The Register

CEO-to-grunt pay ratio now 300:1 as wider workforce gets 4.4% more than year earlier HPE chief Antonio Neri was awarded $20.06 million in compensation for the company's last financial year, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission....

Or so says opsec firm, which confirms 70% of all industrial org ransomware in 2023 targeted manufacturers Analysis Cybercriminals follow the money, and increasingly last year that led them to ransomware attacks against the manufacturing industry....

Fact-checkers will label AI-generated media for upcoming EU elections Meta is launching an "EU-specific Elections Operations Center" to tackle AI-generated misinformation and political advertising to prepare for upcoming parliament elections....

First integration across properties, as end user compute division readies to leave home Broadcom has delivered on its 2023 teaser of integration between VMware's SD-WAN and Symantec's Security Service Edge, by today debuting the "VMware VeloCloud SASE, Secured by Symantec" at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona....

Machine learning will make everyone a programmer, so best become an expert in something else Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes AI has advanced to the point at which it's no longer necessary to prioritize computer science and coding education for the world's youth....

Customer service data from five top telcos across Asia, Europe, and UAE will feed a carrier-centric multi-lingual chatbots A joint venture comprising carriers SoftBank, Singtel, SK Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and e& Group plans to develop a large language model (LLM) they will use to automate customer service for the telco sector....

How's that for resilient? Against almost astronomical odds, Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) has reestablished communication with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)....

Scammers' tactics are tiresomely familiar: get-rich-quick schemes and data harvesting China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has warned local netizens that fake wallet apps for the nation's central bank digital currency (CBDC) are already circulating and being abused by scammers....

Yemeni rebels thought to lack the ability to damage submarine cables, but here we are Undersea data cables in the Red Sea have reportedly been damaged, months after Yemeni Houthi rebels threatened to do so....

While you wait, Android devices will start to use gen AI to do stuff like summarize group chats Google hopes to reinstate Gemini's AI image-generating abilities in the next couple of weeks as it races to fix an issue that prevented the model's text-to-image service from depicting White people....

Kremlin's spies tried out the TTPs on Microsoft, and now they're off to the races Russia's notorious Cozy Bear, the crew behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack, has expanded its targets and evolved its techniques to break into organizations' cloud environments, according to the Five Eyes governments....

Commerce secretary warns priority will go to shovel-ready projects US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo shared some hard truths about the $39 billion in CHIPS Act funding up for grabs in a speech on Monday....

State government says it's thinking of the children A law firm acting on behalf of the Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford has asked a state court to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) denying minors access to encrypted communication in Meta's Messenger application....

Steve Kramer claims the whole thing was a ruse to regulate AI in politics A political consultant admitted to paying a magician to create a fake anti-Biden robocall urging people not to vote in a Democratic primary election....

US government's bounty hasn't borne fruit as whack-a-mole game goes on The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang is reportedly responsible for the massive Change Healthcare cyberattack that has disrupted pharmacies across the US since last week....

As always, the lack of memory could prove limiting Nvidia rolled out a pair of entry-level laptop GPUs aimed at professional notebooks on Monday, with performance claims far exceeding that of standalone system on chips (SoCs) from Intel and AMD....

Officials have until March 2 to cough up or stolen data gets leaked Updated LockBit claims it's back in action just days after an international law enforcement effort seized the ransomware gang's servers and websites, and retrieved more than 1,000 decryption keys to assist victims....

Perseverance images show violent end to Ingenuity's final flight A little more light is being shed on the fate of NASA's Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, thanks to fresh images snapped by the Perseverance rover....

Windows 11 didn't kickstart a refresh cycle so here's another excuse Dell Technologies has joined other PC vendors that bought a ticket on the AI hype train as it prepares to release a swathe of new devices....

One year on, balloon fever remains alive and well in the US Just when you thought the skies over America were finally free of Chinese spy balloons ... well they are, at least in this latest case of a mystery object that was spotted while flying over the western US....

Billionaire worried about AI crawling over his computer Are you getting a bit tired of Microsoft's demands while installing Windows 11? You aren't alone - billionaire Elon Musk is also less than impressed with the requirements for a smooth out-of-box experience....

Price tag, hardware durability underpinning 'already lengthened replacement cycle' Half of consumers polled in a Vodafone-backed survey are considering buying a refurbished smartphone instead of a brand-new handset, with the lower purchase price and environmental concerns cited as the main reasons....

Still works, though, says CEO, promising pics any day now Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander last week became the first American lander to touch down on the Moon in 50 years - albeit landing on its side....

Just what Android fans were missing, amirite? A 7 billion parameter LLM that accepts image and voice prompts? MWC Qualcomm is going big on AI at MWC, where it's showing off a 7 billion parameter large language model running on an Android phone, along with an online hub to help mobile devs blend models into their apps, and AI infused into its latest 5G modem and Wi-Fi 7 silicon....

Plus fresh edge compute system that may be able to run on existing infra MWC Intel's opening day at MWC is all about networks and edge compute, specifically a dedicated edge platform, a developer kit for AI models for vRAN, and a power management tool for 5G infrastructure....

Check your service level agreements to make sure you'll at least get a slice of cake when your vendor goes down The $5 credit AT&T is offering to customers affected by last week's major outage highlights that compensation when a provider suffers downtime is unlikely to get even close to the inconvenience or cost to business....

2,000 employees at 38 facilities had data processed 'unlawfully', ICO says A data protection watchdog in the UK has issued an enforcement notice to stop Serco from using facial recognition tech and fingerprint scanning to monitor staff at 38 leisure centers it runs....

Also, another fake iOS app slips into the store, un-cybersafe EV chargers leave UK shelves, and critical vulns in brief A Florida journalist has been arrested and charged with breaking into protected computer systems in a case his lawyers say was less "hacking," more "good investigative journalism."...

Two major procurement initiatives aim to beef up public sector tech UK government has launched two tenders for cloud services that could jointly see up to 7.5 billion ($9.5 billion) spent under framework agreements....

Arise, the new Migration Nation Opinion It looked like the most cynical corporate move of the last couple of years, at least in IT. A year and a half after it was announced, so it has proved to be. Broadcom's $61 billion buyout of VMware was expected to follow a familiar formula - price hikes, product abandonment, complete ecosystem devastation - and the creation of two classes of people....

Making full effective use of new persistent memory means tearing up the rulebook FOSDEM Non-volatile RAM is making a comeback, but the deep assumptions of 1970s OS design will stop us making effective use of it. There are other ways to do things....

While you ponder that, look - or try to - at a concept transparent lappie Lenovo has used Mobile World Congress (MWC) to debut a clutch of updated ThinkPads for business users that it claims are AI PCs - but which look a lot like just PCs that ship with AI-capable processors....

Cupertino only wanted to be with Google for search - despite the prospect of buying Bing outright Bad search results for the query "Annie Lennox first band" were among the reasons Apple rejected an approach from Microsoft to use the Bing search engine as the default in its Safari browser - and also discarded the idea of a joint venture to make Bing better or even the chance to buy the search engine outright....

The whole incident could have been avoided by spending some spare change on a fastener Who, Me? What? Monday? Again? Didn't we do Monday last week? OK, fine. Welcome once again to your soft landing pad into the working week - the oasis we call Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with tales of tech tribulations....

Headcount down 18 percent as content creation time shrinks from 99 hours to 90 minutes Singapore-based superapp Grab logged its first ever positive net profit late last week, and revealed it was helped by cutting cloud costs and adopting generative AI....

Plus: US Department of Justice has hired its first chief AI officer AI in brief Microsoft is investigating fictional press statements about the death of political prisoner Alexei Navalny, written by its AI Copilot and falsely attributed to Russian president Vladimir Putin....

As users report Broadcom massively hikes license costs, consultant advises negotiation tactics used for Oracle or Microsoft will apply VMware's end-user compute business unit is set to be acquired by private equity firm KKR, according to a Reuters report that claims the deal will see $3.8 billion change hands....

PLUS: Huawei's tablets beat iPad sales; Japanese supermarket's long ransomware fight; Do Kwon extradited Asia In Brief India's home-grown DIR-V VEGA RISC-V processors have debuted in development boards....

It takes only one bottleneck or single point of failure to ruin your week Systems Approach One refrain you often hear is that security must be built in from the ground floor; that retrofitting security to an existing system is the source of design complications, or worse, outright flawed designs....

Use of AI to calculate legal bill 'utterly and unusually unpersuasive' You'd think lawyers - ostensibly a clever group of people - would have figured out by now that relying on ChatGPT to do anything related to their jobs could be a bad idea, but here we are, yet again, with a judge rebuking a law firm for doing just that....

In with the new, but old Insider bugs remain More than a month after the Wi-Fi alliance introduced certification for Wi-Fi 7 devices, Microsoft has added support for the technology to Windows 11....

Oodles of problems with data decompression and suchlike, depending on system settings Some recent Intel microprocessors are crashing systems - and the problem appears related to the chips' firmware and clock rates settings....

Investigating LockBit's finances has blown previous estimates of the operation's wealth out of the water Authorities digging into LockBit's finances believe the group may have generated more than $1 billion in ransom fees over its four-year lifespan....

$800M expansion canceled after a mere glimpse at the power of Sora If you ask American film mogul Tyler Perry, AI isn't coming for jobs - it's already taken them. Case in point, Perry's Atlanta film studio, where the movie maker just scrapped an expansion in the works for four years after getting a glimpse of OpenAI's Sora....

The coasters are making a comeback ... but tech won't be commercially available for some time Optical discs that can store up to 200 TB of data could be possible with a new technology developed in China. If commercialized, it could revive optical media as an alternative to hard disk or tape for cost-effective long-term storage....

Space factory startup celebrates successful re-entry Almost drowned out by last night's lunar landing, Varda Space Industries celebrated the re-entry and landing of the capsule from its W-1 mission in the Utah desert....

Thieves broke into IT system using stolen login U-Haul is alerting tens of thousands of folks that miscreants used stolen credentials to break into one of its systems and access customer records that contained some personal data....

Pair had to dodge croc on trek back to civilization Two German tourists got more than they bargained for when they put their lives in the hands of Google Maps and blindly followed the service into the depths of the Australian jungle....

NCA still left enough for onlookers to wonder if there's anything more to come The grand finale of the week of LockBit leaks was slated to expose the real identity of LockBitSupp - the alias of the gang's public spokesperson - but the reveal has fallen short of expectations....

Publicity around offer breaches loan agreement, or so SEC filing alleges MariaDB has been warned by a bank lender that it may "sweep" its accounts in retaliation for the publication of a private equity bid for the troubled database company....