The Register

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....

Gaming industry clings to 'Survive 2024' Sega this week announced it was laying off 240 of its European workforce....

STOP USAGE OF FEDORA RAWHIDE, says Red Hat while Debian Unstable and others also affected Red Hat on Friday warned that a malicious backdoor found in the widely used data compression software library xz may be present in instances of Fedora Linux 40 and in the Fedora Rawhide developer distribution....

CVE-2024-1086 turns the page tables on system admins A Linux privilege-escalation proof-of-concept exploit has been published that, according to the bug hunter who developed it, typically works effortlessly on kernel versions between at least 5.14 and 6.6.14....

Cut-down chips get a big boost US sanctions on China that banned Nvidia's fastest gaming GPU might be irrelevant thanks to overclocking its slightly slower replacement back to original levels of performance....

Standard Term Support means only 18 months before retirement Support for Microsoft's .NET 7 software framework ends in May, a mere 18 months after its 2022 release - a reminder that the days of enterprise-pleasing long-term updates are receding into the past....

E-commerce titan to appeal sanction amounting to three hours of annual profit Poland's competition and consumer protection watchdog has fined Amazon's European subsidiary around $8 million (31.9 million Zlotys) for "dark patterns" that messed around internet shoppers....

PLUS: Dodging rats the size of cats while repairing chewed-through cabling On Call: Dirt File It's a holiday Friday in much of the Reg-reading world so On Call is departing from its usual format of a single story to instead bring you more tales from our Dirt File: your stories of mud, crud, dust, fust, and other foul substances that make fixing hardware so very fun....

Defenses against prompt injection, hallucination arrive as Feds eye ML risks Microsoft has introduced a set of tools allegedly to help make AI models safer to use in Azure....

2016 meddling was 'primitive' compared to what's ahead When it comes to AI possibly influencing elections, 2024 will be "ground zero," according to Hillary Clinton....

We know the average customer doesn't have a law degree, CEO tells us Updated Cloud server provider Vultr has rapidly revised its terms-of-service after some netizens were alarmed by clauses that broadly demanded the "perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free" rights to customer "content."...

But don't worry, the models are here to help summarize technical docs and answer your questions ... for now +Comment Two years ago, before ChatGPT turned the tech industry on its head, Juniper CEO Rami Rahim boasted that by 2027 artificial intelligence would completely automate the network....

Xi Jinping warns 'no force' can stop country's science and tech progress The US government has publicly confirmed it is applying pressure on chipmaking tool suppliers based in allied nations - think ASML and the like - to halt maintenance of kit already sold to China....

Vendor takes hardline approach to patch disclosure to new levels JetBrains TeamCity users are urged to apply the latest version upgrade this week after the vendor disclosed 26 new security issues in the CI/CD web application....

$340M finance upgrade still working out the kinks Hundreds of research grants are stuck in processing limbo as the University of Washington continues to grapple with its $340 million implementation of Workday software....

Could have been worse: Prosecutors wanted decades more Fallen crypto-king Sam Bankman-Fried has been jailed for 25 years after New York federal judge Lewis Kaplan expressed disbelief at almost every argument from his legal team....

Flaws enable privilege escalation and remote code execution Nvidia's AI-powered ChatRTX app launched just six week ago but already has received patches for two security vulnerabilities that enabled attack vectors, including privilege escalation and remote code execution....

Sustainability Summit pushes industry partners to reduce their environmental impact, including harmful chemicals Intel is seeking alternatives to harmful chemicals that the electronics industry has used for decades, amid growing concerns about the potentially negative impacts on the environment and human health....

After all, it's only about keeping the essentials on - no rush America's long-awaited cyber attack reporting rules for critical infrastructure operators are inching closer to implementation, after the Feds posted a notice of proposed rulemaking for the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA)....

It reached the desktop and then ... A former Microsoft engineer has waxed lyrical about how he and a colleague made a sporting bet over how far a new build of Windows would get before crashing....

In happier news, Ubuntu Pro extended support now goes up to 12 years After multiple waves of cryptocurrency credential-stealing apps were uploaded to the Snap store, Canonical is changing its policies....

MySQL sibling saga continues as 40-year-old infrastructure software firm enters the fray Progress Software has made a bid for MariaDB, offering a price that is less than a tenth of the beleaguered company's value at its IPO launch....

Sensitive documents dumped on leak site amid claims of 3 TB of data stolen in total NHS Scotland says it managed to contain a ransomware group's malware to a regional branch, preventing the spread of infection across the entire institution....

Michael Stonbraker on the neat side effects of putting an operating system on top of a database Database pioneer Michael Stonebraker is promising his new concept of putting the operating system on top of a database could help end ransomware....

In the AI gold rush, analytics outfit wants to provide the shovels Analytics platform Databricks has launched an open source foundational large language model, hoping enterprises will opt to use its tools to jump on the LLM bandwagon....

One might say this is a wurst case scenario The German Federal Office for Information Security (BIS) has issued an urgent alert about the poor state of Microsoft Exchange Server patching in the country....

Simply look out for libraries imagined by ML and make them real, with actual malicious code. No wait, don't do that In-depth Several big businesses have published source code that incorporates a software package previously hallucinated by generative AI....

Government issues stern warning over despot money-making scheme Two executives were issued arrest warrants in Japan on Wednesday, reportedly for charges related to establishing a business that outsourced work to North Korean IT engineers....

Report claims Beijing is most displaced by junta's failure to address slave labor scam settlements The military junta controlling Myanmar has struggled to control all of its territory thanks in part to China backing rebel forces as a way of expressing its displeasure about cyberscam centers operating from the country....

Past versions struggled to spot a lungbuster - this time authorities think they've reduced false positives Singapore has improved the AI it uses to detect smokers who light up in the many places where the practice is forbidden across the island nation, to help local law enforcement more efficiently stub out offenders....

Novel design might also help reduce those annoying burn-in issues A recent paper published in Nature demonstrates that hyperfluorescent OLEDs could significantly reduce the energy required to display the color blue - potentially mitigating, but not solving, screen burn-in....

Domain-specific accelerators are 'essential to progress' it claims, and a chiplet ecosystem is one way forward Video Future AMD processors could feature domain-specific accelerators - even some created by third parties, according to senior execs at the chip shop....

Beware support calls offering a fix Apple device owners, consider yourselves warned: a targeted multi-factor authentication bombing campaign is under way, with the goal of exhausting iUsers into allowing an unwanted password reset....

We're dreaming of a white list, because we're just like the ones you used to know More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters....

Hardware misbehaving in orbit? Time for a reset on the avionics NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) space observatory has had a problem, prompting engineers on the ground to hit the reset button....

Anyscale claims issue is 'long-standing design decision' - as users are raided by intruders Thousands of companies remain vulnerable to a remote-code-execution bug in Ray, an open-source AI framework used by Amazon, OpenAI, and others, that is being abused by miscreants in the wild to steal sensitive data and illicitly mine for cryptocurrency....

Adds $2.75B to the ML sweepstakes ante and is counting on Claude Amazon says it has concluded its investment in AI super-startup Anthropic, which now stands at $4 billion, a figure the e-commerce colossus committed to last year....

Judge says watchdog can HODL four of its five charges against crypto exchange The SEC's lawsuit accusing cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase of operating as an unregistered securities broker has survived its first legal challenge, opening the door for the case to go to trial....

The bare minimum performance, but suggests a beefy integrated GPU Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite has some gaming and graphics prowess as seen in a demo where a reference laptop was shown to be running Baldur's Gate 3 at 1080p resolution and around 30 frames per second....

Boffins hope to better understand how phenomena disrupt comms tech in order to prevent future outages There's a total solar eclipse coming up in North America, and NASA plans to shoot some rockets at it to see how the ionosphere changes as the Sun is obscured by the Moon....

Some staff are worried - can't think why Mutterings of alarm are emerging from the cloisters of Red Hat after the world's largest management consultancy was hired to help the IBM subsidiary focus engineers on their highest-value work....

The Intel CPU that incorporated an AMD GPU into the processor package resurrected by Topton Kaby Lake-G, the Intel CPU that incorporated an AMD GPU directly into the CPU package itself, was pronounced dead in 2019, but that hasn't stopped one company from reviving it for a NAS motherboard....

Does anyone actually want one? Intel has muddied the AI PC waters by sharing some of Microsoft's requirements while also claiming that its own take on the concept has Intel silicon at its heart....

AMD, Apple, Intel throw weight - and cash - behind process technology TSMC will see its 3nm node represent over 20 percent of its revenue this year as the node of choice for upcoming processors designed by AMD, Apple, and Intel....

I ain't afraid of no ghosts, but in this case... To spy on rival Snapchat and get data on how the app was being used, Meta - when it was operating as Facebook - allegedly initiated a program called Project Ghostbusters, which intercepted data traffic from mobile apps. And it used that data to harm its competitors' ad business....

Air cooling's diminishing returns on full display with Nv's B-series silicon Analysis Hotter and more power-hungry CPUs and GPUs were already causing headaches for datacenter operators before Nvidia unveiled its 1,200W Blackwell GPUs at GTC last week....

Oh, and there's small matter of an alleged $26M in unpaid bills Updated Boeing and its subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation have sued Virgin Galactic, alleging the space tourism company has misappropriated trade secrets....

Crooks know where the big bucks are Zero-day exploits targeting enterprise-specific software and appliances are now outpacing zero-day bugs overall, according to Google's threat hunting teams....

Facility to bring major leap in domestic chip production amid government support UK chipmaker Pragmatic Semiconductor has officially opened its latest manufacturing facilities in Durham, just over a year after its CEO threatened to move the company out of the country over the government's lack of support for the chip industry....