The Register

Still not reusable, but at least it's getting closer to long-delayed launch The Ariane 6 launcher has successfully conducted a hot fire test -, an important achievement for the Arianespace and the European Space Agency (ESA)....

Buying on credit forbidden, affordability tests imposed, and accreditation required for big bets The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) revealed on Thursday its latest cryptocurrency regulations - measures designed to manage the digital payment tokens (DPTs) with measures akin to those some governments treat cigarettes or gambling....

Bharti Enterprises-backed outfit beats Kuiper and Starlink The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) has approved Eutelsat OneWeb to provide commercial satellite broadband services....

Tech companies should behave like the aviation industry and detail failures to improve safety for all The chief scientist of the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the region's internet registry, as called for operators of digital infrastructure to share more info about their outages....

Russia's Unified Digital Platform could be yours, along with many other less controversial projects India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has created the Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository - a collection of code created by governments, made freely available to other nations....

One of US's largest underwriters forced to shut down a number of key systems Fortune 500 insurance biz Fidelity National Financial (FNF) has confirmed that it has fallen victim to a "cybersecurity incident."...

With Ingenuity still on the Red Planet, engineers have the best of both worlds NASA is planning more ambitious flights for the Mars Ingenuity helicopter as engineers work on its follow-up back on Earth....

Recall issued for fiery surprise Got a Lenovo USB-C Laptop Power bank? Is the model number PBLG2W? There's a chance the device could catch fire, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC), and Lenovo has issued a recall notice....

Company hopes more folks needing AI compute globally will offset pain AI chip developer Graphcore is laying off staff in China after ceasing sales in the country, following the introduction of updated US export restrictions....

Kim's cyber cronies becoming more active, sophisticated in attempts to pwn global orgs The national cybersecurity organizations of the UK and the Republic of Korea (ROK) have issued a joint advisory warning of an increased volume and sophistication of North Korean software supply chain attacks....

Eyeing an August 2024 launch, if spacecraft is ready for its first mission Blue Origin is expected to launch two small Martian satellites as the first-ever interplanetary payload aboard its upcoming New Glenn rocket, NASA confirmed this week....

Customers complain of poor comms during huge outage that's sparked payroll fears A ransomware attack and resulting outages at direct debit collection company London & Zurich has forced at least one customer to take out a short-term loan as six-figure backlogs continue to cause cash flow mayhem....

Net-zero promises or zero-net progress? Greenpeace has savaged global electronics companies, claiming they are simply not doing enough with efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions....

Restoration project headed up by Steve Kaisler is gathering steam ANTIQUE CODE SHOW Xerox's pioneering graphical Lisp workstation operating system is not only alive, well, and MIT-licensed, but running in the cloud as well as on modern OSes....

Akamai sounds the alarm - won't name the vendors yet, but there is a fix coming Akamai has uncovered two zero-day bugs capable of remote code execution, both being exploited to distribute the Mirai malware and built a botnet army for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks....

Study finds galactic cosmic radiation can damage below-the-belt tissues, and the problem may not go away Male astronauts who spend prolonged periods in space may suffer permanent erectile dysfunction, new research has found....

Here comes the Sun Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) has taken an AI tool created to monitor telco networks and adapted it to predict anomalies in a nuclear fusion reactor to help keep its experimental power source running....

Users told to hold tight and await instructions as investigation continues Web tracking and analytics outfit New Relic has issued a scanty security advisory warning customers it has experienced a scary cyber something....

Community programs retained but CEO waves farewell Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has concluded, and quickly resulted in the creation of four divisions dedicated to the virty giant's business - none of which appear to include end-user compute products....

That GitHub repo an interviewer wants you to work on could be malware Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 has detailed a pair of job market hacking schemes linked to state-sponsored actors in North Korea: one in which the threat actors pose as job seekers, the other as would-be employers....

And offers $25,000 prize to stop voice deepfakes from catching on The US Federal Trade Commission has given itself the power to use compulsory processes - a mechanism that allows it to demand access to documents - for investigations of products and services that use or claim to be powered by AI....

Not that we're encouraging anyone to defeat this fingerprint authentication Hardware security hackers have detailed how it's possible to bypass Windows Hello's fingerprint authentication and login as someone else - if you can steal or be left alone with their vulnerable device....

Staff records swiped, leaked by gang who probably read one too many comics, sorry, graphic novels The self-described "gay furry hackers" of SiegedSec are back: this time boasting they've broken into America's biggest nuclear power lab's computer systems and stolen records on thousands of employees. Some of that data has already been leaked, it appears....

Decision means family of man killed in 2019 cross-traffic collision can take carmaker to trial There is "reasonable evidence" that Tesla and Elon Musk were aware of deficiencies in Autopilot that caused the 2019 death of a Model 3 owner, a Florida judge has ruled, opening the way for yet another liability trial....

Stop us if you've heard this one before While the chaos unfolding at OpenAI might be amusing to watch, the issue of copyright infringement continues to plague the upstart after yet another lawsuit was lobbed its way....

GPS-jamming tactics were doing much more than simply scrambling missile guidance systems Cisco says it has shipped modified switches to Ukrenergo, Ukraine's state-owned electricity grid operator, to help it withstand Russian cyberattacks aiming to disrupt energy infrastructure....

Unsurprisingly, the app doesn't know what's going on at the company either Despite the revolving door of CEOs at OpenAI, the company has found time to update ChatGPT with a freebie voice feature....

Cites alleged ageist headwinds A former Boeing employee has filed a brief for damages against the aerospace giant, seeking compensation of $1.75 million for emotional distress after allegedly suffering retaliation for speaking up against "targeting conduct" aimed at older workers....

What is double of 15% sales shrinkage? HP CEO Enrique Lores is betting a sprinkle of AI dust can regenerate the flagging PC market - and with shipments still in decline across the industry, he can't afford to tease Wall Street....

Two companies both online when slide was viewed at presentation Nvidia is facing legal action in the US for theft of trade secrets from a German automotive company, which alleges its ex-employee made an epic blunder of showing something he shouldn't have when minimizing a Powerpoint slide at a joint Microsoft Teams meeting both companies were attending....

Helium tech to end up on $1-$2 SoCs claimed to bring big performance gains for ML workloads Arm is aiming to infuse AI into connected devices and other low-power hardware with an addition to its Cortex-M line-up of microcontroller core designs....

There ain't no party like a Pu-238 party NASA has celebrated a shipment of half a kilo of plutonium oxide by the US Department of Energy, the largest since US production of plutonium-238 was restarted just over a decade ago....

Crims drain wallets of marks after letting them in on 'awesome crypto scheme secret' The US has seized nearly $9 million in proceeds generated by exploiting more than 70 victims across the nation in so-called "pig butchering" scams....

Today's story was brought to you by the words politician and silly Deputy UK Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said the country's civil service would improve public services by, among other things, setting up an "Incubator for AI."...

Katie Moussouris, who pioneered Redmond's program, says folks are focusing on the wrong thing Interview Microsoft's bug bounty program celebrated its tenth birthday this year, and has paid out $63 million to security researchers in that first decade - with $60 million awarded to bug hunters in the past five years alone, according to Redmond....

30 days to get compliant with tracking rules or face enforcement action The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is getting tough on website design, insisting that opting out of cookies must be as simple as opting in....

Award follows 1 deal during pandemic and 60 million in non-competitive contracts Palantir has secured a 330 million ($412 million) contract to provide the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), which the world's largest healthcare provider says is vital to recover from its pandemic backlog....

Future neural nets will probably use a mix of AI-generated and real info Synthetic images can help AI models learn visual representations more accurately compared to real snaps, according to computer scientists at MIT and Google. The result is neural networks that are better at making pictures from your written descriptions....

A certain Big Red Communist country looms as a dampener - but not a big one Nvidia has revealed it tripled revenue, year-over-year, for the third quarter of its financial year....

New board includes former Salesforce CEO and treasury secretary Breaking News Sam Altman seems set to return to the job as CEO of OpenAI - from which he was last week suddenly and unexpectedly ejected....

Competitors predict price gouging as employees await news China's State Administration for Market Regulation approved Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, and also revealed it suspended deliberations on the matter on September 25 and only resumed on November 17 - beyond the October 30 date Broadcom set as its target for the deal to close....

Why can't we be FRANDS? Updated Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo announced on Tuesday it had filed suit against Taiwanese manufacturer Asus for patent infringement related to software, hardware and connectivity in multiple products....

Stockpiled silicon, improving efficiency, and looking for alternative suppliers - while maybe taking a dig at Microsoft and OpenAI Chinese web giant Baidu, which emphasized AI services long before they were cool, has revealed it is largely untroubled by the United States' chip tech export bans, can do just fine with silicon that is allowed to be sold in China, and has a workaround plan for when sanctions bite....

Many projects really about basic services, or don't integrate well. Charge ahead and extend it anyway, think tank recommends In an assessment of India's eight-year-long Smart Cities Mission, think tank the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) has opined that the project can be considered "at best a drop in the ocean" and should be viewed as a "pilot project."...

At least get a court order before mining Hemisphere Project data, says Senator A senator has alleged that American law enforcement agencies snoop on US citizens and residents, seemingly without regard for the privacy provisions of the Fourth Amendment, under a secret program called the Hemisphere Project that allows police to conduct searches of trillions of phone records....

Chief quits, pays own penalty after helping crooks launder cash, aiding sanctions evaders The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange just got a little smaller, with the US Department of Justice announcing Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao have both pleaded guilty to a multitude of financial crimes. As a result Binance will fork out $10 billion to Uncle Sam in fines and settlements....

Search giant says delays not specific to any browser - just those evading advert breaks. YMMV Google has admitted its efforts to discourage the use of ad blockers on YouTube have resulted in a deliberate "suboptimal viewing" experience for some users....

Half as many hallucinations, startup claims, and it admits when it's wrong Anthropic has launched Claude 2.1, the latest version of its large language model. We're told it can process more text and generate responses that are more accurate than previous iterations, and it can interact with developer-defined APIs allowing it to be integrated with users' tech stacks....

Tune in, hear or watch our vultures wrap up this fiasco, before it goes out of date Kettle By now you've probably all seen the drama at OpenAI unfolding: CEO Sam Altman being fired by the board, attempts to woo him back, and attempts by Microsoft to hire him and his staff, who have threatened to quit....

Case filed in Texas, where anti-SLAPP provisions don't apply in federal court Elon Musk has made good on threats to take legal action against Media Matters over its reports alleging high-profile ads are being served next to antisemitic posts, filing a suit yesterday in Texas....