The Register

Appoints new CFO, CTO, chops 1 in 4 staffers Quantum startup Rigetti is to shed about 28 percent of the workforce as part of an updated business plan that includes revising its technology roadmap and focusing on nearer-term strategic priorities. The move follows earlier warnings that the company was in danger of being delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange due to a slump in its stock price.…

Kickstarter backers left empty-handed Mycroft AI, creator of a Linux-based virtual assistant, announced on Friday it would not be able to fulfill rewards for its Mark II Kickstarter campaign.…

Double counting share units led to mistake, 'we have corrected' the error, says ad search titan Google staff already reeling from the shock of mass layoffs now have another bitter pill to swallow: the shares due as part of their severance terms will, in some cases, be much lower than first thought.…

Blames 'third-party provider' as phishers drain Ethereum wallets Domain registrar Namecheap blamed a "third-party provider" that sends its newsletters after customers complained of receiving phishing emails from Namecheap's system.…

You wait years for unidentified aerial phenomena then three turn up at once It was a busy weekend in the skies over North America, with the US Air Force shooting unidentified aircraft out of the air on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.…

R&D engineers given marching orders in 14% headcount reduction Arm may be doing well, but its China-based joint venture has reportedly laid off a significant number of staff in the face of a challenging business outlook.…

Still no deal as new Science and Tech dept head claims Britain has 'global-facing alternative' in the wings Among her public first acts since becoming UK science minister, Michelle Donelan has said Britain is prepared to go it alone on scientific research as it struggles to reach an agreement with the EU on the UK's association with the lucrative Horizon programme.…

Also: Russian wiper malware authors turn to data theft, plus this week's critical vulns in brief The notorious LockBit ransomware gang has taken credit for an attack on the Royal Mail – but a deadline it gave for payment has come and gone with nothing exposed to the web except the group's claims.…

It's not yet reached alpha, but it's already breaking new ground FOSDEM Chimera Linux is a new distro under construction that is not only systemd-free, it's GNU-free as well. Its creator hopes to reach alpha testing this spring.…

Bad AI is bad, bad search is worse Opinion "The pleasure is fleeting, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable." Famously about sex but more probably about golf, this quote is now most accurately ascribable to AI-enhanced search engines. …

Unnamed platform boasts three times the application performance of its predecessor, Cobra Atos is building a new supercomputer for the Max Planck Society, an organization conducting research into the natural sciences, life sciences, and humanities, in a contract valued at €20 million ($21.3 million).…

Smart-alec worker found a way to avoid nasty, boring jobs – by doing what he was told Who, Me? Ah, gentle reader, welcome back once again to the comfortable backwater of The Register we call Who, Me? in which readers' tales of not-quite-rightness are immortalized for the ages.…

European Commission satisfied joint venture won't create competitive problems for locals In a world saturated with digital ads, four of Europe's mightiest telcos will soon ask citizens if they're willing to volunteer their phone numbers to a startup that promises to deliver targeted ads while also observing European privacy regulations.…

US Commerce Department can't just let red balloons go by The US Department of Commerce added six more entities to its blacklist on Friday on grounds of national security after an errant Chinese surveillance balloon was shot down over the US last week.…

Atlassian wants it used more widely … but probably not for reporting misinformation to social networks Atlassian's Jira tool last Friday received significant upgrades aimed at encouraging its use beyond development teams, a day after it was cast in a sinister role in the USA's culture wars.…

Emperor Penguin promised a relaxed seasonal development cycle and has delivered Work on version 6.2 of the Linux kernel will stretch into an eighth release candidate, despite emperor penguin Linus Torvalds now saying it isn't really necessary.…

Plus: Publisher using AI tools generated false health advice for men; how ChatGPT widens economic inequalities In brief Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been waiting for the chance to challenge Google's dominance of internet search, and just might have finally pulled it off this week with the launch of AI-powered Bing.…

PLUS: Toshiba acknowledges buyout bid; BTS member Jungkook's hat lands online seller in strife; and more Asia In Brief India's minister for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has insisted that the nation does not target Chinese apps for law enforcement action or bans.…

Neo4j v PureThink rumbles on Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, claims a California federal court has misinterpreted version 3 of GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3) by allowing it to be combined with the Common Clause software license.…

Valentine's Day is the moment to fall a little bit out of love with chatbots Opinion Valentine's Day could sour our romance with AI chatbots.…

Brit AI video tech caught up in pro-PRC disinformation campaign Deepfake videos online featuring AI-generated news anchors spouting pro-Chinese government propaganda are likely the creations of a prolific disinformation crew dubbed Spamouflage.…

You might say this thing sucks At first glance, TP-Link's Tapo RV10 looks a bit like a fallen Omada access point that's now leaking a mysterious substance on the floor. In reality, the white and black plastic puck is the company's entry into the robotic vacuum and mop arena.…

All that data coming soon to a darkweb crime forum near you? Several California medical groups have sent security breach notification letters to more than three million patients alerting them that crooks may have stolen a ton of their sensitive health and personal information during a ransomware infection in December.…

ASCENT propulsion system just didn't work A tiny NASA cubesat, sent to hunt for signs of water ice on the Moon, will not reach lunar orbit after all four thrusters in a miniaturized propulsion system malfunctioned en route.…

We wanted robot butlers and flying Deloreans ... and got internet-from-orbit instead Amazon's plan to launch a series of satellites to offer broadband internet service can move ahead now that the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has endorsed the web giant's plan to keep space tidy.…

And yes, sure, totally secure Microsoft's Edge browser will be getting a significant facelift in the coming months, thanks to Adobe.…

Surely this is how at least one Michael Crichton novel starts Neuralink, the Musk-founded brain implant company that's no stranger to controversy, is in hot water again, this time over allegations it may have illegally transported implants removed from deceased animals and infected with dangerous pathogens. …

Some devs object because they don't trust Mountain View Russ Cox, a Google software engineer steering the development of the open source Go programming language, has presented a possible plan to implement telemetry in the Go toolchain.…

30 months in prison for providing, um... enterprise mobile banking software dev tool A dual Iranian/US national has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for smuggling export-controlled technology products to end users in Iran.…

Sumo Logic attracts private equity investor while InfluxData and Onehouse raise VC cash Log management and analytics biz Sumo Logic has agreed to a private equity buyout valuing the firm at around $1.7 billion.…

Hundreds of thousands of techies looking for work, with ultimate cost to vendors not yet tallied It was another bad week for tech professionals amid further bloodletting by an industry feeling the squeeze of inflation and higher interest rates as Microsoft, Zoom and Yahoo all dished out the pink slips.…

After a long wait and some company problems, the latest member of the Pantheon appears Elementary OS 7, codenamed "Horus" and based on Ubuntu 22.04.1, is here at last after a longer than usual delay.…

Beat Microsoft. Set agendas. Became essential. Hiked prices. Now we wait for Broadcom's reign Special feature In a decade of watching VMware, I've encountered two unverified but irresistible legends about the company.…

Margaret Thatcher-founded body thinks it's solved the problem US and China couldn't A report by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) claims the UK can support a local chip industry without engaging in a "subsidy arms race" with other nations and proposes measures government should instead be taking.…

Data sovereignty and compliance gives CEO pause for thought as Deutsche Börse AG jumps in bed with Google Pan-European stock exchange Euronext says worries about data sovereignty and compliance means it will not follow rivals into signing contracts with US public cloud megacorps.…

As IT spending drops below promised billions, there's always room for those offering the right kind of feedback In response to the widespread controversy surrounding the UK health department's attempt to buy a Federated Data Platform (FDP) – a competition that incumbent supplier Palantir considers a "must-win" – NHS England has reached for a "critical friend."…

Blast 'corporate' types who are much more square than $5.14 billion HR corp Workday tasked itself with the challenge of what to do if you’re the third or fourth vendor in the global market for enterprise-grade finance and HR software and came up with the answer: Super Bowl ads.…

Cloud-native Vela specializes in developing and training large-scale AI models – in-house only, though IBM is the latest tech giant to unveil its own "AI supercomputer," this one composed of a bunch of virtual machines running within IBM Cloud.…

Who would willingly chews a 6:00AM Sunday callout? On-Call As the world gears up for a week that features a celebration of love, The Register brings you another instalment of On-Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of the thing IT pros hate most – being asked to fix silly problems at loathsome times of day.…

Any act that sends so much as a ruble to seven named netizens now forbidden The US and UK have sanctioned seven Russians for their alleged roles in disseminating Conti and Ryuk ransomware and the Trickbot banking trojan.…

State Dept already has one target, FBI is identifying sources of floating surveillance platform's components The Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the US last week looks set to spark a new round of sanctions against Middle Kingdom tech firms.…

Regulator wants to bust the oligopoly in mobile OS and app markets Japan's competition regulator has recommended big changes to local laws to reform the "oligopoly" it's assessed Google and Apple enjoy in the markets for mobile operating systems and the apps that run on them.…

The usual suspects - Hikvision and Dahua - named as a risk to national security, prompting the usual denials Australia's Defence Department removed all Chinese manufactured surveillance cameras after an audit detailed the number of Hikvision and Dahua devices installed in various government facilities.…

Don't trust your super-hot military boyfriend you've never met. He doesn't exist As Valentine's Day approaches, if your offshore oil rig worker "boyfriend" – who looks like Bradley Cooper in his online pics and has hinted at proposing to you for months, but you've never met in real life – suddenly needs money for "hospital bills" … Just. Don't. Do. It.…

For those relying on this cloud-based security thing It's difficult for security teams to quickly respond to potential threats if the data coming in and the detection rules around it are off.…

Phishing hooked internal documents, code, and some non-critical systems, but users' personal info safe Colorful web forum Reddit has revealed it has suffered a security breach.…

And the FCC ain't exactly helping, senators say Major US carriers are exaggerating the availability of fixed wireless services and leaving under-served communities at risk of missing out on billions in federal funding that would pay for improved services.…

Medical payments expected to resume ... soon? IBM retirees have been forced to pay for some medical expenses out of their own pockets as a result of the IT giant's handling of their healthcare funding.…

Translation: Please, please, Vlad, don't shoot down our satellites While SpaceX continues sending its Starlink terminals to Ukraine - provided the cash keeps coming in - it isn't okay with its satellite internet gear being used directly in war, such as piloting military drones.…

Plus: Microsoft's nu-Bing can't answer question on exoplanets correctly either Web content automatically generated by AI will be ranked according to its quality by Google Search, the internet titan confirmed this week, after previously suggesting it would blanket down-rank computer-created pages.…