The Register

The 1990s are back, baby Microsoft plans to make web links in the Outlook for Windows app and Teams open by default in its Edge browser, regardless of the default browser chosen in Windows Settings.…

NewsGuard finds 49 websites spewing robo-written garbage to scoop ad money Makers of the content rating tool NewsGuard warned on Monday that "a new generation of content farms is on the way" after it found 49 news sites publishing content that appears to be completely fabricated by AI.…

'Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary' Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in machine learning who is best-known for his research of neural networks, has resigned from Google to speak freely about the dangers of AI.…

You want this to go faster? OK, send in the contractors. That'll do the trick The US government's hypersonic weapons programs may have been lagging behind international rivals, but at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, there's a plan to accelerate the process by opening its doors to hundreds of contractors who've previously not been allowed inside the secure facility. What could possibly go wrong?…

Gee, you mean that surge to 800,000 applications in one year isn't entirely legit? Shocking The US has seen a surge in employers making multiple H-1B visa registrations to bring skilled foreign workers into the country, a trend that authorities fear reflects rising immigration fraud.…

Qualcomm acquisition dodges one bullet, Arm still coming for blood Apple has abandoned its lawsuit against its former chief chip architect Gerard Williams, just over three years after accusing him of breaching his contract to found Arm-compatible chipmaker Nuvia.…

Patient data 'was and is never endangered', says medical tech slinger German IT services provider Bitmarck has shut down all of its customer and internal systems, including entire datacenters in some cases, following a cyberattack. …

But don't toss out your silicon chips quite yet Talk about branching out: Swedish researchers have built what they claim is the world's first wooden transistor.…

Security posture management gets its due at RSA RSA Conference When talking about the idea behind security posture management in today's enterprises, Yotam Segev looks a few hundred years into the past.…

Ashlee Vance's When the Heavens Went on Sale paints an inside view of orbital startups Book review First, a disclaimer: Ashlee Vance worked for The Register in the early noughties. But he's also the chap who literally wrote the book on Elon Musk and has a new tome on the private space industry, When the Heavens Went on Sale, that's definitely food for thought.…

Also: Your Salesforce Community site might be leaking; a new CPU side-channel; and this week's critical vunls in brief You may have heard news this week that Google is finally updating its authenticator app to add Google account synchronization. Before you rush to ensure your two-factor secrets are safe in the event you lose your device, take heed: The sync process isn't end-to-end encrypted.…

Industry groups and biz aren't yet sold on reforms The European Commission late last week proposed rules governing patents on technical standards, ostensibly to ensure innovation, competition, and fair prices.…

There are pranks, and savage pranks, and this prank when the CTO and HR ganged up on a very stressed techie Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we call Who, Me? in which Reg readers can confess to the naughty or not-quite-competent things they did at work, knowing they will not be judged.…

Game benchmark suggests 'Ultra 5' could replace names like 'Core i5' Poll When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, it could be the end of the chip giant's long-standing naming conventions for desktop and mobile processors.…

Watch the AI-generated anti-Biden advert from the GOP, and more In-brief European lawmakers recently added a clause to the AI Act – legislation proposed to regulate machine learning systems – requiring AI developers to disclose copyrighted data used to train their models.…

Japanese owner states float 'won’t have material impact,' suggesting small stake will be up for grabs Arm has secretly filed for a public listing that its owner, SoftBank, says will see the chip design firm remain a subsidiary.…

Combatting it is going to take more money. Lots of more money. China has 50 hackers for every one of the FBI's cyber-centric agents, the Bureau's director told a congressional committee last week.…

AWS adds Korean support; Singtel creates InfraCo; Philippines SIM registration drive extended Asia In Brief China's Zhurong rover may have succumbed to dusty solar panels, but while the robot explorer was operational it found potential evidence of water on Mars.…

Luckily CrowdStrike's CSO has a brighter outlook than we vultures RSA Conference The RSA Conference this year had a decidedly Black-Mirror-meets-modern-warfare feel to it, with AI permeating almost every session, and conversations about geopolitical threats happening as frequently as plans to meet for cocktails.…

Reg-turned-Bloomberg journo talks rockets, satellites, and more Interview Bloomberg journalist and former Register vulture Ashlee Vance has finished a five-year in-depth investigation into Earth's potentially multi-trillion-dollar private space industry, which will be published in the form of his upcoming book: When The Heavens Went On Sale.…

Time to shake, rattle, and roll the probe to remove pesky antenna pin A tiny pin stuck in place on ESA's Juice spacecraft may be preventing engineers from unfurling its 16-metre-long antenna as it zooms toward Jupiter.…

Joint site to produce low-power chips GlobalFoundries and STMicroelectronics will receive billions of euros in European funding to build a chip factory in Crolles, France.…

Rapid7 CSO Jaya Baloo on how to tackle this potential looming tech RSA Conference AI was all the rage at RSA Conference this year, though there was another tech buzzword that managed to make its presence felt: quantum computing, and the security threat those systems may or may not someday pose.…

Not today, AI RSA Conference Crooks are becoming more and more adept at using social engineering to hoodwink corporate executives into unwittingly helping the fiends break into organizations' networks — and it's not because the miscreants are using ChatGPT, according to folks at Kaspersky.…

Redmond ditches own line of mice, keyboards, webcams Microsoft is a brand synonymous with PCs, not just for its market-dominating Windows operating system, but also for the mice and keyboards we've used to interact with them over the past four decades.…

'Reject this capitalist logic' urges French legion within Linux slinger Exclusive Red Hat's decision to lay off around 800 people, or four percent of the company, has not only upset employees, it's fueled calls to unionize.…

Go on, Elon, tweet a meme, that'll straighten this all out Tesla broke US labor laws yet again, a watchdog concluded, this time not by suppressing labor organizing, but by prohibiting workplace discussion of wages and complaints, and blocking employees from appealing to higher-level managers. …

The Chinese tech giant has 'yet again increased investment in R&D' to make up for technology losses The first quarter of 2023 wasn't an easy one for Chinese tech giant Huawei, which saw its profits continue to plunge in the face of sanctions with sales largely stagnant, growing just 0.8 percent compared to the same quarter last year.…

Shift off to Win 11 now, go on... better hope your biz is giving out fresh hardware Windows 10 is reaching the end of the road, with the current release – version 22H2 – confirmed as the final one, and support for the platform is scheduled to end on October 14, 2025.…

Managed offerings now work in tandem to crunch data where it resides Two SaaS products targeting open source data management and analytics technologies have joined forces in a move hoped to attract users who wish to model and manage data for crunching.…

Average employee got $199k, changes afoot to exec compensation Salesforce founder, CEO, and chairman Marc Benioff received a compensation package valued at almost $30 million in its most recent financial year, the one in which it chopped ten percent of the workforce.…

World's encyclopedia warns draft law could boot it offline in UK Wikipedia won't be age-gating its services no matter what final form the UK's Online Safety Bill takes, two senior folks from nonprofit steward the Wikimedia Foundation said this morning.…

Cloud is 'SERIOUSLY expensive' Reg reader complains Fears over stalling cloud services growth have hit Amazon’s share price, despite the company beating Wall Street estimates in its latest results. Microsoft and Google likewise showed better than expected cloud profit and loss accounts, perhaps indicating that such concerns are misplaced.…

Boffins devise query language for LLMs to make them more civil and less expensive Scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland believe one way to make large language models (LLMs) more affordable, and perhaps a bit more safe, is not to address them directly in a natural language like English.…

Motorola's contract departure draws question mark over future of ESN The UK's police, fire, and ambulance services are scrambling for solutions amid an uncertain wait for the Emergency Services Network (ESN) following Motorola's departure from a £400 million ($498 million) contract.…

Generative AI hallucinations are the least of our problems Opinion A year ago, AI was big news… if you were a data science geek or deeply concerned with protein folding. Otherwise? Not so much. But, then along came generative AI, you know it as ChatGPT, and now everybody is psyched about AI. It's going to transform the world! It's going to destroy all "creative" jobs. Don't get so excited yet sparky! Let me re-introduce you to an ancient tech phrase: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO).…

As bizarre tales of tech support go, this may be the GOAT On Call Many a middle aged man knows that hair today is gone tomorrow, but every Friday you can count on The Register bringing you a new instalment of On-Call, our reader-contributed tales of tech support tasks that required tact in the face of trying truculence.…

It's got an onboard Arduino Leonardo, too If the idea of cramming a 44W Intel Raptor Lake laptop processor into a system the size of your palm appeals to you, LattePanda's newly launched Sigma single board computer (SBC) might be worth a look.…

Windows Phone did this ages ago but flopped Folks who use both Windows 11 and an iPhone will soon be able to get calls, receive notifications, and see iMessages pop up on their PCs, after Microsoft revealed plans to add iOS support to its Phone Link software.…

CEO Gelsinger insists plan to grow a whopping foundry business will pay off Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has defended the company's plan to become a chipmaker for hire after the company's profits plunged 134 percent year over year and it recorded a $2.8 billion loss during the first quarter of 2023.…

Three minutes of video, 100 sentences of speech, and 24 hours gets you a bot to front your livestreams and answer questions Tencent Cloud has announced it's offering a digital human production platform – essentially Deepfakes-as-a-Service (DFaaS).…

As local usage slips despite annual call to do better China has again signalled its intention to shape IPv6 standards and encourage more uptake of the standards within its borders – but may not have succeeded with its past ambitions.…

Lessons learned from the front-line responders RSA Conference After something really bad happens on a company's network – say, a SolarWinds or Log4J-esque supply-chain attack – comes the chatter among infosec friends. Usually before anyone knows the scope or even the details. …

Hands off those Chrome users, they're ours! Google said it obtained a court order to shut down domains used to distribute CryptBot after suing the distributors of the info-stealing malware.…

We've progressed from blaming this kinda thing on millennials, immigrants, China, woke libs, etc Dropbox axed 500 employees, or 16 per cent of its workforce, on Thursday as the online storage biz pivots to AI amid slowing growth.…

Now that's a C change we can back Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers.…

Tycoon hopes to swerve deposition in Tesla death crash lawsuit Tesla CEO Elon Musk may face a deposition in a civil lawsuit over a death allegedly caused by Autopilot – after a judge rejected arguments made by the billionaire's lawyers.…

Ahead of planned IPO, parent company moves executive pawn into place SoftBank has nominated Arm CEO Rene Haas to be appointed to its board of directors, in another sign the Japanese tech investment holding biz is planning to keep the chip designer under its influence after the IPO.…

By redirecting energy from probe's voltage regulator, NASA buys itself another three years NASA boffins seeking a way to postpone instrument shutdowns on the venerable Voyager spacecrafts have worked out a solution they say will get another three years of power to Voyager 2's five remaining scientific tools.…

'It is a tough day across our organization,' says memo from AWS boss Amazon is in cost-cutting mode in both its retail and cloud arm, with layoff memos surfacing in HR and AWS, and the company ditching Halo fitness gear as the Book Depository subsidiary closes its covers for good.…