The Register

Engineers at Grab don't need to ask each other questions any more Asia's answer to Uber, Singaporean superapp Grab, has admitted it gathered more data than it could easily analyze - until a large language and generative AI turned things around....

Space broadband on weapons is not something Elon Musk condones A Russian drone shot down over Ukraine appears to have been fitted with equipment made by Elon Musk's space broadband service Starlink, according to Ukrainian media....

Rudra machines use local designs for server, interconnect, and cooling - but seemingly not a planned 96-core Arm CPU Indian prime minister Narendra Modi yesterday dedicated three new supercomputers, and made the machines a symbol of his economic, social, and industry policies....

Starting at SoftBank, using its own PayPay service Ten subsidiaries of Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank Group have begun paying employees' salaries into SoftBank's own PayPay digital wallet....

Appears to be prioritizing GPUs, not manycore CPUs Oracle could choose to take control of Ampere Computing, the Arm processor designer it has backed and uses in its cloud....

Return-to-office mandate reaches inevitable conclusion Dell, after telling employees in March they're expected to be in the office three days a week, has ordered its salespeople to be onsite for the full working week when not with customers and partners....

From allegations of lying about capabilities to fake reviews. Plus: Biden AI robocaller finally fined $6M The FTC has made good on its promise to crack down on suspected deceptive AI claims, announcing legal action against five outfits accused of lying about their software's capabilities or using it to break the law....

Is this a debris inspection mission or an Ubuntu release? NASA and Starfish Space have inked a contract worth $15 million to inspect defunct satellites in Earth's orbit ahead of future missions to deal with space junk....

33% of cloud environments using the toolkit impacted, we're told A critical bug in Nvidia's widely used Container Toolkit could allow a rogue user or software to escape their containers and ultimately take complete control of the underlying host....

Onion Amnesia: Steaming up your digital disguise The Tor Project, a non-profit focused on network anonymity, is joining forces with Tails, an anonymity-focused Linux distribution, in an effort to make better use of financial and technical resources....

More 9.8 bugs? Ay, papi! Aruba access points running AOS-8 and AOS-10 need to be patched urgently after HPE emitted fixes for three critical flaws in its networking subsidiary's networking access points....

Alleged inquiry comes amid claims server maker cooked its books Comment Supermicro has reportedly fallen under the scrutiny of the US Justice Department amid allegations the US-based server vendor is cooking its books....

Nothing says 'oops' like a penalty that won't even dent the electronics giant's coffee budget Two Samsung employees suffered X-ray radiation exposure at a chip fab near Seoul, and electronics giant is only facing a small 10.5 million (less than $8,000) fine for two violations of South Korea's Atomic Energy Safety Act....

Quick fix: Remove cups-browsed, block UDP port 631 Updated After days of waiting and anticipation, what was billed as one or more critical unauthenticated remote-code execution vulnerabilities in all Linux systems was today finally revealed....

Construction slated to begin next year at site of failed BritishVolt plant US investment giant Blackstone is plowing 10 billion ($13.4 billion) into a massive AI datacenter project located in northeast England, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Wednesday....

Root cause identified, but it's taken the better part of a year After what has felt like an eternity, Intel reckons it has finally identified why its 13th and 14th Gen Core series desktop processors have been so unstable....

Should be Jensen Huang's hands in less than 60 days Korea's SK hynix revealed on Thursday that it had become the first chip manufacturer to mass produce the much-anticipated 36 GB 12-layer HBM3E chip....

Attackers got 10k people to download 'trusted' web3 brand cheat before Mountain View intervened The latest in a long line of cryptocurrency wallet-draining attacks has stolen $70,000 from people who downloaded a dodgy app in a single campaign researchers describe as a world-first....

Looks like it's going to be the Sam Altman show from now on Three key OpenAI staff members - CTO Mira Murati, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, and Research VP Barret Zoph - are leaving the ChatGPT maker....

Single digit price hikes suspected for UK and Europe and double digit mooted for everywhere else Updated Like car insurance, software support contracts can renew annually by simply doing nothing, a phenomenon with which SAP users should be all too familiar... but sometimes they are not....

Hey Reg readers, what would you do with Honey, Queen, and Bumble? NASA is looking for ideas on what to do with the Astrobee drones flying around the International Space Station (ISS)....

See it, say it... not sorted just yet as network access remains offline Updated A cybersecurity incident is being probed at Network Rail, the UK non-departmental public body responsible for repairing and developing train infrastructure, after unsavory messaging was displayed to those connecting to major stations' free Wi-Fi portals....

Grafana Labs CTO looks at the options Interview The CrowdStrike chaos was caused by software running riot in the Windows kernel after an update tripped up the code. eBPF is a useful tool for kernel tracing and observability, but could it have mitigated the CrowdStrike incident?...

Access to account info needed to tackle benefit fraud, latest bill claims Privacy campaigners are criticizing UK proposals to force banks to share data from the accounts of government benefit claimants, saying the ploy amounts to "a financial snoopers' charter targeted to automate suspicion."...

AI boosted revenue last year, demand for more RAM in devices to help in 2025 Micron has told investors it expects a new round of server consolidation to add to its already strong growth....

iThing-maker is Putin Kremlin repression ahead of privacy, rights orgs argue Apple has pulled 60 VPNs from its App Store in Russia, according to research from anti-censorship org GreatFire....

HQ in Sweden, made in China, programmed in Bengaluru, but with a traditional offshoring marque Indian tech services giant Infosys has scored a deal to write code for Swedish electric vehicle outfit Polestar....

And hints at revised rules to come later this year India's Ministry of Commerce and Industry has extended the scheme that enraged hardware makers by requiring them to secure import permits - and indicated it will be revised further....

Crikey! $40M of investments in 'digital employees' allegedly went down faster than a frosty Fosters The former CEO of an AI startup that promised to replace humans with "digital employees" has been accused by the US Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission of raising $40 million from investors, including venture capitalists, after showing them deliberately falsified financial records....

That escalated quickly WordPress on Wednesday escalated its conflict with WP Engine, a hosting provider, by blocking the latter's servers from accessing WordPress.org resources - and therefore from potentially vital software updates....

Counsel for aggrieved authors will view info in a secure room, without internet access, and no devices present OpenAI has agreed to reveal the data used to train its generative AI models to attorneys pursuing copyright claims against the developer on behalf of several authors....

Add compliance requirements to your AI to-do list If juggling the extreme cost and hazy ROI of AI weren't enough of a headache, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) now expects enterprise compliance officers to start weighing the tech's potential for harm - or risk stiff fines if it breaks the law....

Expecting a longer storm season this year? Updated Another Beijing-linked cyberspy crew, this one dubbed Salt Typhoon, has reportedly been spotted on networks belonging to US internet service providers in stealthy data-stealing missions and potential preparation for future cyberattacks....

You're doin' fine, Oklahoma! Apple's anti-union posturing is looking like quite the paper tiger: The iPhone goliath has reached an agreement with unionized retail workers in Oklahoma, marking the second time it has caved to organized labor after facing the prospect of a strike....

'Decisions like the one from Jassy are a big reason why I don't want kids' Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last week sent a memo to staff informing them everyone is now expected in the office five days a week from the start of next year, and a poll of staff suggests this hasn't gone down well....

With 2.5 million Blackwell GPUs, would gobble enough energy to power millions of homes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly trying to convince the Biden administration that an enormous network of AI datacenters, each consuming up to five gigawatts of power, is imperative to ensuring US national security and maintaining its technological lead over China....

No more cold calls: Recruit 360 pinpoints top prospects from millions Plagued by recruiting shortfalls, the US Army is turning to AI to help it sift through the chaff for fresh recruits....

Design files will be available soon, but no word yet on the software A highly controversial 3D printed suicide pod has been used for the first time, leading to multiple arrests in Switzerland. The device is so DIY-friendly that you could technically build it at home, assuming you've got the right tools and, well, the necessary motivation....

Extorting underfunded public services for $1M isn't a good look Despite being top of the ransomware tree at the moment, RansomHub - specifically, one of its affiliates - clearly isn't that bright as they are reportedly trying to extort Delaware Libraries for around $1 million....

Memory safety flaws used to represent 76% of 'droid security holes. Now they account for 24% Google says its effort to prioritize memory-safe software development over the past six years has substantially reduced the number of memory safety vulnerabilities in its Android operating system....

Fun retro tweaks, App Center facelift, and more as Oracular Oriole moves into view The beta version of Ubuntu 24.10 has just come out, with GNOME 47 as its default desktop and some fun retro touches....

DRACO will be born to die in the fires of atmospheric re-entry The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded Spanish company Deimos Space a contract for a spacecraft whose sole purpose is to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere so engineers can see what happens....

AC/DC: America's power grid might need to brace itself Analysis The multibillion-dollar gamble of Intel and other semiconductor industry players on US-based chipmaking is shaking a lot more than just technological trees - it seems set to give America's power infrastructure a bit of a headache....

Tracking alternative is less invasive than other methods, but is opt out by default Privacy activist group noyb has filed a complaint against Mozilla over a "Privacy Preserving Attribution" feature that was quietly enabled in the Firefox browser following a July update....

Better or worse than a surprise U2 album? Apple's on-device AI model, dubbed Apple Intelligence, will require 4 GB of device storage space, and more at a later date. That's about the size of an HD movie, for now....

Mountain View versus Redmond: Fight over cloud software licensing policies gets formal Google Cloud Platform has filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging Microsoft software licensing policies are anti-competitive, including claims customers are being charged four times more to run Windows Server in non-Azure clouds....

Officers put in danger when republican dissidents grabbed hold of their names and details Victims have yet to receive any compensation after a document was mistakenly published in 2023 containing data belonging to members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), however, fresh reports say damages in the case could reach up to 240 million ($320.9 million)....

Think tank warns of sovereignty risks from subsea cable consolidation The dominance of US-based hyperscalers like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon in subsea cables has reshaped the industry and put critical infrastructure at risk, an Australian think tank claims....

After Telegram CEO was charged in France, Element bosses mull the challenges Interview Not upsetting law enforcement with end to end encryption and finding a sustainable way to fund open source development are challenges facing messaging giants and minnows alike....