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Alexa, am I wasted? Wondering if that wee tipple was a bit too much? Someday soon your sloshed speech may spill your secrets to your resident digital assistant as easily as you stumble through a tongue-twister....

White hat bounty looks more like a beg bounty The founder of the Poloniex has offered to pay off thieves who drained an estimated $120 million of user funds from the cryptocurrency exchange in a raid on Friday....

Custom Hall-effect propulsion system makes sure satellites won't trip over space junk - like Starlink Amazon's custom thrusters are performing well on its prototype Project Kuiper satellites following a series of tests to check if the Hall-effect electric propulsion system works as expected on orbit....

Tech was proven, but nobody wanted to put it in their Snapdragon devices Updated Moves toward enabling satellite connectivity for smartphones have taken a knock with the cancellation of an agreement between chipmaker Qualcomm and satellite operator Iridium....

Ransomed.vc shuts after 20% discount fails to entice bids Short-lived ransomware outfit Ransomed.vc claims to have shut down for good after a number of suspected arrests....

Apparently the move was in error In what would be delicious irony, Microsoft is reported to have temporarily pulled internal access to OpenAI's ChatGPT over security fears....

Scientists shocked to find Dinkinesh is orbited by two touching asteroids Dinkinesh, the first asteroid encountered by NASA's Lucy spacecraft, is being orbited by a smaller binary pair, and is the first object of its kind to be found by astronomers....

But with technical and insurance industry question unanswered, a few potholes may lie ahead The UK government has promised to "clarify and update" the law to allow the introduction of self-driving vehicles to the country's roads, but it is set to be a long, technical journey....

At KubeCon, the need to bridge the skills gap was clearer than ever Opinion At KubeCon North America, I did a little exercise I've done before at major technology shows. I went around the booths in the exhibition hall and asked a very simple question: "Are you hiring?" The answer from two-person startups still building up from their personal credit cards to Fortune 500 companies was always the same: Yes....

Not in my backyard, says Buckinghamshire Council Plans to build a datacenter campus on a landfill site overlooking the M25 motorway near London have been rejected on grounds it would significantly alter the character and appearance of the area, despite recognition there is significant demand for datacenter capacity in the area....

Despite what you may have heard, it's not as proprietary as the trolls think Ubuntu Summit One of the most common bits of FUD about Ubuntu's Snap packaging format is that it's proprietary - but exploring the documentation shows that is wrong....

CitrixBleed patch has been available for around a month China's largest bank, ICBC, was hit by ransomware that resulted in disruption of financial services (FS) systems on Thursday Beijing time, according to a notice on its website....

Causing pain can be so much more effective than a rational explanation On Call Friday is here, and perhaps your temper is a little frayed. Which is why The Register always opens the last day of the working week with a fresh instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed tale of the excitement of incidents on the front lines of tech support....

Duo paid themselves $600K salaries as the cupboard was emptying The co-founders and co-CEOs of failed startup Bitwise appeared in a California court Thursday accused of cheating investors out of $100 million by making up bank statements and revenue figures....

At least two destructive attacks, but - crucially - after deadly conflict erupted Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war has been largely "reactive and opportunistic," says Microsoft, in contrast to reports that Tehran's spies plotted cyberattacks against Israel to coincide with the October 7 Hamas terrorist atrocity....

Perp said to have secretly recorded patients - and digitally undressed them using web neural networks A child psychiatrist was jailed Wednesday for the production, possession, and transportation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), including the use of web-based artificial intelligence software to create pornographic images of minors....

Plus: Lab launches dataset sharing initiative for its own benefit OpenAI's ChatGPT assistant and APIs weathered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack this week, according to the super-lab....

Billions of data-leaking processors sold despite warnings and patch just made them slower, punters complain Intel has been sued by a handful of PC buyers who claim the x86 goliath failed to act when informed five years ago about faulty chip instructions that allowed the recent Downfall vulnerability, and during that period sold billions of insecure chips....

Chips limbo-dance right under Biden's performance limits It's been less than a month since the Biden administration effectively barred the export of most American-designed AI accelerators to China, yet Nvidia has already found a way to weave around those rules and get high-ish-end silicon out to the Middle Kingdom....

Someone hit the zero key one too many times? Not that anyone's complaining Alien seekers at the SETI Institute have received an organizationally life-altering $200 million (164 million) bequest from late Qualcomm cofounder Franklin Antonio, the institute confirmed Wednesday....

State of Apple co-founder's health is unclear - it could be a stroke or vertigo Reports indicate that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been hospitalized in Mexico City following a speech at the World Business Forum....

Experiments include subjecting seeds to radiation and expanding flight envelope Rather than launch from a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V or SpaceX Falcon 9 as it has done in the past, the seventh takeoff of the US Space Force's reusable X-37B spaceplane will make use of a Falcon Heavy rocket....

IT software slinger publishes fierce response to lawsuit brought last month SolarWinds has come out guns blazing to defend itself following the US Securities and Exchange Commission's announcement that it will be suing both the IT software maker and its CISO over the 2020 SUNBURST cyberattack....

Just because they store messages in a way owners can't access doesn't mean it's a privacy violation, US court rules In response to five class-action lawsuits, a Washington appeals court has decided that Honda and several other automakers did nothing wrong by storing text messages and call records from connected smartphones....

'Rare conditions' the culprit for an arc that shorted out the power supply A Rocket Lab update on what caused the failure of its "We Will Never Desert You" mission identifies an electrical arc under Paschen's Law as the most likely culprit....

Brit chip house now looking to cloud and automotive to grow revenues Arm has shown better than expected revenue in its first earnings report since the company's public offering, but its shares fell on a weaker outlook for the quarter ahead....

Software and services set to save continent's tech growth into 2024, says Gartner IT spending in Europe is set to hit $1 trillion by the end of 2023, and will see growth of 9.3 percent into next year, well up on this year's figure of 5.5 percent, according to stats from Gartner....

Second novel zero-day exploited by Lace Tempest this year offers notable demonstration of skill, especially for a ransomware affiliate The cybercriminals behind the rampant MOVEit exploits from earlier this year are making use a zero-day vulnerability in on-prem instances of IT service and help desk software-slinger SysAid....

20th anniversary version of Linux distro brings lots of new goodies Fedora Linux is released when it's ready, so two decades plus one day after its debut, the latest version is here, with lots of new goodies....

Vendor promises ChatGPT and DALLE-esque products in the near future Upcoming versions of Samsung devices will come equipped with Generative AI features starting next year after the chaebol launched its own tool - Gauss - on Wednesday....

VP of the Open Ecosystem at chip biz talks trust in the era of AI Interview Intel veep Arun Gupta is taking a pragmatic approach to open source and how contributing companies can keep the lights on....

Good news for skilled workers with new owner aiming to 'safeguard positions' A US-based semiconductor biz is to buy the Newport Wafer Fab (NWF) facility in South Wales, following last year's decision by the UK government that it had to be sold under national security legislation....

Names of consultants on encryption bypass plan leaked anyway Europe's government watchdog has found that the European Commission's refusal to disclose which experts it consulted on the proposal to scan encrypted communication for child sexual abuse material amounted to maladministration....

Online attack coincided with major military action, Mandiant says Blackouts in Ukraine last year were not just caused by missile strikes on the nation but also by a seemingly coordinated cyberattack on one of its power plants. That's according to Mandiant's threat intel team, which said Russia's Sandworm crew was behind the two-pronged power-outage and data-wiping attack....

Don't worry, this half-baked Python script is for educational purposes onl-hahaha Infosec bods have detailed an underground cybersecurity tool dubbed Predator AI that not only can be used to compromise poorly secured cloud services and web apps, but has an optional chat-bot assistant that only kinda works....

Today it's Bollywood actors, tomorrow it could be lawmakers themselves India's Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) this week issued an advisory saying social media companies need to remove deepfakes from their platforms within 36 hours after they're reported....

Sir, this is a Wendy's AI hypesters may think their training datasets and models' output are, or ought to be protected, from copyright claims, but their neural networks could still fall foul of consumer protection laws, the FTC has has warned....

Malfunctioning sensor system blamed for technician's death at Korean food plant ROTM A man in his 40s was crushed to death by a robot at a produce-sorting facility in South Korea Tuesday after the machine apparently mistook him for a box of vegetables....

8,388,608KB ought to be enough for anybody, huh? Eight gigabytes has been the standard RAM load out on new MacBook Pros for the better part of a decade, and in 2023, Apple execs still believe it's enough for customers....

The world needs a timeout moment Violent AI-generated photos fictionalizing the ongoing deadly Israel-Hamas conflict are not only being sold via Adobe's stock image library, some news publishers are buying and using the pics in online articles as if they were real....

Also: Antitrust trial exhibits signals Incognito mode isn't truly private and 100M users may be underage In 2018, concerned about the public's perception of its privacy practices, Google leaders proposed a subscription-based private Search service, one that doesn't log queries and other data....

Self-driving car outfit also creates chief safety officer role. No wonder Cruise has pushed a handy update to its self-driving taxi fleet so that they will no longer drag pedestrians along the road after running them over....

Strategies differ, though both have gaps that could hurt efficacy Microsoft and Meta have very different initiatives to combat misinformation in 2024, slated to be a busy election year all over the globe, but whether they'll be effective is another issue....

Without strong governance, incoming tools will wreak havoc for CIOs Gartner has raised the specter of departments outside of tech running their own IT functions under the guise of low-code and digital democratization....

Building material supplier left without functional ERP can amend claim Oracle has won a temporary reprieve in its defense of a lawsuit alleging the company conducted a "widespread fraudulent scheme and unfair business practice" in sales of NetSuite software, with all claims dismissed against Big Red except for one....

Nice tech, but poke underneath and you'll find Kubernetes KubeCon Kubernetes is having its Linux moment, Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Priyanka Sharma told KubeCon in Chicago yesterday. Her proclamation was rapidly followed by every IT presenter's nightmare - a demo problem live on stage....

Meltdown apparently resolved, capacity issues still popping up, as Claude hits a resource wall Updated ChatGPT's hundreds of millions of users were left without their digital discussion companion this morning, as owner OpenAI reported a major outage across the platform and its APIs....

Dutch exports skyrocket thanks to Washington restrictions China is hurrying to buy as much chipmaking equipment as it can before further export restrictions shut off supply, boosting the country's imports from the Netherlands, home to photolithography maker ASML....

Ability to attract sponsorship a bonus as vehicle set to emerge from ashes, attempt to blast past 763mph Drivers keen on taking the world's fastest car for a spin - or rather, for a straight-line dash - are being sought amid emerging plans to revive the UK's Bloodhound Land Speed Record car....

Attackers secure admin rights after vendor said they could only steal data Atlassian reassessed the severity rating of the recent improper authorization vulnerability in Confluence Data Center and Server, raising the CVSS score from 9.1 to a maximum of 10....