The Register

LLMs are helpful, but don't use them for anything important AI models just can't seem to stop making things up. As two recent studies point out, that proclivity underscores prior warnings not to rely on AI advice for anything that really matters....

PLUS: UK man charged with hacking US firms for stock secrets; ransomware actor foils self; and more Infosec In Brief Put away that screwdriver and USB charging cable - the latest way to steal a Kia just requires a cellphone and the victim's license plate number....

Plus: SpaceX plans Vietnam investment; Yahoo! Japan content moderation secrets; LG offloads Chinese display factory; and more ASIA IN BRIEF It's not often The Register writes about a cryptocurrency outfit being on the right side of a scam or crime, but last week crypto exchange Binance claimed it helped Indian authorities to investigate a scam gaming app....

Alethe Denis exposes tricks that made you fall for that return-to-office survey Interview A hacker walked into a "very big city" building on a Wednesday morning with no keys to any doors or elevators, determined to steal sensitive data by breaking into both the physical space and the corporate Wi-Fi network....

It won't smash any benchmarks, but it will go where most others can't Brit chipmaker Pragmatic Semiconductor has created a 32-bit microprocessor in a "flexible technology that is fully functional while flexed."...

Soldiers' new best friend does all the heavy lifting Soldiers bear a heavy burden while serving their homelands, which is why the US Army has awarded contracts this week to two companies for a new generation of equipment-hauling robots....

Snoops allegedly camped out in inboxes well into September The US Department of Justice has charged three Iranians for their involvement in a "wide-ranging hacking campaign" during which they allegedly stole massive amounts of materials from Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and then leaked the information to media organizations....

Now Arm reportedly approached, rebuffed by Chipzilla. Who's next? MOS Technology? Comment Brit chip designer Arm is reportedly the latest to make an attempted play for Intel's product division....

AI screengrab service to be opt-in, features encryption, biometrics, enclaves, more Microsoft has revised the Recall feature for its Copilot+ PCs and insists that the self-surveillance system is secure....

Licensing mixes also needed lest vendors give too much away Interview On the eve of the Cockroach Labs' annual conference, CEO Spencer Kimball commented about the virtues of a rival database company. "There are real benefits to the way MongoDB does things, and that's why a lot of developers like it," he told The Register from RoachFest in New York....

Even investors might not get much out of it Opinion Once upon a time, OpenAI was purely a non-profit. Really. It was established in December 2015 as a non-profit AI research organization. Now it appears increasingly likely that OpenAI will become a for-profit company....

Defenders beware: Data theft, extortion, and backdoors on Storm-0501's agenda Microsoft's latest threat intelligence blog issues a warning to all organizations about Storm-0501's recent shift in tactics, targeting, and backdooring hybrid cloud environments....

Satellite broadband mega-constellation passes mega-milestone Starlink's subscriber count is accelerating and has passed the 4 million milestone, up from the 2.3 million it claimed in its 2023 progress report....

Pair of industry giants set to take on 711M upgrade supporting four UK departments IBM and Oracle have won a competition to supply an ERP upgrade to a group of UK central government departments in a deal worth 711 million ($950 million)....

Working from home, but missing the voice of Elinor Hamilton telling you all services are canceled? Great news for transport nerds! It is now possible to recreate the desolation of an empty platform with every train delayed or canceled, thanks to an unnervingly accurate replica of a station departure board....

Text Edit emerges, plus tinted terminal title bar when it's time to tread tactfully For those on the RPM side of the fence, Fedora 41 has hit beta, and works better in VirtualBox than ever if you're curious to try it....

Engineers at Grab don't need to ask each other questions any more Asia's answer to Uber, Singaporean superapp Grab, has admitted it gathered more data than it could easily analyze - until a large language and generative AI turned things around....

Space broadband on weapons is not something Elon Musk condones A Russian drone shot down over Ukraine appears to have been fitted with equipment made by Elon Musk's space broadband service Starlink, according to Ukrainian media....

Rudra machines use local designs for server, interconnect, and cooling - but seemingly not a planned 96-core Arm CPU Indian prime minister Narendra Modi yesterday dedicated three new supercomputers, and made the machines a symbol of his economic, social, and industry policies....

Starting at SoftBank, using its own PayPay service Ten subsidiaries of Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank Group have begun paying employees' salaries into SoftBank's own PayPay digital wallet....

Appears to be prioritizing GPUs, not manycore CPUs Oracle could choose to take control of Ampere Computing, the Arm processor designer it has backed and uses in its cloud....

Return-to-office mandate reaches inevitable conclusion Dell, after telling employees in March they're expected to be in the office three days a week, has ordered its salespeople to be onsite for the full working week when not with customers and partners....

From allegations of lying about capabilities to fake reviews. Plus: Biden AI robocaller finally fined $6M The FTC has made good on its promise to crack down on suspected deceptive AI claims, announcing legal action against five outfits accused of lying about their software's capabilities or using it to break the law....

Is this a debris inspection mission or an Ubuntu release? NASA and Starfish Space have inked a contract worth $15 million to inspect defunct satellites in Earth's orbit ahead of future missions to deal with space junk....

33% of cloud environments using the toolkit impacted, we're told A critical bug in Nvidia's widely used Container Toolkit could allow a rogue user or software to escape their containers and ultimately take complete control of the underlying host....

Onion Amnesia: Steaming up your digital disguise The Tor Project, a non-profit focused on network anonymity, is joining forces with Tails, an anonymity-focused Linux distribution, in an effort to make better use of financial and technical resources....

More 9.8 bugs? Ay, papi! Aruba access points running AOS-8 and AOS-10 need to be patched urgently after HPE emitted fixes for three critical flaws in its networking subsidiary's networking access points....

Alleged inquiry comes amid claims server maker cooked its books Comment Supermicro has reportedly fallen under the scrutiny of the US Justice Department amid allegations the US-based server vendor is cooking its books....

Nothing says 'oops' like a penalty that won't even dent the electronics giant's coffee budget Two Samsung employees suffered X-ray radiation exposure at a chip fab near Seoul, and electronics giant is only facing a small 10.5 million (less than $8,000) fine for two violations of South Korea's Atomic Energy Safety Act....

Quick fix: Remove cups-browsed, block UDP port 631 Updated After days of waiting and anticipation, what was billed as one or more critical unauthenticated remote-code execution vulnerabilities in all Linux systems was today finally revealed....

Construction slated to begin next year at site of failed BritishVolt plant US investment giant Blackstone is plowing 10 billion ($13.4 billion) into a massive AI datacenter project located in northeast England, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Wednesday....

Root cause identified, but it's taken the better part of a year After what has felt like an eternity, Intel reckons it has finally identified why its 13th and 14th Gen Core series desktop processors have been so unstable....

Should be Jensen Huang's hands in less than 60 days Korea's SK hynix revealed on Thursday that it had become the first chip manufacturer to mass produce the much-anticipated 36 GB 12-layer HBM3E chip....

Attackers got 10k people to download 'trusted' web3 brand cheat before Mountain View intervened The latest in a long line of cryptocurrency wallet-draining attacks has stolen $70,000 from people who downloaded a dodgy app in a single campaign researchers describe as a world-first....

Looks like it's going to be the Sam Altman show from now on Three key OpenAI staff members - CTO Mira Murati, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, and Research VP Barret Zoph - are leaving the ChatGPT maker....

Single digit price hikes suspected for UK and Europe and double digit mooted for everywhere else Updated Like car insurance, software support contracts can renew annually by simply doing nothing, a phenomenon with which SAP users should be all too familiar... but sometimes they are not....

Hey Reg readers, what would you do with Honey, Queen, and Bumble? NASA is looking for ideas on what to do with the Astrobee drones flying around the International Space Station (ISS)....

See it, say it... not sorted just yet as network access remains offline Updated A cybersecurity incident is being probed at Network Rail, the UK non-departmental public body responsible for repairing and developing train infrastructure, after unsavory messaging was displayed to those connecting to major stations' free Wi-Fi portals....

Grafana Labs CTO looks at the options Interview The CrowdStrike chaos was caused by software running riot in the Windows kernel after an update tripped up the code. eBPF is a useful tool for kernel tracing and observability, but could it have mitigated the CrowdStrike incident?...

Access to account info needed to tackle benefit fraud, latest bill claims Privacy campaigners are criticizing UK proposals to force banks to share data from the accounts of government benefit claimants, saying the ploy amounts to "a financial snoopers' charter targeted to automate suspicion."...

AI boosted revenue last year, demand for more RAM in devices to help in 2025 Micron has told investors it expects a new round of server consolidation to add to its already strong growth....

iThing-maker is Putin Kremlin repression ahead of privacy, rights orgs argue Apple has pulled 60 VPNs from its App Store in Russia, according to research from anti-censorship org GreatFire....

HQ in Sweden, made in China, programmed in Bengaluru, but with a traditional offshoring marque Indian tech services giant Infosys has scored a deal to write code for Swedish electric vehicle outfit Polestar....

And hints at revised rules to come later this year India's Ministry of Commerce and Industry has extended the scheme that enraged hardware makers by requiring them to secure import permits - and indicated it will be revised further....

Crikey! $40M of investments in 'digital employees' allegedly went down faster than a frosty Fosters The former CEO of an AI startup that promised to replace humans with "digital employees" has been accused by the US Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission of raising $40 million from investors, including venture capitalists, after showing them deliberately falsified financial records....

That escalated quickly WordPress on Wednesday escalated its conflict with WP Engine, a hosting provider, by blocking the latter's servers from accessing WordPress.org resources - and therefore from potentially vital software updates....

Counsel for aggrieved authors will view info in a secure room, without internet access, and no devices present OpenAI has agreed to reveal the data used to train its generative AI models to attorneys pursuing copyright claims against the developer on behalf of several authors....

Add compliance requirements to your AI to-do list If juggling the extreme cost and hazy ROI of AI weren't enough of a headache, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) now expects enterprise compliance officers to start weighing the tech's potential for harm - or risk stiff fines if it breaks the law....

Expecting a longer storm season this year? Updated Another Beijing-linked cyberspy crew, this one dubbed Salt Typhoon, has reportedly been spotted on networks belonging to US internet service providers in stealthy data-stealing missions and potential preparation for future cyberattacks....