected a challenge to the law that prevents popular apps that collect data on Americans from being controlled by a foreign adversary....

Crashing stock, plummeting reputation, but yeah, of course, let's focus on office usage Boeing has paused its efforts to install and use employee-monitoring sensors, including at its office in Everett, Washington, after media inquiries followed an employee's leak of the plans....

How much AI does one subscriber need? OpenAI says it will charge $200 per month for ChatGPT Pro, a new premium tier that costs ten times the Plus subscription price....

Proposal pushes stricter infosec safeguards after Chinese state baddies expose vulns The head of America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to force telecoms operators to tighten network security in the wake of the Salt Typhoon revelations, and to submit an annual report detailing measures taken....

Calling everything SageMaker is confusing - but a new name would have been worse says AWS re:Invent Amazon has introduced a new generation of SageMaker at the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, bringing together analytics and AI, though with some confusion thanks to the variety of services that bear the SageMaker name....

Return to flight almost two years since the previous endeavor failed Arianespace has finally managed to return the Vega-C to flight carrying a Sentinel payload for the European Space Agency (ESA)....

Interim chief David Zinsner claims core strategy intact, will stay the course to contract manufacturer Intel wants to be "the western provider of leading-edge silicon," according to interim co-chief executive David Zinsner, but needs a successful products division for this to be possible....

Threatened with life in prison, Kyiv charity worker gives middle finger to state spies A Russian programmer defied the Federal Security Service (FSB) by publicizing the fact his phone was infected with spyware after being confiscated by authorities....

Schools taken out of scope, but 108M plan still dwarfs initial 20M Europe's largest local authority has settled on a 108 million ($137 million) bill for its disastrous replacement of SAP with Oracle until 2026, five times the sum initially predicted and five years late....

How to tell a customer they're an idiot without telling them they're an idiot Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen revealed another product support trick from within the corridors of Microsoft. This time, it's not about blowing on connectors but about avoiding casting some embarrassing shade on a customer's purchasing decisions....

Lunar flights therefore set for seven-month delay and change re-entry approach, but redesign not needed NASA's investigation into damage found on the heatshield of the Artemis Mission's Orion module two years ago has concluded that the technique used to re-enter Earth's atmosphere meant gas became trapped in the shield's outer ablative material, causing concerning cracks....

Call the boss instead. He's not a big fan of sleep On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which each Friday we share your tales of fun and frolics at the frontline of tech support....

Still unpatched 100+ days later, watchTowr says updated A zero-day arbitrary file read vulnerability in Mitel MiCollab can be chained with a now-patched critical bug in the same platform to give attackers access to sensitive files on vulnerable instances....

That's 2.56 decillion of them, destined for use in CDNs and the cloud - and APNIC needed 83 decillion more to handle the request Huawei has been allocated 2.56 decillion IPv6 addresses by regional internet registry the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC). That's a lot....

Redmond threat intel maven talks explains this persistent pain to The Reg A Chinese government-linked group that Microsoft tracks as Storm-0227 yesterday started targeting critical infrastructures organisations and US government agencies, according to Redmond's threat intel team....

Damage likely limited to those running bots with private key access Malware-poisoned versions of the widely used JavaScript library @solana/web3.js were distributed via the npm package registry, according to an advisory issued Wednesday by project maintainer Steven Luscher....

Louisiana facility's three natural gas turbine plants to churn out 2,262 MW Richland Parish, an idyllic rural area in northeast Louisiana, USA, is set to host a gigantic new Meta datacenter....

OpenAI chief says he doesn't think Elon will unleash political powers to zap AI competition OpenAI boss Sam Altman has expressed hope that Elon Musk won't use his political clout to hurt his competitors, describing such activity as "un-American."...

Project includes hundreds of millions of loonies for a national supercomputing facility Canada is one of the latest nations to catch the sovereign AI bug and plans to invest $2 billion CAD ($1.42 billion USD) to bolster the nation's domestic compute capacity by funding the development of new datacenters and computing infrastructure north of the 49th parallel....

Compatibility holds persist as gamers face black screens Windows 11 24H2 is set to hit more users as the Microsoft operating system enters a "new stage of availability."...

Another buzzword box ticked: OCI-compliant containers FreeBSD 14.2, the latest point release of the most widely used of the BSDs, brings some new features to tempt Docker fans....

Euro rocket stuck on the ground for another day The return to flight of Arianespace's Vega C has been delayed due to a "mechanical issue" with the mobile gantry....

Very much a 1.0 - but it's a solid start MLCommons, an industry-led AI consortium, on Wednesday introduced AILuminate - a benchmark for assessing the safety of large language models in products....

Merger will create third large operator in UK mobile market Vodafone and Three's proposed merger has been cleared by the UK's competition watchdog, as long as the pair commit to certain conditions. The move will create a third large-scale mobile operator, with the expectation this will offer greater competition for BT/EE and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2)....

Children's hospital and cardiac unit say criminals broke in via shared 'digital gateway service' Both National Health Service trusts that oversee the various hospitals hit by separate cyberattacks last week have confirmed they're still in the process of restoring systems....

Sensitive data allegedly stolen from US subsidiary following Black Basta post BT Group confirmed it is dealing with an attempted attack on one of its legacy business units after the Black Basta ransomware group claimed they broke in....

A third-party Kubuntu remix with a severe identity crisis Wubuntu is a stripped-down Kubuntu, with custom themes and additional tools to make it look (a lot) and work (superficially) like Windows 11....

Stoli Group on the rocks in the US Two US subsidiaries of alcohol giant Stoli Group filed for bankruptcy protection this week over financial difficulties exacerbated by an August ransomware attack....

Bases predictions on historical data, instead of solving physics equations Google DeepMind researchers claim they've used machine learning to devise a model that can deliver better 15-day weather forecasts and requires only modest quantities of compute resources to produce its predictions....

Boffins' big brainwave of using custom skullcaps to capture, er, more brainwaves Eggheads in the US are said to have created an easier, faster, and just-as-reliable but much cooler way to measure brain activity than the bulky, wire-ridden caps used today: Printable, temporary "e-tattoos."...

Which could be in short supply as Beijing bans rare earth exports Four of China's top industry bodies have published advice suggesting members source fewer semiconductors from US silicon slingers, because supply chain issues caused by sanctions mean they are "no longer secure and reliable."...

Smaller buyers see deep discounts and suddenly worry less about regulatory issues Canalys Forums APAC Chinese cloud vendors are undercutting their US counterparts on price and making inroads into the Asian small and medium business market, according to analyst firm Canalys....

Now wants to work with 500 and lean more on partners to defend against migrations - which Dell says are on the cards Canalys Forums APAC Broadcom has revised its strategy to work directly with the top 2,000 "strategic" VMware users, and will instead focus on just 500 - a move that Canalys chief analyst Alastair Edwards described as "a U-turn."...

Floating the idea of a robot navy NATO is testing hardware for a potential force that would operate unmanned surface vessels (USV) to patrol the coastal waters of member states and also help protect undersea cables from attack....

Security chief talks to El Reg as Feds urge everyone to use encrypted chat interview While Chinese-government-backed spies maintained access to US telecommunications providers' networks for months - and in some cases still haven't been booted out - T-Mobile US thwarted successful attacks on its systems "within a single-digit number of days," according to the carrier's security boss Jeff Simon....

Facebook titan targets early 2030s for reactor deployment Meta believes it will need one to four gigawatts of nuclear power, in additional to the energy it already consumes, to fuel its AI ambitions. As such, it will put out a request for proposals (RFP) to find developers capable of supplying that level of electricity in the United States by early 2030....

Billionaire space tourist and mate of Elon pledges Americans will get to Mars President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman, a notable SpaceX customer, as head of NASA....

Lawsuit says e-commerce giant cut two zip codes from its own fleet without telling residents Amazon has trouble in the US capital, where the city's attorney general alleged in a lawsuit filed today that the company excluded two postal zip codes from its fastest Prime delivery service without informing customers....

TPM 2.0 'non-negotiable' for latest OS, says software giant Microsoft is not backing down on the hardware requirements for Windows 11, stating that the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is essential for the operating system, even if it is not part of the minimum requirements for Windows Server 2025....

Nozzle woes in the past for continent's new launcher Arianespace's Vega C is set to make a return to flight this evening, almost two years to the day after a second-stage failure doomed its previous launch....

Never mind our alleged cheating of customers - you guys are a bunch of leakers, Redmond tells watchdog Microsoft isn't happy about an antitrust investigation reportedly kicked off by the FTC recently, but not for the reason you might think: Redmond's mad that it found out about the probe by reading the news....

Drugs, botnets, forged docs, and more generated fortune for platform sellers German authorities say they have again shut down the perhaps unwisely named Crimenetwork platform and arrested a suspected admin....

Installed the final non-security preview update of 2024? Best not hop onto the Dev Channel Microsoft has pinned down why some eager Windows Insiders could not persuade the Recall preview to save any snapshots. It's all down to a pesky non-security preview....