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Mega framework set to replace earlier deals coming to an end next year The UK government has launched the procurement of a package of tech deals worth up to 8 billion ($6.36 billion), attempting to consolidate two earlier purchasing arrangements....

Next time you get in a Facebook argument, just let ChatGPT handle it If you're scratching your head wondering what's the use of all these chatbots, here's an idea: It turns out they're better at persuading people with arguments....

Web devs advised to do their part to limit UI redress attacks Web browsers still struggle to prevent clickjacking, an attack technique first noted in 2008 that repurposes web page interface elements to deceive visitors....

Chinese space startup claims it has the tech to make it happen. Yeah, right Alibaba's Taobao e-commerce platform is exploring one-hour delivery by - wait for it - rocket....

More entities will need a license On Tuesday, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) extended digital payment token (DPT) restrictions that seek to prevent money laundering and financing of terrorism....

Internet outages recorded as Japan issues tsunami warning Video A significant earthquake has struck Taiwan, shuttering some of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's chip fabrication plants....

CISA calls for 'fundamental, security-focused reforms' to happen ASAP, delaying work on other software A review of the June 2023 attack on Microsoft's Exchange Online hosted email service - which saw accounts used by senior US officials compromised by a China-linked group called "Storm-0558" - has found that the incident would have been preventable save for Microsoft's lax infosec culture and sub-par cloud security precautions....

Konnichiwa, Sato-San A simulation run by a Japanese professor and released on Monday revealed that by the year 2531, everyone in Japan will have the surname Sato....

Generative AI darling was on track to pay $99M on compute to generate just $11M in revenues The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall - because he couldn't find a way to pay for them....

And Diameter, too, for good measure The FCC appears to finally be stepping up efforts to secure decades-old flaws in American telephone networks that are allegedly being used by foreign governments and surveillance outfits to remotely spy on and monitor wireless devices....

Elon controversial? No way Grok, the edgy generative AI model developed by Elon Musk's X, has a bit of a problem: With the application of some quite common jail-breaking techniques it'll readily return instructions on how to commit crimes....

Come on in, drill into Anthropic and Mistral - that's not the sound of a door slamming shut behind you Amazon will furnish recent AI startups partnered with Y Combinator with $500k in credits each on Amazon Bedrock to use with third-party models like Anthropic and Mistral AI....

Advertiser antitrust lawsuit says claimed deal with Netflix is anticompetitive Meta allegedly starved its Facebook Watch video service to appease Netflix and sustain its ad monopoly, advertisers suing the biz have claimed....

Land of the Free has lost its way in quest for profits Comment Generally the head of US government agencies and comedy don't mix, but on Monday night the Lina Khan, boss of the Federal Trade Commission, was on the Daily Show recounting how the agency is going after Amazon, Facebook and others over monopolistic practices. She also got evidence of her persona non grata status with Cook & Co....

As 70% of boffinry nerve center's projects involve machine learning A DARPA leader has revealed that around 70 percent of the US government agency's programs involve AI in some shape or form, and those projects could have serious ramifications for the future of jobs in software development....

Irony alerts: Open Web Application Security Project Foundation suffers lapse A misconfigured MediaWiki web server allowed digital snoops to access members' resumes containing their personal details at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation....

Memorandum of Understanding penned to put models, systems, and agents through their paces The US and UK governments will collaborate on test suites to promote safety in the fast-paced world of AI development....

Power snafus take limelight in latest downtime diary from Uptime Institute The frequency and severity of datacenter outages is on the decline, yet when incidents do occur they can be very costly to the organization involved, with power issues leading to the most serious blackouts....

Nothing says 'sorry' like 10 percent off shipping for a month Ecommerce platform Pandabuy has apologized after two cybercriminals were spotted hawking personal data belonging to 1.3 million customers....

Consumer-grade devices won't be hit as hard Samsung intended to raise prices on its enterprise SSDs by 15 percent in the second calendar quarter of 2024, but unrelentingly high demand boosted by AI might push that higher still....

Simple stuff like slapping on a logo fools more folks and travels further As hundreds of millions of voters around the globe prepare to elect their leaders this year, there's no question that trolls will try to sway the outcomes using AI, according to Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center....

Action gathers steam in the EU, US and UK as anti-trust teams collate market feedback The Cloud Infrastructure Providers In Europe (CISPE) lobby group has welcomed an agreement among French lawmakers that it claims "will enshrine fair software licensing for cloud customers in French law."...

Cloud cyber resilience model could raise $700M despite $278M losses Cloud security provider Rubrik has filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange following a flurry of similar flotations....

Refusal to play ball may result in satellite operator moving investment elsewhere Starlink is reportedly facing obstructions to its expansion in the Mediterranean from Telecom Italia, which it claims is refusing to share data that would help to avoid interference between the two operators....

Victims of the powerful surveillance tool will soon find out the truth Former Polish government officials may face criminal charges following an investigation into their use of the notorious spyware Pegasus to surveil political opponents and others....

This follows attack on NHS services in Scotland last week The cyber skids at INC Ransom are claiming responsbility for the ongoing cybersecurity incident at Leicester City Council, according to a post caught by eagle-eyed infosec watchers....

Licenses everywhere can omit collaboration app thanks to EU regulators For those not keen on Microsoft Teams, help is in hand - European Union requirements to unbundle the software from Office 365 will be implemented globally....

Senders of more than 5K messages a day are in the crosshairs It was 20 years ago on Monday that Google unleashed Gmail on the world, and the chocolate factory is celebrating with new rules that just might, hopefully, cut down on the amount of spam users receive....

Is Developer Cloud enough to steal Nvidia's thunder? Interview Intel is attempting to woo developers to its cloud with early access to unreleased hardware and a born-again attitude to open source in a bid to differentiate itself from competitors....

Ye cannae change the laws of physics, but you can change your mind Opinion Apple is good at security. It's good at processors. Thus GoFetch, a major security flaw in its processor architecture, is a double whammy....

But unhappy European buyers have called for regulators to step in Exclusive VMware by Broadcom will deliver a significant update to its flagship Cloud Foundation bundle in the middle of this year and follow it up with a major update early in 2025....

Big in China - and a presence elsewhere, but not at a scale to worry global hyperscalers On Friday, China's Huawei Technologies released its annual report in which it revealed its cloud computing business was its fastest growing established segment....

Brief awakening brought mixed news and familiar scenery Japan's Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) late last week revealed that its Moon lander had - somewhat unexpectedly - mostly survived a second lunar night and was briefly well enough to send home some snaps....

PLUS: Google Cloud ANZ boss departs; Japan revives airliner ambitions; China-linked attackers target Asian entities ASIA IN BRIEF Singapore's Monetary Authority on Monday launched an application, intuitively named "COllaborative Sharing of Money Laundering/TF Information & Cases" (COSMIC for short, obviously) to target money laundering and terrorism financing....

Declares victory in settlement of class action lawsuit, but individual claims remain possible In hopes of settling a lawsuit challenging its data collection practices, Google has agreed to destroy web browsing data it collected from users browsing in Chrome's private modes - which weren't as private as you might have thought....

At least not until Redmond's government edition is ready to roll Staff working at the US House Of Representatives have been barred from using Microsoft's Copilot chatbot and AI productivity tools, pending the launch of a version tailored to the needs of government users....

This time, we got lucky. It mostly affected bleeding-edge distros. But that's not a defense strategy Analysis The discovery last week of a backdoor in a widely used open source compression library called xz could have been a security disaster had it not been caught by luck and atypical curiosity about latency from a Microsoft engineer....

Play it again, Sam OpenAI is believed to be in talks with Microsoft to construct a massive supercomputer code-named Stargate containing millions of AI accelerators at a cost of up to $100 billion....

We're never going to give you up... An ASIC designed to display the infamous Rickroll meme is here, alongside 164 other assorted functions....

Super lab loves to big up things it says it couldn't possibly let loose on the world for now OpenAI's latest trick needs just 15 seconds of audio of someone speaking to clone that person's voice - but don't worry, no need to look behind the curtain, the biz wants everyone to know it's not going to release this Voice Engine until it can be sure the potential for mischief has been managed....

Timing predictions aside, multi-chip designs with 3D stacking will be the path forward 3D chiplets will be the key to building the world's first one-trillion transistor GPU, says TSMC chairman Mark Liu and chief scientist H.-S. Philip Wong....

Also, TheMoon botnet back for EoL SOHO routers, Sellafield to be prosecuted for 'infosec failures', plus critical vulns Infosec in brief Nearly a year on from the discovery of a massive data theft at healthcare biz Harvard Pilgrim, and the number of victims has now risen to nearly 2.9 million people in all US states....

Theresa Payton on why US needs a national privacy law Interview Congress is mulling legislation that will require TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance to cut ties with the video-sharing mega-app, or the social network will be banned in the USA....

Still claims the personal info wasn't stolen from its systems AT&T confirmed over the weekend that more than 73 million records of its current and former customers dumped on the dark web in mid-March do indeed describe its subscribers, though it still denies the data came direct from its systems....

Guess what? Some users should look out for expensive surprises Microsoft has consolidated its licensing terms for Power BI with its Fabric data platform, leaving some users facing steep price hikes according to one analyst....

Enthusiastic young tech decided to simplify the mainframe, with unexpected results Who, Me? Well hello again, dear reader, and welcome once more to Who, Me? - in which Register readers unburden themselves with confessions of tech mistakes long past. It's very cathartic, you know....

Code shines up nicely in production, says Chocolate Factory's Bergstrom Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++....

Redmond's strategy for blending cloud and client is finally taking shape Comment Microsoft's definition of what does and doesn't constitute an AI PC is taking shape. With the latest version of Windows, a dedicated Copilot key, and an NPU capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second, you'll soon be able to run Microsoft Copilot locally, ish, on your machine....

Karen Jacobsen had no idea what she was getting into when she applied for a very odd job in 2002 Interview In 2002 Australian singer-songwriter Karen Jacobsen was living in New York City when she was offered the chance to audition for a job that required a voiceover artist with a native Australian accent, resident in the north-east of the USA, to record a voice model that would be used for ... nobody quite knew what....

The 'most painful' part? Coding the Windows drivers If you've ever wondered whether a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA can be configured as a homegrown gaming 3D GPU capable of accelerating Quake and other faves from the 1990s, we have an answer - and it's yes....