The Register

Zuck needs silicon smarts - and the energy experience of a former Enron exec Social networking company Meta has appointed Broadcom CEO Hock Tan to its board and added energy entrepreneur John Arnold too....

Anti-abortion group said to have used that monitoring to push ad campaign A pro-life group was able to specifically target visitors to nearly 600 Planned Parenthood facilities in 48 states in America with anti-abortion ads using location data from a broker called Near Intelligence, according to US Senator Ron Wyden....

Summarizes threads you just can't keep up with and beefs up search After nearly a year of testing, Salesforce-owned Slack has launched some generative AI features that may help enterprise users search, summarize, and ask questions about information in their conversations....

Claims what took weeks to do by hand, machine learning can do in hours On Tuesday AI startup Quilter picked up $10 million in series-A funding to use a combination of machine learning and high-performance computing (HPC) to make designing printed circuit boards a less grueling and manual experience....

You don't need us to craft phishing emails or write malware, super-lab sniffs OpenAI has shut down five accounts it asserts were used by government agents to generate phishing emails and malicious software scripts as well as research ways to evade malware detection....

Lina Khan may not even be in charge of watchdog by time case gets to trial, if it even goes that far The FTC's antitrust case against Amazon is headed to trial, though not anytime soon, with a federal judge scheduling it to begin on October 13, 2026....

Jeez, not now, Xi. Can't you see we've got an election and Ukraine and Gaza and cost of living and layoffs and ... The Chinese government's Volt Typhoon spy team has apparently already compromised a large US city's emergency services network and has been spotted snooping around America's telecommunications' providers as well....

MIT economist argues AI can moderate the inequalities of the Information Age The future described in OpenAI's mission statement, in which autonomous systems "outperform humans at most economically valuable work," sounds like a hellscape to MIT economics professor David Autor....

New Start Menu is a 'game changer' claims relentlessly cheerful vid Microsoft is again releasing a video to entice more Windows 10 users to make the leap to the brave new world of Windows 11, with market share figures indicating the majority of customers are still reluctant to do so....

Officer pay, limited command duties and writing 'code for your country' Skilled IT professionals considering a career change have a new option, as the US Air Force is reintroducing warrant officer ranks exclusively "within the cyber and information technology professions."...

Some company admin and customers data exposed, but bad guys were there for 'only' a day Prudential Financial, the second largest life insurance company in the US and eight largest worldwide, is dealing with a digital break-in that exposed some internal company and customer records to a criminal group....

Alphabet owned autonomous vehicle biz files voluntary recall report saying it tweaked wares via over-the-air update Self-driving car company Waymo - a subsidiary of Google owner Alphabet - has voluntarily filed a recall report after one of its vehicles collided with a truck in Pheonix....

Emergency impacting more than 100 facilities appears to be caused by incident at software provider The Romanian national cybersecurity agency (DNSC) has pinned the outbreak of ransomware cases across the country's hospitals to an incident at a service provider....

World's only EUV photolithography maker finished 2023 with order backlog worth 39B Even as the chip industry lifts itself out of the current deep downcycle, ASML is worried geopolitical developments outside its control could still have an unforeseen impact on business....

HeartBlocker extension aimed at the 'forever alone' crowd Opera is rolling out an extension to the gamer version of its eponymous browser aimed at users who would rather not be reminded of the significance of February 14....

The company also curiously disappears from Black Basta leak site UK utilities giant Southern Water admits between 5 and 10 percent of its customers have had their data stolen during a January cyberattack....

Who could possibly have predicted this backlash? When Netflix launched its ad-supported tier in November 2022, it tried to tempt viewers in with discounted rates, hoping to win new consumers and sell their eyeballs to ad-slingers. But Amazon Prime, well, it went a different route....

Trying to break in with malicious Word documents? How very 2015 of you The Bumblebee malware loader seemingly vanished from the internet last October, but it's back and - oddly - relying on a vintage vector to try and gain access....

Ready for cruising: successful deployment leaves the ball in the scientists' court NASA says its latest take on solar sail technology is ready for proposals for it to be flown on science missions....

DSL 2024 is not as svelte as it used to be - but who is? Seventeen years after its last major version, an old favorite, Damn Small Linux, is back with a new 2024 release....

Decades of obsessing about always going faster have left us in constant danger Column Before he woke up on the first day of February, one of my friends was robbed....

Did someone say a safety word? iMessage, Bing, Edge, Ads avoid gatekeeper restrictions The European Commission has reversed its decision that some Apple and Microsoft offerings qualify as "gatekeeper services" under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), meaning the bloc's toughest regulations won't be applied....

Of course it's bristling with Noctuas - how else do you cool a 1kW desktop? Nvidia's long-teased GH200 CPU-GPU Superchips are finally going on sale, and the 1,000-Watt chip - built to run in servers and handle hefty AI training and inference tasks - is even available in a workstation from German startup gptshop.ai....

Reckons OpenAI and Google are mere infrastructure players who don't understand apps or how AI will change them Airbnb sees AI as its ticket out of the travel industry ghetto, and a passport to expanding its services into other industries....

$1.3 billion lost as identity fraud - and greed - saw 57,000 or more seek unearned tax refunds One hundred and fifty people who worked for the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) have been investigated - and some prosecuted - for participating in a tax refund scam promoted on Facebook and TikTok....

Scribes may have a point about unfair competition, will need to try again on infringement A US judge has dismissed some of the claims made by writers in a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, though gave the wordsmiths another chance to amend their complaint....

SAP, Adobe, Intel, AMD also issue fixes as well as Google for Android Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed 73 security holes in this February's Patch Tuesday, and you better get moving because two of the vulnerabilities are under active attack....

Firefox Mobile also getting increased attention Firefox maker Mozilla has laid off "approximately 60" staff, or around five percent of its workforce....

'You don't have to do more than that to disconnect an entire network' El Reg told as patches emerge A single packet can exhaust the processing capacity of a vulnerable DNS server, effectively disabling the machine, by exploiting a 20-plus-year-old design flaw in the DNSSEC specification....

You can use neural networks to help, sure, but not do all the work The US Patent and Trademark Office this week repeated loud and clear it will only accept patent applications that list actual real humans as the inventor and not AI....

Two new flaws, one zero-day, countless different patches, but everything's fine! Network-attached storage (NAS) specialist QNAP has disclosed and released fixes for two new vulnerabilities, one of them a zero-day discovered in early November....

Gang still going after critical infrastructure because it's, you know, critical Updated Canada's Trans-Northern Pipelines has allegedly been infiltrated by the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware crew, which claims to have stolen 190 GB of data from the oil distributor....

Demands investigation into iPhone maker for potentially breaching regulations over Beeper Mini Brendan Carr of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has called on the authority to take a closer look at Apple's actions in the Beeper Mini affair....

Robocar company lost license to operate in California Autonomous vehicle biz Cruise has hired a Chief Safety Officer following the dramatic incident last fall when a pedestrian was dragged under the wheels of one of its cars, precipitating a suspension of its US fleet....

AT&T, Verizon leading new initiative to finally commercialize OpenRAN technology, sans timeline The Biden administration is keeping America's dreams of a future filled with open radio access network (OpenRAN) kit alive after awarding $42.3 million to a new consortium dedicated to commercialization of the tech....

RP2040-based Video Game Module brings game controller functionality and video output A Video Game Module (VGM) containing a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller is out today for the Flipper Zero pentester multi-tool....

Time to look elsewhere for an operating system for that ancient CPU If you're running a very old PC but have managed to persuade Windows 11 to boot, it looks like the rug could soon be pulled from under you, judging by a post claiming that Microsoft's code will now require an instruction not found on old CPUs....

Failure rates are consistent with aging - something we can all relate to Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published a report on hard drive failures for 2023, finding that rates increased during the year due to aging drives that it plans to upgrade....

Plenty of successful attacks observed with dangerous follow-on activity The number of senior business executives stymied by an ongoing phishing campaign continues to rise with cybercriminals registering hundreds of cloud account takeovers (ATOs) since spinning it up in November....

'Literally bulletproof' but needs constant cleaning to stave off corrosion It's only been a few months since Tesla's long-awaited Cybertruck made its way to those at the front of the queue, but the arrival has been tarnished for some....

Linked to the prime minister's wife, the Indian firm achieves contract wins in open and fair process Tech services biz Infosys enjoyed a 49 percent increase in its invoices from the UK government for 2023, according to research figures....

Some users will pay for AI tools, but more worry about their future employment prospects What a difference a year makes. Analysts at Jefferies have run a survey showing that nearly all US office workers have heard of ChatGPT - up from just over half a year ago - yet the flipside is that some now fear automation is coming for their jobs....

Creator of the Hacker Diet and sponsor of pre-Web hypermedia system Xanadu Obit Polymath, pioneering developer of software and hardware, a prolific writer, and true old-school hacker John Walker has passed away....

MP calls on council to ensure education teams can plan their financial futures A letter from a former government minister to the head of education for one of the UK's largest local authorities reveals the financial disruption caused by the implementation of a Unit4 HR, finance, and payroll system....

Forget historic cloud downtime, latest contract with reseller to offer 'agile and flexible' approach The NHS in Wales has decided to send up to 450 million ($568 million) of taxpayers' hard-earned cash into the bank account of Microsoft via one of its resellers, the public sector organization has confirmed....

Leaves it to carriers, promoting a complaint to Irish data cops from Big Tech's bete noire Meta has acknowledged that phone number reuse that allows takeovers of its accounts "is a concern," but the ad biz insists the issue doesn't qualify for its bug bounty program and is a matter for telecom companies to sort out....

The Small Bodies Nomenclature Working Group has just given 29 space rocks names The Small Bodies Nomenclature Working Group (WGSBN) - the folks responsible for assigning names to minor planets and comets - last week published a bulletin [PDF] in which it gave 29 small celestial bodies their very own names....

I'd buy that for a $0.00000001 The team behind Chromium - the open source engine of Google Chrome and other browsers - has begun working on a way to enable those surfing the web to pay for the stuff they read or watch without any interaction....

Looks like LockBit took a swipe at an outsourced life insurance application Indian tech services giant Infosys has been named as the source of a data leak suffered by the Bank of America....

Certain licenses still allow tinkerers to taste the vStack. Whether they want to is another matter Broadcom has discontinued the free version of VMware's ESXi hypervisor....