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Onward to Venus! ESA's Juice spacecraft has had close-ups with the Moon and Earth and is on its way to Venus, having snapped images with its monitoring cameras and collected scientific data as it passed....

Construction surged 70% ... with 80% already snapped up The number of bit barns currently under construction has exploded in the wake of the AI boom, surging nearly 70 percent in North America's top markets over the past year to a record high of 3.87 gigawatts, according to a newly published CBRE report....

Documents from NHS England meeting reveal scope of politicos spending intent Exclusive The total planned budget for the English health service's controversial Palantir-based analytics system was set to reach 485 million over four years, according to figures seen by The Register....

Whack yakety-yak app chaps rapped for security crack Slack AI, an add-on assistive service available to users of Salesforce's team messaging service, is vulnerable to prompt injection, according to security firm PromptArmor....

Egress fees? Ticked. Spend discounts? Not yet. Software licensing? Might need to shape up, Microsoft Britain's competition watchdog is scheduled to announce a provisional decision in the coming weeks on its examination into whether the major cloud players engage in practices that may limit customer choice. Its ruling could have far-reaching implications for the cloud sector....

Hoped to dodge child support payments, now faces 81 months inside - and a bigger bill than ever A US man has been sentenced to 81 months in jail for faking his own death by hacking government systems and officially marking himself as deceased....

Chinese fast fashion slingers get their Spider-Man meme moment Shein, a well-known purveyor of desperately cheap goods, has raised lurid claims against its rival Temu in a lawsuit....

Giant solar farm in Australia will make 'leccy that flows under the ocean to Singapore Atlassian CEO Mike Atlassian Cannon-Brookes's plan to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore has been approved by the land down under's government....

Think tank warns US and friends they can't assume Beijing won't catch up China's chip design and fabrication capabilities lag significantly behind the US and its allies, according to a report from US think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF)....

Defense contractor gets hacked - what's the worst that could happen US semiconductor manufacturing firm Microchip Technology has revealed an "unauthorized party disrupted the Company's use of certain servers and some business operation."...

Still no love for 1000- or 2000-series In an apparent reversal, AMD has decided that its Ryzen 3000-series processors released in 2019 are actually worth patching against the recently disclosed SinkClose vulnerability....

Another day, another lawsuit over how AI lands training sets Anthropic was sued on Monday by three authors who claim the machine-learning lab unlawfully used their copyrighted work to train its Claude AI model....

AWS first, others to follow VictoriaMetrics has become the latest open source company to offer a hosted product, claiming around five times the savings for customers....

Let's hope the spacesuits hold up for extravehicular activity The Polaris Dawn mission to send humans to a 1,400 km orbit - higher than 1966's Gemini 11 - is set for launch in less than a week....

Microsoft-backed extension aims to address open source database's perceived weaknesses A Microsoft-backed open source project aims to help address PostgreSQL's weaknesses as an analytics database....

Notification omits a number of key details Popular flight-tracking app FlightAware has admitted that it was exposing a bunch of users' data for more than three years....

Taiwanese IT infrastructure provider claims platform ghosted it X is facing yet another legal case in the shape of a breach of contract claim from IT infrastructure provider Wiwynn over non-payment for $120 million in components it procured for the Elon Musk-owned biz....

Digital athletes enjoy positive effects in Japan study, but too much screentime sees diminishing returns A study of nearly 100,000 people in Japan has found that gaming may be good for the player's mental health, contrary to the prevailing narrative around the popular pastime....

Enterprise-level long-term stability, but a little friendlier Oreon Lime R2 blends AlmaLinux with a bunch of extra tools and repositories, plus some helpful tweaks for the GNOME desktop. It's sort of akin to an LTS version of Fedora 34....

First stage destroyed during hot fire in Scotland A hot-fire test of Rocket Factory Augsburg's RFA One ended in explosion at Scotland's SaxaVord spaceport....

Your country needs you... to quit it with all those sick days UK government believes its proposed "right to switch off" will bring crucial economic and productivity benefits to the country, while also improving the well-being of workers....

Removing security services not always the best way to tackle problematic content Interview Cloudflare wants harmonization of all the regulation and compliance frameworks springing up around the world, according to the networking service provider's deputy chief legal officer and global head of public policy, Alissa Starzak....

Europe's largest local authority canceled expected savings baked into financial plans The total cost of Birmingham City Council's Oracle implementation disaster is set to reach 216.5 million ($280.4 million) by April 2026, according to a new audit report....

Her legacy hinges on her successor - will they double down? Europe's top competition cop, Margrethe Vestager, will reportedly be stepping down later this year, a development certain to please the US tech firms she called to the carpet....

Political stirrer Roger Stone may have been a weak link after personal emails cracked US authorities have named Iran as the likely source of a recent attack on the campaign of the US Republican Party's presidential nominee, Donald Trump....

Minister issues denial - it's just an upgrade to the 'web-management system' Industry group Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT (P@SHA) last week accused the Pakistan government late last week of implementing a China-style internet firewall - a claim the nation's IT minister denied over the weekend....

Lenovo also cashes in on AI demand, without being able to turn it into profit Demand for cloudy CPUs has levelled out at top Chinese clouds Alibaba and Tencent, whose customers increasingly want GPUs instead....

Plus a further 200 delays, rockstars knocked off stage ... all on a holiday weekend Thirty-six flights were cancelled at Japan's New Chitose airport on Saturday after a pair of scissors went missing....

Researchers find it's possible to downgrade authentication checks, and shabby token refresh policies Digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal can be used to conduct transactions using stolen and cancelled payment cards, according to academic security researchers....

That tornado warning couldn't possibly be a hallucination... could it? While enterprises struggle to quantify the return on investment of AI, the technology continues to show promise in bolstering weather forecasting and climate models....

12 on X and one on Instagram caught in the crackdown OpenAI has banned ChatGPT accounts linked to an Iranian crew suspected of spreading fake news on social media sites about the upcoming US presidential campaign....

Windows giant tells Cisco Talos it isn't fixing them Cisco Talos says eight vulnerabilities in Microsoft's macOS apps could be abused by nefarious types to record video and sound from a user's device, access sensitive data, log user input, and escalate privileges....

Automaker claims it has to make bold choices' General Motors (GM) is cutting more than 1,000 salaried positions worldwide in its software and services division, with the majority based in the US....

Pretending you're a server won't stop the hardware police Microsoft has finally patched a workaround exploited by users seeking an upgrade path for Windows 11 that dodged the company's hardware requirements....

Founder's side-project is letting in water News is bubbling up both from the Gentoo project and its successor, the tellingly named "Funtoo" - what Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins did next....

Bad news for impatient LTS users, balanced out by tweaked policy The launch date for the next Ubuntu point release is being pushed back, but there's a silver lining: Canonical is promising fresher kernels in future builds....

Autonomy founder's wife rescued, daughter and others unaccounted for Updated Mike Lynch, often dubbed the UK's answer to Bill Gates, is missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily this morning....

Investigators previously said the number was much, much higher The data broker at the center of what may become one of the more significant breaches of the year is telling officials that just 1.3 million people were affected....

AI's thirst for power is only making things worse Concerns over the environmental impact of datacenters in the US state of Virginia are being raised again amid claims their water consumption has stepped up by almost two-thirds since 2019, and AI could make it worse....

Gravity assist flybys planned for tonight and tomorrow The European Space Agency's Juice probe is to thread the needle this week with a first for a space mission - swings around the Moon and Earth that will result in the spacecraft coming approximately 700 km from the lunar surface....

Distributed database biz doesn't like bigger customers using the free version of its software CockroachDB, the distributed transactional system with a mostly PostgreSQL compatible front end, plans to retire its free open source "Core" product in favor of a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users....

Company continues to investigate root cause Brighton-based ISP and hosting provider Fastnet has emerged from a trying week which involved battling VMware/Broadcom tech issues that have downed a number of its customers' websites....

Innovation dead for twenty years? Tell that to 2004 Opinion Want a good time on stage, but you're not a performance artist? Surprisingly easy. Fill a hall with an audience of your peers, tell them the world's gone to hell in a handcart, then that they're the only ones who can fix it. You'll feel the love. Guaranteed....

Nobody really needs more than that, right? Almost a year after Raspberry Pi 5 debuted, a cheaper 2 GB version has appeared for users that want to save a little cash or for whom 4 or 8 GB was just slightly excessive....

Debugging software on the waterfront is a strangely dangerous task Who, Me? Welcome once more, dear reader, to Who, Me? in which Reg readers like your good self attempt to soften the blow of the working week with tales of techie misadventure....

The plan is to do away with an H-IIA rocket upper stage - and prove it's possible Japanese space debris cleaning outfit Astroscale revealed on Monday that it will enter a 12,000 million ($81.4 million) five-year contract with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to remove the upper stage of the space org's H-IIA rocket from orbit using a newly developed satellite....

Plus: China's richest man used to work for Google; Singtel profit jumps; most APAC governments don't have AI governance policies, and more ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese semiconductor equipment manufacturer Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMMEC) is challenging its inclusion on a US blacklist for alleged ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), according to numerous reports....

Also: Your external-facing NetSuite sites need a review; five popular malware varieties for Q2, and more in brief Malware that kills endpoint detection and response (EDR) software has been spotted on the scene and, given it's deploying RansomHub, it could soon be prolific....

Here's how to get started with the open source tool Continue Hands-on Code assistants have gained considerable attention as an early use case for generative AI - especially following the launch of Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. But, if you don't relish the idea of letting Microsoft loose on your code or paying $10/month for the privilege, you can always build your own....

Good for beginners, but a few missing features will annoy Hands On Purveyor of optics Beaverlab has unveiled its an inexpensive telescope for wannabe star-gazers: the Finder TW2....