The Register

Offering wisdom on AI signals the Alibaba boss is in Beijing's good books again Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma has appeared in his homeland after over a year away, visiting a school and sharing commentary on the state of AI.…

'Our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos' Here's a conspiracy theory for you to consider: the war in Ukraine has shown that the West can't produce ammunition fast enough to sustain even that limited conflict. China noticed, and therefore had TikTok plan three energy-hungry datacenters close to an ammunition factory, threatening its electricity supply.…

Code of conduct complaints were not publicized in case it disrupted voting The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the regional internet registry for 56 nations, has revealed that it was threatened with an injunction that would have disrupted its elections if it named candidates found to have breached its election nominee code of conduct. Voters therefore went to the polls without knowing about findings of code breaches.…

Executive Order has loopholes for government spyware or American-made commercial spyware US president Joe Biden on Monday issued an Executive Order on Prohibition on Use by the United States Government of Commercial Spyware that Poses Risks to National Security – a title that is not quite as simple it seems.…

There is no honor among chatbots Criminals are already using ChatGPT to commit crimes, Europol said in a Monday report that details how AI language models can fuel fraud, cybercrime, and terrorism.…

In addition to $100k given to LockBit New York law firm Heidell, Pittoni, Murphy and Bach (HPMB) has agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a data-breach lawsuit related to the now-notorious Hafnium Microsoft Exchange attacks that siphoned sensitive data from victims around the world. …

We're sure Elon will be first in line as a test subject Neuralink is reportedly trying to partner up with neurosurgery clinics to carry out clinical trials testing its invasive brain-computer interface devices on humans.…

Dot-org vows to appeal after judge decides digitizing printed titles and lending them out isn't fair use Analysis A federal judge rejected the Internet Archive's claim that it has a fair use right to lend out a digital copy of each printed book that it has purchased, raising the possibility of it facing huge damages for copyright infringement.…

Sounds like some IT teams are due for some training Amtrak trains across the US are back on schedule after a server breakdown forced the rail service to cancel dozens of routes across the American Midwest and parts of California.…

Not what cost-cutting companies want to hear right now. Maybe they should hang onto those engineers? The rate at which IT infrastructure outages happen seems to have fallen in recent years, but the flip side is that those that do occur are becoming more pricey for organizations suffering them.…

What to expect? 16 inch model, a desktop case, and both Intel and AMD variants Modular repairable laptops vendor Framework has lifted the covers off models that are coming later this year – including one with a 16 inch display.…

Mission accomplished? Meanwhile Musk's Starlink's V2 sats experience de-orbit-worthy 'issues' Satellite comms operator OneWeb says its constellation is complete, with the latest launch bringing its total of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to 618, although it will add further launches for resiliency and redundancy.…

It's finger-linking.... what happened to my $$$? Police in India announced late last week they arrested four individuals accused of running fake websites in which they sold fraudulent franchises, including for fast-food chicken restaurant, KFC.…

Benioff gets a pat on the head and an undefined reprieve Salesforce and Elliott Investment Management have issued a joint statement saying the activist investor, which took a multi-billion-dollar stake in the CRM giant in January, is not nominating directors to the board.…

A consumer campaign group's food hall of shame: sticky tape instead of loo rolls, dog chews for chicken breasts What’s on your lunchtime menu today? For some poor sucker it might be toilet paper that provides the wrapping for their sandwich, or perhaps a dog chew instead of that tender grilled chicken breast they’d hoped for.…

Plus OIG finds Uncle Sam fibbed over Login.gov In brief A team of hackers from French security shop Synacktiv have won $100,000 and a Tesla Model 3 after subverting the Muskmobile's entertainment system, and from there opening up the car's core management systems.…

Get your staff and processes lined up and ready to go Interview The woods are full of IT sales teams promising the moon when it comes to locking down databases, yet all the tech fixes in the world won't help you if the staff don't know what to do.…

ByteDance with the devil if you dare Opinion As country after country bans TikTok from official systems, it’s fair to ask what’s so dodgy about a social network filled with dance crazes, makeup advice and cats.…

Hardware configuration also important to get query times down, says global research publisher Developers and architects considering deploying graph databases should spend more time on defining schema than they initially think, according to one multi-national user of the system.…

Moving premises can have all manner of hidden traps. Here's one to watch for Who Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader folk, to that buffer between the weekend and the workaday we call Who, Me? in which Register readers turn raconteur and recount tales of tech gone wrong.…

Nature probes published research as it emerges journal paper allegedly used to entice $120m cloud deal Special report A Google-led research paper published in Nature, claiming machine-learning software can design better chips faster than humans, has been called into question after a new study disputed its results.…

First big government expo since COVID sees CEOs galore jet in Some of Big Tech's top execs have sung China's praises at the 2023 China Development Forum – an annual government-organized event that returned from its COVID hiatus over the weekend.…

Meanwhile the US contemplates drastic action The government of France has banned TikTok – and all other recreational apps – from phones issued to its employees.…

ALSO: Web traffic to Microsoft Bing up 15.8 per cent since launch of GPT-4 bot, and more AI In Brief Google did not train its internet web search chatbot Bard on text from private Gmail accounts, a spokesperson confirmed to The Register.…

Gee, why could that be? Nah, not that. AI contender might just want better SmartNICs Chinese RISC-V upstart StarFive has revealed that Chinese web giant Baidu has become an investor, to advance use of the open source processor design in the datacenter.…

ALSO: Indian space agency completes OneWeb constellation; Singapore warns on AI weapons; AUKUS tech pact advances Asia In Brief Although Chinese smartwatch shipments declined in 2022, Huawei, Apple and Oppo saw growth. Meanwhile Huawei's smartwatch designed for parents to keep tabs on their kids took the lead as the year's bestseller.…

Search aspired to the the command line to the world, but ML models may get there first Analysis OpenAI this week introduced ChatGPT plugins, a way to extend the scope of its chatbot language model beyond the slurry of internet training data to bespoke business information.…

May fly in the summer, with some presumably pretty nervous pilots Boeing's first mission carrying astronauts to the International Space Station aboard its Starliner capsule, scheduled for April, is now delayed until summer due to the risk of overheating batteries.…

I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further Analysis The rumors and whispering of Arm substantially hiking its fees, right as an IPO looms, just won't go away.…

'Impossible to imagine the world we live in today ... without his contributions' Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has died, the microprocessor giant confirmed this evening. He was 94.…

Age verification, a private right to sue Big Tech ... thinking of the children or political points? To protect children, Utah Governor Spencer Cox on Thursday signed two bills aimed at "holding social media companies accountable."…

All your previously Snipping Tool cropped images aren't, basically Microsoft is said to be preparing to fix the high-profile "aCropalypse" privacy bug in its Snipping Tool for Windows 11.…

Beijing's Made in China drive fueled by Washington's export crackdowns Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes.…

Not a headline we expected to write today American cybersecurity officials have released an early-warning system to protect Microsoft cloud users.…

OCI is much more efficient than the acquired Cerner DCs, Ellison told investors Oracle is set to make a number of job cuts at Cerner, the electronic health records company it acquired last year, as its shift workloads to its cloud infrastructure.…

Back to work on Monday? Branson and co still fighting to get funding SpaceX and OpenAI backing venture capitalist Matthew Brown, of Matthew Brown Companies, has confirmed that his group is in funding talks with space biz Virgin Orbit.…

Numerical abilities could be a hardwired, ancient feature of the developing vertebrate brain, study suggests Researchers in Italy have discovered newborn zebrafish possess the ability to count, suggesting numeracy may be hard-wired into the vertebrate brain.…

Getting connection failures? Don't panic. Get new keys GitHub has updated its SSH keys after accidentally publishing the private part to the world. Whoops.…

2.5% of workforce to go as sales and margin growth forecasts dip Accenture is erasing the jobs of 19,000 employees - with in-house IT workers confirmed on the front line - after it trimmed revenue projections for the rest of its current fiscal 2023.…

Without publicly accessible code, there would be no AI chatbot Opinion When OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in late November 2022, no one expected much from the new release. It was just a "research preview," explained Sandhini Agarwal, an AI Policy researcher at OpenAI. "We didn't want to oversell it as a big fundamental advance," added Liam Fedus, a scientist at the org.…

Five developers named Bob were not good at their jobs On Call Welcome once again, dear reader, to On-Call, The Register's Friday feature in which we share readers' tales of being asked to address avoidable annoyances.…

It’s the only game in town for extreme ultraviolet lithography, and that makes it every chip shop’s new best friend Dutch semiconductor equipment vendor ASML is likely to benefit heavily from the rapid adoption of generative AI and machine learning technologies.…

Liberté, égalité, reconnaissance faciale for all Despite the opposition of 38 civil society groups, the French National Assembly has approved the use of algorithmic video surveillance during the 2024 Paris Olympics.…

Customers banished to an IP address in Uzbekistan that Redmond’s cloud did not recognize Microsoft has found a new and interesting way to break its cloud services: by messing up geolocation services and sending its users to Uzbekistan, which made it impossible for them to log in.…

Probably in a jail cell, waiting to be extradited stateside The US Justice Department charged fugitive crypto bro Do Kwon with fraud on Thursday, just hours after Montenegro's minister of interior announced he had been detained by local authorities.…

Next time you blow a project budget, console yourself that you weren’t this bad Cisco, Huawei, and Ericsson have all been asked to take a hit after a Filipino telco blew its budget by a whopping $880 million and blamed it on bad procurement processes.…

It's probably going to happen, but final approval depends on 'circumstances' The board of troubled Japanese tech conglomerate Toshiba has announced it supports but will not recommend a $15 billion takeover offer that will launch in the next ten days but won't close for around four months.…

'Hunt forward' teams of this sort aid with defense and learn how attackers like Tehran operate US Cyber Command operators have confirmed they carried out an online defensive mission in Albania, in response to last year's cyber attacks against the local government.…

Mission named 'Good Luck Have Fun' needed more of both, but launch outfit insists it's a win The world's first 3D-printed rocket, Terran 1, blasted off into the sky but failed to make orbit during its maiden voyage on Wednesday.…

Security researchers find bugs, big and small, in every industrial box probed Devices used in critical infrastructure are riddled with vulnerabilities that can cause denial of service, allow configuration manipulation, and achieve remote code execution, according to security researchers.…