The Register

Security experts insist ransomware is involved but Leicester zips its lips Leicester City Council continues to battle a suspected ransomware attack while keeping schtum about the key details....

Boosted on-device generative AI's not just for the flagship smartphone kids Qualcomm is pushing out its second smartphone platform within a week, in this case an extension of its Snapdragon 7 series for high-end devices that are built to a lower price point than flagship premium smartphones....

Prices also set to rise after being frozen since 2020 Nominet is cutting staff on the back of market pressure, including the loss of a government cyber contract and is considering a domain registration price increase, according to an update from its CEO....

Google pulls a few coins from the sofa and says whatever, just clarify who needs to be paid for what The French Competition Authority (FCA) on Wednesday fined Google 250 million ($272 million, 214 million) for breaking its promise to figure out a payment plan with French news publishers for using their articles....

Claims members will be bankrupted by new VMware licensing regime, and vital services disrupted Lobby group CISPE - a collective representing Cloud Infrastructure Providers in Europe - has called for regulators to investigate VMware by Broadcom's software licensing arrangements, which it claims will bankrupt some of its members and hurt end-users....

Operators pack twenty phones into a chassis - then rack 'em and stack 'em ready to do evil Chinese upstarts are selling smartphone motherboards - and kit to run and manage them at scale - to operators of outfits that use them to commit various scams and crimes, according to an undercover investigation by state television broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) revealed late last week....

New infostealer may indicate a shift in tactics - and maybe targets too, beyond Asia North Korea's notorious Kimsuky cyber crime gang has commenced a campaign using fresh tactics, according to infosec tools vendor Rapid7....

Trust us - we're the government On Tuesday, Hong Kong's legislature unanimously passed the city's latest controversial national security legislation, otherwise known as Article 23....

Claims the tech has brought 38 percent improvement to its own dev cycle time ServiceNow has released its "Washington DC" platform update, and done the very 2024 thing of adding generative AI features. It's also done a slightly less 2024 thing by not just hyping the tech, but sharing the benefits it has enjoyed by actually using it....

Claims former staff ripped off IP and even did demos for their new company on Nutanix computers Nutanix has brought a lawsuit against database-as-a-service startup Tessell, an outfit founded by three of its ex-employees, alleging the upstart's products are rip-offs of Nutanix's own Era database management product....

Exact location, power source, and go-live date unknown. But don't worry, there'll be digital jobs Google has announced plans to drop $1 billion on a new datacenter in Kansas City, Missouri - its first in the state - though when it'll come online is anyone's guess....

Phishing season started early with crims intent on the hooking early filers As the digital wolves dress in sheep's tax forms, Microsoft has thrown a spotlight on a crafty 2024 phishing expedition, unraveled in January, that preys on the unsuspecting herd of early tax filers....

From a trickle to a flood, threats now seen as too great to ignore US government is urging state officials to band together to improve the cybersecurity of the country's water sector amid growing threats from foreign adversaries....

Um. Let's successfully land on Moon without immediately faceplanting first, amirite? All aboard the space train - DARPA has commissioned defense contractor Northrop Grumman to figure out what would be necessary for a railroad network on the Moon....

Crouching entity list candidate, hidden semiconductor ... or that's the idea, anyway The US government is considering measures against a number of Chinese semiconductor companies linked with technology giant Huawei, in what appears to be further escalation of Washington's chip wars strategy....

Twitter tipster points to suspicious signs from author producing thousands of recipes Late last year, Sam Altman, the optimistic CEO of chatbot manufacturer OpenAI, predicted artificial general intelligence would be with us in five years, give or take....

First: Not being able buy a meat pie with a credit card. Now this The London Clinic where the Princess of Wales had surgery at the start of this year says it is investigating claims an employee tried to access her medical records....

Special tech allegedly lets Musk's assembly lines produce 5-10 times more kit than rivals Canadian battery exec Klaus Pflugbeil, a 58-year-old who lives in Ningbo, China, was arrested in Long Island yesterday for trying to sell undercover agents "battery assembly trade secrets" so crucial to Tesla's ops that it spent millions on them....

Robert Purbeck even went as far as threatening a dentist with the sale of his child's data A cyberattacker and extortionist of a medical center has pleaded guilty to federal computer fraud and abuse charges in the US....

Department of Commerce says it's the largest such investment in US semiconductor manufacturing Intel is set to grab up to $8.5 billion in direct funding and up to $11 billion in loans from the US government under the CHIPS and Science Act to help build out its semiconductor manufacturing capacity....

At least 31,031 people affected last year Stalkerware has reached "pandemic proportions," according to Kaspersky, which documented a total of 31,031 people affected by the intrusive software in 2023 - up almost six percent on the prior year....

Warm water and a scraper not an option when you're 1.5 million kilometers from home Less than 12 months into its six-year survey mission, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid telescope is experiencing optical issues that require European teams to devise a de-icing procedure....

First they came for McDonald's and I did not speak out because I have even worse taste in food A princess is AWOL, the government refuses to admit defeat, and now pastry purveyor Greggs is unable to process card payments. How many more national crises can the Great British public weather before the streets burn?...

2026 FIFA World Cup in US could be first to see ML models play a part... and you thought video referees were crap A team at Google's DeepMind claim to have demonstrated the efficacy of an AI model in predicting outcomes in soccer football game set pieces, as well as generating on-field tactics....

Unless you want to be the next Change Healthcare, that is The Feds and friends yesterday issued yet another warning about China's Volt Typhoon gang, this time urging critical infrastructure owners and operators to protect their facilities against destructive cyber attacks that may be brewing....

Too busy not using X to notice Brits are satisfied with the speed of their mobile network, research finds, despite the UK having some of the slowest average 5G download speeds among G7 nations. Twitter is also no longer among the top 10 most used mobile apps....

Great! Just ignore the energy needed to train them, process queries, keep the lights on in datacenters ... As the world struggles to keep up with decarbonization pledges, the UK government is dumping 1.73 million ($2.2 million) into a series of AI projects to help it meet 2050 net zero goals....

Awards contracts for spacecraft to bring the IoT to space The European Space Agency has committed 76.6 million ($83 million) toward the development of Genesis - a flying observatory that will provide positioning services accurate to a single millimeter....

Sales are down at home and poor compared to other nations The founder and chairman of Chinese electronics maker TCL has taken the bold step of suggesting China's censors "improve" their work, to help his company sell more televisions ... and help China succeed at home and abroad....

And teases a laptop to show off its current silicon - running the open edition of Huawei's CentOS spinout Alibaba's research arm, the Damo Academy, last week promised to deliver a server-grade RISC-V processor later this year, showed off a RISC-V-powered laptop running the open source cut of Huawei's CentOS spinout, and talked up a growing community working on the permissively licensed processor architecture....

Choice of alternative payment providers labelled 'illusory' - because none existed India's competition regulator, the Competition Commission of India (CCI), has ordered an investigation into Google's in-app billing systems after accusations they levy excessive charges and are discriminatory....

Also down under, researchers find security-cleared workers leaking details of their gigs An Australian IT contractor has been sentenced to 30 months jail for ripping off the National Maritime Museum....

Section 230 on trial: Plaintiffs contend social media platforms are defective products, not protected message boards Some of the largest social media platforms in the world will soon try to convince a US court their platforms did not contribute to the radicalization of a mass shooter who killed ten people and injured three more in a New York grocery store in 2022....

FYI, FTC: Karen Simonyan, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman absorbed rather than acquired Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the formation of a new AI division headed by Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan, two of the three founders of AI upstart Inflection....

Plus potential links to I-Soon, researchers say Chinese cyberspies have compromised at least 70 organizations, mostly government entities, and targeted more than 116 victims across the globe, according to security researchers....

Latest figures paint grim picture of how viciously the elderly are targeted The FBI says investment fraud was the form of cybercrime that incurred the greatest financial loss for Americans last year....

GPU giant says NIM will eliminate dependency headaches for the low low cost of $4,500/year per GPU Nevermind using large language models (LLMs) to help write code, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that in the future, enterprise software will just be a collection of chat bots strung together to complete the task....

That's a juicy-looking IPO you've got there. Be a shame if someone took a licensing bite Mere days from going public, Reddit is staring down a challenge from Nokia, which has accused the "front page of the internet" ofinfringing some of its thousands of patents....

It's all about privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, ok? The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has an AI roadmap and a trio of test projects to deploy the tech, one of which aims to train immigration officers using generative AI. What could possibly go wrong?...

And you now get keyboard navigation in the built-in PDF reader The latest version of Firefox improves in areas that should help it fit in better on several categories of hardware....

CNN veteran publishes Musk interview that got his X show canceled Comment Last year, two high-profile American news anchors lost their jobs. This year, CNN's Don Lemon joined Fox News's Tucker Carlson with a new show on Elon Musk's X....

Gamma-ray burst watcher almost two decades past use-by date NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has dropped into safe mode after one of the spacecraft's three gyroscopes showed signs of degradation....

Innovative Ethereum feature exploited as victims say goodbye to assets Infosec researchers are noting rising cryptocurrency attacks and have encouraged wallet security providers to up their collective game....

You know where plants are much cheaper to construct? Asia Intel and TSMC face new hitches to their chip fabrication plants in Arizona with key suppliers encountering difficulties in building support facilities due to surging costs for building materials and labor....

Latest release of coffee-themed programming language aspires to simplicity with a dozen new features Oracle released Java 22 (JDK 22) on Tuesday, sporting a dozen new features for Java developers....

ChatGPT deems your work to be commendable, innovative, and comprehensive Academics focused on artificial intelligence have taken to using generative AI to help them review the machine learning work of peers....

Ailing tech integrator takes a hard hit... share price down by up to 20% this morning Atos' share price sank as much as 20 percent this morning on confirmation that Airbus is no longer interested in buying the big data and security (BDS) parts of the crumbling tech empire....

Not the best looking street furniture in town UK telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) says it can boost mobile services by sticking small cells on top of poles linked to its on-street fiber network cabinets....

GPU-based system offers high performance off Parquet files Analytics software startup Voltron Data claims to have completed the full TPC-H 100 terabyte scale factor on unsorted Parquet files directly from storage in less than an hour with only 6 TB of GPU memory....

Could this be the first green shoot of enterprise vendors paying for long-term maintenance? The Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) has stepped up to maintain Linux kernel version 4.14 - which went out of support in January - to the end of the year. But why that particular version?...