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Laser beam comms are fast, so long as the weather cooperates NASA's optical communications demonstration has hit 25 Mbps in a test transmitting engineering data back to Earth from 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away....

Shareholders are loving it. What are customers getting out of it all? Kettle This week a chunk of Big Tech reported its latest quarterly financial figures, and our beady eyes were on whether the ongoing AI obsession will pay off for these mega corporations....

Under Flight Rules, the crew should have turned back to Earth Former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale has posted a correction to NASA's history of STS-109, which he claims "is a lie" - although that may be a slight exaggeration....

Stacking the deck - we've heard of it Leaders of the world's most prominent AI companies are being recruited for the Homeland Security Department's new advisory group....

Not even maintenance is OK in the eyes of the Uncle Sam Under US pressure, Dutch photolithography giant ASML will no longer service certain chipmaking equipment purchased by Chinese customers....

Nobody's favorite operating system is now available for inspection In partnership with IBM, Microsoft has released the source code for MS-DOS 4.0, more than 35 years since the operating system made a muted appearance ahead of Windows 3.x....

One Chinese national arrested in Chicago while another suspect thought to be abroad Two Chinese nationals were this week accused by the US of attempting to illegally export chipmaking kit to a company back home, in another twist in the tech wars between the two nations....

Ouch! Millions of Kaiser Permanente patients' data was likely handed over to Google, Microsoft Bing, X/Twitter, and other third-parties, according to the American healthcare giant....

Cloud giant directs users to pack their bags for DropBox, gives them a year to get affairs in order Updated Amazon is killing its WorkDocs document sharing and content collaboration service, notifying users that sign-ups are no longer available and giving them a year to migrate any data stored....

Getting their hands on AI memory one Huawei or another... A group of Chinese semiconductor firms including Huawei are reportedly looking to get domestic production of high bandwidth memory (HBM) up and running by 2026....

Analysts brand deal a 'nail in the coffin' for UK tech investment Private equity investor Thoma Bravo has successfully completed a second acquisition attempt of UK-based cybersecurity company Darktrace in a $5.3 billion deal....

Yes, they are harder to solder, but there's way more potential Feature The Z80 has a long series of successor models - some compatible and some not. There are multiple options for hobbyist computer builders....

Tuta cries foul, Chocolate Factory denies service unreachable Tutao, known for the encrypted email service Tuta Mail, has filed a Digital Markets Act (DMA) complaint to the EU over an alleged de-ranking in Google Search....

Doing business in Beijing? 'You need to do a what-if scenario' interview It didn't seem America's divest-or-ban bill for TikTok was going to make it into law when we last spoke with former White House chief information officer Theresa Payton - but law it now is....

Only minor changes from original proposals that kicked up privacy storm The UK's contentious Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill (IPB) 2024 has officially received the King's nod of approval and will become law....

Plus the system builder says an Arm-based system is already in the works Exclusive Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike....

Already facing off against each other in Texas over separate reverse engineering claims IBM and LzLabs are to lock horns in a London court next week over Big Blue's claim of breach of contract relating to mainframes and the development of software to allow mainframe applications run on x86 server clusters....

Defra is counting contractors like sheep The UK agriculture department is "working towards" getting consultant and contractor numbers down to less than a quarter of its tech and digital transformation teams and reducing contingent labor to 12 percent of headcount by the end of the financial year....

Support chap learns users will try to solve problems in non-obvious ways On Call As another week drains down the plughole of history, it's time for The Register to once again deliver a fresh instalment of On Call - our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support torments and triumphs....

Cloudy hosts given short license change deadlines, customers warned of support portal brownouts VMware by Broadcom's breakup with its end-user compute products will enter a new phase next week, with cloudy service providers and customers both warned of imminent changes....

Huawei is OK, but Xiaomi, OPPO, and Samsung are in strife. And Honor isn't living its name Many Chinese keyboard apps, some from major handset manufacturers, can leak keystrokes to determined snoopers, leaving perhaps three quarters of a billion people at risk according to research from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab....

Discloses ongoing experiments with usage-based pricing Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar has announced he will step down in August, leaving Mike Cannon-Brookes alone at the top of the Australian collaborationware company....

Chipzilla's Foundry business weighs down the Gelsinger gang - for now Intel has reported double-digit growth in client computing revenue, growing demand for AI PCs, and promised of strong gains in the second half of 2024 - but also reported a first quarter loss that sent the chip biz's stock sliding in after-hours trading Thursday....

If ML proves an expensive habit in future, these money printers won't have much to worry about ... probably Alphabet and Microsoft's stock prices jumped in after-hours trading today after the AI-infatuated businesses delivered higher-than-anticipated quarterly earnings....

Talk about going round the (South) Bend Amazon Web Services (AWS) is adding $11 billion of datacenter capacity in St Joseph County outside South Bend, Indiana, the cloud giant announced Thursday....

Athletics boss accused of deep-faking Baltimore school principal Baltimore police have arrested Dazhon Leslie Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School (PHS), for allegedly impersonating the school's principal using AI software to make it seem as if he made racist and antisemitic remarks....

Cash to go out as refunds to punters The FTC today announced it would be sending refunds totaling $5.6 million to Ring customers, paid from the Amazon subsidiary's coffers....

As app boss vows to nuke America's divest-or-ban law in the courts Between shutting down or selling TikTok, owner ByteDance would prefer doing the former....

Law responds again to pings The FCC voted Thursday to restore America's net neutrality rules, nearly seven years after they were taken offline....

Pulumi's CEO on new products and that other Infrastructure as Code company Interview Infrastructure as code biz Pulumi has updated its eponymous Deployments product with drift detection and automated clean-up for an untidy reality....

Suspects in Portugal and the US said to have laundered over $100M Two men alleged to be co-founders of cryptocurrency biz Samourai Wallet face serious charges and potentially decades in US prison over claims they owned a product that facilitated the laundering of over $100 million in criminal cash....

Watch out Intel ... Angstrom-class A16 with Super Rail backside power tech incoming Semiconductor giant TSMC has disclosed details of a process technology called A16 that could be delivering the first 1.6nm chips for customers by 2026....

App maker accuses Cupertino of defying EU rules Spotify claims Apple rejected an update to the popular music streaming app that would have informed users about purchase methods outside of the Apple ecosystem....

Crew entirely optional DARPA has been working on off-road autonomous vehicles for decades, and now it has a combat-scale unmanned tank to show....

Europe's largest local authority had no way of knowing if fraud took place Birmingham City Council, Europe's biggest local authority, has no way of knowing if financial fraud has been committed after it failed to run security and audit features in a new Oracle Fusion ERP system....

Memory biz ditches NAND production plans to make more crucial HBM tech The global AI infrastructure buying frenzy is still in full swing - so much so that it has pushed the world's second largest memory maker, SK hynix, into its second highest operating profit ever and an all-time high for Q1 revenues....

Google security crew reveal the four Ds' to be on the watch for It may come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that experts say, in revealing the most prevalent and likely tactics to meddle with elections this year, that state-sponsored cybercriminals pose the biggest threat....

Revenues up, but is the AI hype bubble is threatening to burst? Meta's shares tumbled after company boss Mark Zuckerberg said the quiet bit out loud: it will take a while before AI bets start paying back the huge financial investments it is making....

Struggling French tech giant posts disappointing Q1 results Crisis-hit tech giant Atos is pushing back the deadline for its refinancing proposals after posting a slim operating profit of 48 million ($51 million) for calendar Q1....

What do we say to the God of Death? Not today Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) has woken up again, having survived three lunar nights....

The software redemption Teaching prisoners how to design and program websites turns out to improve their sense of self-worth and provides them with digital literacy skills that help them stay out of prison....

The Thermonator can be yours for just $9,420 Picture Boston Dynamics' nightmare fuel robot dog Spot. Now imagine it 1,000 percent more terrifying....

Tech giants confident everything's in order UK regulators want to hear from "interested third parties" on whether Microsoft and Amazon's investments in AI startups is impeding competition....

'Software companies try to extend their reach and their usage, but this can't be by locking in users,' says process mining lead BMW's process mining leader has called for greater openness among enterprise application and software vendors to avoid data lock-in....

Machine learning has its place, just not in ways that suits today's hypesters Systems Approach Full disclosure: I have a history with AI, having flirted with it in the 1980s (remember expert systems?) and then having safely avoided the AI winter of the late 1980s by veering off into formal verification before finally landing on networking as my specialty in 1988....

After two years of warnings, and outages, regulators ran out of patience with Kotak Mahindra Bank India's central bank has banned Kotak Mahindra Bank from signing up new customers for accounts or credit cards through its online presence and app....

Might help to set spluttering EV market on fire. Won't catch fire thanks to built-in vents Samsung SDI, the Korean giant's battery biz, on Tuesday promised EV batteries that can charge to 80 percent capacity in a mere nine minutes, plus models that can perform at that level for 20 years....

Investors want to know what Big Blue is smoking after growth disappoints IBM has announced it will acquire Hashi for $6.4 billion, and touted the deal as meaning its hybrid cloud platform will emerge with a comprehensive" set of products....

And warn that AI is already being used by extremists to plot attacks The director general of Australia's lead intelligence agency and the commissioner of its Federal Police yesterday both called for social networks to offer more assistance to help their investigators work on cases involving terrorism, child exploitation, and racist nationalism....

Don't get too comfortable: 'Line Dancer' malware may be targeting other vendors, too A previously unknown and "sophisticated" nation-state group compromised Cisco firewalls as early as November 2023 for espionage purposes - and possibly attacked network devices made by other vendors including Microsoft, according to warnings from the networking giant and three Western governments....