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Tech companies, not users, to be punished for violations of social media time-out The Australian government has confirmed it will create legislation that bans access to social media for people under the age of 16....

What's the difference between a broken update system and a malware injection engine? Opinion A seemingly simple, single mistake in metadata that auto-trashes a critical, major component in the Windows ecosystem sounds bad. And it is, in so many ways....

Those old operating systems had awesome power - you had to be careful wielding it who, me? Good morning and welcome, once again, to Who, Me? in which Register readers share tales of tech support moments they might prefer to forget. But forgetting is not a way to learn from mistakes, is it?...

Also: Crypto hacks will continue; CoD hacker gets thousands banned, and more in brief One of the suspected masterminds behind the widespread Snowflake breach has been arrested in Canada - but the saga isn't over, eh....

Plus: A premium minimum wage for Malaysian datacenter workers; N Koreans maybe discover spicy content; S Korea fines Meta for data misuse, and more Asia In Brief Taiwanese silicon wafer provider GlobalWafers said last week it expects its award from the CHIPS and Science Act to continue, despite a change in the US presidency and direction....

Got a modern Nvidia or AMD graphics card? Custom Llamas are only a few commands and a little data prep away Hands on Large language models (LLMs) are remarkably effective at generating text and regurgitating information, but they're ultimately limited by the corpus of data they were trained on....

Dwindling power and problematic communications, but the spacecraft just keeps on going "We're definitely going to make the 50th anniversary," says Professor Garry Hunt, one of the scientists responsible for NASA's Voyager mission, as Voyager 1 recovers from an unexpected pause in communications....

Now that's a brew-haha Struggling chip giant Intel has rescinded a cost-cutting plan to abolish free coffee and tea for its staff....

The new normal The feud between Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and rival web hosting firm WP Engine has led Automattic to create a website that lists WordPress customers who have moved their site hosting away from WP Engine and those who haven't....

Raw Story and AltNet allowed to amend complaint A US judge has thrown out a case against ChatGPT developer OpenAI which alleged it unlawfully removed copyright management information (CMI) when building training sets for its chatbots....

Move to suspend 7 nm and smaller processes follows US pressure Semiconductor giant TSMC is expected to stop supplying chips made with 7 nm or smaller processes to customers in China that are developing AI processors or GPUs. The move is reportedly to ensure it remains compliant with US export restrictions....

And separately, alleged ex-military traitor also arrested in Frankfurt The US is moving forward with its prosecution of a man who is accused of illegally shipping semiconductors to sanctioned businesses in Russia after he pleaded guilty to the multi-million-dollar scheme....

Does anyone want to tell Linus Torvalds? No? I didn't think so Opinion I must be a glutton for punishment. Not only was my first programming language IBM 360 Assembler, my second language was C. Programming anything in them wasn't easy. Programming safely in either is much harder....

Affected business calls situation 'mindbogglingly dangerous' as sysadmins reminded to check backup and restore strategies Microsoft remains silent over Windows Server 2025 turning up in the guise of a security update earlier this week, much to the chagrin of affected administrators....

We all know by now that monsters never die, right? Two high-profile criminal gangs, Scattered Spider and BlackCat/ALPHV, seemed to disappear into the darkness like their namesakes following a series of splashy digital heists last year, after which there were arrests and website seizures....

Printed around 4,000 pages of tech before leaving for a job at Huawei, claims court A Chinese national was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 20 million ($14,400) for allegedly stealing semiconductor manufacturing technology from SK hynix, according to a South Korean court ruling....

Government-appointed commissioners say Birmingham severely lacked Oracle skills during disastrous implementation UK government-appointed commissioners have labeled Birmingham City Council's Oracle Fusion rollout as "the poorest ERP deployment" they have seen....

'It helps Euro organizations to avoid lock-in and design the cloud strategy they want' European cloud consortium CISPE has unveiled a framework to help members and their customers automate compliance with the EU Data Act's obligations around data portability and switching....

UK data regulator says some devs and providers are operating without a 'lawful basis' The UK's data protection watchdog finds that AI recruitment technologies can filter candidates according to protected characteristics including race, gender, and sexual orientation....

Your very fastest resolution, delivered in a flash - even in The Time Before Google On Call The working week can be a trek. And so can a holiday, which the On Call author has taken this week - but not before preparing a new installment of The Register's Friday column that recounts tech support tales kindly contributed by readers....

Nanopore DNA screening technology may identify novel pathogens, propose treatments in as little as six hours A public-private partnership in the UK is constructing what the government said is "the world's first real-time surveillance system" to track and prevent future pandemics....

A try called Quesst Vid The aircraft NASA hopes will usher in a new generation of transport that's supersonic but also relatively quiet has fired up its engines for the first time as a test....

Govt order destroys 'hundreds of well-paying local jobs', eh Canada has ordered the dissolution of TikTok's Canadian business - without banning the app itself - citing national security risks associated with ByteDance's operations in the country....

'Multiple' malware samples likely targeting education orgs Criminals are using game-related applications to infect Windows systems with a malicious software framework called Winos4.0 that gives the attackers full control over compromised machines....

Privacy lawsuit blows this way alleging disclosure of names, email addresses, geo info, video titles without permission IBM has been sued again for allegedly allowing third-party ad partners to collect personal data without consent via videos on its Weather Channel website....

They also boost support for populist politicians, study finds Robots are devaluing and derailing workers' careers in both manufacturing and other jobs tied to regional economics, according to a recent study....

An emotionally-manipulable AI in the hands of the Pentagon and CIA? This'll surely end well Palantir has announced a partnership with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services to build a cloudy Claude platform suitable for the most secure of the US government's defense and intelligence use cases....

Enigmatic cosmic signals from outside this galaxy could come from collapsed binary stars Scientists have discovered more clues about the birth of fast radio bursts (FRBs) emitted from distant galaxies whose origins remain a mystery....

Curiosity gives crims access to wallets and passwords Organizations should be on the lookout for bogus copyright infringement emails as they might be the latest ploy by cybercriminals to steal their data....

Data platform vendors can't meet all your needs, warns Gartner Users should beware of the single platform approach when preparing for the demands of AI and machine learning on their data management systems, Gartner is warning....

9 out of 10 are techies, but Zuckerberg lost money Yesterday's stock market bounce after the election of Donald Trump has added billions to the pockets of the tech elite, although apparently Mark Zuckerberg failed to cash in....

Snapdragon X Plus 8-core platform gains traction with 58 laptop designs ... but will Windows users care? Qualcomm is flexing its Arm muscle in the x86 market, highlighting the push into the Windows laptop market during its Q4 2024 earnings call....

May not see full use until 2030 - even if it arrives this year Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is prioritizing, among its manufacturing tools, the acquisition of high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet scanners for research and development....

Rewrite 'please leave my text editor alone' Windows Insiders will soon get firsthand experience of Microsoft's AI ambitions for Paint and Notepad: the image editor is getting Generative Fill and Erase and the text editor is getting a Rewrite function....

Q2 climbs 23% on Armv9 adoption, but licensing dips Smartphone chip champ Arm is crowing over expanding royalty revenues, driven by uptake of Armv9 technology, yet execs can't stop talking up AI as its future money spinner....

Got a spare $2.9 million lying around? Asking for a friend ... If you fancy yourself a Batman aficionado - and you have Bruce Wayne levels of spending money sitting around - you could be one of the lucky few to score a working, licensed reproduction of The Tumbler from Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy....

Zen 5 3D V-cache is here at last, and priced at $479 - one for the gamers or multi-purpose desktop chip for all? Review AMD is officially launching its hotly anticipated next-gen X3D desktop processors based on the Zen 5 architecture today, which means The Register can let you know about the 8-core Ryzen 9800X3D we've personally taken for a spin....

Hands up who wants to see the 'chopsticks' catch the Super Heavy again? SpaceX will make its next Starship launch attempt on November 18, if all goes to plan - and may also try another catch of the Super Heavy Booster, depending on conditions....

IT spend set to rise nonetheless and it's not all about wundertech Three is the magic number, or more specifically the amount of time in years before a killer app emerges that helps businesses more usefully use generative AI to drive meaingful producitivty gains....

Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul doesn't live up to its name Cisco is issuing a critical alert notice about a flaw that makes its so-called Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul systems easy to subvert....

Environmental, social, and governance? Cutting money spent on power is CEOs' priority Chief execs in key European countries are pushing back on net zero commitments to focus on their core business, in the face of a volatile energy market with rising costs and supply issues....

Nation's favorite cloud-slinger, AWS, unlikely to be taking part A fresh pilot of a four-day working week is currently taking place in the UK, despite several tech giants recently mandating five days a week in the office for their staff....

10,000 of Kim Jong Un's soldiers believed to be headed for front line The EU has joined US and South Korean officials in expressing concern over a Russian transfer of technology to North Korea in return for military assistance against Ukraine....

Government wants to make semiconductors big on home turf again Japan has asked AI chip startup Tenstorrent to train up to 200 chip designers from the country at its US offices over the course of five years to help inject new blood into Japan's semiconductor industry....

In case today's news cycle wasn't shocking enough, here's a gem from Sophos Fresh from a series of serious reports detailing its five-year battle with Chinese cyberattackers, Sophos has dropped a curious story about users of a popular infostealer-cum-RAT targeting a niche group of victims....

Failure to warn customers about chip flaw leads to fraud claim Intel was sued in a federal court in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, based on claims that the chipmaker's 13th and 14th generation desktop processors from 2022 and 2023 are defective....

Electromagnetic radiation contributed to that zincing feeling: analysts The collapse of the 305-meter telescope at Arecibo Observatory in 2020 is being attributed to zinc creep - slow deformation due to stress - in the telescope's cable spelter sockets, according to a committee report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine....

21 lines that show the big man still has what it takes A relatively tiny code change by penguin premier Linus Torvalds is making a measurable improvement to Linux's multithreaded performance....

US firm made OEMs, glass processors sign exclusivity deals, tattle on competitors, claims Euro Commish Corning's Gorilla Glass is found in countless tech products, from smartphones and wearables to automobile windshields, and the European Commission has an inkling its success is due in part to the US-based business cutting anticompetitive deals....

22,000 IP addresses taken down, 59 servers seized, 41 arrests in 95 countries Interpol is reporting a big win after a massive combined operation against online criminals made 41 arrests and seized hardware thought to be used for nefarious purposes....