The Register

Authors continue to lose out on owed payments as rebuild of digital services drags on The British Library is denying reports suggesting the recovery costs for its 2023 ransomware attack may reach highs of nearly $9 million as work to restore services remains ongoing....

Renewed focus follows TV drama UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has promised to speed up the process of exonerating Post Office employees wrongfully convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud decades after after faulty software led to one of the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history....

Plus: A virtual Elvis Presley animated using AI to perform in shows, and the most popular chatbot on Character.ai AI in brief Adding visible or invisible watermarks to images to identify whether they're made by AI won't prevent content from being manipulated to spread misinformation online, experts warn....

FOSS's license to exist depends on helping users. It has to learn to think that way Opinion Bruce Perens is unhappy. He sees the spirit and potency of FOSS decaying into obsolescence as the big guns learn to game the system and users don't see the point....

How the hyperscalers derailed Europe's cloud infrastructure train Interview Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek is blunt about the future of Europe's Gaia-X project: it doesn't have one. At least, not in the way many of its founders hoped....

Old BT green boxes to be repurposed The BT Group has made good on its promise to repurpose street cabinets into EV charge points by kicking off a pilot to demonstrate the concept actually works....

How badly do you want your name in the About box? Who, me? Welcome, gentle reader, and rejoice, for with the new year comes a new instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers recount tales of tech trouble for your edification....

When record labels go bananas over brief samples, good luck generating tracks built from today's culture Comment Generative AI models are most known for knocking out text and pictures, though they're also getting some way with audio. Music is particularly tricky, arguably: as humans, we can be relatively forgiving with machine-imagined imagery and some forms of writing, but perhaps not so much with audio. People can be very picky about the sounds they like listening to....

Also: Twitter hijackings, BEC arrest, and critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief We gather everyone's still easing themselves into the New Year. Deleting screens of unread emails, putting on a brave face in meetings, and slowly getting up to speed. While you're recovering from the Christmas break, Meta has been busy introducing fresh ways to monetize your web surfing habits while dressing it up as a user experience improvement....

It'll also cost billions, but perhaps a price worth paying? Let's say that you and your political leaders are committed to reducing the effects of the "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide (CO) and methane (CH) that are indisputably toasting our Earth....

Won't stop the chaos, may lead to attacks with more dire consequences Opinion A general ban on ransomware payments, as was floated by some this week, sounds like a good idea. Eliminate extortion as a source of criminal income, and the attacks are undoubtedly going to drop....

An electric airplane on Mars, micrograv hibernation, and plenty others NASA is funding 13 ambitious projects that could potentially lead to space missions one day, ranging from scanning for signs of life on Mars to exploring a nearby exoplanet with thousands of swarming spacecraft....

Remember the good old days when ransomware crooks vowed not to infect medical centers? Extortionists are now threatening to swat hospital patients - calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims' homes - if the medical centers don'tpay the crooks' ransom demands....

You really think someone would do that? Go on the internet and tell lies? Predictive and generative AI systems remain vulnerable to a variety of attacks and anyone who says otherwise isn't being entirely honest, according to Apostol Vassilev, a computer scientist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)....

Stockpiled TSMC silicon from 2020 shock! Did Huawei's domestic fab partners somehow develop the means to mass produce a 5nm laptop chip in spite of US sanctions designed to prevent just that? No, they most certainly did not....

The advent of generative AI has made the attack far more pervasive The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is promising a $25,000 reward for the best solution to combat the growing threat of AI voice cloning....

Perfect timing - now BYD can rub that in Tesla's face along with stealing the global EV sales crown A hot new Tesla import has arrived in China in the form of a pair of forced software updates for nearly every car the US EV maker has sold in the Middle Kingdom....

Decades, gone in a flash: Longlived mission was almost derailed by file system whoopsie It is 20 years this week since NASA's Spirit rover landed on Mars, kicking off years of exploration before ending its mission stuck in the sand....

So long, and thanks for all the sanctions as PR and government relations teams decamp Chinese tech giant Huawei has reportedly stood down much of its public and government relations teams in the US and Canada, in a sign it may have given up trying to persuade Washington to soften its stance....

Remember when Microsoft said that about FTC (and then walked it back)? SpaceX has sued America's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent federal agency responsible for protecting private sector employees' rights, just 24 hours after the body accused Elon Musk's company of treating employees unfairly....

Fitzpatrick faces potentially decades in prison later this month, so may as well get some foreign Netflix in beforehand The cybercriminal behind BreachForums was this week arrested for violating the terms of his pretrial release and will now be held in custody until his sentencing hearing....

Throwback word processor ditched from clean installs, soon to be removed on upgrade Microsoft has begun ditching WordPad from Windows and removed the editor from the first Canary Channel build of 2024....

Self-driving car biz says Q1 orders to drop 50% amid widening operating losses Mobileye shares tanked by up to 27 percent yesterday in pre-market trading after the self-driving tech biz surprised Wall Street by warning that customers are chewing over excess inventory and cutting orders....

86-DOS version 0.1-C found and archived - all nine files of it An intrepid code archaeologist has found and uploaded an early ancestor of what became MS-DOS, which later sparked the IBM PC-compatible computer industry....

Research warns not to make the same mistakes as other electronic patient record systems A leading expert has warned that the value of the NHS's Federated Data Platform (FDP) will depend on usability testing if it is to improve patient safety and efficiency in the UK health service....

But we also have a bit to say about Dark Souls, Starfield, Foxhole, and more The RPG Greetings, traveler, and welcome back to our occasional gaming column The Register Plays Games....

Read the manual, they said. If only they'd said it about the right manual On Call 2024 has commenced, but in today's edition of On Call - The Register's reader-contributed tales of tech support strife - a reader we'll Regomize as "Stuart" shared a tale caused by a temporal anomaly....

'Almost everything' wiped in the telecom attack, says Ukraine's top cyber spy Russia's Sandworm crew appear to have been responsible for knocking out mobile and internet services to about 24 million users in Ukraine last month with an attack on telco giant Kyivstar....

'Conversational engine' still hallucinates, cites its sources at least AI search engine startup Perplexity has raised $73.6 million in a series-B funding round led by Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and other investors....

India's IT outsourcers have an exec poaching problem A Bengaluru civil court has ordered Indian IT outsourcer Wipro to go into arbitration with its former CFO, Jatin Dalal, over accusations the latter violated a non-compete clause by joining competitor Cognizant....

Devil is in the as-yet-undisclosed revenue sharing details OpenAI's GPT Store - a one-stop shop for customized chatbot models - is expected to start business next week, after missing its planned debut last month amid boardroom turmoil at the startup....

Uncle Sam: Nothing goes together quite like a well-pressed uniform and weapons of mass destruction Microchip will receive $162 million of US CHIPS and Science Act funding to bolster domestic production of microcontrollers used in both commercial and military applications....

'New' ADAS and infotainment parts powered by older FPGAs and earlier cores. It's good enough for Tesla +Comment Just in time for CES, which has become just as much a car show as an electronics event in recent years, AMD has revealed its newest chips for the automotive market: a processor powered by a nearly five-year-old core architecture, and a 2.5-year-old FPGA with some Arm cores and AI accelerators baked in....

Moving parts on a plane? What is this, Kitty Hawk? The latest experimental DARPA aircraft, which is designed to maneuver without the need for moving parts, is headed to the manufacturing stage and could be flying as soon as next year....

Search giant told yet again that contractors still employees, must be bargained with Updated The US National Labor Relations Board has decided that Google's contractors are still its employees, thus Google is violating US labor laws by refusing to bargain with their chosenunion....

Hallucinated programming flaws vex curl project Generative AI models like Google Bard and GitHub Copilot have a user problem: Those who rely on software assistance may not understand or care about the limitations of these machine learning tools....

Miscreants mock Google-owned security house: 'Change password please' Miscreants took over security giant Mandiant's Twitter account for several hours on Wednesday in an attempt to steal cryptocurrency, then trolled the Google-owned security shop, telling its admins to change the password....

Another Silicon Valley Icarus flies too close to the Sun A former Adobe software engineer was this week sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in an insider trading scheme that earned him millions before the feds caught on....

Users apparently at fault after reusing credentials the company didn't check were already compromised 23andMe users' godawful password practices were supposedly to blame for the biotech company's October data disaster, according to its legal reps....

Evangelist of lean software and devisor of 9 programming languages and an OS was 89 Obit Swiss computer scientist Professor Niklaus Wirth died on New Year's Day, roughly six weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday....

Modern life is rubbish. What if your favorite tech giant had stopped trying to reinvent the wheel? A brave hero has given us a glimpse at an alternative universe, where Microsoft evolved the Windows XP design language. And isn't that a better use of time than coming up with the Copilot key?...

Outsider brought in to rule crucial unit will play key part in AI strategy Intel has hired Justin Hotard to head up its Data Center and AI (DCAI) Group, poaching the exec from HPE where he lead its High Performance Computing business....

Rule 1: You do not criticize the boss. Rule 2: You do NOT criticize the boss The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued a complaint against SpaceX, alleging it dismissed workers for being critical of the company's boss, Elon Musk, among 37 other unfair labor practices....

That's what happens when Uncle Sam tries to curb your chip sector Global semiconductor capacity is tipped to grow in 2024, despite the doom and gloom, with China forecast to lead the way and expand its share of global chip production as it tries to become more self sufficient....

Pushing your buttons: Microsoft's AI assistant is going so well that it's going to have its very own spot Microsoft says a Copilot key will be coming to Windows 11 PCs, oddly exciting fanatics but confounding some others....

No 2FA or special characters to prevent database takeover and BGP hijack Updated A weak password exposed by infostealer malware is being blamed after a massive outage at Orange Spain disrupted around half of its network's traffic....

Meanwhile, finding a public charge point that works and doesn't require a second mortgage remains a challenge All new cars and vans bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035, according to the latest legal mandate updated this week....

Headline-grabbing takedowns are nice, but long-term solutions require short-term sacrifices Comment In some ways, the ransomware landscape in 2023 remained unchanged from the way it looked in previous years. Vendor reports continue to show a rise in attacks, major organizations are still getting hit, and the inherent issues that enable it as a business model remain unaddressed....

Deal expanded from 4.5M to 19.5M over 7 years as critics point to shortcomings The UK's Environment Agency has awarded Fujitsu - the tech biz embroiled in the high-profile Post Office scandal - a 2 million contract extension to run the flood warning system after apparent delays to finding a replacement supplier....

Also: Remember that balloon over the US last February? It might have used a US internet provider Four Chinese balloons have reportedly floated over the Taiwan Strait, three of them crossing over the island's land mass and near its Ching-Chuan-Kang air base before disappearing, according to the Taiwan's defense ministry....