The Register

Spending returns to pandemic levels as tech deals make up bulk of framework agreements UK public expenditure on management consultancies has returned to COVID-era levels, despite repeated plans by the previous government to reduce dependency on external expertise....

Cupertino quits screwing around with defaults - for those in the EU Analysis Apple has agreed to change the way it implements web browser choice screens and browser capabilities to comply with Europe's monopoly-busting Digital Markets Act....

Algorithm just a fancy way to collude using private info, prosecutors say The Justice Department and the Attorneys General of eight states in the US on Friday filed a civil antitrust complaint against real estate service firm RealPage for providing landlords with software that maximizes rent at the expense of renters....

For 100 concurrent users, the card delivered 12.88 tokens per second-just slightly faster than average human reading speed If you want to scale a large language model (LLM) to a few thousand users, you might think a beefy enterprise GPU is a hard requirement. However, at least according to Backprop, all you actually need is a four-year-old graphics card....

Because everyone has a box of mystery computer bits they simply can't part with Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took a trip down memory lane this week by building a functioning PDP-11 minicomputer from parts found in a tub of hardware....

A glimpse into the rapidly advancing world of Chinese open source After a couple of years in development, Linux Deepin 23 arrives, with some new shiny that throws shade on the leading Western desktop distros....

Decision time arrives for NASA bigwigs A big weekend lies ahead for Boeing's CST-100 Starliner as NASA prepares to make a call on whether the crew will be returning in the spacecraft, as originally planned, or as part of the Crew-9 mission in 2025....

Rap sheet spells out major no-nos after disgruntled staff blow whistle The US is suing one of its leading research universities over a litany of alleged failures to meet cybersecurity standards set by the Department of Defense (DoD) for contract awardees....

Orgs are accessing restricted tech, raising concerns about more potential loopholes More claims are emerging that developers in China are using US-based cloud services to bypass measures intended to block its access to advanced chips and other technologies for accelerating AI development....

As VC-owned fauxpen source biz yells 'show me the money,' more may follow to the peril of the community Opinion Repeat after me: Open source is not a business model. It is a programming model. Still businesses keep trying to make it one, and far more often than not, they fail....

Over 20 years into a 2-year mission, but all good things come to an end The first of the European Space Agency's Cluster satellites is set to return to Earth next month after an extraordinarily long mission. The spacecraft is destined to burn up over the South Pacific....

Mature, stable - and can rescue corrupt files The second LibreOffice release of 2024 is here, with additional spreadsheet functions, improved presentation layouts, better searching, and more....

A tale of retro tech - have you heard of Trivector computers? - and a very troubled tech support journey On Call Every IT pro has a story filed away about the time they were asked to provide tech support under odd circumstances, which is why each Friday The Register brings you one such story in a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that celebrates odd circumstances....

As results from 2023's Chandrayaan-3 mission suggest south pole Moon magma India's Department of Space has outlined plans to send its first astronaut to space next year, establish a space station by 2035, and land an Indian on the Moon by 2045....

There's a lot of CO in datacenters, and Big Tech has promised to get to net zero The Open Compute Project, the org best known for offering designs for hyperscale hardware, has rounded up AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft to help it test concrete....

LY Corp's QA team struggled to manage projects while wading through prolix posts LY Corp, a joint venture between Japan's SoftBank Group and South Korea's Naver Corporation known for its flagship messaging app LINE, has detailed how it uses an in-house ChatGPT implementation to keep its quality assurance (QA) tasks on track....

Also testing allowing women to chose female drivers Chinese ride-share provider DiDi Chuxing announced on Thursday that it has started testing a feature that would allow riders to name and shame operators of smelly cars - and even take them off the road....

Those using Windows 11, version 24H2, should see better speed AMD has responded to community concerns about underwhelming gaming performance of its Ryzen 9000 Series desktop processors by attributing disappointing results recorded by independent testers to the vagaries of their system and software setups....

The data analytics vendor's CEO says rival's over $1 billion Tabular acquisition is the 'vindication' Databricks' $1 billion plus purchase of Tabular demonstrates Iceberg has won the data table format wars, according to rival data analytics and ML vendor Snowflake....

Why go to the effort of backdooring code when devs will basically do it for you accidentally anyway SolarWinds left hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product that can be used by remote, unauthenticated attackers to log into vulnerable instances, access internal functionality, and modify sensitive data...

Complaints about lack of notice plus an inquiry from El Reg prompt U-turn by web giant Google Chrome 128, released on Wednesday, does not function without intervention on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver," and Google initially had no plans to fix it....

Big Blue says companies are so obsessed, basic services are going to pot Is chasing the promise of generative AI causing companies to neglect other IT services? IBM seems to think so....

So what's that good for? Like eight of Nvidia's NVL-72s? As GPUs and AI accelerators push beyond one kilowatt of power consumption, many systems builders are turning to liquid cooling to manage the heat. However, these systems still rely on complex networks of plumbing, manifolds, and coolant distribution units (CDUs) to make it all work....

DC appeals court reverses dismissal, finding enough evidence of anticompetitive behavior to proceed The District of Columbia Court of Appeals on Thursday found there was sufficient evidence of anticompetitive behavior by Amazon to allow Washington DC's antitrust case against the e-commerce giant to move forward....

And CFO is off, maybe to find a role where she doesn't have to come into the office Zoom continues to turn a profit from providing remote collaboration tools, despite mandating that its own staff must work in the office at least twice a week....

Not related to the massive outage in July, security biz spokesperson told us Some IT administrators suffered a moment of deja vu on Thursday morning as CrowdStrike blamed a cloud service issue for performance problems and lagging boot times affecting some of European customers....

A Paint-like rescue unlikely for old configuration warhorse Microsoft has confirmed that the venerable Windows Control panel will finally be put out to pasture in favor of a shiny new Settings app....

What could the problem be? Reportedly, a cyberattack American oil giant Halliburton is investigating an "issue," reportedly a cyberattack, that has disrupted some business operations and global networks....

More of an Easter egg than a vuln, but a fun one to mess around with Typing a special four-character string will crash your iPhone thanks to a newly discovered, albeit benign, bug in iOS and iPadOS....

Can't even get good signal in my garden Nokia is to equip Axiom Space spacesuits for the Artemis III lunar mission with 4G connectivity....

Controversial concept may not even be a useful goal in computing Gartner is warning that any prospect of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is at least 10 years away and perhaps not certain to ever arrive. It might not even be a worthwhile pursuit, the analyst says....

Whether attack slowdown continues downward trend is the million dollar question that security researchers can't answer Critical industrial organizations continued to be hammered by ransomware skids in July, while experts suggest the perps are growing in confidence that law enforcement won't intervene....

Insiders get ready for Redmond's second run at AI snoopware Microsoft is testing its controversial Windows Recall technology again with a cautious release to Windows Insiders in the hope of nipping another security and privacy outcry in the bud....

Needless to say, it backfired in a big way University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) students may be relieved to hear that an emailed warning about a staff member infected with the Ebola virus was just a phishing exercise....

You awake to find yourself in a dark room... with an empty wallet Did you have a collection of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books? Microsoft offers something similar in the form of its subscription plan advisor, though it's tricky to avoid one particular priced outcome....

Nokia custodian makes efforts to help you fight fondleslab fixation HMD is the company that made the post-Microsoft Nokia Android devices. Now it's going by its own name - and offering greater repairability....

Shuffles financial metrics so Copilot Pro revenue ends up in a happier place Microsoft has changed the way it reports its financial results....

Echoes human rights groups' concerns that it could suppress free speech and more Networking giant Cisco has suggested the United Nations' first-ever convention against cyber crime is dangerously flawed and should be revised before being put to a formal vote....

That's one way to mark the end of an eight-year partnership Walmart has divested around $3.6 billion of stock in Chinese e-retailer JD.com, concluding eight years of partnership....

WPS Office took a long lunch on Wednesday, the day after its developer posted big profits China's top personal productivity suite, WPS Office, experienced a lengthy outage yesterday - during working hours....

2030 vision also calls for its appliances and televisions to turn you into a subscription cash cow LG Electronics plans to expand its datacenter cooling business, to cash in on demand for AI....

Unless you're cool with an unauthorized criminal enjoying admin privileges to comb through your code A critical bug in GitHub Enterprise Server could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a user account with administrator privileges and then wreak havoc on an organization's code repositories....

Plus: Three-year-old ProxyLogon flaw added to CISA's exploited bugs list Microsoft says it's investigating issues with a patch intended to plug a two-year-old flaw in the GRUB open source boot loader that is crashing some dual-boot computers running both Windows and Linux. In that crash users are aptly told: "Something went seriously wrong."...

Tycoon's demise follows US acquittal after years of legal battles with HP Obit UK software tycoon Mike Lynch has been found dead two days after he went missing in a sailing tragedy off the coast of Sicily....

Italian divers reportedly recovered their bodies as search for missing continues The bodies of former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter Hannah have reportedly been recovered from the wreck of the yacht Bayesian....

If you needed yet another reminder of what happens when security basics go awry Updated It's a good news day for organizations that don't leave their AWS environment files publicly exposed because infosec experts say those that do may be caught up in an extensive and sophisticated extortion campaign....

That annoying requirement to switch between home and work accounts has finally gone Microsoft has released a unified Teams app, doing away with the requirement to have one app for work or education and another for personal use....

Forget about your love life too, no dating apps until the war is over Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs is warning residents of under-siege regions to switch off home surveillance systems and dating apps to stop Ukraine from using them for intel-gathering purposes....

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google dominate the west, but the Middle Kingdom plays by its own rules The global cloud ecosystem shows a clear split, with China dominated by an almost completely different set of companies compared to the rest of the world - a divide as much due to political reasons as economic factors....

Securiti's Jack Berkowitz polled 20-plus CDOs, and half have hit pause Security and corporate governance concerns are weighing heavily on large enterprises as they try to work Microsoft Copilots into their organizations amid a complex web of existing tech products and access rights....