The Register

Well you wouldn't get far protesting a water system or a power grid, right? The UK government's decision to designate datacenters as critical national infrastructure (CNI) may do more than just offer protection against critical incidents; it may also allow developers to override any local objections to such facilities being built....

UK's second largest retailer set to move ERP to the cloud with AWS, Accenture, and the German software gaint Sainsbury's has become the third top-ten UK retailer to join the SAP program to lift legacy applications to the cloud and migrate them to its latest S/4HANA ERP system....

If there's one thing we know about Big Red, it's being entirely reasonable JavaScript luminaries and at least 2,500 other interested parties have again asked Oracle to set the programming language free by walking away from the trademark for its name....

Digital Realty's Singapore disaster still complicating cloud after a week A week after a fire broke out at a Singapore datacenter, Alibaba Cloud is waiting for some hardware to dry out before it restores services and customer data....

VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMware have all upgraded September has been a big month for desktop hypervisors, with the field's big players all delivering significant updates....

If this really was that useful, they wouldn't be telling us According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22....

May have reeled in blueprints related to weapons development A Chinese national has been accused of conducting a years-long spear-phishing campaign that aimed to steal source code from the US Army and NASA, plus other highly sensitive software used in aerospace engineering and military applications....

The C in these CVEs stands for Confusing Analysis Microsoft, in a low-key update to its September Patch Tuesday disclosures, has confirmed a just-fixed Internet Explorer vulnerability was exploited as a zero-day before it could be patched....

Pauses European fabs, scores secret US gig, teams up with Amazon, re-orgs its innards, and more! Intel will spin out its Foundry division as an independent subsidiary with its own board, in the hopes of bringing in new sources of capital for the ailing business unit....

Removing de minimis exemption could stymie Beijing's plans to grow its cyber-bazaar abroad The Biden administration announced on Friday it was cracking down on a tax loophole that has enabled Chinese web souks like Shein and Temu to thrive....

And vows to cut ratio of managers-to-employees to 'flatten' the ranks The COVID-19 work-from-home era is over, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has told staff in a Monday memo, signaling his desire for staff to return to working in an office five days a week....

You pipsqueaks want memory safety? We'll show you memory safety! We'll borrow that borrow checker After two years of being beaten with the memory-safety stick, the C++ community has published a proposal to help developers write less vulnerable code....

Cops to citizens will be 'on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting' AI is on the verge of ushering in a new era of mass surveillance, says Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, adding that his juggernaut is ready to serve as the technological backbone for such applications....

Now it's the default for all new accounts Snowflake continues to push forward in strengthening its users' cybersecurity posture by making multi-factor authentication the default for all new accounts....

'No one is trying' to kill Biden or Harris, mogul says after alleged second attempt on Trump's life Calls to deport Elon Musk from the US are trending on the billionaire's very own social media platform after he wondered aloud, following an apparent second attempt on the life of former President Trump, why no one has tried to assassinate President Biden or Veep Kamala Harris....

What the next few months hold for the productivity chatbot updated Microsoft's Copilot Wave 2 has arrived, bringing agents and unanswered questions....

Putting a spanner in work for plans of opposition party to launch a comeback during next year's elections One of Germany's major political parties is still struggling to restore member data more than three months after a June cyberattack targeting its systems....

Cloud unicorn struggles to make database that can do everything 'margin positive' Two years after announcing a database that can do analytics and transactions in the same system, Snowflake has yet to commercially launch Unistore, its CFO admitted....

'These are difficult decisions,' says Antonio Neri Antonio Neri, the former engineer turned chief executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, says the company has to pursue its $4 billion claim against former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch's estate because it is "in the best interest of shareholders."...

Orchestrators of abductions, torture, crypto thefts, and more get their comeuppance One cybercriminal of the most violent kind will spend his best years behind bars, as will 11 of his thug pals for a string of cryptocurrency robberies in the US....

Multi-million euro package to control satellite swerving and debris dodging Neuraspace and the European Space Agency have signed a multi-million Euro contract spanning two years for the Portuguese company's skills in space traffic management (STM)....

Automation is driving the next wave of commoditization, threatening to replace skilled workers Part 1 As we have said before, the software industry has a decades-long history of cost-cutting, commoditization, and a successful sales model of "pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap." This has worrying consequences if your skill set is the next one to be commoditized. But there may be ways out of this narrowing commercial bottleneck....

Telecoms minister pleads with operators to work together The UK issue of multiplying telegraph poles is arising again, with telecoms minister Chris Bryant meeting operators over sharing their infrastructure and consulting residents before installation....

Gartner: ERP giant's flagship cloud-and-upgrade package falls as a ratio of total sales with support deadline looming The latest figures from Gartner indicate SAP is struggling to convince users of the value of its RISE with SAP package, launched to accelerate users' ERP upgrades and switch to the cloud....

* Quite Unlikely A New Technology's Useful, Man Opinion We have a new call to arms in the 21st century battlefront between the West and China. The Middle Kingdom is building an uncrackable national infrastructure based on quantum key distribution (QKD). The laws of physics are being used against us, and we're not keeping up, claims a think tank....

You've got mail ... actually no, you've got nothing Who, Me? Welcome once again to yet another Monday and another instalment of Who, Me? in which Register readers own up to the ... let's say "learning experiences" ... they've enjoyed up in their careers....

Tests show it's just too hard to put the unused 240/4 block to work The 240/4 block of IPv4 addresses - the six percent of the available IPv4 space that is currently not available for public use - should be left alone rather than being added to the pool of available internet resources, according to Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Internet Center....

Alleges its governance was MIA and its KYC SNAFU The Reserve Bank of India has fined HP Financial Services the equivalent of $12,400 for not complying with regulations - some related to Know Your Customer (KYC) measures - and failing to have necessary IT committees....

Visible and audible warnings, plus metadata, with absence of info considered suspicious China's internet regulator on Saturday proposed a strict regime that will, if adopted, require digital platforms to label content created by artificial intelligence....

Also: Apple to end NSO Group lawsuit; Malicious Python dev job offers; Dark web kingpins busted; and more Infosec In Brief Genetic testing outfit 23andMe has settled a proposed class action case related to a 2023 data breach for $30 million....

Plus: Superapps in trouble across Asia; Indonesia connectivity doubles; Alibaba turns 25; and more! ASIA IN BRIEF Japanese imaging device manufacturer Ricoh last week announced plans to cut 2,000....

Started on a whim, almost a decade later it's a fixture - and a marvelous demonstration of your wit and wisdom A short while back, The Register published the 500th installment of On-Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share your tech support stories....

Mad science award ceremony returns to MIT after four years online With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong's bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize....

This is going to be ugly. Really ugly Opinion The Open Source Initiative (OSI) and its allies are getting closer to a definition of open source AI. If all goes well, Stefano Maffulli, the OSI's executive director, expects to announce the OSI open source AI definition at All Things Open in late October. But some open source leaders already want nothing to do with it....

I wanna know What you're feeling Tell me what's on your mind Meta is going to resume scraping the personal public feeds of British Facebook and Instagram users for training AI after reaching an agreement with the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)....

You gotta admit, that speaks volumes for Cupertino America's drug watchdog this week gave Apple permission to market its AirPods Pro 2 as over-the-counter hearing aids, disrupting an industry where traditional devices have often cost thousands of dollars....

That's zloty money but is it too little, too late? Intel is scrambling to stanch the bleeding of its floundering foundry business, but in Poland at least the chipmaker's luck is looking up....

Oh look, another voluntary, non-binding agreement to do better Some of the largest AI firms in America have given the White House a solemn pledge to prevent their AI products from being used to generate non-consensual deepfake pornography and child sexual abuse material....

No love for months-long wait to fix this, either Security researchers have revealed a litany of failures in the Feeld dating app that could be abused to access all manner of private user data, including the most sensitive images not intended to be kept or shared....

Solar arrays are massive... but it's the transistors onlookers are really worried about NASA's Europa Clipper is now less than a month from its October 10 launch, and the US space agency has shown off the spacecraft's giant solar arrays. However, concerns persist over how well the probe's electronics will fare in the harsh Jovian environment....

Oh and about those AI computers... analysts reckon there are still no killer apps or convincing use cases Admins had better dust off their Windows migration skills if Dell and HP are right that a refresh wave of "aging" commercial PC estates is picking up pace - even though the process is slower to happen than either company seems to have expected....

NoSQL database slinger attempts to reassure investors, kinda Analysis It is 1996 in terms of the business adoption of AI if it were put on the dotcom era timeline, according to MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria....

Existing low-level access for security solutions will undergo a rework Microsoft says it's working on Windows to allow endpoint security solutions to operate effectively outside of the operating system's kernel, all with a view to preventing any future CrowdStrike-esque mega-outages....

Doubtful processes, risky spacecraft, what else could possibly go wrong? Oh...30,000 staff off work Industrial difficulties can be added to the list of woes at aerospace giant Boeing after members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751 voted in favor of strike action....

Some users will see the appeal of Big Red stacking its hardware in Amazon's datacenters Analysis At Big Red's recent CloudWorld shindig in Las Vegas, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, looked comfortable and relaxed being hosted by arch rival Oracle....

Analysts claim it would be better for competition though Britain's competition watchdog is worried the proposed merger between Vodafone and Three UK could lead to bigger bills for customers, a view rejected by the companies who see it as a chance to transform the local mobile market with fresh investment....

'Commercially sensitive' incognito buyer has a lot more support than last group that tried to build a bit barn near M25 Exclusive One of Europe's largest datacenter campuses is scheduled to be built in the UK close to the M25 motorway in Hertfordshire, permission pending, with a yet to be identified hyperscale customer set to take ownership....

Mr Snuffleupagus turned out to be all too real and bad at database resilience On Call By Friday the weight of the world presses down upon even the most enthusiastic IT pro, which is why The Register uses the last day of the working week to lighten the load with a new instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of struggling out from under tech support burdens....

'Chain of thought' techniques mean latest LLM is better at stepping through complex challenges OpenAI on Thursday introduced o1, its latest large language model family, which it claims is capable of emulating complex reasoning....

No, you read that right Tokyo-headquartered company ispace announced on Thursday it is sending a tiny toy red Swedish house to the Moon....