The Register

65 AA batteries and $10 Arduino processor power space debris solution A tiny satellite with a drag chute built by a team of students has been held up as one small possible solution to the thorny issue of space junk caused by defunct hardware cluttering up Earth’s orbit.…

The hope? Reducing piles of admin for clinicians freeing them up for medical work The University of Kansas Health System is set to trial software designed to help doctors automatically generate notes from conversations with patients, a move billed as "the most significant rollout to date of generative AI in healthcare" yet.…

Former Google veteran talks to El Reg about trends in bid data of the past decade Interview Jordan Tigani made his name as an engineer leading the team behind BigQuery, Google’s data warehouse, which was among a group of systems to transform the market by separating storage and compute. Despite helping win global customers including Vodafone, and taking on big-name rivals Snowflake, Azure Synapse and AWS Redshift, he’s begun to think the approach has run out of “magic beans” for some users.…

Staff and suppliers paid late last year, new requirements lead to contract price hike Vendors working on an Edinburgh University ERP project have been awarded around £8 million ($9.81 million) in additional fees following a troubled implementation which led to delays in paying staff and suppliers.…

A modern RISC computer trying desperately to pretend it's just another PC Lenovo's Thinkpad X13s is a lovely, if odd, little laptop. It's a modern Arm machine that is trying as hard as it can to resemble a vanilla x86 laptop… and it carries it off.…

Beware of Greeks bearing GIFs Meta's former security policy manager, who split her time between the US and Greece, is reportedly suing the Hellenic national intelligence service for hacking her phone.…

Utility that began as a personal project found its way into billions of devices Daniel Stenberg has observed the 25th anniversary of the curl open source project with the publication of curl 8.0.0, the 215th release of the command line tool, and a modest tele-celebration.…

Bot also botches some requests, but is about to be baked into cloud services anyway Fresh from the launch of its large language model-based chatbot, ERNIE, Chinese web giant Baidu is rolling out of a cloud service integrated with the AI tool.…

April Fools should use Russian or Chinese tech instead, Kremlin advises Advisors and staff to Russia's maximum leader have been told to ditch their iPhones by the end of the month. Or, for those who don't want to throw their Apple devices in the bin, the other option is to "give it to the kids," according to a local Kommersant report.…

Alleges it’s infected with malware – but not the version in its own digital tat bazaar Google has suspended Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo from its Play store because versions of the software found elsewhere have included malware.…

Latitude blames a 'major vendor' for its woes. Is that a vendor? A cloud? Whoever they are, they're in trouble Latitude Financial has blamed a supplier for leaking creds that caused vast PII leak Australian outfit Latitude Financial has taken itself offline, and even stopped serving customers, while it tries to clean up an attack on its systems.…

Speeds away from the very suggestion it would ever pay a ransom Italian automaker Ferrari has warned its well-heeled customers that their personal data may be at risk.…

Meta-made small language model can produce misinformation, toxic text The web demo of Alpaca, a small AI language model based on Meta's LLaMA system, has been taken down offline by researchers at Stanford University due to safety and cost concerns.…

A 'new deal for the night' needed Increasing levels of light pollution means Earth's surface has almost no practical locations for astronomical observatories, a group of astronomers said on Monday.…

Digital lending is only fine when we do it On Monday four of the largest book publishers asked a New York court to grant summary judgment in a copyright lawsuit seeking to shut down the Internet Archive's online library and hold the non-profit organization liable for damages.…

aCropalypse Now, starring any 2018-or-later device If you've owned a Google Pixel smartphone since the 3 series came out in 2018, bad news: any screenshot that you've cropped or redacted on your Pixel can be potentially restored without much fuss.…

Add another zero or so and soon we're talking real numbers Amazon kicked off this week by cutting another 9,000 jobs, bringing its total layoffs to some 27,000 since late last year.…

Concerns over consistent dialog boxes, pinning, default apps mulled Microsoft appears to be heeding the various criticisms of Windows 11's desktop, Start menu, and taskbar, promising to give users and developers more control over what they see and use on the screen.…

You've gotta protect those butter-soft OLED screens somehow If you're one of the small subset of Apple aficionados waiting to get their hands on a folding iDevice, a patent for self-folding displays granted to Cook and Co last week is sure to pique your interest.…

Hopes for predictive insights and automation, but no word on what it'll pay for that HPE is looking to buy IT management specialist OpsRamp and fold it into its Greenlake IT-as-a-service platform to smooth out the creases businesses can face when dealing with multi-vendor and multi-cloud estates.…

Ditching diesel in attempt to shrink its carbon footprint Amazon is moving from diesel to hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to fuel the backup power generators for its datacenters in Europe, with sites in Ireland and Sweden the first to make the switch. The move is part of a strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of its datacenter operations.…

ALSO: Discord quietly edited its privacy policy after rolling out new generative AI features, and more In brief OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman admitted in a television interview that he's "a little bit scared" of the power and risks language models pose to society.…

Open letter to top brass signed by 1,400+ staff offers 5-point plan to improve redundancy process More than 1,400 Alphabet staffers have signed an open letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai to reconsider aspects of the current redundancy process and remember the last line of its code of conduct: "Don't Be Evil."…

NHS could also be hit with higher prices as a result of the merger, CMA argues in initial investigation The UK's market watchdog has warned that US health insurer UnitedHealth's £1.24 billion ($1.5 billion) bid to buy UK health records software supplier EMIS could lead to worse outcomes for the NHS.…

Those with 'sensitive' work-related information told to contact Beeb's security team The world's oldest national broadcaster, the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation, has told staff they shouldn't keep the TikTok app on a BBC corporate device unless there is a "justified business reason."…

Extraterrestrial regolith biocomposite, you say? I’ll have two Have you ended up on Mars or the Moon and do you want to build a safe home from the dusty material surrounding you? Then potatoes are what you need, according to researchers at Manchester University.…

Margins in software are enough to let you heat house, eat and buy a car Adobe CEO and chairman Shantanu Narayen received a total compensation pack of more than $31 million in 2022, the company has confirmed ahead of an Annual Meeting of Shareholders scheduled for next month.…

Don't need flexibility and scaling? Then don’t pay for what you don’t need Opinion On-prem or not on-prem, that is the question. Hamlet, musing on something similar, decried the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, dramatically foreshadowing the outrageous fortunes many report spending on the sea of troubles more commonly known as the public cloud.…

Badly configured routers ended up costing a bundle Who, Me? Gentle reader, once again it is time to cushion your landing into the working week with Who, Me? – The Register's weekly chronicle of people having a worse day than you. Hopefully.…

Australian airline Qantas warns pilots to keep calm and carry on amid reports of satnav and altimeter jamming Australian airline Qantas issued standing orders to its pilots last week advising them that some of its fleet experienced interference on VHF stations from sources purporting to be the Chinese Military.…

Monday morning rush job, anyone? Asking 'cos there's no ETA for a fix other than moving to another region Google Cloud is having a nasty not-quite outage in its US-East region.…

Crypto laundering service gets cleaned up by police and SVB mess draws in more criminals In Brief A man accused of being the head of one of the biggest criminal online souks, BreachForums, has been arrested in Peekskill, New York.…

Can't get Google to finish the job, though Hong Kong's efforts to improve the accuracy of Google search results for its national anthem have yielded some affirmative results, according to an official from the Special Administrative Region of China.…

2023 is only one more than 2022, right? Amazon Web Services (AWS) has delivered a major release of its home-spun Linux distribution – albeit rather later than it first promised.…

ALSO: Japan ends chip supply crimp on South Korea, APAC infosec spending surges; Philippines SIM registration stalls Asia In Brief ByteDance, the Chinese developer of TikTok, "can no longer be accurately described as a private enterprise" and is instead intertwined with China's government, according to a report [PDF] submitted to Australia's Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media.…

No good deed goes unpunished, or something like that The BianLian gang is ditching the encrypting-files-and-demanding-ransom route and instead is going for full-on extortion.…

Attackers exploiting the vulnerability could access encrypted data Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) for Windows 10 and 11 systems that could allow access to encrypted data in storage devices.…

At the very least, with other costs on top A Florida healthcare group has settled a class-action lawsuit after thieves stole more than 447,000 patients' names, Social Security numbers, and sensitive medical information, from its servers.…

More than half of Euro nation's infrastructure would have to go Ripping and replacing Huawei and ZTE equipment from German carrier networks is going to be a painful process, according to the country's economy ministry.…

Farmers need a right to repair The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has called upon farm equipment maker John Deere to comply with its obligations under the General Public License (GPL), which requires users of such software to share source code.…

Alert noise is 'loud and distracting' for drivers, claims filing All-electric vehicle maker Tesla is facing a potential class action lawsuit over claims that some of its cars suffer from a defect involving false collision alerts that not only inconvenience the driver, but could also represent a serious safety hazard.…

Four flaws open mobiles, cars to remote-control at baseband level with just a phone number Google security analysts have warned Android device users that several zero-day vulnerabilities in some Samsung chipsets could allow an attacker to completely hijack and remote-control their handsets knowing just the phone number.…

Botched data deletion threat roils open source worlds Container biz Docker on Thursday scrambled to bandage a self-inflicted marketing mishap, its ham-handed discontinuation of Docker Free Teams accounts.…

Gadget maker accused of 'corporate voyeurism' by gathering up footage against your wishes A lawsuit filed against eufy security cam maker Anker Tech claims the biz assigns "unique identifiers" to the faces of any person who walks in front of its devices – and then stores that data in the cloud, "essentially logging the locations of unsuspecting individuals" when they stroll past.…

Thought you guys were into fail fast, fail often? SVB Financial Group, parent to the imploded Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection less than a week after the top tech bank imploded.…

Aggrieved investors claim tech giant fibbed to inflate stock prices... and it backfired Google parent Alphabet is facing a proposed class action lawsuit from investors unhappy that the company's alleged advertising monopoly, and the subsequent DoJ investigation into this, led to "significant losses and damages."…

Elder statesman of system software makes a shocking revelation Last weekend, the SCALE conference came back from the pandemic with a bang: Ken Thompson as keynote speaker. In the Q&A at the end of his talk, Thompson made a surprising confession.…

Rival network operators champing at the bit amid claims dominant former state firm's undercutting them Britain's telco watchdog Ofcom is delaying a decision on Openreach’s proposed Equinox 2 wholesale pricing scheme for fiber broadband, with just weeks to go until the product aimed at internet service providers is due to hit the streets.…

Campaigners ask if Palantir's 'must-win' contract could see tech giants build products on NHS data Updated Campaign groups acting on behalf of doctors and patients have threatened legal action over NHS England’s procurement of a £480 million ($582 million) “federated data platform”, as questions about patient consultation and compliance with data protection law remain unanswered.…

Tough to see how this model can be released in good conscience Analysis Prompt: Describe GPT-4 as if it were a medicine advertised on television, with appropriate warnings about side effects.…