The Register

Weirdly coy about the AI model's size and what went into making it, tho OpenAI on Tuesday announced the qualified arrival of GPT-4, its latest milestone in the making of call-and-response deep learning models and one that can seemingly outperform its fleshy creators in important exams.…

PaLM springs forth Google has promised to offer API-level access to its large language model PaLM so that developers can build it into their apps and workflows, and thus make the ChatGPT-like text-emitting tech available to world-plus-dog.…

Successful invasion would make China 'the OPEC of silicon chips' The US would sooner see TSMC fabs destroyed than fall into Chinese hands should Xi Jinping invade Taiwan, according to a former national security advisor to the Trump administration.…

Not-so-smart SmartScreen flagged up by Googlers Criminals are exploiting a Microsoft SmartScreen bug to deliver Magniber ransomware, potentially infecting hundreds of thousands of devices, without raising any security red flags, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).…

Fancy playing with some space Lego? We're going to need a lot of robots to handle dangerous tasks once we get to the Moon, and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a solution: Modular, wheel-free walking robots made from a bunch of reconfigurable parts. …

That's one way to counteract rising energy prices – but do you want to sit next to a DC? A UK cloud startup is offering to install its edge server hardware physically within organizations to provide free heat, in exchange for reducing its own location and cooling costs.…

The Year of Efficiency may also include sending engineers back into the office Meta – which claims without irony to be "building the future of human connection" – is laying off 10,000 more staff and will close open vacancies on 5,000 roles as it hunkers down for a "Year of Efficiency."…

Seriously, this tech makes your phone camera look like it's from the stone age To capture fast moving objects — say a cheetah sprinting across the savanna — it's not uncommon for photographers to employ shutter speeds as high as 1/8000th of a second.…

'Today's ruling certainly isn't going to stop us' says campaigner Local gig workers got some bad news yesterday: a bid to overturn California's Prop 22 failed in the appeals court, a major win for Uber and other companies who sell rides and deliveries in their cars.…

'ChatGPT is going to be in everything' says automaker Thanks to a partnership struck with Microsoft in 2021 on the commercialization of self-driving vehicles, General Motors is working to bring a "ChatGPT-like" voice assistant to its cars.…

Investors nervous in same week that Silicon Valley Bank failed In the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, this week is not the best time to spook jittery stock markets with weaker than expected financial forecasts, yet that's what GitLab has done.…

7-year availability as kit goes in hardware that hangs around much longer than average PC AMD has lifted the lid on variants of its 4th generation Epyc processors optimized for embedded applications, delivering greater performance and scalability – although device engineers may look askance at the power envelope ranging up to 400W.…

RSS pioneer Dave Winer sees Mastodon as a positive sign Special report Ten years ago, on March 13, 2013, Google said it was discontinuing Google Reader, a popular application for reading RSS and Atom feeds.…

The primary desktop in Ubuntu 23.04 and Fedora 38 is getting there GNOME 44 is reaching readiness, just in time for inclusion in the next versions of the two big distro daddies, Ubuntu "Lunar Lobster" and Fedora 38.…

Hopes to avoid paying up for crushing a rival while helping Huawei and ZTE to prosper Qualcomm on Monday began an attempt to convince the European Union's Court of Justice that it should not pay a €242 million ($258 million) fine imposed on it for anti-competitive behavior.…

Someone's still got some cash jangling about after the Silicon Valley Bank mess Qualtrics, the experience management company briefly owned SAP, will be acquired by Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).…

A threat that needs two orgs to tackle it: the 'Integrated Security Fund' and the 'National Protective Security Agency' Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5 will oversee a new agency tasked with helping local organizations combat Chinese cyber-spies and other threats]…

Commerce secretary says relationship with China is 'benign' and wants to be open to new possibilities The US's moves to secure closer trade ties with India do not indicate a desire to decouple with China's tech industry, US secretary of commerce Gina Raimondo said last week.…

As Alphabet's Wing wants to fly millions of small packages by 2024 Japan Post is closer to realizing its ambition of delivering letters – like actual, physical letters – by drone. It's futuristic and retro all at once.…

'We're looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus' – which increasingly means staving off TikTok Meta has decided non-fungible tokens (NFTs) don't have a future, and will wind down its efforts to support them.…

Aims to look at the universe's dark ages without interference from Earth NASA and the US Department of Energy hope to build a lunar telescope on the far side of the Moon that will hunt for ancient radio waves, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. …

And also, Ring hit with ransomware, too? No, says Amazon Ransomware gang Lockbit has boasted it broke into Maximum Industries, which makes parts for SpaceX, and stole 3,000 proprietary schematics developed by Elon Musk's rocketeers.…

The man leaking vital data before it was fashionable Comment Daniel Ellsberg, an American former military analyst who became one of the most significant whistleblowers in US history, has made peace with death.…

Names, addresses, SSNs all up for grabs Medical device and software maker Zoll Medical says the personal and health information of more than a million people, including patients and employees, may have been stolen by crooks in January.…

10k delivery vehicles this year isn't going to cut it and upstart really needs the cash Electric van maker Rivian and Amazon are reportedly in talks to scrap part of a 2019 deal that made the retail giant Rivian's sole customer for its electric delivery vans.…

Remember the storage class memory that never took off? It's back Memory startup Intrinsic Semiconductor Technologies has scored funding aimed at bringing its Resistive RAM to market, which it grandly states will enable a new generation of smart devices and systems with embedded intelligence.…

The protocol is simple, unreliable, insecure, and on its way out Microsoft recently outlined several new features it is building into Windows 11, from file recommendations and one-keystroke shortcuts for the XAML context menu in File Explorer to Local Security Authority (LSA) protection against secrets and credential thefts.…

Human lawyers: 'DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm' "Robot lawyer" DoNotPay is headed back to court – and not to prove its merits as a legally inclined chatbot. It's being sued for practicing law in California without a license.…

Government supplier said to be valued at $2.5B The owners of UK-based Ark Data Centres Ltd are locked in negotiations with suitors interested in buying the rack and cloud provider in an agreement said to value the business at around $2.5 billion.…

We don't need to trap customers to force loyalty, says boss A new ISP started by former BT execs claims to offer UK broadband customers a better deal with no contracts or installation fees, and "a Wi-Fi service that actually works."…

$2.9 trillion-asset globo corp's local subsidiary buys Silicon Roundabout fave Just three days ago, the Bank of England planned to apply to place Silicon Valley Bank UK into insolvency by Sunday night due to it having a "limited presence in the UK and no critical functions supporting the financial system."…

Moon is real. Pictures of Moon are real. Phone uses lots of pictures of Moon to make your picture less crap Comment By now most in the Anglosphere must have seen that Samsung ad for the Galaxy S23 Ultra where a woman snaps a detailed photo of the Moon – craters and all – moving her telescope-toting neighbor to ask: "Mia, can you send me that?"…

Also, the FBI just admitted to bypassing warrants by buying cellphone location data, and this week's actionable items in brief Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's director Jen Easterly has been outspoken in her drive to bring more women into the security industry, and this year for International Women's Day her agency formalized that pledge by announcing a partnership with nonprofit Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS).…

Standards that cut across technology could help avoid confusing industry, MPs hear The UK government should create laws common to autonomous vehicles to avoid a patchwork approach to specific technologies, according to industry figures speaking to MPs.…

Any sufficiently stupid technology is indistinguishable from magical thinking Opinion Around the world, a vital technology is failing. Just as massive solar flares fry satellites and climate-change superstorms overwhelm flood defences, so a new surge of ridiculous IT-related events is burning out irony meters across the globe.…

Hardware, software, kitchen sink: it's all in there The UK government has launched the tendering process for an agreement set to be worth up to £12 billion ($14 billion) for the tech suppliers that make it onto the contract.…

A missed migration mitigated the mistake Who, me? Why hello, Monday! You beastly harbinger of another week of work and associated woes, which The Register each week welcomes with an instalment of “Who, Me?”, our reader-contributed tales of techies who make mistakes and mostly mollify their masters.…

Consultation for the long-awaited Digital India Act is finally under way although the draft law's still not been revealed India's government has started to consult some proposed details of its long-awaited Digital India Act, including a declaration that the bill needed a dedicated adjudicatory tool for offenses committed online.…

Some training in refreshed certification platform to be free, including short how-to vids Cisco will shortly open the doors of a new online training service called Cisco U.…

Vietnam, Malyasia, and Singapore roll out the welcome mat The Biden Administration's efforts to starve China's domestic semiconductor industry have reached an inflection point as allied nations join the cause.…

'I am the Chinese Communist Party. I will be with you forever' - Beijing's new propaganda vid says the quite part out loud The Cyberspace Administration of China has continued its drive to clean up the internet, on Sunday taking aim at the behaviours of independently operated content producing accounts on sites like Weibo and WeChat, known as “self-media.”…

Plus: DuckDuckGo launches its own AI web search chatbot, and more In-brief GPT-4, the long-awaited successor to OpenAI's generative models will be unveiled next week, according to Microsoft.…

‘Wouldn’t be profitable, or exist, if our products were 100% on AWS’ Singaporean search engine optimisation tools vendor Ahrefs has claimed that keeping its infrastructure on-premises, rather than using Amazon Web Services, will save it $400 million over three years.…

Feds say this won’t cost taxpayers a dime Customers of collapsed startup-centric Silicon Valley Bank will be able to access their deposits on Monday, US authorities announced on Sunday.…

PLUS: Singapore tests AWS quantum network; Honda bulks autonomous truck; India tightens crypto laws; and more Asia In Brief The president of Indian tech services giant Infosys has left to join rival Tech Mahindra as CEO.…

Luckily this rock is only about the size of the Arc de Triomphe, let alone the 600-to-1 chance Astronomers have another near-Earth object on their ones-to-watch lists: a newly discovered 50-metre-wide asteroid that could hit Earth on Valentine's Day ... in 2046. …

Caveats apply, your mileage may vary Python is among the one of the most popular programming languages, yet it's generally not the first choice when speed is required.…

Why do experiments and all that work when a model could just invent convincing data for you? Feature Generative AI poses interesting challenges for academic publishers tackling fraud in science papers as the technology shows the potential to fool human peer review.…

Or how you'll spend your copious free time running CP/M on a cheap computer There's more to inexpensive single-board computers than the Raspberry Pi. Some DIY projects are just for fun, but others also have immediate practical value – like a low-power, self-updating desk calendar.…

Where there's disaffected twits there's potential revenue, and Facebook parent smells blood – er, profit Not content to sit on the sidelines while Twitter falters, Facebook parent Meta is working on a text-focused competitor, based on the decentralized bones of fediverse favorite Mastodon.…