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875 workers liberated after falling for promises of lucrative work, nine arrested Filipino police rescued 875 "workers" - including 504 foreigners - in a raid late last week on a firm that posed as an online gaming company but in reality operated a forced labor camp that housed romance scam operators....

Nice payday for some, but plenty of Australians still pay extra to help drivers Uber's Australian wheel has agreed to pay AU$272 million ($178 million) to settle a class action brought by cab drivers who claimed their incomes were impacted by the rideshare giant's scofflaw debut down under....

ALSO: Roblox-themed infostealer on the prowl, telco insider pleads guilty to swapping SIMs, and some crit vulns in brief Almost as quickly as a paper came out last week revealing an AI side-channel vulnerability, Cloudflare researchers have figured out how to solve it: just obscure your token size....

ALSO: US woos Thailand, Philippines, for tech trade; China's Fukushima rage glows; Alibaba targets South Korea India's government has stepped back from its plan to require government approval for AI services before they come online....

Cut through the hype, keep your data private, find out what all the fuss is about Hands On With all the talk of massive machine-learning training clusters and AI PCs you'd be forgiven for thinking you need some kind of special hardware to play with text-and-code-generating large language models (LLMs) at home....

Supply-chain attacks are definitely possible and could lead to data theft, system hijacking, and more Feature While in a rush to understand, build, and ship AI products, developers and data scientists are being urged to be mindful of security and not fall prey to supply-chain attacks....

As FTC starts asking questions about that mega-deal with Google to train AI Ahead of its stock market debut, Reddit has said it's going to make it easier for advertisers to craft normal user posts and run them as ads on the social network....

We thought you people wanted choice, IT colossus sniffs Microsoft is cheerily popping up adverts over Chrome on Windows PCs to push its search engine and AI assistant....

Samsung and TSMC apparently slated to receive $6B and $5B The Biden administration may announce billions in government CHIPS subsidies to offset the cost of Intel's US fab expansion as early as next week....

New restrictions seem to usher users toward expensive Dynamics 365 subscriptions Microsoft appears to have updated the licensing rules for its popular Power Apps, which could force some customers to shift their users onto the more expensive licenses, creating a significant hike in costs....

Wave of Okta attacks mark what researchers are calling the biggest security trend of the year IT helpdesk workers are increasingly the target of cybercriminals - a trend researchers have described as "the most noteworthy" of the past year....

Kernel 6.6 and small refinements, plus less visible, but meaningful adjustments The Raspberry Pi Foundation has updated its Debian 12-based OS for the pocket-sized powerhouse, with the newest LTS kernel....

Previous goals were 25Mbps download and a paltry 3Mbps for upload ... and some places don't even have that The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is finally updating its standard for broadband speeds to 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload, after talking about the issue for years....

The decentralized web is alive and well despite Web3 financial scheming Interview The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) debuted nine years ago with the hope of changing the way people interact with content online. It remains an ongoing project....

Don't start planning your long weekend yet - proposal is likely to be a hard sell in work-obsessed America AI, automation, and other new technologies have made the American worker far more productive than ever before, says US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which is why he introduced a bill this week to shorten the US workweek to 32 hours without a commensurate drop in worker pay....

Only the Chocolate Factory is 'vertically integrated' to win at 'every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store' Microsoft has told the European Commission's competition authorities that it only entered into agreements with generative AI developers because it had no other option, unlike archrival Google which can do it all alone....

And the party extends to shareholders with an overall $6B payout IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna bagged a double digit pay bump in 2023 as he met the major financial objectives outlined by the board. The average compensation of employees that helped Big Blue achieve those targets? Up by single digits....

Global meltdown turns fast food slow Technology certainly helped McDonald's process orders faster, but as soon as a computer fault hit, the burger behemoth was shuttled right back to the 90s....

Made public highly sensitive data on complaints about Metropolitan Police Service The London Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime is being rapped by regulators for untidy tech practices that made public the personal data of hundreds of people who filed complaints against the Metropolitan Police Service....

Delays raise questions about 0.5 million legacy support bill, plans for new financial year Updated Gloucestershire County Council has missed the go live date for its RISE with SAP move to the cloud, potentially incurring an additional 500k ($639,000) costs to keep its legacy application up and running....

Adding extra shine to Ubuntu Jammy... with the lightweight edition to follow One of the more widely used Ubuntu spinoffs, non-techie friendly Zorin has put out three editions of its latest version - Zorin OS 17.1 - and there are still more to come....

The NIMBYs are fed up, and it's an election year The UK's Data and Digital Infrastructure Minister wants telcos to stop installing new telegraph poles....

Resulting cycle of rushed repairs and recriminations did wonders for the IT/user relationship On Call Thirsty folk will tell you it's always twelve o'clock somewhere, but Friday comes but once a week and The Register marks it by offering another instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of the weird and woeful world of work....

Reaction from channel was 'stunned silence followed by anger and disbelief' Citrix has allegedly made major changes to its partner program, and one of the consultancies briefed on the new arrangements told The Register that the when the news was delivered to a gathering of the Citrix faithful the result was "stunned silence followed by anger and disbelief."...

Thankfully the prizes for human winners are far higher than those for machines Alibaba has added a twist to its annual Global Math Competition by opening a separate challenge to AI....

But rates his first 100 days in charge a 'strong start' Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has rated his enterprise's first hundred days as the owner of VMware "a strong start," but also acknowledged the rapid changes at the virtualization giant have been hard for some to digest....

Flagship facility has just 48 GPUs NASA's supercomputing capabilities are not keeping pace with the latest technology developments, and are "oversubscribed and overburdened," causing delays to missions that are sometimes addressed by teams acquiring their own infrastructure....

Uncle Sam can use this snooping tool, too, but that's beside the point There's another Chinese-manufactured product - joining the likes of TikTok, cars and semiconductors - that poses a national security risk to Americans: electronic locks, such as those used in safes....

IDC forecasts spend to grow 15.4% in 2024 to $232B - then add another $100B in three years Spending on edge computing is growing fast and because it's 2024, analyst firm IDC believes AI is a big reason for the boost....

If you can live with a measely 6GHz the standard i9 is a $110 cheaper If Intel's 6GHz Core i9-14900K was too pedestrian for your tastes, the x86 giant now has a special-edition processor up for grabs that it says will do 6.2GHz right out of the box....

Imagine trying to trick folks into buying $500 of unnecessary repairs - and they turn out to be federal agents A pair of tech support businesses accused of swindling marks out of their hard-earned cash have agreed to cough up a $26 million settlement following an undercover probe by the FTC....

Boffins show less platinum may be needed for long-lived power source Adding caffeine can enhance the efficiency of fuel cells, reducing the need for platinum in electrodes and significantly reducing the cost of making them, according to researchers in Japan....

Canadian-Russian said to have turned to a life of cybercrime during pandemic, now must pay the price - literally A LockBit ransomware kingpin has been sentenced to almost four years behind bars and ordered to pay more than CA$860,000 ($635,000, 500,000) in restitution to some of his victims by a Canadian court as he awaits extradition to the US....

Rare occasion when you do want Big Tech to make a hash of it Google has enhanced its Safe Browsing service to enable real-time protection in Chrome for desktop, iOS, and soon Android against risky websites, without sending browsing history data to the ad biz....

But is there one that can sort out failing ERP projects? Well Larry, is there? Oracle has unleashed 50 use cases for gen AI on its Fusion Applications suite, letting vector-based statistical models provide financial report "narratives," help filter job candidates, and provide product descriptions....

VLOGGER needs just a still photo and an audio recording to generate footage, but it's far from perfect Google has a new AI trick up its sleeve that can animate a still photo using nothing but a recording of a person's speech, and boy is it widening the uncanny valley....

Zut alors! Department for registering and helping unemployed people broken into A French government department - responsible for registering and assisting unemployed people - is the latest victim of a mega data breach that compromised the information of up to 43 million citizens....

Booster hit the water hard and monster rocket lost during re-entry, but otherwise a success! SpaceX has launched its third Starship Super-Heavy rocket on a test flight that went almost entirely to plan....

Will the WEF experiment work? The Cybercrime Atlas, a massive undertaking that aims to disrupt cybercriminals across the globe, enters its operational phase in 2024, two years after organizers laid the groundwork at the RSA Conference....

If you don't pay attention, your lovely little Teams app will stop working Time is running out for developers and administrators to prepare themselves for Microsoft's one domain to rule them all - cloud.microsoft....

Services slowly coming back online but providers still struggling Change Healthcare is being investigated over the alleged 6 TB data theft by the ALPHV ransomware group as it continues recovery efforts....

Veteran spacecraft shows signs of sanity with poke from engineers Engineers are hopeful that the veteran spacecraft Voyager 1 might have turned a corner after spending the last three months spouting gibberish at controllers....

SteveTok? TikMnuch? breaking news On the heels of the US House of Representatives passing a TikTok ban bill, former US Treasury secretary and private equity mogul Steve Mnuchin is apparently thinking about buying the platform....

We thought everyone was thrilled about being spied on and having their jobs taken by bots A survey of UK workers suggests that quality of life declines as exposure to newer technology including wearables, robotics, and AI rises in the workplace....

Microsoft IP addresses on the spam naughty step If you're an Exchange Online user wondering why emails to Yahoo and AOL users haven't been getting through, don't worry - it isn't just you. Stricter security rules have tripped up Microsoft's email service....

Ewe-nique endeavor aimed to create Jurassic Baaa-rk experience for hunters In a case that could have been lifted from a bad movie about a "mad scientist," a Montana rancher has pleaded guilty to wildlife trafficking charges in his quest to genetically engineer an ubersheep for hunting....

Complainant moved to 'retire in place' role after Sarbanes Oxley Act report, filing alleges SAP is being sued for age discrimination and retaliation by an employee that alleges he was moved to a meaningless role after he asked for an investigation of potentially anti-competitive practices....

Thanks to Europe forcing Apple to offer a browser choice screen. Now, about ditching WebKit ... Since Apple implemented a browser choice screen for iPhones earlier this month to comply with Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), Brave Software, Mozilla, and Vivaldi have seen a surge in the number of people installing their web browsers....

Windows preview delivers one app to handle multiple accounts, boosts Copilot's capabilities Microsoft is on the cusp of addressing a major frustration caused by its Teams app by introducing a version capable of simultaneously logging in to multiple personae....

Australian minister singles out Meta - where Zuck has 600,000 Nvidia GPUs ready to roll The governments of ten nations have called on social media operators to improve their ability to detect and prevent fraud from flourishing on their platforms....