The Register

Plus: Substack shanked by bitter Twitter? The chunk of internal source code Twitter released the other week contains a "shadow ban" vulnerability serious enough to earn its own CVE, as it can be exploited to bury someone's account of sight "without recourse."…

Thanks.dev wants to spread the wealth directly to coders In 2016, the Ford Foundation published a report on the lack of financial support for public source code and there's still a massive funding gap, but a new scheme may sort that out.…

The Reg speaks to one of the founders of the Talos Ukraine task force Interview Leading up to Russia's invasion of its neighboring country, Cisco's Talos Intelligence Group established a dedicated cybersecurity-threat-hunting unit on the ground in Ukraine to protect people and critical infrastructure in the war zone.…

OpenAI and Stripe snaffled a lot of what cash was dished out, or so this report claims Year-over-year global VC funding dropped precipitously in Q1 2023, with at least $76 billion (£61 billion) doled out to companies at all startup stages. That may sound like a lot but it's a 53 percent drop from the same time last year, reports funding tracker Crunchbase.…

Awoogah, awooooogah, new policy coming for developers Developers creating Android applications for the Google Play store will need to make it easy for users to delete their app accounts and associated data, though not for a while yet.…

Netizens urged to disconnect kit after 40,000-plus devices found riddled with dumb bugs A handful of bugs in Nexx's smart home devices can be exploited by crooks to, among other things, open doors, power off appliances, and disable alarms. More than 40,000 of these gadgets in residential and commercial properties are said to be vulnerable after the manufacturer failed to act.…

Service level agreement should really specify services, not just arrivals On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tales of futile and furtive tech support chores.…

WPA stands for will-provide-access, if you can successfully exploit a target's setup A vulnerability identified in at least 55 Wi-Fi router models can be exploited by miscreants to spy on victims' data as it's sent over a wireless network.…

'CORVO' ships with tape and glue, gives defense orgs just-in-time drone capability for a song An Australian engineering company has created a cardboard drone that runs on open source software, standard hardware, and can be assembled and flown with no prior experience.…

I feel the need, the need for code speed The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is recommending the Pentagon respond better to evolving threats, such as speeding up software modernization by using agile dev practices.…

Efforts under way to keep satellites and other craft safe from military threats Russia's invasion of Ukraine clearly defined how warfare going forward will look – a mix of the horrors of conventional fighting on the ground and the more hidden though ferocious battle in cyberspace.…

Which means you may suddenly hit a 5GB limit rather than 15GB Some users of Microsoft's free Outlook hosted service are finding they can no longer send or receive emails because of how the Windows giant now calculates the storage of attachments.…

Prelim Q1 2023 results expected to be company's worst in 14 years Samsung has inked a multi-year agreement with AMD for more Radeon graphics in its Exynos mobile processors, just ahead of reporting quarterly financials that analysts expect will show a steep fall in profit on the back of weakened demand for semiconductors.…

A seventh branch of the military is needed to address rising threats Analysis There is a growing push inside and outside of Washington DC for a new branch within the military dedicated to cybersecurity, with proponents citing the need to protect against growing threats from China, Russia, and other nation states to American national security.…

Report says code has improved – and thousands could still end up falsely ID'd, argue privacy advocates Police in the UK are preparing to reintroduce real-time facial recognition technology after a report found the latest versions of software used by law enforcement have improved accuracy and have fewer false positives.…

While we're just here for De Beers The secret to unlocking the full potential of quantum networking may be hiding at the center of a diamond, according to Amazon Web Services. This week, AWS popped the question to De Beers subsidiary Element Six in the hope of finding it.…

Wrecking foreign infrastructure? But that's Team America's job! Register Kettle Lately, we've learned of Russia's stockpile of cyber-weapons, and we're genuinely wondering if anyone's surprised by these revelations.…

Promises 11% pay rise after almost a year of negotiations and strikes over salary and conditions Amid rampant inflation, spiraling costs and stagnant wages, there was little bandwidth for April Fools' this year when every day can feel like a bad joke.…

It starts with a headlamp and fake smart speaker, and ends in an injection attack and a vanished motor Automotive security experts say they have uncovered a method of car theft relying on direct access to the vehicle's system bus via a smart headlamp's wiring.…

CMA initiates price cap amid spiraling costs, Motorola Solutions to appeal The price cap Britain's competition regulator imposed on Motorola's Airwave Solutions, whose tech provides comms between emergency services across the nation, could save taxpayers more than £1 billion by the time the successor is ready.…

ACRO says payment data safe, other info may have been snaffled ACRO, the UK's criminal records office, is combing over a "cyber security incident" that forced it to pull its customer portal offline.…

Luxury cars and designer duds don't seem very prince of thieves Spanish cops have arrested a 19-year-old suspected of stealing records belonging to half a million taxpayers and developing a database to sell stolen information to other cyber criminals.…

Even destroyed spare parts, then may have rubbed salt into the wound by filing for tax write-offs Cisco destroyed caches of spare parts, and even wrecked its own offices, when international sanctions on Russia saw it quit the country in June 2022.…

Well that didn't take long, now did it? Less than three weeks after Samsung lifted a ban on employees using ChatGPT, the chaebol has reportedly leaked its own secrets at least three times – including sensitive in-development semiconductor information.…

Also clambers aboard the RISC-V bandwagon India's government has decided not to regulate the growth of artificial intelligence in the country, after deciding that policy settings from 2018 don't need to be revisited.…

DaaS is SaaS, so expect constant change that makes numbers moot Microsoft has offered guidance for those trying to benchmark cloud PCs: don't bother.…

And Nvidia's having none of Big G's claims of superiority Google on Wednesday revealed more details of its fourth-generation Tensor Processing Unit chip (TPU v4), claiming that its silicon is faster and uses less power than Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU.…

Chatbot's overseers accused of collecting, using, disclosing personal info without consent The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating OpenAI's generative language app ChatGPT after the watchdog received a complaint claiming the software was collecting, using, and disclosing personal information without consent.…

Tributes paid to former Square CTO Bob Lee, 43 Tech exec Bob Lee has died after he was discovered stabbed in San Francisco in the early hours of Tuesday.…

Metaverse was plan A, is this plan B or C, or what? Meta is building a generative AI system capable of churning out online ads to order and will charge businesses to use it, according to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.…

Feds managed to image entire backend server with full details The FBI today released additional information about its takedown of the Genesis Market, a major online shop for stolen account access credentials, revealing that they'd pwned the marketplace for at least two years.…

How much, you ask? The answer to everything is $0.42 Boffins at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have enlisted ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot that responds to written instructions, to repair software bugs without breaking the bank.…

And commercial operators, with NASA a keen customer The US government has published a strategy for low-Earth orbit research and development, anticipating a transition from the International Space Station (ISS) to the use of private sector successors and investigating approaches to address the threat of orbital debris.…

Germany alleges systemic moderation failure, more vendors sue over unpaid bills, and a new WARN Act suit Twitter is facing a trio of legal challenges this week: German officials are going after the platform for not adequately handling user complaints, four vendors sued over unpaid bills, and another group of laid-off employees claim they were terminated without proper notice.…

Doug Beck definitely won't be transforming the US military into the iArmy, right? The US Defense Department is getting a shiny new director for its Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in the shape of Apple exec Doug Beck.…

Fewer newly funded startups too, according to report Global private investment and the number of AI startups decreased in 2022, while the industry's adoption of the technology has plateaued compared to previous years, according to new data.…

Prime real estate in England's capital after making 10,000 job cuts? Not a good look Microsoft has called off the search for a swanky 500,000 sq ft office in the heart of England's capital amid a cost-cutting drive that has seen thousands of employees forced out.…

As much as 80% in the hands of three companies – you can guess which UK communications regulator Ofcom is to refer the domestic cloud market to the government's competition watchdog over concerns that dominance by the big players may be limiting competition.…

Though he never said he went through with the idea to 'make a scrapbook' How does Sundar Pichai – Google CEO, engineer, dreamweaver – think users could squeeze the most out of the company's Bard "experiment"? Well, he asked the AI chatbot to come up with ideas for his father's 80th birthday party.…

Delays to OECD plan means interim fix could be found wanting Britain's parliamentary spending watchdog has warned that tech giants are set to "circumvent" the government's digital tax regime despite what appeared to be a successful introduction.…

And you wouldn't want that ... would you? Microsoft is updating a service introduced last year that shifts the responsibility of patching Windows devices from IT admins to the vendor itself.…

That means more space and less energy consumption Big iron is not always beautiful. Just ask IBM, which has updated its z16 mainframe and lifted the covers off a shiny new LinuxONE 4, both of which are built for rack mount and single frame configurations.…

Hardware biz trying to compete with cloud giants, wants to rid customers of data silos, reduce cost and complexity HPE is adding storage services to its cloud-like GreenLake subscription-based tech platform, powered by a disaggregated hardware architecture that it says is built to scale up to exabyte capacities if required.…

German-speaking heartlands fear they'll be paying again for features they've already built SAP is angering users in its German-speaking heartland as its push to migrate vital ERP systems to the cloud is hampered by confusion over the tools used to develop and manage systems in the new environment.…

Draganfly aims to help clear Ukraine's deadly harvest With the drone war in Ukraine In late April, representatives of Canada-based industrial drone firm Draganfly are scheduled to demonstrate how the company's Commander 3 XL drone can be used to map the location of landmines in Ukraine.…

Operation Cookie Monster crumbles stolen data-as-a-service vendor A notorious source of stolen credentials, genesis.market, has had its website seized by the FBI.…

China's tech giants show, yet again, they're as much a slave to silicon valley fashion as anyone Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei are reportedly ready to satisfy local demand for generative AI chatbots in coming weeks.…

G7 meeting agrees that sales bans are here to stay A meeting of G7 trade ministers has flagged researchers as a possible route through which tech trade sanctions are being circumvented.…

Investors and educators called on to think more broadly at think tank event Insufficient attention has been paid to the national security implications of private enterprise taking over from government as the main source of innovation for defence and intelligence applications, according to a panel at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)'s Sydney Dialogue on Tuesday.…

98% accuracy, but tests suggest a human touch will beat the teachers Academic plagiarism-detecting software vendor Turnitin demoed an AI-writing detection tool on Tuesday, with a claim of 98 percent accuracy at spotting machine-generated cheating.…