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Cat flap fever, a streaming service for dogs, and other oddities on display in Vegas this week CES Ah, January: The start of a new year, crisp winter weather (if you live in the northern hemisphere, at least) and CES, with the latter giving us a look at what's in store from the biggest names in tech....

It's taken months for crims to hack together a working exploit chain Security experts claim ransomware criminals have got their hands on a functional exploit for a nearly year-old critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability that was this week added to the US's must-patch list....

Humboldt cable to zoom from Chile to Australia through the South Pacific Google says it is building the first ever subsea cable connecting South America to Asia-Pacific, in partnership with Chilean state-run infrastructure fund Desarrollo Pais and the Office of Posts and Telecommunications of French Polynesia (OPT)....

Criminal scored $2M in crypto proceeds but ends up in cuffs following property raid The criminal thought to be behind a multimillion-dollar cryptojacking scheme is in custody following a Europol-led investigation....

But Congress is on top of that, right? A US federal tax change that took effect in 2022 thanks to a time-triggered portion of the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may leave entrepreneurs with massive tax bills....

Company expects $245 million hit due to depreciation Rental giant Hertz is backing away from electric vehicles (EVs) and plans to sell off a third of its global fleet of battery-powered cars....

US senators want to know how chatbots represent an existential crisis to journalism and democracy Tech companies should compensate news publishers for training AI models on their copyrighted content, media experts told senators in a hearing this week....

Unhelpful error codes, complex fixes ... When did Windows turn into Linux? Microsoft sent yet another problematic patch into the wild this week in the form of KB5034441. However, rather than deal with a BitLocker vulnerability, the patch is failing to install for some users....

Microsoft says it's doing its best to crack down on crims The popularity of Github has made it too big to block, which is a boon to dissidents ducking government censors but a problem for internet security....

Our vulture spent a week in Las Vegas for CES 2024 - here are his key takeaways Column Every January in Las Vegas a few hundred thousand folks gather to learn about the latest innovations from an ever-broadening range of gadget makers, appliance manufacturers, automobile companies - and, these days, an ever-growing number of "wellness" purveyors....

Messaging menace used text and email to bombard people Food delivery company HelloFresh is nursing a 140,000 ($178k) fine by Britain's data privacy watchdog after a probe found it had dispatched upwards of a staggering 79 million spam email and one million texts in just seven months....

Using embedded medical technology, such as a pacemaker, defibrillator, or insulin pump? What's running inside is a complete mystery Opinion Software Freedom Conservancy's (SFC) Executive Director Karen Sandler was last year awarded an honorary doctorate by Belgium's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for her work for open source and software freedom....

And he would have got away with it, too, if it weren't for this one tiny backdoor On Call Welcome once more, dear reader, to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column detailing the delights and dangers of working in tech support....

Now that's a smart move CES Despite all the buzz around internet-connected smart cars at this year's CES in Las Vegas, most folks don't want vehicle manufacturers sharing their personal data with third parties - and even say they'd consider buying an older or dumber car to protect their privacy and security....

Heads up, this isn't about Elon When the World Economic Forum meets in Davos next week, global leaders are set to discuss how to prevent a future unknown "Disease X" the World Health Organization predicts could kill 20 times more people than the recent coronavirus outbreak....

Datacenter biz plans to deploy 32,000 Nvidia H100 and H200s next year Nvidia may not be able to sell its top-specced GPUs in China, but across the border in India, datacenter operators are buying up tens of thousands of accelerators to bolster their AI capabilities....

Seven words you can't say - This won't backfire and ruin art forever The makers of an hour-long AI-generated comedy special mimicking the late and great American comedian and actor George Carlin have been criticized for, apparently, not obtaining explicit permission from his family to impersonate his voice and style for the vid....

Anything to slow down the tech trash treadmill welcome at this point Google on Thursday voiced support for pending Right to Repair legislation in the US state of Oregon, calling it "a compelling model for other states to follow."...

Now you'll never have an excuse for missing that weekend work text or call SpaceX's Starlink has confirmed a successful test of its Direct to Cell (DTC) technology with a two-way text conversation held earlier this week....

Staff sent live cockroaches, porno - and more - in harassment campaign to silence pair eBay will pay $3 million to settle criminal charges that its security team stalked and harassed a Massachusetts couple in retaliation for their website's critical coverage of the online tat bazaar....

Hint: US, UK, European antitrust police are on the hunt Data egress fees aren't going away, but if you really want to ditch Google Cloud and take your data somewhere else, the search giant is willing to cut you a break....

Wonder when he's going to give that 28-year-old their skin back We're born, we work, we die. That biological injustice just doesn't mesh with the Silicon Valley mindset....

Plus: Analyst believes Samsung might give up on own cores and use Arm designs instead Arm has confirmed it is working on a CPU core expected to deliver a jump in performance, thus taking aim at the closing the gap between its own chips and those produced by Apple....

Speculation builds over whether a nearly year-old policy change was to blame Google-owned security house Mandiant's investigation into how its X account was taken over to push cryptocurrency scams concludes the "likely" cause was a successful brute-force password attack....

Benefits include no snacking on your sensitive data OpenAI is updating its subscription plans to add a "Team" tier for businesses to sit below its existing Enterprise level....

Real-life Kerbal Space Program? A Chinese startup has launched its first rocket from a sea-based platform, sending three satellites into orbit....

Oz online safety czar receives evidence of cull despite platform reinstating hundreds of banned accounts Twitter, the social media service now calling itself X, executed a 30 percent reduction in its Trust and Safety staff globally after Elon Musk's acquisition in October 2022....

Customers currently left patchless while attacks are expected to increase Security experts believe Chinese nation-state attackers are actively exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in security products made by Ivanti....

Power user excavates evidence of experimental 'Cowriter' feature Windows Notepad is set to be the next recipient of Microsoft's AI attentions judging by screenshots posted by a Windows Insider user....

Cuts are a continuation of late-2023 redundancies to help teams better 'align their resources' The 2024 layoff season appears to have only begun, with Google cutting hundreds of employees across multiple divisions yesterday....

Scores are on the doors for Q4, as after 2 years shipments grow again... by 0.3% The PC industry has ended a two-year run of declining shipments, by growing 0.3 percent in Q4 of 2023, amid a warning that the cost of components will rise this year, as will the cost of laptops and desktops....

Interest in Japanese's firm's public sector deals - worth $15B in the UK alone since 2012 - spikes Analysis Since the broadcast of a television drama telling the story of the Post Office Horizon scandal - one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in British legal history - calls have mounted for those responsible to be held to account....

Study of workplace blabbermouths reveals the consequences If you're the type of office blabbermouth who loves to stand at the water cooler and tell anyone who'll listen that Pete in accounts has bad breath, or John and Jill in tech are sleeping together, don't expect a promotion anytime soon....

Discovery could have implications for the field of forensics The belief that all fingerprints are unique is so well accepted that crime novels and TV shows riff on it. Recent AI research has challenged this notion, at least regarding the fingerprints on different fingers of the same person....

Essential tool for PC troubleshooting, even if you never run anything but Windows The revival in development of open source RAM-testing tool Memtest86+ continues with version 7.0 - and it's not just for Linuxy types....

Budget, schmudget, when it comes to AI-enabled productivity gains, says exec Any dangers associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) can easily be countered through action, similarly to how humans resolved the depletion of the ozone layer, according to namesake and founder of Dell Technologies Inc, Michael Dell....

Developers are not alone in losing track of which platform to back Microsoft has a very long history, but the company's attention span seems to be shrinking, which is making it difficult to decide which products have a future and which might be shot behind the shed....

Just keep the cold clammy hand of Fujitsu away from it Japan's government scientific research institute Riken is hedging its bets on quantum computing with the deployment of Quantinuum's trapped-ion H1 systems at its facility in Wako, Saitama....

We've heard of bored penpushers hallucinating at their desks, but this is something else Pennsylvania has signed up for a ChatGPT Enterprise plan, allowing the commonwealth's government employees to use OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence to complete day-to-day tasks, or so Governor Josh Shapiro hopes....

Happy New Year! Last year's tech layoff spree isn't over, with live-streaming site Twitch announcing today that it's laying off 500 employees, around a third of its staff. The biz isn't alone in letting people go....

Enterprise software giant claims it has cut ties with bad apples Enterprise software giant SAP has agreed to pay at least $220 million to settle bribery charges brought by the US Justice Department (DOJ), the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority (NPA)....

It's still not calling it ransomware Fidelity National Financial now says criminals got hold of data belonging to 1.3 million customers after breaking into its IT network in November....

And pinky swear there's no copyright-infringing material Developers must disclose all AI-generated art, code, or music used in their games for Steam to review before their titles can be publicly released via the software souk....

$ gig revert HEAD && gig commit -e 'Biden was here' The US Department of Labor (DOL) on Tuesday issued a rule for determining at what point workers should be classified as employees or independent contractors under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act....

Expect new rules in upcoming weeks US hospitals will be required to meet basic cybersecurity standards before receiving federal funding, according to rules the White House is expected to propose in the next few weeks....

Today us vultures are debating bans on ransom payments, deplorable tactics by extortionists, and more Kettle Believe us, we wish there was a simple solution that could stop ransomware dead in its tracks for good....

It's about time someone figured out how to make swappable bits for EV skateboards CES Korean automaker Kia has returned to CES after a five-year absence to unveil an eagerly anticipated electric vehicle concept: Modular vehicles that can be kitted out to fit various purposes....

US Space Force harnesses Azure cloudy computing for orbital training The US Space Force's Space Systems Command (SSC) has signed a deal with Microsoft to create an "Immersive Intelligent Environment" augmented reality space simulation....

'How can they cancel a major program affecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers, with zero notice?' Exclusive Broadcom is tossing the majority of VMware's Cloud Services Providers as part of its shakeup of the virtualization titan's partner programs, say sources, leaving customers unclear who their IT supplier will be....

Posing as cyber samaritans, scumbags are kicking folks when they're down Ransomware victims already reeling from potential biz disruption and the cost of resolving the matter are now being subjected to follow-on extortion attempts by criminals posing as helpful security researchers....