The Register

Meanwhile, the Google News Initiative is pushing AI tools for publishers A group of more than 30 European media organizations has sued Google for 2.1 billion, seeking damages for lost revenue they say was caused by the search giant's anticompetitive advertising technology....

Very low Earth orbit birds could sip the outer atmosphere on their way up Electric propulsion systems that generate power from the scant air in the outer edges of the atmosphere could power satellites in very low Earth orbit (VLEO), without the need for conventional propellants - at least in theory....

Beats guidance as renewals grow and waits for Broadcom and Cisco to bring more bucks Nutanix doesn't expect a rush of VMware users to adopt its platform, because many signed up for long-term deals before Broadcom acquired the virtualization giant....

This might solve its twin problems of low growth and short-term customers Alibaba Cloud has made significant price cuts for those willing to use its datacenters in mainland China and commit to multi-year deals....

Execs swear Chinese cloud will beat local rivals with a superior software stack that makes AI sing Chinese web giant Baidu has told investors its long-term planning assumes it won't be able to access leading-edge GPUs, but that it can beat local rivals with its superior software stack....

Tried to speed boot times, maybe by messing with 'Windows source code', ended up building a viral on-ramp Chinese PC maker Acemagic has admitted some of its products shipped with pre-installed malware....

Japan's government slapped it for using the wrong code to produce too-powerful results Toyota apologized on Wednesday for an incident involving the fraudulent certification of its diesel engines that resulted in a corrective order from Japan's transport ministry....

And accuses a former Australian politician of having 'sold out their country' The director general of security at Australia's Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has delivered his annual threat assessment, revealing ongoing attempts by adversaries to map digital infrastructure with a view to disrupting important services at delicate moments....

The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet want damages and to have their content removed from models Three digital publishers have sued OpenAI over claims that it stole their copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT in two separate lawsuits filed on Wednesday....

Brags it lifted 6TB of data, but let's remember these people are criminals and not worthy of much trust The ALPHV/BlackCat cybercrime gang has taken credit - if that's the word - for a ransomware infection at Change Healthcare that has disrupted thousands of pharmacies and hospitals across the US, and also claimed that the amount of sensitive data stolen and affected health-care organizations is much larger than the victims initially disclosed....

Talk about gone in 60 seconds Computer scientists have developed an efficient way to craft prompts that elicit harmful responses from large language models (LLMs)....

Fujian Jinhua escapes prosecution tho remains on the US sanctions list A Chinese chipmaker accused of stealing DRAM secrets from American memory manufacturer Micron has been found not guilty, bringing a five-year long legal saga to an end....

Subzero temperatures and batteries don't mix - but there may be a solution Researchers have discovered that using "small molecule" solvents could help improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries, speeding up charging and ensuring they work at low temperatures....

Comes after US probe into biz's dealings with SMIC Applied Materials was served with multiple subpoenas relating to Chinese shipments, the chip factory equipment maker disclosed today....

Expert panel finds 'a lack of awareness of safety-related metrics at all levels,' and more, at plane maker "Inadequate," "confusing," "disconnect," and "lack of awareness" aren't words passengers would like to hear associated with aviation safety, but according to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that's exactly what the situation is like at Boeing....

Lawsuit alleges it misled investors with claims new AI products were 'facilitating greater platformization' and more Updated Palo Alto Networks (PAN) is facing a proposed class action lawsuit that alleges investors were deceived about the traction of its platform tactics and hurt by an unexpectedly low billings forecast that crashed the share price....

But beware - Gparted Live hasn't been updated yet There's a new bugfix release of Gparted, a FOSS replacement for PowerQuest's wonderful Partition Magic....

Charlie and the AI factory flop compared to 'meth lab' In the most flagrant case of false advertising since The NeverEnding Story, cops were called to a Wonka-themed "Willy's Chocolate Experience" in Glasgow, Scotland, because promotional material was made entirely from AI-generated slop....

Trevor Milton bought it for cash and stock options, and he wants the cash back Try not to weep into your morning coffee, but convicted fraudster Trevor Milton might lose a ranch that a fresh filing claims he bought after lying to its owner "about Nikola's business" to persuade the man to sell to him....

Stock awards front loaded, get five years in one go Broadcom's boss Hock Tan more than doubled his total compensation package in fiscal 2023, which will no doubt be well received by the thousands of small VMware customers and cloud providers he's upset....

Czech billionaire buyer walks away from ailing Tech Foundations division Troubled tech giant Atos confirmed today that negotiations with the prospective buyer of its legacy IT operation have ended prematurely, coming after the recent cancellation of its rights issue to raise cash....

Train-wreck public sector project was forecast to save 'bankrupt' council money Europe's largest local authority has allocated 5.3 million ($6.7 million) in next year's budget to pay for manual workarounds deemed necessary after its effort to transition from SAP to Oracle ended in an expensive disaster....

New versions of both Overstreet's baby and OpenZFS will hit the street soon New versions of the two leading next-generations filesystems are coming: both OpenZFS 2.2.3, and some time afterwards, an improved bcachefs....

Motor-mouth CEO Alex Karp claims Palantir stopped 'innumerable' terror attacks in Europe The CEO of controversial data-mining firm Palantir has claimed that the company's technology has prevented terrorist attacks in Europe, thereby implicitly saving the continent from the return of fascism....

Biden readies executive order targeting China, Russia, and pals US President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order today that aims to prevent the sale or transfer of Americans' sensitive personal information and government-related data to adversarial countries including China and Russia....

Report points out the difficulties of getting such a system right Using waste heat from datacenters for district heating makes sense from an environmental standpoint, yet there are implementation challenges and potential pitfalls introduced with any government regulations covering it....

Cash-for-Azure-access deal went through just as latest LLM landed The European Commission is investigating Microsoft's 15 million ($16.3 million) investment in French startup Mistral, which came just after the latter released a large language model to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT....

Jensen Huang's automotive engineering team has now pinched two top Middle Kingdom talents Nvidia has picked up the former head of Baidu's L2+ Autonomous Driving System, Luo Qi, to head the engineering team of its own automotive business unit....

Ad giant that owns over 80 percent of search traffic yells at cloud monopoly Google has again stoked fears that rival Microsoft is using anticompetitive business practices and licenses to establish a cloud monopoly, and is calling on regulators to take action....

Seminal game runs on everything, so why not pay 2,199 to run it on a tiny screen? Swedish garden appliance maker Husqvarna has ported Doom to one of its robotic lawn mowers....

Non-techies told to master firmware upgrades and firewall rules. For the infosec hardheads: have some IOCs Authorities from eleven nations have delivered a sequel to the January takedown of a botnet run by Russia on compromised Ubiquiti Edge OS routers - in the form of a warning that Russia may try again, so owners of the devices should take precautions....

Si2 Microsystems was tapped for silicon photonics expertise, but has Russian ties that worry Washington and Brussels The European Union has imposed sanctions against Indian microelectronics maker Si2 Microsystems late last week for allegedly providing Russia with goods and technology that support the country's illegal invasion of Ukraine....

Super lab claims 'deceptive prompts' that it happily processed - and may have tracked - weren't fair, so case should be dismissed OpenAI has accused The New York Times Company of paying someone to "hack" ChatGPT to generate verbatim paragraphs from articles in its newspaper. By hack, presumably the biz means: Logged in as normal and asked it annoying questions....

Washington sees potential emergency as miners power up to chase new BTC high A Texas judge has granted a temporary restraining order that prevents the US federal government surveying domestic cryptocurrency miners about their energy consumption....

Cruise is parked, Waymo is in trouble, Tesla's never quite nailed auto-autos so is China in the no-driver's seat? After nearly a decade of work, two indictments, the departure of a senior exec, and unknown levels of expenditure, Apple has reportedly decided to cancel its not-so-secret self-driving car effort, Project Titan....

People still make the final decision, but recent raids in Iraq and Syria had help The US Department of Defense has deployed machine learning algorithms to identify targets in over 85 air strikes on targets in Iraq and Syria this year....

Game over for 900 staff as PlayStation London office and more shuttered Sony's gaming wing has become the latest technology org to announce broad layoffs, including the complete closure of the London office of PlayStation Studios amid other headcount reductions....

Big biz invited to like and subscribe, without fear of litigation GitHub on Tuesday made Copilot Enterprise generally available, hoping to sell corporate developers on automated coding assistance....

Canadian network box maker floats in denial The US Commerce Department has blacklisted Sandvine for selling its networking monitoring technology to Egypt, where the Feds say the gear was used to spy on political and human-rights activists....

The original was definitely getting a bit long in the tooth for modern challenges After ten years operating under the original model, and two years working to revise it, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released version 2.0 of its Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)....

Controllers estimate 10-20 hours remain for Intuitive Machines lander Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lunar lander is facing another countdown. This time the question is how much longer it can continue to operate until it exhausts what remains of the battery life....

You know you want to throw out that Windows 10 fleet Intel would really like businesses to buy some new PCs, and is unveiling its latest vPro platform with an exhortation for them to refresh their fleet now in order to be "AI ready."...

You've heard of Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. How about an energetic engine failure? The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has closed its investigation into the case of another exploding SpaceX rocket with a list of corrective actions to be implemented before Starship can fly again....

Before building the Torment Nexus, consider the risks Computer scientists at the University of Maryland (UMD) have asked robot makers to do further safety research before wiring language and vision models to their hardware....

Factoring in the deposit, you'd be better off running away with it Apple is a big deal in China. Despite competition from four homegrown smartphone vendors, the iPhone comes top with a 17.3 percent market share, with Honor closely behind at 17.1 percent, according to IDC....

Was your Patch Tuesday followed by a Rollback Wednesday? You're not alone Microsoft says that February 13's security update for Windows 11 might "face installation issues."...

Sabre Technology shutters 17 datacenters, says 90% of workloads transferred Airline reservation technology biz Sabre Corporation has almost completed a mammoth migration to Google Cloud - one that would have tested the nerves of the most steely-eyed IT director....

Latest 33M awarded without competition in 11+ years contract that's now worth well over half a billion Northern Ireland's Education Authority has awarded UK tech outsourcer Capita a managed services contract extension worth 33 million ($41.8 million) without external competition....

Harmlessly entered over the North Pacific, but solar array was already bent The European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite has re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. While no damage to property was reported, some impressive shots were taken of the spacecraft starting to buckle as it approached re-entry....

Try preliminary version of a new environment in a snap Version 0.1.0 of Miracle-wm is very incomplete still, yet shows that interesting stuff is happening on the back of Canonical's Mir display server....