The Register

Amazon Appstore tieup fizzles out, too Next year Microsoft will kill off the Windows Subsystem for Android, its framework for running Android applications from the Amazon Appstore on Windows 11 devices....

Insurance giant blames Infosys, LockBit claims credit Criminals have probably stolen nearly 30,000 Fidelity Investments Life Insurance customers' personal and financial information - including bank account and routing numbers, credit card numbers and security or access codes - after breaking into Infosys' IT systems in the fall....

Now the pressure is on for Microsoft to stop holding user data hostage Amazon Web Services has joined Google in waiving egress fees for customers looking to ditch its platform for a rival cloud provider or on-prem datacenter....

US broadband customers prepare for the great disconnection The end is nigh for the US Affordable Connectivity Program, with April being the final full month of the program....

You get a 'sovereign' AI, and you get a 'sovereign' AI, everybody gets a 'sovereign' AI AMD is betting that it can get governments and other public bodies to sign off on investment in AI infrastructure by enlisting the former head of America's prestigious Oak Ridge National Laboratory research center....

Where better to expose confidential data than on a dating app? Yet another US military man is facing a potentially significant stretch in prison after allegedly sending secret national defense information (NDI) overseas....

If you're still on X you'd better disable this insecure-by-default calling feature Video and audio calling features for X Premium users added last year to Elon Musk's version of Twitter have been expanded to everyone on the platform, and we're warning Reg readers yet again to disable the feature - this time because it appears to expose user IP addresses....

Millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced Updated Those trying to log into Meta's Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for their social media fixes are facing panic this morning after being locked out of their accounts....

It's in the Beta Channel build for now... but oh my, you're not going to love this Copilot in Windows is set to get even more assertive after Microsoft added a function that makes the AI assistant's window pop up after a user's cursor hovers over the icon in the task bar....

Caught on camera: 'Our jobs are ended today, effective immediately' The moment 43 unionized YouTube Music subcontractors lost their jobs was dramatically caught on camera during an Austin City Hall meeting in Texas last week....

Investors unhappy after 2022 revenue guidance cut Snowflake is the subject of a would-be class action lawsuit alleging it made misleading statements and failed to disclose important data about sales practices and its commercial model between September 16, 2020, and March 2, 2022....

Left-wing extremist group claims responsibility, says goal is to 'bring Tesla to its knees' An alleged arson attack at a power substation outside Berlin has knocked Tesla's nearby gigafactory offline, and a left-wing activist group is claiming that disrupting Tesla was their entire intent....

Lawyers argue content used to train LLMs does not 'supplant the market' for news Microsoft is coming out swinging over claims by the New York Times that the Windows giant and OpenAI infringed copyright by using its articles to build ChatGPT and other models....

Exploits began within hours of the original disclosure, so patch now Updated Security shop Rapid7 is criticizing JetBrains for flouting its policy against silent patching regarding fixes for two fresh vulnerabilities in the TeamCity CI/CD server....

Don't hold your breath Brit tech industry association Techworks wants to see more support for the UK semiconductor sector in this week's budget to help the nation's chip companies better compete on the global stage....

AI's appetite for compute means general refreshes stalled as customer used budgets elsewhere The server market is bouncing back in value terms, as customers demand beefier systems to train or run AI models - and the success of server makers is now largely dependent on getting GPUs from Nvidia....

Exclusivity deals a no-no, and 'charging deserts' must be avoided The UK's competition regulator is calling for more competition, interoperability, and better reliability in the local electric vehicle (EV) charging network....

Less abundant molecular oxygen narrow chances of life being found on Jupiter's icy moon Jupiter's moon Europa has a lot less free oxygen than previously thought, narrowing the odds that life may have evolved in this remote orb....

Penny Appeal sent more than 460,000 texts asking for money to help war-torn countries, no opt out Typically it is energy improvement peddlers or debt help specialists that are disgraced by Britain's data watchdog for spamming unsuspecting households, but the latest entrant in the hall of shame is a charity....

Trade watchdog argues that browsing and location data are sensitive and deserve to be defended The US Federal Trade Commission on Monday warned that data brokers need to rethink how they define sensitive data in light of recent enforcement actions involving antivirus vendor Avast, and location data providers X-Mode and InMarket. Europe too is moving in this area and crackdowns move around the world....

Hot and hungry, yet direct liquid cooling may not be required If you thought Nvidia's 700W H100s were hot and power-hungry machines, just wait until the GPU slinger's B100 arrives later this year....

Washington reportedly decided chipmaker hadn't done too little AMD reportedly failed at an attempt to dumb down its AI chips to a level at which Washington is happy for them to be exported to China....

Large APKs and disk footprints spell doom in a developing market In 2019, Southeast Asian superapp developer Grab spotted a problem: its app was growing in size by one percent per month, making it less suited to the modest smartphones found across the region in which it operates, degrading user experience and ultimately threatening its prospects for attracting more users....

Musk playbook described as 'Keep money he owes other people, and force them to sue him' Four top former executives who were let go after Elon Musk acquired the social media platform have sued the tech billionaire for $128 million in severance payments....

Claims to protect against DDoS, sensitive data leakage Cloudflare has tweaked its web application firewall (WAF) to add protections for applications using large language models....

Boasts of 'near-human levels of comprehension and fluency' AI startup Anthropic has released Claude 3, the latest iteration of its large language model, which it claims is more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4....

E-commerce giant on the hook for 480MW of power from Susquehanna plant Amazon Web Services on Monday added a nuclear-powered datacenter campus to its public cloud empire as part of a $650 million deal with Talen Energy - an owner and operator of electricity generation and transmission facilities in the US....

Don't leave home without ... IT security A security failure at a third-party vendor exposed an untold number of American Express card numbers, expiry dates, and other data to persons unknown....

What will happen first by 2026? Model A in production or end of the world? Alef Aeronautics claims to have more than 2,850 preorders for its Model A, which CEO Jim Dukhovny opines is the world's first true flying car, although we're still waiting for a live demonstration of the vehicle in flight....

No honor among thieves? ALPHV/BlackCat, the gang behind the Change Healthcare cyberattack, has received more than $22 million in Bitcoin in what might be a ransomware payment....

Kim Jong Un's all in for home-built silicon says warning North Korean government spies have broken into the servers of at least two chipmakers and stolen product designs as part of attempts to spur Kim Jong Un's plans for a domestic semiconductor industry, according to Seoul's security agency....

Plus a new anodization seal should make Midnight edition more resilient to gamer grease Four months after Apple launched its M3 processors alongside refreshed MacBook Pros, the chips have finally arrived on the iGiant's fanless ultra lite laptops....

Meanwhile, only 22% of orgs are looking at GenAI strategy for databases Google has introduced vector search to its MySQL database service, surpassing Oracle - custodian of the open source database - which has so far failed to add the feature deemed an advantage in executing large language models (LLMs)....

Officials can't tell whether the tape was edited, but fear Kremlin has more juicy bits to release in the future The German Ministry of Defense (Bundeswehr) has confirmed that a recording of a call between high-ranking officials discussing war efforts in Ukraine, leaked by Russian media, is legitimate....

Copilot failed to shift the dial. Could Moment 5 and upcoming invitations do the trick? Microsoft is adding fresh features to Windows 11 and preparing to fling yet more update nagware at Windows 10 users in the hope that a bigger wave will migrate to the latest - but not necessarily the greatest - OS....

OSAM-1 - expensive, late, difficult, and no longer what the market needs? NASA has finally pulled the plug on its ambitious mission to refuel and service working satellites via its OSAM-1 demonstrator....

Cupertino blames Spotify, says Commission is just giving preference to another European company Apple's anti-steering provisions that prevent music streaming apps from directing users outside the App Store for paid services were smacked down in the European Union today and earned the iGiant a fine of more than 1.8 billion ($1.95 billion)....

Built on OCI, the cancer-focused analytics company struggled to find sufficient paying customers, one report claimed A Larry Ellison-backed startup focused on bringing data analytics to the study and treatment of cancer has reportedly closed....

Increasingly clear number of permanent solutions is narrowing Global law enforcement authorities' attempts to shutter the LockBit ransomware crew have sparked a fresh call for a ban on ransomware payments to perpetrators....

At least the US Army is thinking about the frogs in those 226 acres of wetland Micron's proposed "mega fab" semiconductor plant in New York State is to be scrutinized by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which is tasked with preparing an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the project....

Plus: Google CEO admits company got it wrong when it built 'too-woke' AI, and more AI in brief Cruise, the self-driving biz backed by General Motors, had its valuation slashed by more than half since one of its cars crashed and dragged a woman down a street....

'Criminal,' says CEO Lawyers representing shareholders who quashed Elon Musk's $56 billion Tesla compensation package have submitted a request for nearly $6 billion in the electric car maker's stock as their fee....

Website 404ing, calls to switchboard go dead, 'sad reflection' of how tough it is to make money in smartphones UK-based ruggedized phone maker Bullitt Group has called in PWC as administrative receivers after its management team seemingly failed to pull off a proposed restructure....

Design aims to sate the bandwidth hunger of next-gen networks Semiconductor design outfit Synopsys is targeting datacenter customers with a 1.6 terabit (1.6T) Ethernet blueprint intended to enable chips for demanding AI networking applications....

Updated with kernel 6.6, latest GCC and glibc, still under 25 MB Tiny Core Linux shows that a fully functional, GUI-driven Linux distro can be smaller than Windows 95 and still be modern and useful....

When you can't lock 'em up, lock 'em out Opinion The best cop shows excel at mind games: who's tricking whom, who really wins, and what price they pay. A twist of humor adds to the drama and keeps us hooked. It's rare enough in real life, far less so in the grim meat grinder of cybersecurity, yet sometimes it happens. It's happening right now....

Pride came before a fall for techie who thought he knew it all who, me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, for that cushion into the working week that we like to call Who, Me? in which readers like your good selves entertain us with tales of times technology did not go quite right....

The tech just isn't ready and clunky collab with ESA isn't helping, auditor finds NASA's Office of Inspector General, the agency's auditor, has found that the Mars Sample Return Program is struggling to get off the drawing board, never mind the launchpad....

Not compulsory for now, but IT minister says that's coming after Google's Gemini said the quiet part out loud India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued an advisory last Friday stipulating AI technology still in development acquire government permission prior to release to the Indian public....

15.99/month server offered with Ubuntu or Debian, and a zero percent Service Level Agreement French cloud provider Scaleway has fired up an instance type powered by a RISC-V system-on-chip (SoC), developed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba's T-Head offshoot....