The Register

Shipments alleged to have gone to a sanctioned company A businessman has been arrested in the US and charged with unlawfully exporting sensitive technology including semiconductors to a sanctioned business with ties to Russia's military and intelligence agencies....

But what kind of info was actually compromised? None of your business VF Corporation, parent company of clothes and footwear brands including Vans and North Face, says 35.5 million customers were impacted in some way when criminals broke into their systems in December....

Sacrificing its academic backups for the sake of the environment Microsoft's decision to cut the storage in its Microsoft 365 Education line is having some real-world consequences, with a Canadian university imposing draconian measures partly in response to the restrictions....

El Reg talks to the project's founder Interview The last units of the second batch of the ZX Spectrum Next are heading off to their owners. If you missed out, we have good news....

A peek back at the wobbly Windows of yesteryear Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has taken us back to the era of 16-bit Windows and the definition of a "hard error" compared to something a bit softer and easier....

Pause comes after controversial supplier wins another 9-figure deal paid for by taxpayers Fujitsu has written to UK Government to confirm it will no longer tender for business in the public sector amid the ongoing inquiry into the Post Office scandal - weeks after winning a 485 million ($614 million) contract....

Disrespect for physics saw the datacenter, and a career, come tumbling down On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly column that tries to balance your diet of industry news with your peers' experiences of the messes they confront at the coalface of IT....

Advocate general kicks holes in some of the European Commission's arguments about ancient rebate program An advisor to Europe's General Court has torn into the legal logic behind the EU's 1.06 billion ($1.2 billion) antitrust fine levelled against chip giant Intel....

Spotting a plaintext password and using it in research without authorization deemed a crime A security researcher in Germany has been fined 3,000 ($3,300, 2,600) for finding and reporting an e-commerce database vulnerability that was exposing almost 700,000 customer records....

Fending off ransomware at home in Taiwan as it continues diversification into semiconductors Updated Taiwan's contract manufacturer to the stars, Foxconn aka Hon Hai Technology Group , has teamed with India's HCL Group to create a semiconductor assembly and testing facility in India....

Including for cross-border remittances, which could shake things up nicely Google has decided to bring India's Unified Payments Interface to the world....

VMs are slow. And who can arrange remote hands wherever your traffic needs to flow? Equinix has unveiled a cloudy router it hopes will displace competitors in large, multi-cloud networks....

It's a bird, it's a plane... it's a flying menace out to endanger national security Two US government agencies, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), warned on Wednesday that drones made in China could be used to gather information on critical infrastructure....

Testing for this can can involve taking a chunk out of your flesh, making this a case of AI tech being kinder to humans The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a handheld AI-powered medical device that helps doctors diagnose skin cancer....

'Fairly Trained', founded by a former AI exec who quit over the issue, hopes consumer activism spurs adoption A former VP of audio at Stability AI who quit the biz over content scraping has launched a non-profit organization named Fairly Trained" that certifies generative AI models whose developers obtained consent to train their models on copyrighted data....

Everybody loves Google still, judging by these numbers Microsoft's share of the global web search market has hardly changed since the arrival of Bing AI, aka Bing Chat aka Copilot, according to industry figures. We're told Bing's share has increased just 0.56 percentage points since it plugged OpenAI's GPT-4 into its web search nearly a year ago....

Executives told comply or say goodbye IBM Consulting this week told its US-based executives and people managers that, effective immediately, they must work from a corporate office at least three days per week, or face the consequences....

Just as Secretary of State's 737 goes on the Blink(en) at Davos Boeing could use any win it can get lately, and it's found an admittedly small one in a $102.7 million deal to modernize some of the US Navy's submarine-hunting P-8A Poseidon aircraft....

A lot of IT depts can't wait to get past their ESX addiction As the fallout from Broadcom's takeover of VMware continues to rain down on the industry, rivals of the one-time virtualization giant have the opportunity to swoop on customers thanks to the massive changes happening to its channel....

Assets boss also reckons she has more engineers than Amazon The largest bank in the United States repels 45 billion - yes, with a B - cyberattack attempts per day, one of its leaders claimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos....

Politics-busting, uber-transparent incident reviews require independence, less internal conflict As the US mulls legislation that would see the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) become a permanent fixture in the government's cyber defense armory, experts are calling for substantial changes in the way it's organized....

Japanese lunar lander to attempt a soft touchdown As the Astrobotic Peregrine spacecraft prepares for its final descent into the Earth's atmosphere, another lunar mission, the Japanese Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), is gearing up for a soft landing on the Moon's surface....

They paved paradise, put up grocery stores, bars, restaurants, hotels, hospitals ... Californians wondering why a shady shell company spent time buying up vast acreages of scrubland in Solano County can wonder no more - because a gaggle of tech billionaires are going on a charm offensive to get a city built from scratch....

Untold harms of holding the corporate perimeter revealed in extensive series of interviews Ransomware attacks are being linked to a litany of psychological and physical illnesses reported by infosec professionals, and in some cases blamed for hospitalizations....

SF employees set sail on exclusive six-seater sea shuttle - the rest will have to stick to roads San Francisco-based employees of financial services firm Stripe will soon have an alternative to their automotive commute thanks to Navier, a startup building electric hydrofoil boats....

Like buying a car where the seats are an optional extra Microsoft's demands for extra cash from customers wishing to use Copilot for Microsoft 365 has highlighted a growing problem - the number of paid add-ons....

Just when you thought you had recovered from Bleed Two vulnerabilities in NetScaler's ADC and Gateway products have been fixed - but not before criminals found and exploited them, according to the vendor....

Plus fresh release brings native Wayland support on Linux WINE 9.0 brings the benefits of better WoW64 support to 64-bit x86 - and Arm - kit, plus native Wayland support on Linux....

It won't be anywhere near the 12,000 heads that rolled last year, though, says Pichai Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai is warning Googlers to brace themselves for more jobs cuts in 2024 though they won't be as deep as last year....

The threat hunters believe COLDRIVER has used SPICA since at least November 2022 Russian cyberspies linked to the Kremlin's Federal Security Service (FSB) are moving beyond their usual credential phishing antics and have developed a custom backdoor that they started delivering via email as far back as November 2022, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group....

Chipmaker reports flat Q4 but expects to be on the up in 2024 Chipmaker TSMC had a mixed final calendar quarter of 2023, with profit falling less than expected and revenue growth essentially flat," in another sign that the global semiconductor downturn is over....

UK political and media storm following dramatization of Post Office Horizon scandal Fujitsu has seen $1 billion wiped off its market value after a week in the political and media spotlight for its role in the UK's Post Office Horizon scandal, which prompted the European chief exec to say the company was morally responsible for providing compensation....

Ad slinger bends to the demands of the DMA Updated Google is making some changes to how its products, including search, will work in Europe....

10 PRINT "Retro Awesome":20 GOTO 10 Retro Tech Week If one of the tenets of retro computing is doing awesome things with not a lot of resources, then there are few better examples of the breed than the BBC Micro Bot - a Mastodon account that recently posted an image that looked for all the world like a raytraced scene....

8-year-old op responsible for DDoS attacks and commandeering broadcasts to push war material Security researchers have pinned a DDoS botnet that's infected potentially millions of smart TVs and set-top boxes to an eight-year-old cybercrime syndicate called Bigpanzi....

The Reg talks to co-creator Ian Bell and coder Mark Moxon about what's under the cobra's hood Retro Tech Week In 1984 the launch of a computer game was reported on British national news. The purported reason? The news editor apparently walked in after lunch and found all the staff were playing it....

Gelsinger reckons pandemic-era supply chain snarls helped demonstrate the sector's importance The COVID-19 pandemic was a decisive factor in Intel's decision to re-emphasize its own manufacturing prowess, after decades in which US and European nations failed to recognize the importance of the semiconductor industry and allowed Taiwan and Korea to become global leaders, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab in Davos on Wednesday....

CEOs believe generative AI will make their companies more efficient, but more energy is needed to power the tech The one question on leaders' minds as they debate the future of generative AI at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos is how the tech might change the future of employment....

Pen-equipped Ultra is this year's hero, helped by Circle to Search' that lets you Google without exiting apps Samsung has made AI the centerpiece of its annual premium handset launch and featured its Galaxy Ultra, the heir to the Galaxy Note, as the hero of the day....

Pipelines are full, but hiring has slowed Indian IT service outfit HCL's share price hit a record high this week, and scrip for its peers Infosys, TCS and Wipro also spiked, after the four announced quarterly results that revealed strong deal pipeline fueled by demand for AI, along with very slow headcount growth...

Nvidia raked in the boatloads of cash, but the rest of the industry is still hurting 2023's copious chatter about generative AI has not translated into surging semiconductor revenues across the industry, according to analyst firm Gartner....

Series 9 and Ultra 2 models cannot be imported to the US starting from 18 January Apple will not be allowed to sell its latest watches containing blood oxygen sensors starting from Thursday, judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ordered....

Aerial delivery kit doubles payloads Alphabet's drone delivery biz, Wing, has unveiled a drone capable of carrying up to five pounds (2.26 kg) of payload, almost doubling the capacity of its existing fleet....

Mmm, Zuck up that data The startlingly extent to which websites and brokers hand over details of people's habits to Facebook was revealed Wednesday....

Pen-tester accessed more than 650,000 sensitive messages, and still can, at Indian outfit using Toyota SaaS Toyota Tsusho Insurance Broker India (TTIBI), an Indo-Japanese joint insurance venture, operated a misconfigured server that exposed more than 650,000 Microsoft-hosted email messages to customers, a security researcher has found....

So much for isolation A design flaw in GPU drivers made by Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, and likely Imagination can be exploited by miscreants on a shared system to snoop on fellow users....

Let's be realistic: If the EU can't regulate it well, America definitely won't Comment If anything could compel the US government to regulate facial-recognition technology, a report sponsored by federal law enforcement urging just that may do the trick....

Big Blue staffers aren't pleased to lose out on potential bonuses Exclusive IBM has canceled a program that rewarded inventors at Big Blue for patents or publications, leaving some angry that they are missing out on potential bonuses....

'Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam,' says study Updated No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded....

Middle Kingdom can make market moves too... as potential global price battles loom China's chip manufacturing capacity is expected to more than double within the next 5 to 7 years, according to TrendForce, and this could lead to a market oversupply that would spell trouble for semiconductor companies elsewhere....