The Register

Plus Bluetooth gadget that gives your Android or iPhone the same ability MWC Ruggedized handset maker Bullitt Group has lifted the lid on its first smartphone with satellite messaging ahead of MWC next week, as well as a Bluetooth dongle from Motorola that provides the same capability for any iOS or Android phone.…

System caused issues in fitting electronic tags to dozens of criminals after new tech rolled out The UK courts service failed to see the benefits of a £1.3 billion ($1.56 billion) case management platform after a rethink led to a £22.5 million ($27 million) write-off, says a government watchdog.…

Twin cities? There’s an app for that Sponsored Feature Technologists have been attempting to create digital worlds since the dawn of computing. The industry has been entranced then left feeling deflated by digital environments ranging from The Sims™ to Second Life™, to virtual reality headsets, and arguably, the initial variants of the Metaverse.…

Some investors and creative pros may cheer, but Photoshop giant's not done yet Some investors felt Adobe’s purchase of Figma was overvalued, creative types that used the web-first design collaboration startup's wares were nervous about its takeover, and it seems the US Department of Justice is too.…

Representative even given opportunity to pitch tech to government during science committee hearing Microsoft chose a UK parliamentary hearing as the venue to slam the EU's efforts to regulate the development and introduction of AI.…

Developers and, more to the point, the companies that employ them Opinion Even now, I run into those who think Linux and open source software is made by people living in their parents' basement and writing the code out of the goodness of their hearts. Wrong. So, so wrong.…

Customer with a magnetic personality also had a significantly magnetic wristband On Call Welcome once more to On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we retell readers' stories of being asked to fix contraptions that display confounding, confusing, or cockeyed behavior.…

Cyber Europe cyber worried about cyber threats, doesn't cyber use the other C word (China) The European Commission on Thursday banned the use of the TikTok short video app on corporate devices and on the personal devices of employees enrolled in the commission's mobile device management service.…

Labelling scheme offers developers easy loopholes to play down personal info spreading The Mozilla Foundation has accused Google of incorrectly labelling apps as "Data Safe" as much as 80 percent of the time in its Play digital bazaar – with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter among the misdescribed software.…

There’s no HumOR in cyberattacks At last year's Ignite show, Microsoft talked up a capability in its 365 Defender that automatically detects and disrupts a cyberattack while still in progress, hopefully stopping or reducing any resulting damage. Now it's extending that to include additional criminal areas.…

Continental bloc also greases the skids to usher in the gigabit age in two or three years The European Union yesterday decided it's time to start "laying the ground for the transformation of the connectivity sector" in the region with three initiatives – one of which codifies the idea that Big Tech should pay for the networks that carry its traffic.…

Wi-Fi not? It boosts Aruba's portfolio, single wireless nets are a way off, and everything-as-a-service is hot right now HPE announced on Friday it has acquired an Italian outfit called Athonet that specializes in private 4G and 5G cellular networks.…

Study: Old pacts ditched the moment Moscow moved in The so-called "brotherhood" or Russian-speaking cybercriminals is yet another casualty of the war in Ukraine, albeit one that few outside of Moscow are mourning.…

Multilateral trade actions also aim to stop China and Russia using biotech to create 'super soldiers'. Really! The USA's ban on certain semiconductor tech reaching Chinese shores will likely see it set quotas for non-Chinese chipmakers that build their products in the Middle Kingdom, according to Alan Estevez, undersecretary of commerce for industry and security at the Department of Commerce.…

Comic sans Midjourney images would be eligible for IP protections Images generated by Midjourney and other AI text-to-image tools are not protected by US copyright law since they "are not the product of human authorship", according to the nation's Copyright Office.…

Dariy Pankov accused of infiltrating systems, selling tool and passwords to other miscreants A Russian national accused of developing the NLBrute brute-force hacking tool has made his first court appearance this week in Florida over accusations he used the tool to spawn a criminal empire.…

And jobs shift offshore, says source Merative, known until last year as IBM Watson Health, is laying off an estimated 10 percent of its staff, according to a source familiar with the matter.…

Yes, we have no bananas, and things aren't looking peachy on the salad front Irish agricultural megacorp Dole has confirmed that it has fallen victim to a ransomware infection that reportedly shut down some of its North American production plants.…

Fake donors allegedly padded politicians' pockets, both Republican and Democrat FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's eight-count indictment related to the collapse of his crypto empire has been superseded by a new 12-count indictment unsealed in New York which provide graphic details about the extent the defunct biz paid off politicians. …

AWS, Google and Oracle may benefit as Microsoft blames the Pentagon and the Pentagon blames Microsoft A hole in a US military email server operated by Microsoft left more than a terabyte of sensitive data exposed to the internet less than a month after Office 365 was awarded a higher level of government security accreditation.…

Still not quite as fast as it was in the halcyon days of 2021 SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband service has shown a modest peformance jump in some regions from Q3 to Q4 of last year, although speeds are still down from 2021 before the rapid increase in subscriber numbers.…

Software allegedly rejects applicants based on 'race, age, and/or disability' Workday stands accused of building algorithms that have resulted in bias against Black applicants in their 40s, according to a lawsuit.…

You can add Snap's rival cross-distro packaging format back in yourself Canonical has issued an official edict: the approved Ubuntu remixes must remove Flatpak support as of the next release.…

Aim is to bring entry fee down to tens of thousands of dollars, if you have that lying around Japanese startup Iwaya Giken has pulled the sheets off a two-seater airtight sphere that it plans to hook to a helium balloon and send space tourists into the stratosphere.…

You're going to have your cloud-native infrastructure and you're going to like it Dell will showcase kit for the comms industry at next week's Mobile World Congress, with more infrastructure choices, PowerEdge servers for telecoms, Private Wireless network options, and a new lab for punters to validate network configurations.…

'If we did one of these calculations in our lab, we are talking weeks or months' Supercomputer-power calculations have helped to uncover how certain variants of the COVID-19 virus "improve" – ie, become more contagious – through their binding energy with human cells.…

From free message therapy and on-site gyms to alternating desk days with fellow Googlers Google Cloud employees stateside are being asked to share a desk with a colleague in the latest cost curb as real estate is rationalized in line with efforts outlined by management, and mass redundancies is realized.…

Of course the company that figured out chiplets says the answer is more chiplets Within the next 10 years, the world's most powerful supercomputers won't just simulate nuclear reactions, they may well run on them. That is, if we don't take drastic steps to improve the efficiency of our compute architectures, AMD CEO Lisa Su said during her keynote at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week.…

What's the time? It's time to go to court to see if the iGiant crushed a rival's heart-watching apps The Biden Administration has decided not to veto a ruling, which could result in an import ban on Apple Watches that include patent-infringing heart monitoring hardware.…

Similar look for FOSS folk, with same UI and OpenZFS storage back-end Enterprise NAS vendor iXsystems has updated its Kubernetes-capable Debian-based NAS OS, and scored Digital Public Good status too.…

Monopoly giant can't stand it when anyone else has a monopoly Microsoft Edge has been spotted inserting a banner into the Chrome download page on Google.com begging people to stick with the Windows giant's browser.…

Or maybe it's just resting and pining for the fjords Pic China National Space Administration's Zhurong rover remains uncertain as the latest images captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released on Tuesday show the vehicle hasn't moved in months.…

Ten cities panic after emergency systems start Putin out warnings of an impending attack Millions of Russians in almost a dozen cities throughout the country were greeted Wednesday morning by radio alerts, text messages, and sirens warning of an air raid or missile strikes that never occurred. The warnings were later blamed on hackers.…

Meanwhile Baidu plans to add its Ernie generative AI to search in March China's reaction to ChatGPT fever has seen a university-developed version crash within hours of launch, even more new regulations from Beijing, and an accelerated timeline to deploy the tech from local AI giant Baidu.…

Infiltrators tried to create fake remote hands tasks, alter visitor lists Criminals have targeted datacenter operators in Singapore and China, tapping into their CCTV cameras, accessing their tenant lists and then attacking those customers.…

Five from five take a dive, but connections are still alive Vietnam's connection to the internet has become even more tenuous after a fifth submarine cable's service degraded, meaning all maritime links are now compromised.…

Two-wheelers outnumber cars three to one in India, so promised licences mean Uber and Ola aren't off-road forever On Monday, the Transport Department in India's capital city Delhi banned private bike taxi services effective immediately – delivering a swift and sudden blow to ridesharing platforms in the city of over 30 million souls.…

Did the financial watchdog just do the impossible and herd cats? More than 80 law firms say they are "deeply troubled" by the US Securities and Exchange Commission's demand that Covington & Burling hand over names of its clients whose information was stolen by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.…

Closes takeover of One Medical, has your shopping habits and medical data Amazon's $3.9 billion deal to buy its way into the healthcare world is complete, as it and US healthcare chain One Medical on Wednesday announced the consummation of a merger the pair have been working on since 2022.…

Cap on daily interactions also lifted slightly – to 60 questions per day Microsoft is integrating its Bing chatbot into iOS and Android apps, allowing users to access AI-powered search features on mobile devices. …

Warrantless data harvesting, you say? Feds have their secret reasons and we're OK with that America's Supreme Court has declined to hear Wikimedia Foundation's challenge of the NSA's "upstream" surveillance program, effectively exempting the agency's data collection from review as a state secret.…

Sales will only be down 37 percent next quarter Pat promises After tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks and hefty dividends for shareholders over the last years, Intel on said Wednesday that it's cutting its quarterly dividend to $0.125 per share in an effort to cut costs while also funding its expansive foundry construction plans.…

$20k Pwn2Own prize for the humans, zero for the AI It was bound to happen sooner or later. For what looks like the first time ever, bug hunters used ChatGPT in a successful Pwn2Own exploit, helping researchers hijack software used in industrial applications and win $20,000.…

Just as everyone looks to optimize what they spend for computing services Microsoft is previewing two new Azure general-purpose virtual machines that will give organizations running compute-intensive workloads more options for balancing costs and performance.…

Pay no attention to that Supreme Court case about Twitter's algorithmic liability If Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk is to be believed, the social media platform's algorithm is finally going open source, and it's happening "next week." …

'We reached the break-even point' on roadmap, say boffins in peer reviewed paper, but it's still 'not good enough' Google is claiming a new milestone on the road to fault-tolerant quantum computers with a demonstration that a key error correction method that groups multiple qubits into logical qubits can deliver lower error rates, paving the way for quantum systems that can scale reliably.…

Galaxies got big much sooner than expected, new observations Formed between 500 and 700 million years after the Big Bang, objects at the extreme limits of human observation have showed up on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), designed to uncover the early life of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.…

Company claims that's the best way to put 'historical' legacy in the hands of the global public Comment What does the Titanic have in common with NFTs? Not much. One lives on in the collective psyche as a monument to hubris while the other refuses to just sink already.…

If a phone is as mighty as a laptop, why not make it convertible and use it as one Freedom and privacy-oriented kit vendor Puri.sm has put out a device that turns its Librem 5 smartphone into a laptop.…

Prototype private network uses single board computer with software-defined radio circuit hardware Vodafone will lift the covers off a prototype 5G base station built on a Raspberry Pi at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in a bid to showcase how small businesses could run their own private 5G network.…