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AI might take your job, but you'll be toasty warm while you starve Google plans to invest 1 billion to expand its datacenter campus in Finland - a move that will both bolster its AI compute capacity and reclaim the thermal energy generated by power hungry accelerators to heat local homes....

Sam Altman liked the sound of a fictional ScarBot, which makes this all a bit creepy Audio Movie megastar Scarlett Johansson has complained that one of the voices OpenAI's ChatGPT uses in voice interactions sounds eerily like her own - despite having rebuffed an approach to record a bot for the AI market leader....

DoJ claims he used platform's last days to extort its users A 23-year-old Taiwanese man was arrested in New York for allegedly running the $100 million global dark web narcotics e-commerce operation known as Incognito Market....

Opponents of Myanmar's internet-nobbling military government don't like when Facebook asks for their real names Big Tech isn't much help if you're an activist trying to work against a military junta, and FOSS tools aren't a great alternative either, according to opponents of Myanmar's military regime....

Drone island too - in part to keep China at bay, and ensure TSMC's sweet silicon remains available Taiwan's recently elected president, Lai Ching-te, has used his inaugural address to call for the island state to upgrade to an AI nation....

Plus: Windows set for ML-powered always-watching-you Recall feature Build Microsoft isn't waiting around for Intel and AMD to get their neural processing units (NPUs) up to snuff and is pushing its AI PC agenda forward with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus system-on-chips (SoCs)....

New infosec intelligence service aims to spread the word about recently discovered vulns in free code Securing open source software may soon become a little bit easier thanks to a new vulnerability info-sharing effort initiated by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)....

Let me go, Brandon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can appeal his extradition to the US from the UK, the High Court of England and Wales ruled Monday....

A case of 'keep digging deeper' actually being the right move for Elon, potentially America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reportedly approved Neuralink to implant an updated brain chip in a second human patient. The Elon Musk startup also hopes to perform ten tryouts by the end of the year....

Luckily we have the Wayback Machine The web is melting away like so many glaciers these days....

Staff decibel level is high - and not just from all those jet engines A union representing Boeing employees held a training session last week on whistleblower protection rights, suggesting the troubled jetmaker's problems may be far from over....

Also, feds who switch to Google Workspace for 3 years get an extra year for free Updated Google has taken a victory lap in the wake of high-profile intrusions into Microsoft's systems, and says businesses should ditch Exchange and OneDrive for Gmail and Google Drive....

Blind customers complain they've been forgotten in rollout of latest UI Sonos has alienated chunks of its customer base after releasing a revamped app for its music boxes that strips users of often-used features, including making it nearly "impossible" for the vision impaired....

Just ask a pal in a neighboring town with laxer restrictions Updated Police in multiple major US cities have figured out a trick to circumvent bans on facial recognition technology. Just ask a friend in a city without any such restrictions to do it for you....

This bird isn't going to space for a while Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule will spend a little longer on Earth than planned following the discovery of a leak in one of the spacecraft's reaction control thrusters....

As OpenAI's safety culture comes under scrutiny, CEO bemoans his lack of privacy Spare a thought for poor Sam Altman. Amid the ongoing drama that is OpenAI, with high-profile departures and regulators worrying about safety, the CEO is complaining that his fame put an end to impromptu dining in his own city....

WatchTowr publishes report claiming vendor failed to issue fixes after four months Infosec boffins say they were forced to go public after QNAP failed to fix various vulnerabilities that were reported to it months ago....

Forced selloff case will likely be appealed again ... see you in (Supreme) court The US Department of Justice and Bytedance spent a rare moment unified on Friday when the duo asked for a fast-tracked court schedule for the Chinese short video apps divest or ban case....

Less middleware plus more AI equals ... fewer people? Exclusive Red Hat is slowing or stopping development of some of its middleware software, a situation which could result in some staff layoffs....

Computers learning to spot sass - what could go wrong? Researchers from the University of Groningen's Speech Technology Lab say they have created a multimodal algorithm that can detect sarcasm in speech....

Already delayed, IBM and Deloitte's 'Single Trade Window' presents SaaSy challenge's to tax collector The UK's public spending watchdog is warning that the nation's tax collector needs be become an "intelligent client" in its handling of tech service providers contracted to create a "single trade window" for post-Brexit border arrangements already beset with delays....

Several people are typing. And something might be learning... Salesforce division Slack has responded to criticism by users outraged that its privacy principles allowed the messaging service to slurp customer data for AI training unless specifically told not to, claiming the data never leaves the platform and isn't used to train "third party" models....

It quickly realized dry' progress updates weren't cutting it CyberUK Emotional intelligence was at the heart of the British Library's widely hailed response to its October ransomware attack, according to CEO Roly Keating....

Has Cupertino been trolling us all along? Opinion Apple! What the hell were you smoking? How can a market leader worth $2.9 trillion make such a massive marketing mistake as the advert for the latest iPad?...

This is why all-nighters are a bad idea Who, me? Greetings and salutations, dear readers, and welcome to the sunny spot on the interwebs we like to call Who, Me? in which Reg readers share their tales of tech tasks gone awry....

Industry reportedly pressuring digital ministry not to cut the cord Germany may soon remove Huawei and ZTE equipment from its 5G networks, according to media reports....

Deleted about 40 networks that services needed, causing late Friday fun In the week after its astounding deletion of Australian pension fund UniSuper's entire account, you might think Google Cloud would be on its very best behavior....

PLUS: Connected automakers put on notice; Cisco Talos develops macOS fuzzing technique; Last week's critical vulns Infosec in brief Nissan has admitted to another data loss - this time involving the theft of personal information belonging to more than 50,000 Nissan employees....

PLUS: Grab's fintech profits surges; TSMC exec gets ASML sticker shock; US and China talk about AI, and more. ASIA IN BRIEF Jean Qing Liu, the president of China's top rideshare biz DiDi (and daughter of Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi) on Sunday "informed the Company and its board of directors her wish to resign from her current position as a director and president, with a view to focusing on the company's talent and organization, development of supporting functions and social responsibility work."...

The enemy of my enemy is my best friend Analysis With its newly formed partnership with Arm server processor designer Ampere Computing, Qualcomm is slowly establishing itself as AI infrastructure startups' best friend....

Follow us down this deep rabbit hole of privacy policy after privacy policy Feature In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library....

For starters: Crypto, import tariffs, and Microsoft shipping out staff Kettle It's been a fairly troubling week in terms of the relationship between China and the Western world....

The problem isn't just that LLM-bot generated code is bad - it's where it came from Comment The Debian project has decided against joining Gentoo Linux and NetBSD in rejecting program code generated with the assistance of LLM tools, such as Github's Copilot....

Feds scoff at blockchain integrity while software bug said to have been at heart of the matter The US Department of Justice has booked two brothers on allegations that they exploited open source software used in the Ethereum blockchain world to bag $25 million (20 million)....

Throw another healthcare biz on the barby, mate Australian prescriptions provider MediSecure is the latest healthcare org to fall victim to a ransomware attack, with crooks apparently stealing patients' personal and health data....

Yup, demand's that strong Since 2023, the leasing rate for datacenters in North America that haven't even been fully built yet has shot up and now stands at 84 percent for the first quarter of this year....

Now Google and OpenAI can slurp up your precious memes and priceless comments Still upset that Reddit decided to sell all its content to Google for training its AI? Well, bad news: Now OpenAI has jumped into the mix as well....

But incumbent is mentioned a lot more in attack material Although Joe Biden spends more on Facebook and Instagram ads than Donald Trump, ads attacking the US president outnumber those attacking his likely rival in this year's presidential election, according to data analysis....

Your local nail tech could be a secret agent for Kim's cunning plan Three individuals accused of helping North Korea fund its weapons programs using US money are now in handcuffs....

Funds to be used for purchasing servers and networking kit AI server startup CoreWeave has raised $7.5 billion in a debt deal from private equity companies Blackstone, BlackRock, and others....

Could 2030 bring touchdown at last? NASA and ESA have signed an agreement to finally send the long-delayed ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to the Red Planet....

You get a GPU, you get a GPU, everyone gets a ZeroGPU! Open source AI champion Hugging Face is making $10 million in GPU compute available to the public in a bid to ease the financial burden of model development faced by smaller dev teams....

Watchdog drops official probe but IT giant's deal with Inflection AI and Amazon's with Anthropic still in play Britain's competition watchdog does not think Microsoft's investment in Mistral AI constitutes a merger situation - just weeks after calling for industry views on the agreement....

Ensure there are no sperm whales in the area Underwater datacenters have yet to take off in any meaningful way, but it seems they could prove vulnerable to attack using sound waves, according to researchers....

Rival coders must have Europe-based staff to build and test non-WebKit surfing Exclusive Apple's grudging accommodation of European law - allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices - apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region....

TLDR: Peace in our time is really really hard Interview On Wednesday the FBI and international cops celebrated yet another cybercrime takedown - of ransomware brokerage site BreachForums - just a week after doxing and imposing sanctions on the LockBit ransomware crew's kingpin, and two months after compromising the gang's website....

It'll own the datacenters, but keep data and employees local AWS is to invest 7.8 billion in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany and make the first AWS Region in the State of Brandenburg available to all customers by the end of 2025....

Over-50s to get early retirement offer Toshiba says it will cut up to 4,000 jobs within Japan, a number that accounts for six percent of the company's national workforce, by offering early retirement packages....

How to handle sales pressure and licensing 'negotiations' to make sure it plays to your advantage Feature You might be able to tell what time of year it is by the blossom on the trees or bluebells in the woods. But for Oracle customers stuck in an office somewhere, there is another way of knowing that it's May without consulting a calendar....

The machine was so dead, hospital staff treated it like a corpse On Call The Register knows that tech support people are heroes. That's why each Friday we offer a new installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column featuring your stories of dutifully and selflessly taking on the endless and thankless challenge that is tech support....