The Register

Plus: Huawei closer to divorcing Android; India probes Amazon warehouses; Singapore gets autonomous street sweepers Asia In Brief SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son last week told investors he believes an "artificial superintelligence" that has 10,000 times the intelligence of humans could arrive in as little as three years....

All depends on how you count it - Chocolate Factory claims 1% fail rate Google this week offered reassurance that its vetting of Chrome extensions catches most malicious code, even as it acknowledged that "as with any software, extensions can also introduce risk."...

In Rust, we trust. But in gen-AI to not hallucinate? Eh, that's another story Hands on Large language models (LLMs) are generally associated with chatbots such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini, but they're by no means limited to Q&A-style interactions. Increasingly, LLMs are being integrated into everything from IDEs to office productivity suites....

It's been a long time coming. Now our journos speak their brains Kettle The US government on Thursday banned Kaspersky Lab from selling its antivirus and other products in America from late July, and from issuing updates and malware signatures from October....

These privacy rules might harm privacy! No, really, that's totally why we're doing this Apple has delayed plans to deploy artificial intelligence features in Europe because the American giant is unhappy with the continent's privacy regulations....

'Substantial proportion' of America to get a little note from next month Change Healthcare is formally notifying some of its pharmacy and hospital customers that their patients' data was stolen from it by ransomware criminals back in February - and for the first time has concretely disclosed the types of information swiped during that IT intrusion....

Here's America's list of the supposedly dirty dozen Uncle Sam took another swing at Kaspersky Lab today and sanctioned a dozen C-suite and senior-level executives at the antivirus maker, but spared CEO and co-founder Eugene Kaspersky....

Campus faces yet another racial discrimination lawsuit as Clean Air Act violations claims also hit the fan Yet another lawsuit was this week filed against Tesla citing a "systemically ... racially hostile work environment" at the company's Fremont, California plant....

Mozilla backtracking on private window changes after uproar Firefox remains the browser of choice for many, but the latest update has lost users' tabs and makes it much more apparent when they have private tabs open, missing the point of privacy....

Telecoms company will remain a carrier of last resort per CPUC ruling AT&T will have to continue operating landlines in California despite its wish to cut off the less lucrative line of business, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has ruled....

Researchers discuss it in same breath as BlackLotus and MosaicRegressor A new vulnerability in UEFI firmware is threatening the security of a wide range of Intel chip families in a similar fashion to BlackLotus and others like it....

Google's self-driving cars can be tested in way mo' streets now The way is paved for autonomous vehicle company Waymo to extend taxi services beyond San Francisco and into the San Francisco Peninsula and Los Angeles....

Earthly politics and mission planning no match for fast-moving rocky orb Earth possesses "limited readiness" to "quickly implement" needed space missions to defend itself against a devastating asteroid strike, even with 14 years' notice....

Satellite dishes not just for roofs anymore SpaceX is inviting some customers to buy a new Starlink Mini receiver for its satellite broadband service offered as a portable option, with an introductory price tag of $599 in the US....

Or any other hypervisors that might hypothetically be acquired or suddenly get more costly Devconf.cz Moving a VM from one host machine to another is easy. Moving VMs from one hypervisor to another is less trivial - but help is at hand....

At least they didn't get paid their $50 million ransom demand The ransomware gang responsible for the chaos at London hospitals kept true to its word and released a trove of data that it claims belongs to pathology services provider Synnovis....

Not a lot, says NetApp's Matt Watts as he talks file classification, wastage, and power consumption Interview NetApp's Chief Technology Evangelist, Matt Watts, is worried about sustainability and data wastage, even as his employer withdraws third-party support from BlueXP classification....

Never underestimate the stickiness of legacy technology It is 40 years since Robert W Scheifler ushered in the era of the X Window System, a windowing system that continues to stick around despite many distributions looking for alternatives....

There should be honor among techies, but it can be hard to admit error On Call Few among us are faultless, but more often than not it's users and managers who are in the wrong when IT goes awry. Which is why each Friday The Register offers a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of being asked to bail out bores, brats and blockheads....

If Putin likes jammin', we hope NATO likes jammin' too Sweden says its satellites have been impacted by "harmful interference" from Russia ever since the Nordic nation joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) last March....

Open Web Advocacy report calls for these extensive changes to iGiant's rules Exclusive The results of the European Commission's inquiry into Apple's response to the continent's competition rules are expected to surface soon - and reports indicate the regulators are less than enamored with Cook & Co....

Australian telco Optus allegedly left redundant website with poor access controls online for years The data breach at Australian telco Optus, which saw over nine million customers' personal information exposed, has been blamed on a coding error that broke API access controls, and was left in place for years....

Like a bat out of hell they'll be gone when November comes Updated Micron is reportedly facing a new hitch to starting work on its proposed fabrication center in New York State: Endangered bats....

It's no hallucination: '4 in 1,000 inferences inaccurate' due to this alone, depending on the setup Meta has identified another reason AI might produce rubbish output: Hardware faults that corrupt data....

Fast, funny, visionary, sure ... anything that knocks OpenAI down a peg will do Video OpenAI challenger Anthropic has delivered its latest model - Claude 3.5 Sonnet - and claimed it outperforms rivals on many tasks....

Won't somebody pleeease think of the ... oh, right, they are A lawsuit accusing Google of breaking America's child privacy laws will proceed to trial as a judge denied the web goliath's motion to throw out the case....

Two ransomware gangs bragged of massive theft of personal info and medical files Consulting Radiologists has notified almost 512,000 patients that digital intruders accessed their personal and medical information during a February cyberattack....

Blockade begins July 20 on national security grounds as antivirus slinger vows to fight back The Biden administration today banned the sale of Kaspersky Lab products and services in the United States, declaring the Russian biz a national security risk....

Downtime set to crash into next week The vendor behind the software on which nearly 15,000 car dealerships across the US rely says an ongoing "cyber incident" has forced it to pull systems offline for a second time in as many days....

Oh, Mike, what have you got yourself into now Dell Technologies and Supermicro have been confirmed as the computer makers building an Nvidia-powered AI supercomputer for Elon Musk's xAI startup....

More big blues at Big Blue ... And of course El Reg coverage is cited in the lawsuit Once again, IBM has been sued for age discrimination, this time alongside spin-off Kyndryl, for allegedly cutting the jobs of older workers while creating similar positions for younger ones....

Class action allowed to continue with EV maker's 'tying' practices the focus A judge has ruled that Tesla must face a lawsuit alleging the electric car manufacturer denies customers and third parties the right to repair its vehicles....

Researchers allegedly stole $3M using the vulnerability, then asked how much it was really worth Kraken, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, has accused a trio of security researchers of discovering a critical bug, expoliting it to steal millions in digital cash, then using stolen funds to extort the exchange for more....

Where we're at in 2024: Billionaire says he didn't mean to tell everyone to 'go f%$k themselves' Just seven months ago, Elon Musk told an interviewer: "If someone's going to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is."...

Fixes catastrophic data loss, er, bug, er poorly documented feature... user error Following closely after the release of version 256, version 256.1 fixes a handful of bugs. One of these is emphatically not systemd-tmpfiles recursively deleting your entire home directory. That's a feature....

Reduced promotion prospects for those involved, and some already eyeing up the exit route Return to office (RTO) mandates don't work, at least not for a reported 50 percent of Dell staff in the US, some of whom are prepared to let go of promotion hopes and start looking for alternatives that offer more flexibility....

Despite dip in equipment revenue, analysts predict robust rebound Chipmaking equipment suppliers haven't had the greatest start to the calendar year, collectively reporting a sales slump in the opening three months of 2024, according to analyst figures....

IP address of downloads offers crumb trail to orgs who should be ready for Big Red, says licensing expert Organizations that do not consider themselves Oracle customers, but who use Java, can expect a call from the Big Red in the next three to nine months, according to a software licensing specialist....

Publishing right before a major election is apparently just a coincidence A fresh report into the Nobelium offensive cyber crew published by France's computer emergency response team (CERT-FR) highlights the group's latest tricks as the country prepares for a major election and to host this year's Olympic and Paralympic Games....

Germans cooling on proper EVs, according to auto industry group The market share of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is declining in Europe while hybrid electric cars are proving more popular....

Cybercriminals claim they used a zero-day to breach pathology provider's systems Interview The ransomware gang responsible for the current healthcare crisis at London hospitals says it has no regrets about the attack, which was entirely deliberate, it told The Register in an interview....

What if it's LLMs all the way down? Researchers in computing and linguistics have devised a new way to detect errors in large language models, which relies on employing more LLMs....

Nice computer. Shame if anything happened to it Shiny new Surface 7 devices are starting to arrive, but a lack of recovery media is causing problems for some users....

Yes, AI will volunteer to run your IT estate. You might be a fool to trust it Analyst firm Gartner has published its annual hype cycles for cloud tech and enterprise networking, and both suggest cooling your jets rather than rushing towards AI-assisted tools to operate your tech....

FWIW Microsoft says 'your apps run great' even when emulated on Arm Samsung has debuted Copilot+ PCs running on Qualcomm processors, but warned buyers in South Korea - and seemingly only that nation - that they won't run many common applications....

Andrew Forrest has spent five years railing against promos that falsely claim he's found the route to crypto riches Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest has won the right to sue Meta over ads it carried that falsely depict him endorsing cryptocurrencies and other financial services products....

He's in competition with - and critical of - his former workplace OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever - who last month quit the GPT creator - has unveiled his next gig: an outfit dubbed Safe Superintelligence Inc. that aims to produce a product of the same name - without the "Inc."...

Judge asked to green-light payout to shareholders over SEP license and bundling claims Qualcomm investors say if the company stumps up $75 million, this should resolve lawsuits they brought over claims the chipmaker misled them by describing its sales and tech licensing businesses as separate concerns, artificially inflating the share price at the same time....

AlmaLinux and Broadcom added to list of partners for open source Redis fork Momentum is building behind open source Redis alternative Valkey with confirmation of new backers including Broadcom, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, and Instaclustr by NetApp....

America's Big 3 cellcos all signed up already, though most of the 'non terrestrial' tech not actually live yet Convergence between mobile networks and satellite services is becoming the norm rather than a niche strategy: a full 91 telecoms operators worldwide are now signed up to agreements with satellite providers....