The Register

It's just some if-then statements, no AI here, insurer sniffs Cigna has been sued in California based on allegations the US healthcare insurer unlawfully reviewed insurance claims using automated systems rather than relying on humans....

Sachkov faces 14-year stretch after 'unreasonably rushed trial' A Russian court has sentenced Ilya Sachkov, the founder of security research house Group-IB, to 14 years in a maximum-security prison after finding the executive guilty of high treason....

Bouyant jobs market and increased stress prompt exodus, says research A survey of 1,800 IT professionals and senior managers has found a quarter of tech workers in the UK are considering quitting their jobs in the next six months....

Plus: Did Xwitter just suggest stripping people of gold checks? Don't threaten us with a good time The website formerly known as Twitter is trying to win back advertisers yet again with half-off deals on certain ads - and reportedly threats to remove gold checks from company profiles if advertisers don't start spending money....

That could pay for 35 humans and their families' health insurance, says human Striking Hollywood writers and actors will be delighted to learn that Netflix, one of the powers perceived to be upending the entertainment industry, is advertising for an AI product manager with a salary up to $900,000....

Are you sure that's an exec on the line? Also, smart move distracting folks from revenue growth slowdown, profit slide AI was mentioned 175 times during Microsoft's conference call with analysts to discuss the megacorp's Q4 financial results - it seems there will be no let-up to the hype in an industry already bursting at the seams with marketing bluster....

Some big changes are afoot Intel has revealed two sets of extensions coming to the x86 instruction set architecture, one to boost the performance of general purpose code and the second to provide a common vector instruction set for future chips....

It has a meaning in mathematics, and even more interested parties than you might expect Logowatch Twitter's new logo isn't just an X, it's a very specific form of X, and not only does it have a meaning, it also has some history behind it....

Talk about all your eggs in one China-coveting basket TSMC confirmed on Tuesday that it is investing $2.87 billion in a chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging fab for AI chips in northern Taiwan....

BLISS this: Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail project wants to head into space on the cheap Boffins believe the future of space exploration may belong to small, affordable probes sailing away under the Sun's power....

EURIALO project aims to prove flights can be tracked in real time through multilateration The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded a contract to a US company to create a technology demonstrator for a proposed aircraft monitoring system using low Earth orbit satellites....

UK trusts serving 12 million people affected as vendor awaits results of forensic investigation Several UK NHS ambulance organizations have been struggling to record patient data and pass it to other providers following a cyber-attack aimed at health software company Ortivus....

Good thing these eggheads have created a database of patches Python security fixes often happen through "silent" code commits, without an associated Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifier, according to a group of computer security researchers....

Adverts said Onavo Protect user data would be kept a secret - just didn't say from whom On Wednesday, Australia's Federal Court ordered two Meta subsidiaries to pay $14 million after an over two and a half year legal battle instigated by the country's competition regulator found the pair misled users on the data collection of a now defunct VPN app....

Uncle Sam warns sysadmins to get patching as soon as possible A critical security flaw in Ivanti's mobile endpoint management code was exploited and used to compromise 12 Norwegian government agenciesbefore the vendor plugged the hole....

Inflatable heat shields, robot cable layers, and a furnace to burn lunar dust for minerals and oxygen NASA is distributing $150 million between 11 US organizations developing technology and infrastructure supporting long-term human exploration on the Moon for its Artemis missions and beyond....

Earnings calls from the Big Four show massive reskilling in progress India's top four IT outsourcers saw a quarter where clients were hesitant about everything except their desire to discuss AI, according to earnings reports from TCS, HCL, Infosys and Wipro....

Semi industry fears US will be short 70K engineers, technicians, computer scientists by end of decade Last week, TSMC postponed production at its under-construction Arizona chip fab until at least 2025 because it said it couldn't find enough skilled workers to complete the facility. This could be a sign of things to come....

If getting stuff right is such a deal breaker, why are we still so deep into this ML hype? OpenAI has taken down its AI classifier months after it was released due to its inability to accurately determine whether a chunk of text was automatically generated by a large language model or written by a human....

How quick y'all are to forget Nvidia-Arm Two high-profile defeats in court do not a failed strategy make, or so says FTC boss Lina Khan....

One spotted by Amnesty International - wonder what that was used for? Apple has released fixes for several security flaws that affect its iPhones, iPads, macOS computers, and Apple TV and watches, and warned that some of these bugs have already been exploited....

Just 6% of the water it consumed last year was replenished, report says Google's plans to go green are faltering - and its all AI's fault, the company claims....

The next version, 'Trixie', is starting to take shape and boasts an additional official CPU architecture The first point release in the Debian "Bookworm" series is here, but version 12.1 is a modest bugfix. It might be time for even the ultra-cautious to start taking a look....

US semiconductor manufacturer unhappy rival TSMC is bagging billions US semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries has criticized the German government's 20 billion ($22 billion) in semiconductor subsidies, claiming it will distort competition....

Inventory holding reduced in Q1, hunt for new CEO continues Logitech has reported shrinking sales across much of its portfolio but the rate of decline is slowing, causing interim CEO Guy Gecht to up sales and profit forecasts for the first half of fiscal 2024....

With 34 designs to pick from, you can choose your own ML adventure To encourage techies and engineers to try out its AI acceleration hardware, Intel has put together a bunch of software reference kits it claims will reduce the time and resources required to deploy machine learning systems on its silicon....

Turns out proto-Earths may bring their own drinks Astronomers have detected water vapor in the inner region of a protoplanetary disk - where rocky planets may be forming - for the first time, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope....

Technology resilience gets red rating in tax collector's annual report Poor IT performance caused a five-day shutdown of the UK tax authority's phone services in December last year, affecting around 99,000 citizens....

More than 3,000 needed to meet demand, and that won't be easy, says Aggreko The European datacenter industry is facing issues meeting the growing demand for capacity with materials and heavy equipment to build sites in short supply, among other factors....

Lawyers look to scale the walled garden Apple is facing a legal challenge over the "creator tax," or the commission it charges developers who write the apps that populate its digital walled garden....

Less than a quarter will go to locals though German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reportedly plans to siphon 20 billion ($22 billion) from the country's Climate and Transformation Fund to offset the cost of building semiconductor manufacturing plants....

Scavenging for disgruntled former Twitter users? Fellow vulture, we honor thee. Chinese short video platform TikTok announced yesterday it will offer text-based content - a feature that mimics capabilities of various other social media sites, including what is formerly known as Twitter, Meta's Threads and even Instagram....

Safe to say, this proposal has gone down like a poweroff -fn Analysis Googlers have proposed a way to determine whether browsers can be trusted, as a defense against criminal fraud and other bad behavior. Some in the internet community fear this is the end of the web as we know it....

If it looks like a backdoor, walks like a backdoor, maybe it's a ... Midnight Blue, a security firm based in the Netherlands, has found five vulnerabilities that affect Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), used in Europe, the United Kingdom, and many other countries by government agencies, law enforcement, and emergency services organizations....

Something something don't cross the streams Google has been ordered by a US federal court to cough up $338.7 million in damages for infringing someone else's patents with its Chromecast gear....

Zen 2 flaw more simple than Spectre, exploit code already out there - get patching when you can AMD has started issuing some patches for its processors affected by a serious silicon-level bug dubbed Zenbleed that can be exploited by rogue users and malware to steal passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets from software running on a vulnerable system....

The pain and joy of using an old OS on hardware newer than it is Warning: the stunts in this article were performed by professionals, so for your safety and the protection of those around you, do not attempt any of the stunts you're about to read unless qualified....

Meanwhile, Einstein dismantles the creation myth in $125,000 letter A pair of Apple-branded sneakers have gone on sale for $50,000 through art broker Sotheby's....

One in five users can expect an audit in the next three years Most organizations adapting to Oracle's new licensing terms for Java expect the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model, according to Gartner estimates....

TSMC has too much capacity when China has made no secret of its desire for Taiwan AMD is considering broadening chip production suppliers as it believes it is too reliant on semiconductor giant TSMC and this places the supply chain at risk of disruption....

X marks the rot: It's Elon's fave letter and way forward for the 'everything app' Mercurial billionaire Elon Musk has ditched the Twitter brand name in favor of a white "X" on a black background, and is kicking the blue bird logo out of the nest to signal a world-bending shake-up at the biz....

Plus: Apple is building its own large language models internally, and AI South Park is terrible AI in brief Judges have tentatively rejected Google's request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a former engineer who accused the company of firing him for challenging an internal AI chip design research project....

More puffins than people on Lundy, and no one wants to say how much it cost BT and satellite operator OneWeb are now providing internet access to the island of Lundy as part of the UK government's program to connect up hard-to-reach areas of the country, but the pair are strangely reluctant to discuss costs....

What do you call an air-gapped Googler? Anything you like, they can't hear you Opinion It seems intuitively obvious. Disconnect your PC from the internet, and it's safe from attack. Google thinks enough of the idea to try cutting off a couple of thousand workstations from the pestilential swamp. The air gap is an experiment in increasing the cost of mounting an attack, says the company....

Penguins are OK with glaciers. Academics not so much Who, Me? Ah, gentle reader, we find ourselves once again at that juncture of the week we call Who, Me? in which your fellow Regizens' tales of technical not-quite-competence brighten an otherwise dull Monday....

Sign of confidence or ... something bigger? Alibaba will not participate in a planned share buyback of its fintech arm, Ant Group, according to a regulatory filing lodged with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sunday....

ALSO: Amazon's child-sized COPPA fine, smart tech security labels coming to the US, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief A security weakness in Google Cloud Build could have allowed attackers to tamper with organizations' code repositories and application images, according to Orca Security researchers....

ALSO: Singapore's government LLM, China beats 5G base station target, and Malaysia telecom gives in to 5G bandwidth purchasing policy ASIA IN BRIEF Mastercard announced last week it will allow linking of its credit cards to AliPay's digital wallet without advancing the cash to a prepaid account, thus easing foreigner travel in China....

Web super-biz dreams of lobbing 3,000-plus internet-relay birds into orbit Amazon is building a $120 million facility at the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida's Cape Canaveral, where it'll prepare Project Kuiper internet-relaying satellites for launch....

How does more natural gas consumption contribute to Redmond's eco dream? Unable to secure a steady supply of power from Ireland's national power grid, Microsoft has elected to build its own power plant to keep its 900 million datacenter development outside Dublin up and running....