The Register

Boffins devise query language for LLMs to make them more civil and less expensive Scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland believe one way to make large language models (LLMs) more affordable, and perhaps a bit more safe, is not to address them directly in a natural language like English.…

Motorola's contract departure draws question mark over future of ESN The UK's police, fire, and ambulance services are scrambling for solutions amid an uncertain wait for the Emergency Services Network (ESN) following Motorola's departure from a £400 million ($498 million) contract.…

Generative AI hallucinations are the least of our problems Opinion A year ago, AI was big news… if you were a data science geek or deeply concerned with protein folding. Otherwise? Not so much. But, then along came generative AI, you know it as ChatGPT, and now everybody is psyched about AI. It's going to transform the world! It's going to destroy all "creative" jobs. Don't get so excited yet sparky! Let me re-introduce you to an ancient tech phrase: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO).…

As bizarre tales of tech support go, this may be the GOAT On Call Many a middle aged man knows that hair today is gone tomorrow, but every Friday you can count on The Register bringing you a new instalment of On-Call, our reader-contributed tales of tech support tasks that required tact in the face of trying truculence.…

It's got an onboard Arduino Leonardo, too If the idea of cramming a 44W Intel Raptor Lake laptop processor into a system the size of your palm appeals to you, LattePanda's newly launched Sigma single board computer (SBC) might be worth a look.…

Windows Phone did this ages ago but flopped Folks who use both Windows 11 and an iPhone will soon be able to get calls, receive notifications, and see iMessages pop up on their PCs, after Microsoft revealed plans to add iOS support to its Phone Link software.…

CEO Gelsinger insists plan to grow a whopping foundry business will pay off Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has defended the company's plan to become a chipmaker for hire after the company's profits plunged 134 percent year over year and it recorded a $2.8 billion loss during the first quarter of 2023.…

Three minutes of video, 100 sentences of speech, and 24 hours gets you a bot to front your livestreams and answer questions Tencent Cloud has announced it's offering a digital human production platform – essentially Deepfakes-as-a-Service (DFaaS).…

As local usage slips despite annual call to do better China has again signalled its intention to shape IPv6 standards and encourage more uptake of the standards within its borders – but may not have succeeded with its past ambitions.…

Lessons learned from the front-line responders RSA Conference After something really bad happens on a company's network – say, a SolarWinds or Log4J-esque supply-chain attack – comes the chatter among infosec friends. Usually before anyone knows the scope or even the details. …

Hands off those Chrome users, they're ours! Google said it obtained a court order to shut down domains used to distribute CryptBot after suing the distributors of the info-stealing malware.…

We've progressed from blaming this kinda thing on millennials, immigrants, China, woke libs, etc Dropbox axed 500 employees, or 16 per cent of its workforce, on Thursday as the online storage biz pivots to AI amid slowing growth.…

Now that's a C change we can back Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers.…

Tycoon hopes to swerve deposition in Tesla death crash lawsuit Tesla CEO Elon Musk may face a deposition in a civil lawsuit over a death allegedly caused by Autopilot – after a judge rejected arguments made by the billionaire's lawyers.…

Ahead of planned IPO, parent company moves executive pawn into place SoftBank has nominated Arm CEO Rene Haas to be appointed to its board of directors, in another sign the Japanese tech investment holding biz is planning to keep the chip designer under its influence after the IPO.…

By redirecting energy from probe's voltage regulator, NASA buys itself another three years NASA boffins seeking a way to postpone instrument shutdowns on the venerable Voyager spacecrafts have worked out a solution they say will get another three years of power to Voyager 2's five remaining scientific tools.…

'It is a tough day across our organization,' says memo from AWS boss Amazon is in cost-cutting mode in both its retail and cloud arm, with layoff memos surfacing in HR and AWS, and the company ditching Halo fitness gear as the Book Depository subsidiary closes its covers for good.…

Tokamak Energy off to Albuquerque desert to douse kit in radiation UK fusion company Tokamak Energy claims to have made a breakthrough in fusion magnets – and is prepared to test its technology at a US gamma ray facility in the desert.…

That's right – we're going to hold the world ransom for... ONE BILLION POUNDS! UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is said to be preparing a £1 billion ($1.24 billion) investment for the country’s semiconductor industry, as chip companies threaten to relocate elsewhere if sufficient government support is not forthcoming.…

Apple only vendor to report shipment rise in tricky Q1 for smartphone industry The visit from the Pope might have paid off for Tim Cook as Apple is the only top five smartphone brand that retailers are calling up to order more stock.…

With inventory surplus still an issue, revenues are 'bottoming out' Sluggish global demand has left Samsung and SK Hynix - the world's top two memory makers - reporting similar hefty losses for Q1, with promises that more profitable days are coming thanks to production cuts.…

Has harsh words for Python fan Musk after losing the blue tick RSA Conference The Wednesday keynote at RSA is often not time for something completely serious, and so it was that Monty Python's Eric Idle got the assembled throng singing along to some of the troupe's most popular songs.…

First British biz joins Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers A cloud group pressing the European Commission to address Microsoft's software licensing practices has snagged its first British member.…

Snapdragon giant and others insist alleged data gathering is overblown Analysis Cellphones using Qualcomm chipsets may transmit data sometimes classified as personal information, specifically IP addresses, back to Qualcomm. But where such transmission is occurring, it's not secret and it has been going on for years.…

Gusts associated with M87 accretion flow surprises scientists peering into massive ring-like structure Scientists have observed larger ring-like structures around the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87 than when it famously became the subject of a photoshoot in 2019.…

Of course the German conglomerate expects Yankee cash for its trouble German manufacturing titan Bosch announced it will add California-based TSI Semiconductors to its arsenal, in a bid to bolster production of the silicon carbide (SiC) chips used in electric vehicles.…

Promises more cross-product links, better security, and easier admin – for you and Redmond’s own crew Microsoft has admitted its panoply of 365-branded products have sprawled across an uncomfortably large quantity of inconsistently named URLs, so the software giant has started to consolidate them all at cloud.microsoft.…

Hopes it might wake during the Martian solstice, but not with much confidence China has finally confirmed that its Zhurong Mars rover is inoperable, and may never again roll across the red planet.…

Claims it's verified viability of city-scale network that would free vast resources, in Japan or elsewhere Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points – and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they’re reserved for private use, according to NTT. The Japanese tech giant proposes sharing the fleet to cope with increased demand for wireless comms without adding more hardware.…

Inspection drones and telemedicine enabled by island-hopping hybrid network For years The Reg has heard how 5G's many features will profoundly change every industry under the sun. Yesterday we saw an example of that claim that holds water: a plan bringing comprehensive 5G coverage to Singapore's maritime industry.…

And a pin to pop this hype bubble would be nice, too The US National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee has urged President Joe Biden to fill key positions and create new organizations to address rising societal concerns with AI models, in its upcoming first report. …

Imagine fighting swarms – swarms – of autonomous planes RSA Conference The future of warfare is autonomous systems, enabled by AI, and these wars will be won and lost in space and cyberspace, according to retired US Army general Richard Clarke.…

Musk loyalists said launch wasn't a failure. Tell that to folks, wildlife covered in dust, ash, debris America's Federal Aviation Administration has grounded SpaceX's Starship to conduct a safety investigation after the heavy-lift launch vehicle rocket destroyed a chunk of the launch pad and exploded during a test last week.…

Remember next time Redmond begs you not to install another browser You might want to think twice before typing anything into Microsoft's Edge browser, as an apparent bug in a recent release of Redmond's Chromium clone appears to be funneling URLs you visit back to the Bing API.…

Yes, launch another appeal, that'll do the trick Elizabeth Holmes, the now-former CEO of the imploded blood-testing startup Theranos who was convicted of conspiracy and wire fraud over her role in defrauding investors, has managed to delay the start of her 11-year prison sentence, which was due to begin tomorrow. …

That's two in three years, in case anyone's counting The Weather Channel is settling a lawsuit alleging it violated privacy laws by selling geolocation data collected from its mobile app users, its second such lawsuit - and settlement - in three years.…

Paris-based europe-west9-a zone still MIA Google Cloud stopped operating in Paris early on Wednesday morning local time due to "water intrusion," said the off-prem biz, which a day earlier reported profitability for the first time.…

If the DPRK is named, you know it somehow involves Lazarus Group The US government is aggressively pursuing three men accused of wide-ranging and complex conspiracies of laundering stolen and illicit cryptocurrency that the North Korean regime used to finance its massive weapons programs.…

Agency hopes program will keep US ahead of curve on semiconductor manufacturing The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) revealed this week that, under the US CHIPS and Science Act, it will establish a network of public-private technical centers to accelerate the research and development of semiconductors.…

Only in the Middle Kingdom as company reportedly eyes IPO Alibaba - China's equivalent to AWS - is bucking the global trend and cutting the cost of its cloud services instead of hiking them, but the bad news for potential takers is that only customers in China will benefit.…

Will need to sit at the front of the class where Commish can keep an eye on them Not to be outdone by the UK's copycat DMCC bill yesterday, European regulators have let the world know about the first few tech giants to make their super strictly monitored hitlist under its own antitrust regs, aimed at curtailing the power of Big Tech.…

Next year's revenue forecast to surpass the halcyon days of 2022 The outlook for the global semiconductor sector appears worse than feared, at least for the near future, with analyst Gartner now expecting to see revenue decline by 11.2 percent for 2023. Weakened demand is being compounded by an oversupply driving down chip prices, it said.…

NeMo Guardrails stops everything that made these chatbots so much fun ChatGPT's testing phases pretty quickly revealed that the OpenAI chatbot and others like it could go off the rails – or "hallucinate" – with enough poking and prodding.…

That's not very Unicorn Kingdom of you UK regulators have dealt a serious blow to Microsoft's hopes of acquiring gaming giant Activision Blizzard, with the Competition and Markets Authority blocking the massive deal because Microsoft's proposed remedies "had significant shortcomings." …

More public-private collab around this issue coming soon RSA Conference Defending space systems against cyberthreats remains "urgent and requires high-level attention," according to acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden. And to this end, the White House will host its first space industry cybersecurity workshop this week in southern California.…

In the rush to commercialize LLMs, security got left behind Feature Large language models that are all the rage all of a sudden have numerous security problems, and it's not clear how easily these can be fixed.…

How much better do mobile networks really have to be by 2030-ish? Another European project aims to kick start 6G telecoms technology and help define the scope of this future standard, even as 5G has yet to really deliver on its promise.…

It also required £20 million in extra funds – and Larry wants to brag about this? Birmingham City Council's ERP overhaul to replace SAP with Oracle has required £20 million ($24.9 million) additional spending and is three years late, a meeting heard last week.…

Addresses annoyances like 20-core VMs requiring 24 licenses Microsoft has made the terms on which it licenses Windows Server 2022 a little more generous.…

RSA's Adi Shamir thinks we're safe for a generation, but more gnarly keys are still a good idea RSA Conference Adi Shamir, the cryptographer whose surname is the "S" in "RSA", thinks folks need to stop worrying about quantum computing breaking encryption algorithms.…