The Register

Unicorn Kingdom prime minister fails to provide 300 million of magic software beans promised A local software subsidy scheme launched by UK PM Rishi Sunak, designed to help struggling small businesses following the pandemic, has spent less than seven percent of its 300 million budget....

Don't worry, you can still put it back, but it's an accessibility snag The Fedora development team is discussing dropping the GNOME on X11 session in Fedora 41, meaning that the flagship edition will be Wayland-only....

Infosec folk aren't thrilled that if you poke APIs enough, you learn AI's secrets Boffins have managed to pry open closed AI services from OpenAI and Google with an attack that recovers an otherwise hidden portion of transformer models....

Language models are entirely happy on the desktop What is it that makes a PC an AI PC? Beyond some vague hand-waving at the presence "neural processing units" and other features only available on the latest-and-greatest silicon, no-one has come up with a definition beyond an attempt to market some FOMO....

KAIROS detonated a few seconds after clearing the launchpad Video On another bad day for Japan's space industry, the nation's first private satellite launch failed within seconds of launch....

100,000 Chinese drivers join queue just to check out the 'SU7' in a showroom The electric vehicle subsidiary of Chinese consumer electronics brand Xiaomi on Tuesday announced its first product - the Speed Ultra 7 (SU7) sedan - will be ready for deliveries this month....

Seoul wants AliExpress and Temu to step up customer service, maybe Meta too South Korea's Fair Trade Commission has announced a raft of measures aimed at ensuring offshore e-commerce services meet their service and support obligations. And it looks to be aimed squarely at Chinese retailers....

Extra zeroes added to transaction values, just a handful of days before a payment deadline India's income tax collection efforts hit a snag this week when it was found that an automated data feed somehow added an extra two zeroes to the value of taxable transactions, resulting in the issuance of notices to individuals that wrongly overstated their tax liabilities....

Went down yesterday, too, longer and harder. Maybe we should call it GitFlub? GitHub is experiencing a second day of degraded performance, following a bad update that threw the code locker into chaos....

Proxmox box sees fresh dedicated hardware become part of the market for Virtzilla alternatives Exclusive Every vendor capable of spelling "virtualization" has spent a good chunk of 2024 making a pitch for its products as a fine alternative for folks discomfited by Broadcom's takeover of VMware. Canadian outfit 45Drives has taken matters a step further by creating an entire product - the Proxinator - to lure those considering the open source Proxmox hyperconverged infrastructure stack....

Critical bugs galore among 61 Microsoft fixes, 56 from Adobe, a dozen from SAP, and a fistful from Fortinet Patch Tuesday Microsoft's monthly patch drop has arrived, delivering a mere 61 CVE-tagged vulnerabilities - none listed as under active attack or already known to the public....

Exec accused of using own work PC to swipe confidential AI and staffing docs for stealth cloud startup An ex-Meta veep has been sued by his former bosses for "brazenly disloyal and dishonest conduct" - and by that, they mean he allegedly stole confidential documents to help him build and recruit colleagues for an AI cloud startup....

Next logical step after rounds of voluntary layoffs IBM is back in the layoff headlines after reportedly slashing jobs in its marketing and communications divisions....

Reports indicate Korean giants fear 'backlash' from US over resale of lithography equipment to Middle Kingdom Just a week after it emerged that Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML was under US pressure to stop servicing and reparing its tech sold to customers in China, Samsung and SK hynix are feeling the squeeze too....

Plus almost $1.5b for health-care cybersecurity US President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve an extra $103 million in funding for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, bringing CISA's total budget to $3 billion....

When almost everyone has the same engine, are benchmarks so important? The latest Speedometer, a benchmark measuring web responsiveness, is out in version 3.0. However, some browser makers have questioned how helpful such benchmarking is in the era of shared rendering engines....

Talk about an unholy social media alliance Faced with mounting legal troubles and a sputtering special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal, former president Donald Trump reportedly turned somewhere unexpected last year to offload his flailing social media platform, Truth Social: X owner and Tesla technoking Elon Musk....

War of words wages on between vendors divided Last week, we wrote about how security outfit Rapid7 threw JetBrains, the company behind the popular CI/CD platform TeamCity, under the bus over allegations of silent patching. Now, JetBrains has gone on the offensive....

Hyperscalers increasingly looking over shoulders as workloads grow AI and its effect on datacenter energy consumption are a concern at Google's parent Alphabet, with the search giant seeking a manager to lead on AI/ML Carbon Reduction and Net Zero efforts....

But Artemis is still OK, so that's alright then NASA has published its budget request for the fiscal year 2025, and it is not good news for the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-ray Observatory....

Forget the piffle about real world results, lets look at the potential of wundertech Oracle disappointed Wall Street analysts after its latest quarterly revenue haul missed market estimates, although teasing an AI deal with en vogue Nvidia proved enough to bolster Big Red's share price....

Think this'll help you escape the fees? Nope - Apple still wants a cut for letting devs install things on user devices Apple's compliance measures with the EU's Digital Markets Act haven't exactly been universally well received, so the iMaker is making a few tweaks to appease the software-developing masses....

Company might even turn a profit this year Telegram's CEO has begun discussing an initial public offering (IPO) as the messaging platform's user count nears the billion mark....

IP sold to founders in pre-pack administration, product warranties unaffected The founders of Bullitt Group and subsidiary Bullitt Satellite Connect bought the IP for 210,000 ($269,000) excluding VAT in a pre-pack administration on the same day that PWC was appointed to liquidate the biz....

Targeting recovery this week, officials still trying to 'dentify the nature of the incident' Leicester City Council says IT systems and a number of its critical service phone lines will remain down until later this week at the earliest following a "cyber incident"....

If it has a GPU and NPU, plus VNNI and DP4a instructions, it qualifies. But it's not a brand like vPro or Ultrabook If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies - at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing....

Amid reports emerge of technical issues, immigration teams keep 24-year-old legacy system up and running Technical issues with the Home Office's new case management system for immigration is causing delays to claims and frustration for staff....

Plaintiffs seek termination of permissionless and unpaid AI data harvesting In early February, Microsoft accused the plaintiffs suing the software maker and its partner OpenAI over alleged AI privacy violations of evoking "doomsday hyperbole about AI as a threat to civilization."...

Some simply chop cables in ducts, others pour in petrol and set 'the whole lot alight' Alternative network providers are calling on UK government to help protect against a growing number of local physical attacks on fiber infrastructure....

Award winning tech turns out to be less than accurate Network Rail has become the latest company to flag the risks of smart technology implementations despite receiving a safety award for geofencing applications....

Russia and Sudan top the list of suspects Several French government websites have been disrupted by a severe distributed denial of service attack....

Shared cultural values sealed the deal and we're struggling to figure out what they are Singapore-based semiconductor packaging company Silicon Box announced on Monday it will invest $3.6 billion to build a manufacturing facility in Northern Italy....

Promises quarterly lookbooks of branded tat, powered by branded kit Cisco has become a fashion retailer....

LLMs show promise, but are 'not yet capable of providing credible explanations for their own predictions' A senior policymaker at Singapore's central bank, the Monetary Authority, has suggested that artificial intelligence technology is not yet suitable to inform its policy development work....

US senator calls cyber attack 'inexcusable,' calls for mandatory security rules The Biden administration and US lawmakers are turning up the pressure on UnitedHealth group to ease medical providers' pain after the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, by expediting payments to hospitals, physicians and pharmacists - among other tactics....

No more creepy snooping? Be my guest Airbnb guests will be delighted to know that their short-term rentals don't contain indoor security cameras - once a change to the platform's community policy takes effect at the end of April....

Don't worry, we have a strong suspicion Putin's still gonna win The Kremlin has accused the United States of meddling in Russia's upcoming presidential election, and even accused Uncle Sam of planning a cyberattack on the country's online voting system....

And perhaps we should be worried that this model is happy to grab a gun and start blasting, says Microsoft bod You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself working with GPT-4. And you may ask yourself, "Will GPT-4 run DOOM?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"...

TA-1 test ticks off all the primary objectives, but hypersonic flight will have to wait Stratolaunch has finally completed the first powered flight of the Talon-A test vehicle - TA-1 - which was dropped from its carrier aircraft - the monstrous Roc - for a planned dunking in the Pacific....

Claims allegedly pirated content from Books3 dataset trawled by its models Nvidia is the latest tech giant to face allegations that it used copyrighted works to train AI models without obtaining the permission of the authors....

It fell through a timewarp from an alternate and very different computing universe The earliest known release of Microsoft's 32-bit version of OS/2 is now out there, and intrepid code archeologists have it running. It's a glimpse into an alternatve computing universe....

Plus: Pilots on Lion Air's Batik fall asleep and miss Jakarta Alaska Airlines is reportedly cooperating on a US Department of Justice (DoJ) criminal investigation into Boeing regarding an incident which saw an aircraft plug blow out of a 737 MAX 9 mid-flight in January....

Water? Like from the toilet? Fancy a cold one? Would it change your mind if that frothy, frosty beer was brewed using treated wastewater?...

CEO defends decision in difficult tech market Distributed database vender PlanetScale has made work-force lay-offs and ended its free-tier services in an effort to achieve sustainable profitability....

Time to start spamming those reposts: Top users are getting early access to 1.76 million shares Redditors hoping to get in early on the company's upcoming IPO had better hope they have a lot of karma in reserve....

Those using African American vernacular more likely to be sentenced to death, if LLMs were asked to decide AI models may consume huge amounts of energy, water, computing resources, and venture capital but they give back so much in the way of misinformation and bias....

Five months in and the mammoth post-ransomware recovery has barely begun The British Library says legacy IT is the overwhelming factor delaying efforts to recover from the Rhysida ransomware attack in late 2023....

Commission has until December 9, 2024, to put its house in order The European Commission has been reprimanded for infringing data protection regulations when using Microsoft 365....

Damage to DNA, mutations, uncontrolled cell division and malignancy. Is space tourism worth the risk? International regulations governing space flight lack rules to protect space tourism passengers from the ill-effects of cosmic radiation, according to researchers....

And does it count as consent? The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has opened a consultation on "consent or pay" business models. We're sure readers of The Register will have a fair few things to say....