The Register

ALSO: online adoption cyberstalker nabbed; Tesla trade secrets thief pleads guilty; and a critical ASUS Wi-Fi vuln In Brief A popular spam blocklist service that went offline earlier this month has advised users it is down permanently - but at least one potential candidate is stepping up to try to fill the threat intelligence void....

PLUS: Australia to age limit social media; Hong Kong's robo-dogs; India's new tech minister The space junk cleaning mission launched by Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has successfully hunted down one of its targets....

As more than 70 civil society groups sign open letter slamming 'intimidation' Meta allegedly tried to discredit university researchers in Brazil who had flagged fraudulent adverts on the social network's ad platform....

Nine out of 10 execs recommend adding Retrieval Augmented Generation to your daily regimen Hands on If you've been following enterprise adoption of AI, you've no doubt heard the term RAG" tossed around....

iBiz potentially facing hefty penalties under the Digital Markets Act The European Commission is said to be preparing to file charges against Apple alleging that its "steering" rules, imposed on third-party developers distributing software through the App Store, violate Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

Business as usual needs a real change Feature Microsoft president Brad Smith struck a conciliatory tone regarding his IT giant's repeated computer security failings during a congressional hearing on Thursday - while also claiming the Windows maker is above the rule of law, at least in China....

Because who needs disinformation research at times like these The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which for the past five years has been studying and reporting on social media disinformation, is being reimagined with new management and fewer staff following the recent departure of research director Renee DiResta....

Facebook parent calls step forward for privacy a 'step backwards' Meta has caved to European regulators, and agreed to pause its plans to train AI models on EU users' Facebook and Instagram users' posts - a move that the social media giant said will delay its plans to launch Meta AI in the economic zone....

Crook and his alleged co-conspirators said to have used Discord to coordinate The US Department of Justice has convicted a Nigerian national of participating in a business email compromise (BEC) scam worth $1.5 million....

Biz too broke, class too big to settle now; agrees to pay in limited circumstances like an IPO, liquidation Unable to afford a settlement with "virtually anyone in the United States whose face appears on the internet," data-scraping facial recognition firm Clearview AI has decided that an IOU for a chunk of the company's future value will have to do....

All businesses use FOSS now, but Big Red never been entirely comfortable with it Opinion All companies use open source now, but some, such as Oracle, have never been completely comfortable with it....

Expansive Spiral 4 program to boost capabilities with cutting-edge tech T-Mobile US was this week picked as a wireless provider by the Department of Defense to supply telecoms services and equipment for the US Navy as part of a ten-year contract worth $2.67 billion in total....

Biz keen to avoid a delisting as share price drops Virgin Galactic has confirmed a reverse stock split in an effort to stop the company from tumbling out of the New York Stock Exchange....

Browser maker decided not to follow Putin's orders. Well done Mozilla has reinstated certain add-ons for Firefox that earlier this week had been banned in Russia by the Kremlin....

Engineers coax veteran probe back to health NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action and conducting normal science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began spouting gibberish at the end of 2023....

Russia recruits local residents to support battlefield goals Infrastructure that enabled two pro-Russia Ukraine residents to break into soldiers' devices and deploy spyware has been dismantled by the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU)....

The value falls but the rocket man still gets his gas money Human ingenuity is not sufficient to construct a violin small enough to lament the fortunes of Elon Musk. The serial entrepreneur, polymath and media figure is facing the knowledge that the nominal value of his stock options from electric car company Tesla fell by $8 billion in the time it took to persuade shareholders to hand them over....

Big data + security division could be owed by the government and its people The French government has confirmed an offer of 700 million ($748 million) for key assets of ailing IT services giant Atos, following the company's acceptance of a restructuring deal earlier this week....

Who needs a real live cephalopod? The Euro 2024 international football tournament gets underway today, and we're delighted to report that AI has finally been turned into something useful in the form of a virtual pundit for sports fans....

The Register queries author Matei Zaharia on a decade of the project Interview Big data is no longer hailed as the "new oil." It has gone out of fashion, both in terms of hype and because its foundational technology - Apache Hadoop - was surpassed by cloud-based blob storage such as AWS S3. However, a sister project born in the big data era has become more influential in the modern world of LLMs and internet-scale data systems....

Downside: High chance of injury. Upside: Permanent bragging rights at performance reviews On Call The Register knows that readers often put themselves in harm's way to ensure tech keeps ticking over, which is why each Friday we salute those efforts with a fresh installment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that details true tales of tech support....

Wider release coming real soon - promise - after the Windows faithful give it a thrashing Microsoft has cancelled the wide release of Recall - the controversial tool for Copilot+ PCs that takes regular snapshots of a machine to create a record of everything users do with their machines - and will instead make it available only to Windows Insiders for the foreseeable future....

Already doxxed and ordered disconnection for half a million of its own citizens suspected of not paying their share Pakistan has outlined measures to punish tax evaders by cutting off their mobile phone....

Some would say ads for cabbage are futile - can pics from space at least make them timely? Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and marketing agency Dentsu have developed a means to use snaps captured by satellites to smooth out agricultural supply chains and enhance advertising....

'It's not our job to find the culprits - That's what we're paying you for' lawmaker scolds Brad Smith Lawmakers on Thursday grilled Microsoft president Brad Smith about the Windows giant's businesses dealing in China - and the super-corp's repeated security failings - at a time when Beijing-backed spies are accused of breaking into Microsoft-hosted email accounts of American government officials....

Can't we do this another way, like without these mini-sats costing $1B over 5 years, House reps wonder A plan by America's Space Force to harden GPS against spoofing attacks may be going nowhere: A request by the service branch for $77 million of public cash to finish the work is struggling to get approval from Congress....

Homer Simpson was ahead of his time Wells Fargo fired a bunch of employees accused of pretending to work, by using some tech to fake their keyboard typing, instead of doing their actual jobs, it emerged today....

In this slightly more private era, your data ain't as profitable as it once was Analysis Oracle Advertising is shutting down, CEO Safra Catz said during the database goliath's fiscal 2024 Q4 earnings call with Wall Street this week....

Might be more of a paper tiger given it runs at 2 GHz and has just 2 TOPS DeepComputing has announced a successor to its Roma laptop, which was the first notebook of its kind to use a RISC-V-compatible processor....

Part of Mountain View's aim for carbon-free power by 2030 Google has signed a deal with NV Energy to help power its Nevada datacenters using geothermal energy under an arrangement the megacorp claims is more progressive than existing renewable energy contracts....

Surely an everything app includes a working currency converter? A group of former Australian Twitter employees are reportedly being asked to return oversized severance checks seemingly because their ex-employer doesn't understand how to convert currency....

28-year-old accused of major ransomware attacks across Europe An alleged cog in the Conti and LockBit ransomware machines is now in handcuffs after Ukrainian police raided his home this week....

Vows to have a 'commercially relevant' system within five years Quantum startup Diraq is to produce sample devices at GlobalFoundries fabs, making it another developer following Intel down the route of using standard CMOS production techniques to build toward full-scale quantum systems....

Trade body bemoans move as 'notably unfair' but no countermeasures yet China has issued a withering response to the EU's decision to raise tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, describing the move as "notably unfair."...

Chocolate Factory accused of misleading Chrome browser users Privacy campaigner noyb has filed a GDPR complaint regarding Google's Privacy Sandbox, alleging that turning on a "Privacy Feature" in the Chrome browser resulted in unwanted tracking by the US megacorp....

Bill proposes appointment of chief AI officers, privacy safeguards, and lots of testing Two US senators have introduced a bipartisan bill that defines guardrails for the acquisition and implementation of AI across the federal government....

Simulation stimulates social media panic NASA provided an inadvertent insight into its training techniques when it accidentally broadcast audio that sounded like an emergency on the International Space Station....

With a strong lead going into general election, opposition claims it will 'supercharge' tech sector The UK's opposition Labour Party - which boasts a sizable poll lead heading into July's general election - has promised to ease planning restrictions holding back investment in datacenters....

Confidential patient information found by member of the public A data protection gaffe affecting the UK's NHS is being pinned on a medical student who placed too much trust in their bin bags....

And it's subsuming another bit of Linux by replacing sudo The latest version of the systemd init system is out, with the openly confrontational tag line: "Available soon in your nearest distro, now with 42 percent less Unix philosophy."...

Raymond Chen talks teapots, and a fully engaged marketing team Archaeologic Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared the origin story behind the Windows 3D Pipes screensaver....

A legacy of scientific discovery, inspiration and engagement Obit Edward C Stone, the project scientist for NASA's Voyager mission from 1972 to 2022, has died....

Group will also look into protecting subsea communications infrastructure More than three years after the pandemic crippled semiconductor supply chains, it seems G7 nations are getting ready to do something to prevent future disruptions....

The plan is a slow build - not a breakout into enterprise tech Taiwan's ASUS is best known for its laptops and Wi-Fi kit, but it's quietly building an enterprise tech and cloud business - and slowly introducing it to the world after big successes at home....

DMA-like law passes in pursuit of a more innovative and open smartphone market Japan's parliament has passed a law that will require Apple and Google to allow access to third-party app stores and payment providers on devices running their mobile operating systems....

Costs cut deeply, with more to come, and forward bookings surge VMware's quarterly revenue appears to have fallen by $600 million during its first full quarter of ownership by Broadcom, which revealed strong growth in forward bookings and huge cost cuts at the virtualization giant....

Sapeon and Rebellions think they can do better together Two South Korean members of the AI Platform Alliance - a group that advocates an open alternative to Nvidia - have proposed a merger to accelerate their work and achieve greater scale, and perhaps give local chipmaker SK hynix a way into the market for AI silicon....

Who tracks the trackers? Life360, purveyor of "Tile" Bluetooth tracking devices and developer of associated apps, has revealed it is dealing with a "criminal extortion attempt" after unknown miscreants contacted it with an allegation they had customer data in their possession....

Parts of the 'droid tech stack are replacing laptop OS plumbing Google's ChromeOS team has begun borrowing from Android's tech stack to innovate faster, to reduce the burden of maintaining multiple operating systems, and to enhance device interoperability in the face of vendor kernel variability, the company says....

NHTSA already probing robo-car biz over crashes with 'clearly visible objects' Waymo is updating its self-driving cars' software after another accident in Phoenix, Arizona, that the driverless taxi biz is blaming on faulty maps and code....