The Register

Budget-friendly tool breaks the you-get-what-you-pay-for rule A budget-friendly remote access trojan (RAT) that's under active development is selling on underground Russian forums for about $7 for a two-month subscription, according to BlackBerry researchers today. …

The State Department notice comes in wake of the cybercrims’ attack on Costa Rican government The US government is offering up to $15 million for information about key leaders of the notorious Conti ransomware group and any individual participating in an attack using a variant of Conti's malware.…

Investor money set to help the software vendor make its AI analytics tech a thing Pyramid Analytics, the BI company which counts Siemens, VW Ireland and Dell among its customers, has secured Series E funding of $120 million.…

AI is meant to solve solve tech challenges innate in designing, running complex system Tesla has started legal action against a former employee the company alleges was copying confidential data from its Project Dojo supercomputer onto his own systems outside the company. It further alleges he then tried to conceal his actions by submitting a substitute laptop for inspection by the carmaker's information security team.…

$30 plans from ISPs and 'up to' $30 monthly credit means free internet for some The Biden White House has put forward a plan that could see 40 percent of households in the United States getting subsidized high-speed internet, with some having service free of charge.…

Lead times still lengthy as chipmakers continue to make bank on what little is available Infineon joined the ranks of chipmakers that are benefiting from the industry-wide global semiconductor shortages, more than doubling profits in a sector where lead times are severely protracted.…

John Deere rival says it may be days or 'potentially longer' before some production facilities are back in action US agricultural machinery maker AGCO is the latest high-profile organization to fall victim to ransomware, which it says affects operations at some of its worldwide production facilities.…

"We live this fight ourselves everyday," Microsoft says of enterprise attacks Microsoft is rolling out its "Security Experts" managed service with an eye on stomping down threats and malware.…

Plus: Unpatched DNS bug puts IoT devices at risk, SolarWinds hackers set up new digs, and a CEO faces hard time for massive mining fraud In Brief Colonial Pipeline is facing an almost $1 million fine for control room management failures after the US Department of Transportation alleged they contributed to the nation's fuel disruption in the wake of the 2021 ransomware attack.…

Check 16, 32, and 64GB DIMMs made in the middle to end of 2020, blames manufacturing errors Cisco is warning that some of its DIMMs are failing prematurely due to a manufacturing error and have advised users to replace the memory component to avoid a server failure.…

From protein prediction to drug generation, neural networks are revolutionizing drug discovery Analysis AI can study chemical molecules in ways scientists can't comprehend, automatically predicting complex protein structures and designing new drugs, despite having no real understanding of science.…

Internet regulator puts a few practices in place – including viewing curfews and bans on tips China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has published guidelines that aim to stop minors from giving tips or other forms of payment to livestreamers, watching after 10pm, or livestreaming themselves.…

Forget the days of NT (Nineties Tyranny), let's change that to New Trust. Corporate IT is watching Opinion We concentrate on their technical aspects, but file systems can get pretty political. They're one of the last fronts still fighting in the Interoperability Wars. While you can plumb any number of open file systems to Linux if you need what they have, NTFS remains a problem. …

All routers are equal, but some are more equal than others Who, Me? Welcome to an edition of Who, Me? where some configuration confusion left an entire nation cast adrift.…

Same goes for Arm, for the same reason: Power efficiency Comment AMD’s plans to integrate AI functionality from its Xilinx FPGAs with its Epyc server microprocessors presents several tantalizing opportunities for systems builders and datacenter operators alike, Glenn O’Donnell, research director at Forrester, told The Register.…

Stalled law satisfies few and has even been identifed as likely to damage growth Analysis NSO Group's Pegasus spyware-for-governments keeps returning to the headlines thanks to revelations such as its use against Spain's prime minister and senior British officials. But there's one nation where outrage about Pegasus has been constant for nearly a year and shows little sign of abating: India.…

Plus: SoundCloud acquires startup for better algorithmic curated playlists In brief OpenAI's image-generation model DALL·E 2 may be fun to play with but it exhibits common stereotypes, biases, and can create NSFW pictures making it risky to deploy in the real world, experts have warned.…

We speak to the head of ISA's governing body on industry adoption, timelines, and more Interview The CEO of RISC-V's governing body says she wants to nothing less than "world domination" for the rising open-source processor technology, but to do that, the nonprofit needs buy-in from a variety of organizations, even those steeped in dominant, proprietary architectures, such as x86 giant Intel.…

Just like it was supposed to do in 2019 Authorities in China have reportedly directed government agencies and state-run companies to bin all personal computers made by foreign companies and replace them with homegrown hardware within two years.…

NSA director says he doesn't know of a 'big one' that was successful False-flag cyberattacks represent a red line that even nation states like Russia and China don't want to cross, according to Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia.…

Telco 'ripped off customers by charging high-speed prices for slow service', says watchdog The FTC has settled a case in which Frontier Communications was accused of charging high prices for under-delivered internet connectivity.…

Sonoma Creek to target non-AI experts, according to docs seen by El Reg Exclusive Intel plans to start selling a software platform that promises to simplify and speed up the training of AI models for computer vision, according to internal company documents seen by The Register.…

You have died of dystopia Amazon plans to build five more datacenters in rural Oregon at estimated cost of $11.8 billion, according to documents filed in Morrow County last week.…

Cloud grammar police more Keystone Kops Google Docs, the search giant's web-based word processing app, has been resuscitated after it was found choking on a series of conjunctions and other parts of speech.…

Helping North Korea? Uncle Sam would like a word The US Treasury has sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer Blender for its role in helping North Korea's Lazarus Group launder stolen digital assets. …

Parallel retrocomputing project of the week, er, month, no, year The astonishing PicoPuter emulation project can run a transputer emulator on multiple Raspberry Pi Picos, and clustering them using the transputer's native inter-processor link protocol.…

Claims FederatedScope is easy to use and keeps training data private Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has open-sourced a federated learning platform it claims protects privacy by enabling the development of machine learning algorithms without having to share training data.…

GPU giant accused of obscuring its impact on gaming segment in 2017 Nvidia has paid a $5.5 million fine to settle charges that the GPU maker withheld the true impact of cryptocurrency mining on 2017 revenue.…

Calls time on interactions and services with customers, including state-owned bank Sberbank Data warehousing specialist Teradata is taking a $60 million hit by ending sales, operations and support in Russia following the country's invasion of Ukraine.…

The PC world is not yet ready for all UEFI all the time The Fedora Project has changed its collective mind, and Fedora 37 won't require UEFI – it will still install and run on BIOS-only systems.…

Government department struggles with 30-year-old applications The UK's chief finance minister, Rishi Sunak, has blamed legacy IT for his decision not to increase social security payments as inflation hits the highest rate in 30 years.…

€14b in state aid on offer for companies to set up shop in the country Germany's government is looking to attract chipmakers to the country by offering €14 billion ($14.7 billion) in financial support, apparently spurred on by global semiconductor supply chain problems.…

Spend your weekend wallowing in the good old days RAD Basic has edged a little closer to bringing Visual Basic 6 back to your PC with the release of 0.5.0 Alpha 3.…

Oops. Beijing wants zero COVID, not zero foreign investment Supply chain issues and other disruptions in China caused by strict COVID-19 lockdown measures have seen 23 percent of European businesses operating in the Middle Kingdom consider moving elsewhere, according to a recent report.…

A different kind of assembly language Google has deployed a pair of AI-related services to woo factories and assembly lines onto its cloud.…

Supply-chain constraints and code for network OS played a role, analyst tells El Reg Nokia’s "significant" contributions to Microsoft's open-source SONiC project and ongoing supply-chain challenges undoubtedly played a role in the Windows giant's decision to deploy the Finns' network switches, despite their relative inexperience in the arena, Dell'Oro analyst Sameh Boujelbene told The Register.…

UK IT service provider sees contract value more than double 20 years after first work on system Updated The IT services arm of UK comms giant BT has won a contract extension worth up to £26 million ($32 million) for up to five years – without competition – to support Northern Ireland's government accounting system.…

Treat all those micro-phonies like so many spies in the wire Something for the Weekend My neighbor is talking to a rock. He is trying to persuade it to sing.…

Nvidia-powered ThinkEdge SE70 gets a view of the Panorama CCTV booster Amazon Web Services has allowed a third-party hardware offering into its universe, with a Lenovo server dedicated to video analytics scoring the gig.…

Leftover bits of wire where PC used to be? Really ties the office together On Call There was a time in IT when "brute force" meant something other than guessing at passwords while wearing a favorite hoodie. Welcome to an edition of On Call that really pulls out some memories.…

Wants Big Tech to butt out, and return control to individuals The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) – a meta bank for the world's central banks and facilitator of cross-border payments – has advocated new governance systems that promote owner control of data and transparency over its use.…

* Terms and so many conditions apply Starlink customers who've been itching to take their dish on the road can finally do so – for a price. …

DingTalk goes into 'extended reality' Alibaba's DingTalk collaboration suite has entered "extended reality" with a new offering powered by smart glasses.…

Whistleblowers say takedowns were used as leverage, Facebook disagrees Facebook whistleblowers have alleged that the company deliberately took down the presences of Australian government and emergency services organizations during negotiations on the nation's landmark pay-to-link-to-news laws.…

BIG-IP iControl authentication bypass, NFV VM escape, and more F5 Networks and Cisco this week issued warnings about serious, and in some cases critical, security vulnerabilities in their products.…

In wake of dinobaby-gate, investors not happy with NDAs hushing up claims of harassment, discrimination IBM shareholders at the IT giant's annual meeting last month endorsed a proposal to have the company produce a public report on the potential risks arising from its use of concealment clauses that constrain disclosure of workplace misconduct.…

Another banner year for criminals. For everyone else, not so much Cyber-scams cost victims around the globe at least $6.9 billion last year, according to the FBI's latest Internet Crime Report.…

With funding from database billionaire, will Oracle-style licensing follow? $50k per like? $1m for 420-character limit? Elon Musk has bagged $7.14 billion in funding from Oracle billionaire co-founder Larry Ellison, cryptocurrency exchange Binance, and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, as well as top VC firm Sequioa and others, in his quest to acquire Twitter.…

If you can't beat the Golden State, try again at the federal level California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Wednesday welcomed the decision by a group of telecom and cable industry associations to abandon their legal challenge of the US state's net neutrality law SB822.…

Passphrases PIP'd, FIDO and W3C projects promoted Analysis Microsoft, Apple and Google – all longtime proponents of doing away with passwords for authentication purposes – are throwing their support behind standards developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that could eliminate passphrases completely.…