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2,000 employees at 38 facilities had data processed 'unlawfully', ICO says A data protection watchdog in the UK has issued an enforcement notice to stop Serco from using facial recognition tech and fingerprint scanning to monitor staff at 38 leisure centers it runs....

Also, another fake iOS app slips into the store, un-cybersafe EV chargers leave UK shelves, and critical vulns in brief A Florida journalist has been arrested and charged with breaking into protected computer systems in a case his lawyers say was less "hacking," more "good investigative journalism."...

Two major procurement initiatives aim to beef up public sector tech UK government has launched two tenders for cloud services that could jointly see up to 7.5 billion ($9.5 billion) spent under framework agreements....

Arise, the new Migration Nation Opinion It looked like the most cynical corporate move of the last couple of years, at least in IT. A year and a half after it was announced, so it has proved to be. Broadcom's $61 billion buyout of VMware was expected to follow a familiar formula - price hikes, product abandonment, complete ecosystem devastation - and the creation of two classes of people....

Making full effective use of new persistent memory means tearing up the rulebook FOSDEM Non-volatile RAM is making a comeback, but the deep assumptions of 1970s OS design will stop us making effective use of it. There are other ways to do things....

While you ponder that, look - or try to - at a concept transparent lappie Lenovo has used Mobile World Congress (MWC) to debut a clutch of updated ThinkPads for business users that it claims are AI PCs - but which look a lot like just PCs that ship with AI-capable processors....

Cupertino only wanted to be with Google for search - despite the prospect of buying Bing outright Bad search results for the query "Annie Lennox first band" were among the reasons Apple rejected an approach from Microsoft to use the Bing search engine as the default in its Safari browser - and also discarded the idea of a joint venture to make Bing better or even the chance to buy the search engine outright....

The whole incident could have been avoided by spending some spare change on a fastener Who, Me? What? Monday? Again? Didn't we do Monday last week? OK, fine. Welcome once again to your soft landing pad into the working week - the oasis we call Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with tales of tech tribulations....

Headcount down 18 percent as content creation time shrinks from 99 hours to 90 minutes Singapore-based superapp Grab logged its first ever positive net profit late last week, and revealed it was helped by cutting cloud costs and adopting generative AI....

Plus: US Department of Justice has hired its first chief AI officer AI in brief Microsoft is investigating fictional press statements about the death of political prisoner Alexei Navalny, written by its AI Copilot and falsely attributed to Russian president Vladimir Putin....

As users report Broadcom massively hikes license costs, consultant advises negotiation tactics used for Oracle or Microsoft will apply VMware's end-user compute business unit is set to be acquired by private equity firm KKR, according to a Reuters report that claims the deal will see $3.8 billion change hands....

PLUS: Huawei's tablets beat iPad sales; Japanese supermarket's long ransomware fight; Do Kwon extradited Asia In Brief India's home-grown DIR-V VEGA RISC-V processors have debuted in development boards....

It takes only one bottleneck or single point of failure to ruin your week Systems Approach One refrain you often hear is that security must be built in from the ground floor; that retrofitting security to an existing system is the source of design complications, or worse, outright flawed designs....

Use of AI to calculate legal bill 'utterly and unusually unpersuasive' You'd think lawyers - ostensibly a clever group of people - would have figured out by now that relying on ChatGPT to do anything related to their jobs could be a bad idea, but here we are, yet again, with a judge rebuking a law firm for doing just that....

In with the new, but old Insider bugs remain More than a month after the Wi-Fi alliance introduced certification for Wi-Fi 7 devices, Microsoft has added support for the technology to Windows 11....

Oodles of problems with data decompression and suchlike, depending on system settings Some recent Intel microprocessors are crashing systems - and the problem appears related to the chips' firmware and clock rates settings....

Investigating LockBit's finances has blown previous estimates of the operation's wealth out of the water Authorities digging into LockBit's finances believe the group may have generated more than $1 billion in ransom fees over its four-year lifespan....

$800M expansion canceled after a mere glimpse at the power of Sora If you ask American film mogul Tyler Perry, AI isn't coming for jobs - it's already taken them. Case in point, Perry's Atlanta film studio, where the movie maker just scrapped an expansion in the works for four years after getting a glimpse of OpenAI's Sora....

The coasters are making a comeback ... but tech won't be commercially available for some time Optical discs that can store up to 200 TB of data could be possible with a new technology developed in China. If commercialized, it could revive optical media as an alternative to hard disk or tape for cost-effective long-term storage....

Space factory startup celebrates successful re-entry Almost drowned out by last night's lunar landing, Varda Space Industries celebrated the re-entry and landing of the capsule from its W-1 mission in the Utah desert....

Thieves broke into IT system using stolen login U-Haul is alerting tens of thousands of folks that miscreants used stolen credentials to break into one of its systems and access customer records that contained some personal data....

Pair had to dodge croc on trek back to civilization Two German tourists got more than they bargained for when they put their lives in the hands of Google Maps and blindly followed the service into the depths of the Australian jungle....

NCA still left enough for onlookers to wonder if there's anything more to come The grand finale of the week of LockBit leaks was slated to expose the real identity of LockBitSupp - the alias of the gang's public spokesperson - but the reveal has fallen short of expectations....

Publicity around offer breaches loan agreement, or so SEC filing alleges MariaDB has been warned by a bank lender that it may "sweep" its accounts in retaliation for the publication of a private equity bid for the troubled database company....

Lawsuit accuses contractor and co-defendants of 'pacify and delay' tactics Sergey Brin and two of his businesses - Google and Bayshore Global Management - are named in a lawsuit seeking damages over the death of a pilot who attempted to ferry one of Brin's airplanes from California to his private island in Fiji....

Windows 10 users would probably prefer longer support instead of prettier pics Windows Insiders cannot get enough of AI if Microsoft is to be believed, with the company rolling out AI-infused Photo updates for Windows 10 and 11....

Air Canada discovered the hard way that when your AI chatbot makes a commitment, your company will be on the hook for it Opinion I keep hearing about businesses that want to fire their call center employees and front-line staffers as fast as possible and replace them with AI. They're upfront about it....

What Linux distros could learn from the inventor of the hypervisor FOSDEM 2024 How hard can you cut down Linux if you know it will never run on bare metal? Further than any distro vendor we know of has tried to go....

Sometimes the best form of revenge is doing nothing - very politely On Call Taylor Swift is playing in On Call's town tonight, creating a city-wide Friday frenzy. Here at The Register we prefer to end the working week in a gentler fashion by offering a fresh installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share stories of haters who hated IT, fakers who faked technical nous, and techies who shook it off and got the job done....

Appears to be struggling to find them, even in India, as it's re-posted job ads Meta wants to build accelerators and SoCs to run in its datacenters - for jobs including machine learning - but appears to be struggling to find folks to design them....

No, this was not the cause of cellular network outages that hit the USA on Thursday NASA has warned of strong solar flares that have the potential to interrupt communications in space and down here on Earth....

Nonprofit SFLC links orders to farming protests The global government affairs team at X (nee Twitter) has suspended some accounts and posts in India after receiving executive orders to do so from the country's government, backed by threat of penalties including significant fines and imprisonment....

Goverment takes TEPCO to task for caesium absorption tower incident Japan's Economy, Trade and Industry minister has called on Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (TEPCO) to improve its management of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant after a leak was discovered earlier this month....

Material information withheld from shareholders, it's claimed Juniper Networks, currently in the process of being acquired by HPE, has been accused of violating US securities laws in a shareholder lawsuit....

A name that's commonly shouted by pirates might be a clue, me hearties! Avast has agreed to cough up $16.5 million after the FTC accused the antivirus vendor of selling customer information to third parties....

Big Tech keeps poisoning the well without facing any consequences for its folly Comment Google has suspended availability of text-to-image capabilities in its recently released Gemini multimodal foundational AI model, after it failed to accurately represent White Europeans and Americans in specific historical contexts....

IPO docs drop showing just who has a stake in the forum Reddit will provide content posted on its forums to Google, which will use it to train and update AI chatbots in a deal reportedly worth $60 million a year that could - oddly enough - deliver big bucks to OpenAI boss Sam Altman....

Food delivery giant promises to drop off $375,000, no tip DoorDash will cough up $375,000 to settle claims it trampled California's privacy laws by giving away customers' info without their consent nor giving them the opportunity to opt out....

Prescription orders hit after IT supplier Change Healthcare pulls plug on systems Updated IT provider Change Healthcare has confirmed it shut down some of its systems following a cyberattack, disrupting prescription orders and other services at pharmacies across the US....

With only enough cash on hand to keep the lights on until 2025, loss-making automaker may soon be next casualty of the EV revolution Amid continuing losses, Rivian is laying off 10 percent of its salaried employees and a limited number of hourly folks in an attempt to reduce its expenses....

New features aimed to stamp out problems of the past Law enforcement's disruption of the LockBit ransomware crew comes as the criminal group was working on bringing a brand-new variant to market, research reveals....

It slides into orbit. Now comes (another) hard part Updated Intuitive Machines has tweaked today's Moon landing time to 2230 UTC following the successful insertion of its Odysseus lander into lunar orbit....

Lower operator energy costs or sell power back to grid for $$$ Nokia is tempting mobile network operators with a tool that it thinks will help them monetize the backup battery storage at their cell base station sites....

Researcher makes case for default limits after arriving via Python library A user left with a surprise bill for thousands of dollars after running queries on Google's BigQuery data warehouse has sparked a debate about how vendors should place limits on the use of their tools....

No, this isn't a pitch for a Godzilla sequel A Japanese Yakuza leader is being charged with trafficking nuclear materials by US prosecutors....

Unfettered access to non-public info would have violated FTC order Longtime Twitter staffers saved Elon Musk from himself, according to a letter from the US Federal Trade Commission chair....

If they did it, it gives new meaning to quality family time. Meanwhile, key LockBit leaders remain at large Today's edition of the week-long LockBit leaks reveals a father-son duo was apprehended in Ukraine as part of the series of takedown-related arrests this week....

Our right to exploit workers trumps your right to probe Amazon, currently locked in a legal battle with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the mega-souk's treatment of workers, is arguing the watchdog is unconstitutional. And it's not the only corporation testing that line of reasoning....

Maker of sometimes less than accurate AI chatbot reminds everyone not to believe everything you read on the net FDC OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has driven a lot of hype around generative AI, but as he reminded attendees at Intel's Foundry Direct Connect (FDC) event Wednesday, not everything you read on the internet is true....

Most reports center on AT&T, which has admitted trouble; T-Mobile, Verizon deny issues Updated Residents of the United States woke this morning to find widespread outages in cellular service, with AT&T bearing the brunt of a seemingly nationwide issue....