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LLMs show promise, but are 'not yet capable of providing credible explanations for their own predictions' A senior policymaker at Singapore's central bank, the Monetary Authority, has suggested that artificial intelligence technology is not yet suitable to inform its policy development work....

US senator calls cyber attack 'inexcusable,' calls for mandatory security rules The Biden administration and US lawmakers are turning up the pressure on UnitedHealth group to ease medical providers' pain after the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, by expediting payments to hospitals, physicians and pharmacists - among other tactics....

No more creepy snooping? Be my guest Airbnb guests will be delighted to know that their short-term rentals don't contain indoor security cameras - once a change to the platform's community policy takes effect at the end of April....

Don't worry, we have a strong suspicion Putin's still gonna win The Kremlin has accused the United States of meddling in Russia's upcoming presidential election, and even accused Uncle Sam of planning a cyberattack on the country's online voting system....

And perhaps we should be worried that this model is happy to grab a gun and start blasting, says Microsoft bod You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself working with GPT-4. And you may ask yourself, "Will GPT-4 run DOOM?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"...

TA-1 test ticks off all the primary objectives, but hypersonic flight will have to wait Stratolaunch has finally completed the first powered flight of the Talon-A test vehicle - TA-1 - which was dropped from its carrier aircraft - the monstrous Roc - for a planned dunking in the Pacific....

Claims allegedly pirated content from Books3 dataset trawled by its models Nvidia is the latest tech giant to face allegations that it used copyrighted works to train AI models without obtaining the permission of the authors....

It fell through a timewarp from an alternate and very different computing universe The earliest known release of Microsoft's 32-bit version of OS/2 is now out there, and intrepid code archeologists have it running. It's a glimpse into an alternatve computing universe....

Plus: Pilots on Lion Air's Batik fall asleep and miss Jakarta Alaska Airlines is reportedly cooperating on a US Department of Justice (DoJ) criminal investigation into Boeing regarding an incident which saw an aircraft plug blow out of a 737 MAX 9 mid-flight in January....

Water? Like from the toilet? Fancy a cold one? Would it change your mind if that frothy, frosty beer was brewed using treated wastewater?...

CEO defends decision in difficult tech market Distributed database vender PlanetScale has made work-force lay-offs and ended its free-tier services in an effort to achieve sustainable profitability....

Time to start spamming those reposts: Top users are getting early access to 1.76 million shares Redditors hoping to get in early on the company's upcoming IPO had better hope they have a lot of karma in reserve....

Those using African American vernacular more likely to be sentenced to death, if LLMs were asked to decide AI models may consume huge amounts of energy, water, computing resources, and venture capital but they give back so much in the way of misinformation and bias....

Five months in and the mammoth post-ransomware recovery has barely begun The British Library says legacy IT is the overwhelming factor delaying efforts to recover from the Rhysida ransomware attack in late 2023....

Commission has until December 9, 2024, to put its house in order The European Commission has been reprimanded for infringing data protection regulations when using Microsoft 365....

Damage to DNA, mutations, uncontrolled cell division and malignancy. Is space tourism worth the risk? International regulations governing space flight lack rules to protect space tourism passengers from the ill-effects of cosmic radiation, according to researchers....

And does it count as consent? The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has opened a consultation on "consent or pay" business models. We're sure readers of The Register will have a fair few things to say....

Good news, everyone! The world's favorite daemon, systemd, is coming to phones. The team behind the leading replacement OS for end-of-life smartphones are to adopt systemd - to make working with GNOME and KDE easier....

Terms and conditions apply. Lawyers need not Opinion It's a good rule of nostril that if your litigation department is a source of revenue, your business model stinks. The law is there to discourage delinquent behavior when all else fails, not to amplify power for profit. If there's a better, fairer way to stop naughtiness, you should try that first....

Older and wiser colleagues couldn't see the funny side Who, Me? Aaah ... Monday! That wonderful week-opening day that brings with it so many possibilities. Including, as Register readers know all too well, the chance to make errors that must then be discreetly buried - the subject of our Who, Me?, our weekly reader-contributed tale of career-threatening bullets you've managed to dodge....

But for now, smaller customers have been cut off from on-demand training content Exclusive VMware by Broadcom will soon launch a new training experience that will offer more training at a fraction of the cost they used to pay."...

Bejing allows easier access to AliPay and Tencent's Weixin, and higher spending limits too China's main payment systems, Alipay and WeChat Pay, eased access for foreign users on Friday, a day after Beijing issued new guidelines for its payment industry....

PLUS: NSA shares cloud security tips; Infosec training for Jordanian women; Critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief Cybersecurity researchers informed Microsoft that Notorious North Korean hackers Lazarus Group discovered the "holy grail" of rootkit vulnerabilities in Windows last year, but Redmond still took six months to patch the problem....

PLUS: Microsoft bars prompts to make Copilot less violent and NSFW AI in brief OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has returned the company's board and will serve alongside three new members....

For now, have Linux 6.8, which Linus Torvalds could find no reason to delay Linus Torvalds has released version 6.8 of the Linux Kernel....

PLUS: Chinese tops Steam's language charts; HPE opens Saudi server factory; Indian government apps have flaws Asia in brief Australia's Federal Court last Friday dismissed Singtel's appeal against a past ruling that it engaged in transfer pricing and therefore owes millions in tax....

Cooked in a math lab, here's an open source LLM that knows the law Machine-learning researchers and legal experts have released SauLM-7B, which they claim is the first text-generating open source large language model specifically focused on legal work and applications....

Lots of pats on the back for the CHIPS Act too US president Joe Biden used the State of the Union address on Thursday to call for a ban on AI voice impersonation....

Chatting to Anmol Taploo about the race to develop tech for satellites Interview Will satellites be capable of generating their own thrust with propellant created out of thin air one day? Scientists at the George Washington University (GWU) and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory reckon so....

All too many 'smart' devices are security stupid Opinion I was one of the first people to use an Internet of Things (IoT) device. It was Carnegie-Mellon's Computer Science Department's Coke machine*. True, I didn't need to check on it since my school, West Virginia University, was 77 miles from CMU, but I thought it was really cool back in the 1970s that I could see what was what with the coke machine over the Internet. That was then. This is now. Today. I'm less than thrilled by the IoT....

Florida man would rather have app stay so as not to give gift to 'true enemy of the people' ... Zuckerberg Comment If you had to guess, who would you say former US President Donald Trump hates more: China or Mark Zuckerberg?...

Plus: CISA pulls plug on couple of systems feared compromised There's yet another group of miscreants out there hijacking insecure Ivanti devices: A new, financially motivated gang dubbed Magnet Goblin has emerged from the shadowy digital depths with a knack for rapidly exploiting newly disclosed vulnerabilities before vendors have issued a fix....

Some might say a blessing in disguise Nano, Google's smallest AI model in its generative Gemini series, will not be available on Pixel 8 handsets due to "some hardware limitations."...

'Luminous phenomena' on the cards, but half a ton of debris could survive A pallet of used batteries from the International Space Station (ISS) is due to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at some point in the next day, and some parts of the 2.6 metric ton mass are likely to hit the ground....

And saying Starlink doesn't work inside Russian borders isn't sufficient... Starlink terminals are reportedly being used by both sides in Russia's war against Ukraine, but now Congressional representatives want to know why....

Still 'no evidence' of any compromised customer-facing systems, we're told Microsoft has now confirmed that the Russian cyberspies who broke into its executives' email accounts stole source code and gained access to internal systems. The Redmond giant also characterized the intrusion as "ongoing."...

Preview's promise ends in digital dust Microsoft has abruptly pulled a feature from OneDrive that allows users to upload files to the cloud storage service directly from a URL....

US spy-tech firm at center of UK health data systems applies its technology to altogether different ends Palantir has won a US Army contract worth $178.4 million to house a battlefield intelligence system inside a big truck....

Remaining services are expected to return in the coming weeks after $22M ALPHV ransom Change Healthcare has taken the first steps toward a full recovery from the ransomware attack in February by bringing its electronic prescription services back online....

Workforce aging, systems still mission-critical ... plus Big Blue looking out for its bread and butter IBM is pinning its hopes on some fresh initiatives - the Mainframe Skills Council and the IBM Z Mainframe Skills Depot - to address a shortage of engineers who have big iron expertise ....

Classified docs, readable passwords, and thousands of personal information nabbed in Xplain breach The Swiss government had around 65,000 files related to it stolen by the Play ransomware gang during an attack on an IT supplier, its National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) says....

Court of Justice of the European Union says consent identifers are personal info, subject to GDPR Online popup solicitations that seek consent for targeted ads in Europe represent personal information, according to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) - a decision characterized as either a "mortal wound" for online ad tracking, or a welcome clarification, depending on whom you ask....

A secret message or just random characters on a license plate? Microsoft veteran Dave Plummer has shared a photo of the Corvette bought by Zip folder support work in Windows and reminded us that, 30 years later, some of the code is probably still running in the operating system....

And soon learned he had won the argument On Call Welcome once more, dear reader, to On Call - The Register's Friday trawl through a mailbag containing stories of your tech support tales....

The Register speaks to the folks behind the AI Incident Database Interview False images of Donald Trump supported by made-up Black voters, middle-schoolers creating pornographic deepfakes of their female classmates, and Google's Gemini chatbot failing to generate pictures of White people accurately....

Redmond hasn't budged on deals that make its wares cheaper on Azure, and regulators are circling A group of cloud infrastructure providers in Europe has delivered an ultimatum to Microsoft: End the "unjustified feature and pricing discriminations against fair competition" or face legal action....

Networking silicon surges, Carbon Black to be kept in the fold Broadcom has told investors its strategy of forcing VMware customers to buy only big bundles of software will see revenue increase by "double-digit percentage sequentially, quarter over quarter, through the rest of the fiscal year."...

Who knew that unzipping a font archive could unleash a malicious file Online graphic design platform Canva went looking for security problems in fonts, and found three - in "strange places."...

Puts $1.2 billion on the table for AI skills and local LLMs, tells private enterprise it expects help India's government has approved a 10,300 Crore ($1.24 billion) funding package to bolster the nation's AI infrastructure....

CISA announces more help, and calls on app makers to step up The US government and some of the largest open source foundations and package repositories have announced a series of initiatives intended to improve software supply-chain security, while also repeating calls for developers to increase support for such efforts....