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Fake it (with a neural network) until you make it YouTube is experimenting with software that generates music using an AI model called Lyria built by Google DeepMind....

Absence of arrests doesn't mean nothing's happening, cyber-cops insist The FBI is applying "significant" resources to find members of the infamous Scattered Spider cyber-crime crew, which seemingly attacked a couple of high-profile casinos a few months ago and remains active, according to a senior bureau official....

If IT giant loses this lawsuit, it might just upset every plan in America HP Inc has been accused of improperly using funds set aside for retired workers....

Now that's the kind of current affairs we're into The Biden administration is splurging $3.5 billion to recharge the American battery industry and increase its manufacturing output, with the Department of Energy handing out the cash....

And that's not counting the incoming lawsuits. Thank goodness for insurance, eh? Rackspace's costs from last year's ransomware infection continue to mount. The cloud hosting biz has told America's financial watchdog, the SEC, its total expenses to date regarding that cyberattack have now reached about $11 million, though insurance has helped cover half of that....

A 'win' for Windows or just another pane in the glass? Ignite Microsoft is teasing a Windows App that provides a home screen for users of its cloud and remote PC services....

'Hello, our records indicate that you had an accident with a massively overhyped technology that wasn't your fault...' The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tightening the rules protecting cellular network users and has kicked off an effort to understand the impact of AI on robocalls and robotexts....

Export curbs strike again and stock prices come tumbling down The US government's unrelenting efforts to prevent China from accessing advanced chips or chipmaking equipment has scored another victim after Alibaba said the scheduled IPO of its cloud division is off due to the impact of CPU export curbs....

Yes, it's true, not everyone uses Azure - shock Ignite As far as Microsoft is concerned, AI is to be inescapable for its customers - even those who want to keep their software development and deployment confined to the PCs in front of them and their users. Welcome to the Windows AI Studio....

Final mission to space station revolutionized orbital labor management It's been 50 years since the final Skylab crew launched and docked with America's first space station for an eventful 84 days in space....

Wild idea: Maybe Microsoft could introduce a Quality Copilot to stop pushing broken patches Something likely to be absent from Microsoft's Ignite event is talk of a fix rolled out to deal with malfunctioning Windows Server 2022 Virtual Machines following a problematic update from the company....

Ads for Slack and Cisco AnyConnect actually downloaded Nitrogen malware Affiliates of the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware-as-a-service operation are turning to malvertising campaigns to establish an initial foothold in their victims' systems....

Mega startup serves slice of GenAI with data engineering main as it tries to upstage Microsoft's Fabric showpiece Databricks has decided to launch a complete overhaul of its platform during the climax of Ignite, the global tech shindig run by Microsoft, the software giant with which the data analytics and ML vendor shares a significant partnership....

Jet-setting to a greener future? Japan Airlines is looking into the feasibility of using hydrogen-electric engines to power aircraft in future, and is working with three engineering outfits to study issues such as safety and maintainability....

First time hard figure given on recovery costs for January incident Royal Mail's parent company has revealed for the first time the infrastructure costs associated with its January ransomware attack....

Supersonic hot gas not that awesome for rocky, dusty surface NASA researchers have developed tools to simulate how rocket engines disrupt the lunar surface in light of plans for newer and larger landers as part of missions to return to the Moon....

As Ubuntu approaches its 20th anniversary, some more of its pieces may be Snapping together Canonical hosted an amusingly failure-filled demo of its new easy-to-install, Ubuntu-powered tool for building small-to-medium scale, on-premises high-availability clusters, Microcloud, at an event in London yesterday....

Calls biz rival 'un-American' for weaving around chip export ban SC23 Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman has criticized Nvidia for its efforts to limbo dance under US semiconductor export limits to China, calling the behavior "un-American" and likening graphics processor titan to an AI arms dealer....

Sneakernet for the stars? Scientists have revealed how data from a NASA telescope was secured thanks to creative thinking and a batch of Raspberry Pi computers....

Dead spin is a dangerous orbital dance that can be stopped with magnets and friction, apparently Airbus has developed a completely mechanical solution to help make space junk easier to capture - using magnets, the Earth's magnetic field and a bit of friction....

'The industry can not be allowed to put elected leaders, military personnel at risk' Online ad auctions represent a threat to national security in the US and Europe, a civil rights group claims, because the data that enables personalized advertising could be used to compromise civilian and military leaders....

Supply chain is back to pre-COVID normal, just in time for big clouds to spend $1 billion on networks for AI Would you please hurry up and build your network?...

No turning back for cash replacement tokens, especially if they make credit more accessible The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) urged the application of AI technology to speed along the maturity and accelerate adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in a speech in Singapore on Wednesday....

Linked to org that UK authorities found once failed its anti-money-laundering obligations Swedish digital rights organization Qurium has discovered around 250 cloned websites and suggested they exist to drive people to China-linked gambling sites....

Refuses to sing from the corporate songbook on the legal grounds for training neural nets on people's work The VP of audio at Stability AI has decided his position at the content-generating startup is untenable, given his belief in protecting artists' copyrights and his now-former employer's stance that training machine-learning models on copyrighted material is legally OK....

Plus: Ransomware crooks file SEC complaint against victim The Clorox Company's chief security officer has left her job in the wake of a corporate network breach that cost the manufacturer hundreds of millions of dollars....

Big Tech's toys have privacy problems. Why not buy utterly unconnected dead-tree books instead? Mozilla has slapped its "Privacy Not Included" labels on several products from Google, Amazon and Microsoft - just in time for Christmas shopping....

Facebook: If only we had a national law to ensure kids get parental permission to indulge in damaging social media Meta, which stands accused in multiple lawsuits of ignoring the mental health toll its services have taken on teens and children, is finally calling for change - on the part of Apple and Google....

Roadblocks ahead as external watchdog hired for full audit of self-driving biz Cruise is temporarily halting supervised and manual operations of its autonomous vehicles in the US and is hiring an outsider to assess the technology and safety risks of its computer-controlled cars....

Why shouldn't you be able to fix your own kit? Clue: Profit is involved iFixit and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) have teamed up to go straight to the US Federal Trade Commission with a rulemaking petition urging it to implement national right-to-repair rules....

Fabric update cuts against the grain, and may have more to do with Databricks partnerships Ignite Microsoft is advising customers using its Fabric platform to copy data from other data warehouses and analytics systems in a move against the prevailing industry trend....

Exploits come with caveats, but Google says no fixes as user security should do the heavy lifting here Novel weaknesses in Google Workspace have been exposed by researchers, with exploits potentially leading to ransomware attacks, data exfiltration, and password decryption....

Bing Chat is now known as - you can guess. Plus more AI bits and pieces coming to Teams, Office, etc Ignite Microsoft continues to push its Copilot concept onto users and shoehorn the technology into every crevice of the Windows giant line-up and others via Copilot Studio....

If only there was an investor with a scalable cloud to hand... Users ready to part with cold, hard cash for OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus service will no doubt be disappointed to learn that sign-ups are being paused following what's claimed to be a surge in demand....

Time for eBay jockeys to ready their watchlists for second-hand clunkers Tesla's threats to sue Cybertruck buyers who resell their vehicles appear to be nothing but hot air, with the language removed from the Musk-owned automaker's terms and conditions just days after it appeared....

We know who's been naughty and who's been nice, says box-shifting-cum-cloud-computing biz Amazon is warning employees they risk undermining their own promotion prospects unless they return to the office (RTO) for three days a week, as was mandated by CEO Andy Jassy months ago....

Semiconductors are a dirty business Intel has published proposals to tackle its environmental impact, largely focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and moving to renewable energy, but gave less attention to water usage and the harsh chemicals involved in chipmaking....

War of words escalates as deadline draws near FBI director Christopher Wray made yet another impassioned plea to US lawmakers to kill a proposed warrant requirement for so-called "US person queries" of data collected via the Feds' favorite snooping tool, FISA Section 702....

The Hat adds tool to facilitate migration from various free RHEL-a-like distros The latest version of Red Hat's flagship distro appeared last week, closely followed by Alma Linux 9.3. RHEL 8.9 is coming soon - and presumably, so is Rocky Linux 9.3....

One that Microsoft and Meta dodged during House of Lords committee In the UK's Parliament this week, Microsoft and Meta ducked the question of whether creators should be paid when their copyrighted material is used to train large language models....

Plus: US execs line up to dine with President Xi US bans on exports of advanced chipmaking equipment to China are not working, according to a report from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission....

Ruh-roh, where did the aircon go? Some drivers of American electric vehicle brand Rivian found themselves on an unexpectedly silent ride at unknown speeds after infotainment and instrument systems failed this week....

Nic Cage? Rami Malek? Or maybe Donald Duck? You decide... A biopic of Elon Musk is in the works, with Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of the controversial figure serving as the source. But who should step into Musk's shoes? Only The Register readership can advise....

Trying times for incident responders who battle fastest-ever ransomware blitz as attackers keep scrubbing evidence clean Organizations are still failing to implement adequate logging measures, increasing the difficulty faced by defenders and incident responders to identify the cause of infosec attacks....

... Even its creators say it ain't 'a replacement for traditional forecasting methods' Google DeepMind claims its latest AI model is capable of generating ten-day weather forecasts in under a minute and is just as accurate as traditional predictive models running on supercomputers....

Talking back to devices will end the confusion caused by long menus of functions nobody uses Comment A fortnight ago my Apple Watch automatically updated to WatchOS 10 and ever since it's taken me twice as many taps to perform basic tasks like telling the device to stop tracking exercise sessions....

Might be great for the datacenter, but not likely to be in EVs anytime soon Japanese battery maker FDK reckons a major improvement in its Ni-Zn battery has proven its durability enough to deem it practical for use as an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)....

Post-acute care algorithm allegedly comes up short 90% of the time UnitedHealthcare has been sued in Minnesota for allegedly denying healthcare claims based on a faulty AI model....

Plus: VMware closes critical hole, Adobe fixes a whopping 76 flaws Patch Tuesday Heads up: Microsoft's November Patch Tuesday includes fixes for about 60 vulnerabilities - including three that have already been found and abused in the wild....

23K nodes earned operator more than $500K - and now perhaps jail time The FBI says it has dismantled another botnet after collaring its operator, who admitted hijacking tens of thousands of machines around the world to create his network of obedient nodes....