Now its functions are shattered between innumerable vendors

Retro Tech Week  It may seem that progress in technology proceeds in a linear fashion, with new developments replacing older ones. From this viewpoint, newer technology will always be better, since it is presumed to have built upon what came before it and improved on it.…

Malware threat from third-party cartridges nothing compared to threat to HP's bottom line

HP CEO Enrique Lores admitted this week that the company's long-term objective is "to make printing a subscription" when he was questioned about the company's approach to third-party replacement ink suppliers.…

More details emerge as Horizon IT scandal inquiry continues

The Post Office proposed suing Fujitsu over missing data from its audit trail that could be used in the prosecution of victims of the Horizon scandal, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history.…

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

Retro Tech Week  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.…