The Register

Application process gets a massive overhaul For decades, Australia has failed to train enough IT pros to satisfy local employers' needs. The nation's solution to the shortfall has involved issuing visas to skilled workers from offshore, under a process that's about to change in March....

ALSO: EncroChat crims still getting busted; ransomware takes down CO public defenders office; and crit vulns infosec in brief The US government is offering bounties up to $15 million as a reward for anyone willing to help it take out the APLHV/Blackcat ransomware gang....

PLUS: Australian Parliament calls for Assange release; Japan's H3 rocket soars; LINE leak worsens Asia In Brief Around one in three of the world's wearable devices is bought by someone in India....

Unsettling reading as Presidents' Day approaches In time for the long Presidents' Day weekend in the US there have been multiple warnings about what will undoubtedly be a challenging and potentially dangerous year for voting processes and government workers....

We speak to professor who with colleagues tooled up OpenAI's GPT-4 and other neural nets AI models, the subject of ongoing safety concerns about harmful and biased output, pose a risk beyond content emission. When wedded with tools that enable automated interaction with other systems, they can act on their own as malicious agents....

Cool, but it's 2024 - needs more hype, hand wringing, and flashy staged demos to be proper ML Google has open sourced Magika, an in-house machine-learning-powered file identifier, as part of its AI Cyber Defense Initiative, which aims to give IT network defenders and others better automated tools....

Fakers face the wrath of Khan The FTC is moving to make not only the fraudulent AI impersonation of government and business folk illegal but is also now asking the American public if they'd like some protection too....

Opening up code used in criminal prosecutions for scrutiny? But where's the text-to-vid hype and doomsaying? Democratic lawmakers once again have proposed legislation to ensure that the software source code used for criminal investigations can be examined and is subject to standardized testing by the government....

One giant leap for astronaut medicine The world's first remote-operated robot space surgeon has been successfully tested, the team behind the device said this week....

Rackscale system can be had with up to 2,048 cores, 32TB of RAM, and nearly a petabyte of flash Analysis Over the past few years we've seen a number of OEMs, including Dell, HPE, and others trying to make on-prem datacenters look and feel more like the public cloud....

Launch delays persist, but test space-based voice calls work Japan's Rakuten Mobile says it plans to offer a satellite-based mobile service that will support standard smartphones starting from 2026, although the satellites to provide this capability have yet to be launched....

Project hails from its original motherland of Russia Russian developer Maxim Dounin has announced a new fork of the Nginx web server and caching proxy, aimed at avoiding the corporate control of owner F5....

Nearly a decade on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List after getting banks to empty vics' accounts A Ukrainian cybercrime kingpin who ran some of the most pervasive malware operations faces 40 years in prison after spending nearly a decade on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List....

121 grams is the largest such sample secured, but NASA won't blow it all at once NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft snagged 121.6 grams of material from asteroid Bennu - the largest quantity ever retrieved by such a mission....

Who knows where they'll get the funds for $1B investment plan, though Quantum technology outfit IonQ has cut the ribbon on its Seattle manufacturing facility, claimed as the first factory for quantum systems on US soil. The move comes shortly after a report claimed that investors have halved the venture capital funding going to quantum companies....

Better visibility and performance caps would be good for regulation too In our quest to limit the destructive potential of artificial intelligence, a paper out of the University of Cambridge has suggested baking in remote kill switches and lockouts, like those developed to stop the unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons, into the hardware that powers it....

The lessons of yesteryear's OS are getting lost in translation FOSDEM 2024 There are vital lessons to be learned from the history of Unix, but they're being forgotten. This is leading to truly vast amounts of wasted effort....

Expert weighs in after Brianna Ghey murder amid worrying rates of child cybercrime The murder of 16-year-old schoolgirl Brianna Ghey has kickstarted a debate around limiting children's access to the dark web in the UK, with experts highlighting the difficulty in achieving this....

Saffire concludes after eight years of flaming good times NASA has concluded its Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment (Saffire) with a test onboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft after it departed from the International Space Station (ISS)....

3 in 5 workers getting strict orders to return to office and something is going to give If some of you think management started to tighten the screws on return to office this year then you aren't alone - three in five workers say they are feeling the squeeze too....

Ganja believe it? The customer couldn't when their box went up in smoke On Call The Register understands that by Friday afternoon readers may reasonably contemplate a drink or two. So to give you something to talk about should you visit a pub in search of such libations we therefore present a fresh instalment of On Call, the column in which you share your stories of tech support jobs that left you a little worse for wear....

iBiz expresses regret for the impact of its entirely avoidable decision Apple confirmed on Thursday it will not support Home Screen web apps - commonly referred to as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) - on iOS devices in European Union member states under its forthcoming iOS 17.4 release....

What's the wurst that could happen? Microsoft has promised to splash 3.2 billion (2.7 billion, $3.4 billion) on AI infrastructure and datacenters in Germany over the next two years....

Calls for collaborators willing to play buzzword bingo on project - 5G, IoT, AI, AR/VR, blockhain, Web3, and plenty more besides India's government has created a project it hopes will result in creation of a city-scale digital twin to help the nation improve future urban planning....

$10 billion subsidies predicted to deliver just five modest fabs by 2029 India's drive to become a semiconductor superpower is likely to result in the creation of just five chip fabs by the year 2029, and the most sophisticated output from those facilities will be chips built on a 28nm process, according to US think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF)....

Will cough up less than two days of annual profit in settlement - and California calls this a win Quest Diagnostics has agreed to pay almost $5 million to settle allegations it illegally dumped protected health information - and hazardous waste - at its facilities across California....

Premium punters in the illustrious company of Hezbollah, Iranian militias, sanctioned Russian banks Elon Musk's X has been accused of flouting US sanctions by providing verified accounts to individuals and entities affiliated with Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Houthi rebels, and other personae non gratae....

Headaches, eyestrain, lack of killer apps cited as some seek refunds The 14-day return-for-full-refund-no-questions-asked deadline for early adopters of Apple's Vision Pro spatial computing" headset is approaching, and some buyers are openly sharing their decision to return the $3,499 device....

OpenAI meanwhile teases experimental text-to-vid system Sora Google on Thursday introduced Gemini 1.5, a multi-modal model family for text, image, and audio interaction said to best rival models in benchmarks....

Airline tried arguing virtual assistant was solely responsible for its own actions Air Canada must pay a passenger hundreds of dollars in damages after its online chatbot gave the guy wrong information before he booked a flight....

Beijing, now Moscow.... Who else is hiding in broadband gateways? The US government today said it disrupted a botnet that Russia's GRU military intelligence unit used for phishing expeditions, spying, credential harvesting, and data theft against American and foreign governments and other strategic targets....

Dungeons and Dragons, high-waisted jeans, Cold War sabre rattling - the '80s are back, baby Updated Last night's launch of six Pentagon missile-detection satellites was well timed as fears mount that Russia is considering putting nuclear weapons into space....

Rolling back will cause data loss, Windows Insiders told Microsoft released a fresh Windows 11 build to the Canary and Dev Channels of the Windows Insider Program with a warning for developers - back up or risk losing data because a known issue with rolling back and Dev Drive is still there....

SpaceX doing some spring cleaning to deal with aging models before they fail SpaceX is set to deorbit about 100 of its older Starlink broadband satellites after identifying an issue that could cause them to malfunction and become unresponsive to ground control....

'They want a closed shop,' claims service provider Broadcom and Google have announced a license portability scheme for biz customers to run VMware workloads on Google Cloud. Broadcom is also trying to reassure VMware partners and users that all the changes are for the best, as rivals circle to scoop up any defectors....

Taking Disaster Recovery as a Service to lunar extremes NASA is taking another crack at a commercial mission to the Moon with the launch of the Intuitive Machines' IM-1 mission this morning....

Hello, Mr. Frying Pan, meet Mr. Fire Google has weighed in on the controversy surrounding Microsoft's plans to render millions of Windows 10 PCs obsolete in 2025 by urging users to pop on a copy of ChromeOS Flex instead....

All desktop and mobile apps vulnerable to at least one of the vulnerabilities Video conferencing giant Zoom today opened up about a fresh batch of security vulnerabilities affecting its products, including a critical privilege escalation flaw....

After March, devs won't be able to create new application resources, in 2027 the system will be shut down Exclusive Out of the blue Microsoft has decided to retire a key plank of its Azure IoT platform, leaving developers currently building systems high and dry....

Deepfake-enabled attacks against Android and iOS users are netting criminals serious cash Cybercriminals are targeting iOS users with malware that steals Face ID scans to break into and pilfer money from bank accounts - thought to be a world first....

$800M charge facing network giant as customers work way through existing inventory Networking goliath Cisco has finally confirmed talk from earlier in the week that it is laying off thousands of staff, reflecting the cautious outlook that management are seeing in customers' spending projections....

Set up a register and strike them off for bad behavior Creating a register of licensed AI professionals to uphold ethical standards and securing whistleblowing channels to call out bad management are two policies that could prevent a Post Office-style scandal....

'This is an excellent way to piss off thousands of developers' End of life for the Authy Desktop authentication app is scheduled for March 19, rather than the August 2024 date previously announced....

Google Workspace hangout extended indefinitely The UK's Cabinet Office has paused its migration away from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, after ditching the current contract it signed with the Redmond headquartered biz last spring....

Reg metrics show Enrique Lores is worth a lot of ink The Reg family would like to extend our condolences to HP CEO Enrique Lores after his headline financial compensation package for 2023 declined more than 7 percent year-on-year to $19.46 million....

Now that's what you call dual-use tech Cyber baddies have turned to ad networks to measure malware deployment and to avoid detection, according to HP Wolf Security....

Surprising third-act twist as Russian case means more freedom for all The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights - a decision that may derail European data surveillance legislation known as Chat Control....

The curious incident of the instrument cover on the Red Planet rover NASA's Perseverance is having trouble with one of its instruments - which could mean the rover will no longer be able to zap rocks with its laser....

Splunk deal may close early, but AI is a way off turning into a money fountain. Meanwhile, Cisco waits for you to finish projects Cisco has delivered mixed news to investors after its customers yet again struggled to deploy products they've already acquired....

$5k a month for the site. $3k for tech support. Infection with malware and funding a despot? Priceless North Korea's latest money-making venture is the production and sale of gambling websites that come pre-infected with malware, according to South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS)....