The Register

Bucks needed to keep an eye on Buck Rogers LeoLabs, a company noted for cataloging objects in low Earth orbit, has scored another $29 million in financing for its AI-powered tracking tech....

Pulls part of system offline as Black Basta docs suggest the worst Willis Lease Finance Corporation has admitted to US regulators that it fell prey to a "cybersecurity incident" after data purportedly stolen from the biz was posted to the Black Basta ransomware group's leak blog....

After lining up someone to fill Hasso Plattner's seat, German ERP giant finds candidate has 'difference in perspective' Enterprise software developer SAP has made a last-minute change to the planned replacement of its 80-year-old co-founder as chairman of its supervisory board, owing to a difference in perspective"....

The speedier computing cake is a lie... so we got software bloat instead FOSDEM 2024 The computer industry faces a number of serious problems, some imposed by physics, some by legacy technology, and some by inertia. There may be solutions to some of these, but they're going to hurt....

$5B investment part of $53B bet to reboot semiconductor industry The US government says it will inject more than $5 billion in the CHIPS R&D program, including funds to boost skills in the semiconductor sector to form the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), a new tech development testbed....

In an industry addicted to job cuts, 34,000 staff roles vanished in first six weeks of 2024 More than 34,000 tech staff who started 2024 in gainful employment are now looking for a new job - and that's before networking titan Cisco reportedly pulls the plug on thousands more to lighten the payroll....

Lawyers argue requests for more info are tantamount to harassment A federal judge has ruled in favor of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), ordering tech mogul Elon Musk to return for additional testimony in their investigation of his 2022 Twitter acquisition....

Experts also put an end to social media security updates The Caravan and Motorhome Club (CAMC) and the experts it drafted to help clean up the mess caused by a January cyberattack still can't figure out whether members' data was stolen....

Musk: No terminals have been sold to Russia 'to the best of our knowledge' SpaceX supremo Elon Musk has waded into controversy over the alleged use of Starlink by Russian forces....

Plus: Computer scientists win $700k in AI competition to decipher ancient scrolls destroyed in Mount Vesuvius eruption, and more AI in brief A dodgy website is claiming to use AI in creating images of fake IDs that could potentially be used to trick online verification methods....

Who needs the present when you can relive the '80s at warp speed? FOSDEM 2024 The PiStorm is an ingenious way to make real vintage Commodore Amiga hardware not only run again, but do it over three orders of magnitude faster - using cheap, open source hardware and software....

We've still got time to make it better before it does Opinion There is a thing that companies do, a pathological behavior that makes customers unhappy and makes things worse in general. It is so widespread and long-running that it should have its own name, much as an unpleasant medical condition. It does not, but you'll recognize it because it has blighted your life often enough: it's the unwanted new feature....

Sometimes you can have too many people in the room Who, Me? Welcome once again dear reader to yet another Monday and of course yet another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers confess the times when they perhaps weren't quite so on the ball as they might have been....

PLUS: Juniper's support portal leaks customer info; Canada moves to ban Flipper Zero; Critical vulns Infosec In Brief Nearly half the citizens of France have had their data exposed in a massive security breach at two third-party healthcare payment servicers, the French data privacy watchdog disclosed last week....

Second test flight for failed H3 booster after a run of bad luck Japan will on Wednesday try to reboot its space program with a second test flight for its H3 booster....

San Franciscans turn on empty robotaxi without apparent motive An angry mob has destroyed a Waymo self-driving taxi in San Francisco....

Rushed law will lose criminal sanction, but debate about its utility is fierce Australia last week passed a Right To Disconnect law that forbids employers contacting workers after hours, with penalties including jail time for bosses who do the wrong thing....

PLUS: Rideshare mega-merger mooted; France raids Huawei; Mongolia plans first satellite APAC in Brief India has received 18 proposals to build chipmaking facilities under its Semicon India subsidy scheme, IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar revealed last week....

Expert Python programmers saw the most benefit GitHub Copilot has steered software engineers at the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ Bank) toward improved productivity and code quality, and the test drive was enough for the finance house to deploy the generative AI programming assistant in production workflows....

$7 trillion will buy you a helluva lotta fabs or every chip biz of consequence Opinion OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's dream of establishing a network of chip factories to fuel the growth of AI may be much, much wilder than feared....

Around The World in 84 days It is 50 years this week since Skylab's final crew departed the station after a record-setting 84 days of flight....

AI is here to stay though conversations won't necessarily replace queries Interview Web search, long dominated by Google, is in play again, at least among incumbents and entrepreneurs if not frustrated web searchers....

Some useful indicators of compromise right here More than 70,000 presumably legit websites have been hijacked and drafted into a network that crooks use to distribute malware, serve phishing pages, and share other dodgy stuff, according to researchers....

Bazaar of Bezos buries bargains, allegedly Amazon has been sued by two customers in the United States who claim the internet titan artificially inflates prices, hitting shoppers in the wallet....

Software company's claim of there being no active exploits also being questioned In disclosing yet another vulnerability in its Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA gateways, Ivanti has confused the third-party researchers who discovered it....

Code might get things wrong for patients but we must think of the corporate profits AI algorithms used to determine eligibility for US government healthcare coverage are increasingly verboten, the federal agency Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) told health insurance companies in a memo this week....

Don't want a GPU? How about some intellectual property or design help? Nvidia is reportedly putting together a business unit to peddle its intellectual property and design services to the likes of AWS, Microsoft, and Meta....

Plus: x86 processor shipments up for the first time in 2 years AMD is steadily accumulating CPU market share, according to new figures from Mercury Research, and Arm-based systems now account for more than 10 percent of PC client sales....

Designer updates, and AI assistants everywhere Like an incontinent hippo on a helter-skelter, Microsoft has flung out yet more Copilot functionality in the form of enhancements to Designer, an AI-infused image generator....

Keep your graphics cards safe, people CableMod has issued a recall for all its angled power adapters for GPU cards following reports of them overheating and posing a safety risk....

Big Tech's home turf set for law to ward against 'unsafe behavior' The State of California is proposing legislation to regulate the use of AI, including building a computing cluster to check for their safety....

Could it have more to do with browser's ever-increasing irrelevance? Opinion I know people who even today donate to the Mozilla Foundation and swear by the Firefox web browser. Their numbers are declining by the day....

A new chapter in the long saga of the 240/4 block is being written. If you want more and cheaper IPv4, maybe you should help Activists are again lobbying for more than 250 million unused IPv4 addresses to be released for use, potentially tackling the IPv4 exhaustion problem. However, the proposal has been tried and failed before, and again faces formidable opposition....

Resistance is futile, upgrades are inevitable and so is hardware margin inflation AI hype is now infecting a computer industry that just months ago was still wrestling with how best to define an AI PC. It won't come as a surprise that the biggest brands could be creating short-term customer expectations that go unfulfilled....

An orchestra of fails for the security vendor We've had to write the word "Fortinet" so often lately that we're considering making a macro just to make our lives a little easier after what the company's reps will surely agree has been a week sent from hell....

No guarantee it'll come to Windows proper, but testers can give it a poke Microsoft has confirmed that Copilot is on its way into Notepad, with a release of the application being rolled out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels on Windows 11....

That Windows 7 license is little more than a digital paperweight now Microsoft's decision to close pathways allowing Windows 7 and 8 users to upgrade to Windows 10 is still catching people out, months after the company took action....

It's not NTP. There's no way it's NTP. It was NTP Interview Back in late 2010, "Zimmie" was working in IT support for a vendor that made VPN devices and an associated operating system. He got a call on a Monday from a customer - a large specialty retailer in the US - about its VPN hardware that had stopped working over the weekend....

Meanwhile ITER's not slated to start deuterium-tritium ops until 2035 The Joint European Torus (JET) has bowed out with a final hurrah by setting a world record in energy output....

Watchdog orders a rethink in time for the next emergency UK government must figure out how to share spending data across departments after up to 59 billion ($74.4 billion) in expenditure was lost to fraud and error early in the pandemic....

This is a fine approach if you want great uptime stats. Security? Not so much On Call As Friday dawns with its promise of rebooting the working week, The Register presses the button to publish another instalment of On Call - our weekly, reader-contributed column that shares real-world tales of being flummoxed by the farces they're asked to fix....

'New era of ocean science' hoped to follow debut of billion-dollar plankton-spotter NASA has successfully launched PACE, its latest near-billion-dollar climate-monitoring satellite that will study how microscopic plankton and aerosol particles are impacted by global warming....

Finds modest savings, but isn't modest about ability to land big customers or sell AI Cloudflare has joined the ranks of hyperscalers that have delayed replacement of their hardware, telling investors it's found a way to operate its infrastructure for five years instead of four....

Reserve Bank also wants a national 2FA framework The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced on Thursday it would make its digital currency programmable, and ensure it can be exchanged when citizens are offline....

That listing for a gig that looked too good to be true may have been carrying SQL injection code Singapore-based infosec firm Group-IB has detected a group that spent the last two months of 2023 stealing personal info from websites operated by jobs boards and retailers websites across Asia....

Capitalism made communism stronger The US has gone to great lengths to stifle China's fledgling semiconductor industry and deprive it of the tools to develop AI models. Yet a newly published congressional report has found that American venture capital firms are at least partially responsible for funding the Middle Kingdom's explosive growth in these arenas....

Honor among thieves about to be put to the test The US government has placed an extra $5 million bounty on Hive ransomware gang members - its second such reward in a year. And it also comes a little over 11 months since the FBI said it had shut down the criminal organization's network....

HTTP 301 Moved Permanently Mitchell Baker announced on Thursday she's stepping down as CEO of Firefox maker Mozilla Corporation to resume her role as executive chair of the not-for-profit software house....

Say Gemini again, I dare you. I double dare you. Say Gemini one more goddamn time Google on Thursday said it is bringing Gemini Ultra - its most powerful large language model yet - to the world in the form of a rebranded subscriber-only Bard....

Never mind the court orders obtained to thwart Volt Typhoon botnet Analysis The FBI's latest PR salvo, as it fights to preserve its warrantless snooping powers on Americans via FISA Section 702, is more big talk of cyberattacks by the Chinese government....