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Distinguish tech pros from tech poseurs with this one weird trick Feature The Reg FOSS Desk, as you might imagine, gets a lot of mail from companies keen to promote their wares. How someone emails instantly betrays real techies, who probably know their stuff, from the marketing types....

IT outfit says it can't - and won't - pay the ransom demand CloudNordic has told customers to consider all of their data lost following a ransomware infection that encrypted the large Danish cloud provider's servers and "paralyzed CloudNordic completely," according to the IT outfit's online confession....

Internal memos detail discontinued Dad-joke products It turns out IBM, the elder statesman of global IT and a paragon of corporate seriousness, has a sense of humor - but the real joke may be on its customers....

Of all the spacecraft in all the orbits around the world, it slams into mine On Tuesday, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that a decade-old piece of space junk it had targeted for removal in a future space debris cleanup has been whacked by another piece of stray kit, thereby increasing the amount of trash in orbit around Earth....

x86 still gets you to where the useful action is, even on the edge Explore For years, VMware's strategy has been to run any app in any environment....

Everything in 2023 is about AI, which this silicon is said to speed South Korean chipmaker SK hynix has shipped samples of HBM3E DRAM, claiming it should be able to process 1.15 terabytes of data in a second....

And work out cheaper than top-end model Developers can now fine-tune OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo model to improve its performance on specific tasks - making it potentially more effective and cheaper to run that OpenAI's ostensibly more-advanced GPT-4 model....

SeamlessM4T seems less open source than some might wish Meta on Tuesday released a multimodal AI foundational model called SeamlessM4T that's designed for translating and transcribing speech and text....

What better time for private equity to capitalize on changing climate Weather.com is an IBM business no more. Big Blue has sold off the unit to private equity....

Credit-reporting giant disagrees with FTC, will hand over the pocket change to make Feds go away Experian has agreed to cough up $650,000 after being accused of spamming people with no opt-out button....

One might say this program is truly up in the air Things haven't gone to plan exactly for the US military's latest warfighting satellite constellation, but that hasn't stopped the Department of Defense from shelling out more than a billion dollars to build more hardware for the up-in-the-skies project....

Snakes on a dataframe Microsoft has added support for running Python code from within Excel, bringing the world's most popular programming language, by some measures, to the world's most popular spreadsheet....

Folks in the Z mainframe game can have a play soon... if they dare IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java as part of application modernization efforts....

If advertisers weren't happy before, this is sure to win them over Elon Musk's seemingly arbitrary decision making was on display over the past few days at the site formerly known as Twitter, most recently in the billionaire's decree that X will strip titles and text from links on the platform, leaving only a lead image behind....

US Air Force keeping mum on results of weekend test A deal's a deal. Despite canning Lockheed Martin's hypersonic weapon program over repeat failures, the US Air Force is still flying planned tests of the platform - including one over the weekend that the Air Force isn't giving many details on....

More of the same is the name of the game, across clouds and app-taming Explore VMware has kicked off its annual Explore conference with a series of announcements that advance its core strategy of using virtualized compute, storage, and networks to allow workloads to run with consistent security wherever their owners choose to have them execute....

Titan Global Capital Management to pay $1m to those it advised without admitting fault A New York fintech biz is set to pay $1 million in fines under a US Securities and Exchange Commission order that claims it advertised "annualized" returns on Titan Crypto of up to 2,700 percent, a number based on a "purely hypothetical account."...

Alienating FOSS community and some employees? Web-based collaboration biz delights shareholders In between upsetting some in the open source community and its own workforce, Zoom managed to crank out a set of financials that show it might be more than just a web conferencing flash in the pan....

Latest revision takes inspiration from TypeScript, Python, and GraphQL Fauna, which offers a distributed document-relational database service, on Tuesday introduced a new version of its Fauna Query Language, promising a better developer experience with less database code....

Students prove $30 device could help declutter Earth's backyard A prototype satellite built to test a deployable drag sail to de-orbit satellites appears to have fulfilled its purpose, burning up on re-entry earlier this month after spending just 445 days in orbit....

All to appease the UK's competition watchdog, the last hurdle to the deal Microsoft so desperately wants its $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard to happen that it's willing to divest cloud streaming rights for the publisher's games to France's Ubisoft....

'We built this thing and now you don't want to hear from us - WTF?' is the gist of it The United Nations' proposed Global Digital Compact will exclude technical experts as a distinct voice in internet governance, ignoring their enormous contributions to growing and sustaining the internet, according to ICANN and two of the world's regional internet registries....

Cupertino appears to be blase about long-standing macOS bug, so coder has blabbed Apple last year introduced a security feature called App Management that's designed to prevent one application from modifying another without authorization under macOS Ventura - but a developer claims it's not very good at its job under some circumstances....

Assuming the orbital hotel is even built by then The first group of astronauts to set foot into NASA's Moon-orbiting Gateway space station will be the Artemis IV crew in 2028, if everything goes as planned....

For dropping stuff in remote locations. Just don't mention the war in Ukraine, where DJI kit repeatedly appeared Chinese drone-maker DJI, the subject of US sanctions, has released its first consumer cargo carrying drone - the FlyCart 30....

The last one splashed down badly, but this is no laughing matter - Japan's PM thinks it could be a missile North Korea intends to launch another "satellite" in coming days, and its neighbors - and the world - are worried....

ISPs in 22 states and Marshall Islands get to split nine-figure pot The Biden administration is ready to divvy up nearly $700 million more in funding for rural broadband expansion, with the US Department of Agriculture taking the helm to disburse the cash....

And by kinda, Idaho fab giant means absolutely 'necessary' for the plants it already announced Micron has advised investors that federal grants and other tax incentives are necessary" for development of its already-announced chip fabs in Idaho and New York....

Good thing you're not exposing admin port 8443 to the world, right? Uh, right? A critical authentication bypass bug in MobileIron Sentry has been exploited in the wild, its maker Ivanti said in an advisory on Monday....

Paperwork confirms parent paid $16B for 25% stake held by Vision Fund Arm on Monday publicly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq stock market, under the ticker ARM....

NB: That will involve handing over your selfies and other personal info to AI outfits to experiment with The US government hopes to add face-based logins to .gov websites - though first it wants to check whether this technology is as biased or unreliable as experts warn....

If spies aren't swiping designs via joint ventures, they're breaking into IT networks and mulling sat hijackings With America outspending the rest of the world on space technologies, those systems and their blueprints are a highly alluring and lucrative target for sticky-fingered spies, Uncle Sam has reminded industry....

Trade org board members petitioning Uncle Sam are who's who of Big Tech Eight US tech-related trade associations penned a letter last week to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and trade ambassador Katherine Tai to oppose India's new import licensing requirement for PCs and other tech kit....

Pioneer of hidden-line removal, co-inventor of Postscript and PDF, author of Illustrator, and charitable benefactor Obit As the creator or co-creator of much of the technology that made Apple's Macintosh and modern computer graphics in general a success, John Warnock's impact is beyond reckoning....

Provides complete security by not letting anyone login Updated Cisco-owned access management firm Duo Security has been unable to give customers access to their own IT systems due to an outage that began on Monday morning....

'A Recent Entrance to Paradise' lost Copyright issues have dogged AI since chatbot tech gained mass appeal, whether it's accusations of entire novels being scraped to train ChatGPT or allegations that Microsoft and GitHub's Copilot is pilfering code....

Identity Access Management? What's that? Insiders are to blame for a May data breach at Tesla, the company claimed in filings after news of the incident was reported months ago by German media....

Middle Kingdom has made a habit of scuppering western mergers of late After all the drama, the UK's competition regulator has given chipmaker Broadcom its unconditional blessing to acquire VMware. However, the merger can still not be considered done and dusted as it faces a potential roadblock from China....

Hold onto your hats people, Lenovo to invest $1B in AI as hardware sales falter Lenovo has hired an experienced executive with financial, M&A and AI chops following a year of declining revenues amid continued efforts to reduce its over-reliance on the struggling PC market....

50% chop effective 'immediately' as department investigates traffic and safety issues Updated San Francisco Bay Area techies who want to hail a driverless Cruise robo-taxi have fewer to pick from after officials said it must reduce its fleet "immediately" in the wake of several incidents, just a day after a collision between an emergency vehicle and an AV on Thursday night....

Update now: Millions of users potentially impacted, plus uncounted warez folks Users of the popular WinRAR compression and archiving tool should update now to avoid a vulnerability that allows code to be run when a user opens a RAR file....

Plus: Bing AI hasn't helped Microsoft eat into Google Search, and more AI in brief OpenAI has acquired its first company, Global Illumination, creators of an online role-playing game that has been compared to Minecraft....

Silicon joins Amazon's homegrown Gravitons, Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeons AMD's fourth-gen Eypc processors have arrived on Amazon Web Services in your choice of general-purpose and high-performance compute (HPC) tasks....

Debian Bookworm without the controversial init - or the platform support, or the polish Devuan 5.0 "Daedalus" is derived from Debian 12 "Bookworm", but with the controversial systemdinit replaced by the user's choice of sysvinit, openrc or runit....

Snoopers Charter: Dead cows don't snitch Opinion Information wants to be free. This usefully ambiguous battle cry has been the mischievous slogan of hackers since early networking thinker Stuart Brand coined it in the early 1980s. Intended as part of a discussion about the inherent contradictions of intellectual property, it has bestowed irony in many other places since....

Quest for redundant cables almost resulted in a redundant techie Who, Me? Ah, dear reader, yet again it is Monday, arriving with the same relentless regularity that has made it the bane of human workers and cartoon cats since time immemorial - or at least the early 1900s. But fear not, for The Reg is here to ease your passage into the working week with another instalment of Who, Me? in which we cushion the arrival of the working week with tales of the working weak....

Inflated expectations and an underdeveloped ecosystem have led to consumer disappointment SK Telecom, South Korea's dominant mobile carrier and sibling of chipmaker SK hynix, has declared that 5G was over-hyped, has under-delivered, and has failed to deliver a killer app....

They've also thought of the children, and the poor SMEs trying to stay secure The G20 bloc's ministers responsible for the digital economy met in India on Saturday and proposed something interesting: a Framework for Systems of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)....

ALSO: NYC says kthxbye to TikTok, slain Microsoft exec's wife indicted, and some ASAP patch warnings Infosec in brief Someone at Microsoft has some explaining to do after a messed up DNS record caused emails sent from Hotmail accounts using Microsoft's Outlook service to be rejected and directed to spam folders starting on Thursday....

PLUS: Lucasfilm quits Singapore Sandcrawler'; China criticizes India's tech push; Red Apple celebrates 30 years in China Asia In Brief Tencent's chief strategy officer James Mitchell has told investors the Chinese web giant's hyperscale cloud operation is bullish on its AI-models-as-a-service (MaaS) business because customers will find migration away from it hard....