The Register

Maybe check the label before you next sip a Kirin alcopop? With less than two weeks remaining in 2023, The Register thinks we've almost reached the point at which we can prove Nothing Is Safe From AI - thanks to an announcement that Japan's Kirin Holdings, purveyor of many fine beers, has enlisted a binary brainbox to brew ideas for new products....

Would you rather a cloud that not-so-gently migrates you, or a retirement home like HCL? Broadcom recently revaled it intends to divest VMware's end-user compute products, which span virtual desktops, app publishing, and device management. Let's ponder where they might land....

Grammar might be off, but use case remains groundbreaking While pundits fear a future where elections are clouded by AI-created videos of faked politicans spreading misinformation, a Pakistani politician has deliberately delivered a deepfake of a speech while isolated from media behind bars....

OTT apps in the clear. Indian citizens, not so much - law proposes registration, surveillance, and shutdown powers India's government has introduced its Telecommunications Bill - heavily anticipated legislation that will replace laws that were passed before the internet existed and prior to India turning on over a billion mobile phone subscriptions....

Its hard to disagree with a mandate to make government digital services fit for people, not box-tickers Beijing's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has decided government digital services and apps need to become less bureaucratic and formal....

Someone needs to think of the children ... and the consequences of breaking encryption and trashing privacy The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has warned that policy proposals requiring or enabling the automated scouring of people's devices for illegal material - as floated by the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States - threaten the open internet....

Predatory Sparrow previously knocked out railways and a steel plant Hacktivists reportedly disrupted services at about 70 percent of Iran's gas stations in a politically motivated cyberattack....

Anticompetitive ... or simply keeping iDevice users nice and safe? Apple's game of Whac-A-Mole with messaging platform Beeper continues unabated, with the service reporting today that most users can again no longer send or receive iMessages....

Mortgage lender says no evidence of identity theft (yet) after SSNs, DoBs, addresses, more swiped Mortgage lender Mr Cooper has now admitted almost 14.7 million people's private information, including addresses and bank account numbers, were stolen in an earlier IT security breach, which is expected to cost the business at least $25 million to clean up....

Wrist, meet slap: Only a quarter will be paid to Treasury, the rest is vouchers and credits The US Department of Transportation has, on paper at least, fined Southwest Airlines $140 million in addition to refunds the government strong-armed the biz to pay out, as a result of the budget airline's massive Christmas outage last year....

IT systems encrypted, personal data pilfered from North Face parent, we're told A digital break-in has disrupted VF Corp's operations and its ability to fulfill orders, according to the apparel and footwear giant....

Now Photoshop giant needs to cough up that $1B break-up fee Adobe has decided to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of Figma in a concession to regulatory pressure in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States....

$270M secret building project includes 5,000 sq ft bunker On a remote part of Kauai, the fourth largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, someone with a lot of money is bankrolling an extensive construction project....

Get those holiday orders wrapped up now, because the bell tolls for iStrap If you're planning to give someone an Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 for the holidays you'd better act fast: Apple plans to pull both models from shelves in the United States in mere days after losing a patent fight earlier this year....

With Emerald Rapids, Chipzilla's Xeon roadmap is back on track - now it just needs to stay there Interview Intel's 5th-gen Xeon server processors have launched into the most competitive CPU market in years....

Musk-owned platform first to face freshly minted rules Elon Musk's X has earned the dubious honor of being the first online platform to have formal Digital Services Act (DSA) proceedings launched against it, with the European Commission accusing it of disseminating illegal content among other violations of the recently enacted rule....

iFixit tears down the M3 workstation The iFixit gang has rounded out their year by tearing into 2023's M3 iMac, where they found Apple's most replaceable battery yet....

Redmond stuffs IT admin Christmas stockings with network issues Microsoft has broken Wi-Fi connectivity for some users with a recent Windows update....

Big Blue shall not iPaaS up on app integration, APIs and data management to help with AI push IBM will buy two of European software industry veteran Software AG's tech platforms for 2.13 billion in cash....

Move reportedly made after consulting with National Cyber Security Centre The National Grid is reportedly the latest organization in the UK to begin pulling China-manufactured equipment from its network over cybersecurity fears....

Peter Smails talks community, licensing, and AI pragmatism Interview Open source companies do not run on goodwill alone, and industry veteran SUSE is walking the tighrope between pleasing the community and charging cold hard cash for some of its wares....

Global Combat Air Program aims to replace Eurofighter Typhoon and Mitsubishi F-2 Britain will be acting as headquarters for a not-so-secret next-generation fighter aircraft program the UK has linked up with Japan and Italy to build, the MoD revealed late last week....

The magic that defied the iron will of Steve Jobs has a lot more to offer Opinion The passage of time can harsh one's mellow in bittersweet ways. Tech anniversaries, while they do make you feel "That can't be true, it was just the other year," also offer the chance of a bit of fun in the form of emulated nostalgia....

Some jokes don't deserve an audience Who, Me? As the year rolls down to its inevitable conclusion, we're running out of Mondays. But have no fear, gentle reader - future Mondays will bring you further installments of Who, Me? in which Register readers share their tales of tech support gone wrong....

Mark your diary for 2061 - if you're over the disappointment of 1986's fuzzy blob Halley's Comet, officially 1P/Halley, has begun its long journey back towards Earth after making it to aphelion - the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun - on December 9....

The online communities that arguably fuelled the search giant's dominance have become too nasty to bother with Google Groups has announced it will end support for Usenet - a significant change that undoes one of the early decisions that propelled the search and ads giant to dominance....

Server tanks can do more than heat water - they can also build into resilient many-site clouds Building owners should consider an on-site datacenter an amenity they need to offer tenants - according to an Australian outfit that hopes to provide those same datacenters....

iGiant was on the back foot after courts found virtual iPhones were fair use Apple and iOS virtualization software maker Corellium have ended their four-year-long battle with a confidential settlement....

PLUS: Cancer patients get ransom notes for Christmas, Delta Dental is the latest MOVEit victim, and critical vulns Infosec in brief MongoDB on Saturday issued an alert warning of "a security incident involving unauthorized access to certain MongoDB corporate systems, which includes exposure of customer account metadata and contact information."...

PLUS: Beijing wants ten-minute reporting of infosec incidents; Infosys CFO bails; TikTok's Indonesia comeback approved, for now Think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) last week published details of a campaign that spreads English language pro-China and anti-US narratives on YouTube....

As world heads into 2024, scientists are asked: When will Big Oil face the heat? Comment You surely noticed much of the world was on fire this year, especially if you were in the western United States, western or eastern Canada, Australia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Tunisia... you get the idea....

Former worker phished then NPM repo hijacked Cryptocurrency wallet maker Ledger says someone slipped malicious code into one of its JavaScript libraries to steal more than half a million dollars from victims....

Cloud misconfig blamed and now fixed Ubiquiti says it fixed a bug that allowed some of its customers to glimpse strangers' security camera footage and access accounts and devices that didn't belong to them....

Android giant follows Apple's lead, will store whereabouts on device and delete info earlier by default Google has announced changes to its handling of Location History data that are expected to limit the internet giant's ability to respond to so-called geofence warrants....

Ah, beans The Kraft Heinz Company says its systems are all up and running as usual as it probes claims that some of its data was stolen by ransomware crooks....

Sadly not saucy enough in this state for return trip to Earth There is good news and bad news regarding the two tomatoes lost aboard the International Space Station (ISS) last year. The good news is that they've been found. The bad news is that they look less than appetizing....

You'd better have 2GB free on that handset and be running Android 14 Google Pixel owners who need to take their devices in for repair now have an option to protect their data from snooping techs in the form of a new "repair mode."...

Mitchell Hashimoto departs, apparently unconnected to controversial licensing change HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto is leaving the building....

Low Earth orbit cell ops will help remote region get services SpaceX has got approval to run tests of a proposed service that allows unmodified smartphones to make calls via a satellite link....

Novel malware adapts delivers DDoS attacks and provides RAT functionality Incident responders say they've found a new type of multi-platform malware abusing the New Kind of Network (NKN) protocol....

Choose your own adventure: Use the old qualification tanks, or squeeze in some from Vega-C? The final Vega rocket launch is being delayed to September 2024 as engineers wrestle with the unusual problem of disappearing fuel tanks....

Another Johnson era fantasy fails to survive its encounter with science, engineering and economics A second planned trial to provide hydrogen for home heating was this week officially cancelled in England, a government minister has confirmed....

Incoming datacenter chips will power new ThinkAgile, ThinkSystem boxes Lenovo is the latest vendor to unveil systems aimed at the wave of interest in AI, but the China-based tech giant is also among the first to say its boxes will feature Intel's Emerald Rapids Xeon chips featuring AMX technology for AI acceleration....

The dos and don'ts of bulk emailing A data regulator has reminded companies they need to take care while writing emails to avoid unintentionally blurting out personal data....

And it's priceless when that abuse is shown to be unreasonable On Call Here at The Register we don't guarantee much - other than that every Friday morning will feature a new instalment of On Call, our weekly column featuring readers' stories of supplying support services and the sometimes-savage response to their efforts....

Nobody expects the Spanish admonition! Pope Francis urged world leaders to establish an international treaty regulating AI, and warned against relying on machines to make moral and ethical decisions that should be left to humans....

'Cos Ananova worked out so well A startup with aspirations of becoming a trusted global news brand is planning to launch a service delivering curated content - written by AI and delivered by artificial anchors....

If all goes to plan, more Chinese goods will flow into the global market Amazon is set to open an innovation center in the Chinese city of Shenzhen to assist Middle Kingdom businesses increase exports - an effort that aligns with the likes of Alibaba and the wider Chinese e-commerce industry....

Association offers utopian vision of authors and model-makers bargaining over the price at which to opt-in for content scraping The Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) has asked us all to imagine a future in which builders of AI models offer a price they're willing to pay for the copyrighted material they need, and creators choose whether to pay it until enough deals are struck that all stakeholders achieve satisfaction....

Finding a reason to do it might be the hardest part CANALYS APAC FORUM Businesses are clamoring to adopt AI, without really knowing what to do with it, according to speakers on a panel at last week's Canalys APAC Forum in Bangkok....