The Register

Back to work on Monday? Branson and co still fighting to get funding SpaceX and OpenAI backing venture capitalist Matthew Brown, of Matthew Brown Companies, has confirmed that his group is in funding talks with space biz Virgin Orbit.…

Numerical abilities could be a hardwired, ancient feature of the developing vertebrate brain, study suggests Researchers in Italy have discovered newborn zebrafish possess the ability to count, suggesting numeracy may be hard-wired into the vertebrate brain.…

Getting connection failures? Don't panic. Get new keys GitHub has updated its SSH keys after accidentally publishing the private part to the world. Whoops.…

2.5% of workforce to go as sales and margin growth forecasts dip Accenture is erasing the jobs of 19,000 employees - with in-house IT workers confirmed on the front line - after it trimmed revenue projections for the rest of its current fiscal 2023.…

Without publicly accessible code, there would be no AI chatbot Opinion When OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in late November 2022, no one expected much from the new release. It was just a "research preview," explained Sandhini Agarwal, an AI Policy researcher at OpenAI. "We didn't want to oversell it as a big fundamental advance," added Liam Fedus, a scientist at the org.…

Five developers named Bob were not good at their jobs On Call Welcome once again, dear reader, to On-Call, The Register's Friday feature in which we share readers' tales of being asked to address avoidable annoyances.…

It’s the only game in town for extreme ultraviolet lithography, and that makes it every chip shop’s new best friend Dutch semiconductor equipment vendor ASML is likely to benefit heavily from the rapid adoption of generative AI and machine learning technologies.…

Liberté, égalité, reconnaissance faciale for all Despite the opposition of 38 civil society groups, the French National Assembly has approved the use of algorithmic video surveillance during the 2024 Paris Olympics.…

Customers banished to an IP address in Uzbekistan that Redmond’s cloud did not recognize Microsoft has found a new and interesting way to break its cloud services: by messing up geolocation services and sending its users to Uzbekistan, which made it impossible for them to log in.…

Probably in a jail cell, waiting to be extradited stateside The US Justice Department charged fugitive crypto bro Do Kwon with fraud on Thursday, just hours after Montenegro's minister of interior announced he had been detained by local authorities.…

Next time you blow a project budget, console yourself that you weren’t this bad Cisco, Huawei, and Ericsson have all been asked to take a hit after a Filipino telco blew its budget by a whopping $880 million and blamed it on bad procurement processes.…

It's probably going to happen, but final approval depends on 'circumstances' The board of troubled Japanese tech conglomerate Toshiba has announced it supports but will not recommend a $15 billion takeover offer that will launch in the next ten days but won't close for around four months.…

'Hunt forward' teams of this sort aid with defense and learn how attackers like Tehran operate US Cyber Command operators have confirmed they carried out an online defensive mission in Albania, in response to last year's cyber attacks against the local government.…

Mission named 'Good Luck Have Fun' needed more of both, but launch outfit insists it's a win The world's first 3D-printed rocket, Terran 1, blasted off into the sky but failed to make orbit during its maiden voyage on Wednesday.…

Security researchers find bugs, big and small, in every industrial box probed Devices used in critical infrastructure are riddled with vulnerabilities that can cause denial of service, allow configuration manipulation, and achieve remote code execution, according to security researchers.…

'We don't think it's a luxury' veep tells The Reg Intel wants enterprises to think upgrading to notebooks and PCs powered by its 13th-gen Core vPro processors isn't a "luxury" they can pass up without putting their businesses at risk.…

Delayed mea culpa isn't a good look for a biz with 'open' in the name OpenAI CEO Sam Altman feels "awful" about ChatGPT leaking some users' chat histories on Monday, and blamed an open source library bug for the snafu.…

In the meantime, the CFO is also interim CEO Out with the SAPper, in with a Hatter: Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen will take over at SUSE May 1st. Chief financial officer Andy Myers is interim CEO until the end of April.…

Concerns over multi-million investments customers already made in their on-prem ERP systems German-speaking SAP users have put out a strongly worded statement calling on the European enterprise software giant to commit to introducing new features in its flagship ERP system on-prem as well as in the cloud.…

Share price slides below $1 for 30 days straight, but company vows it will comply with NYSE regs again D-Wave Quantum Inc is being warned by the New York Stock Exchange that it no longer complies with the regulations that govern listed businesses because its share price has been sitting under $1 for 30 trading days.…

A highly opinionated little live USB/DVD/VM image for the paranoid The latest version of TAILS has improved memory management, which means it should work a little better on memory-constrained computers. It's the go-to option for secure private internet access.…

A cool $1 million to a man who is not afraid to eat his own words, nor roll out his own cable Professor, engineer and namesake of Metcalfe's law Robert Metcalfe is the latest winner of the Turing Award for an invention he made back in the 1970s: the Ethernet.…

Just lucky Western Europe was asleep when it happened Any insomniacs, workaholics or those pulling an all-nighter related to a past deadline project may have noted a four-and-a-half hour failure of Azure Resource Manager in Europe this morning following a recent code change.…

Strange appearance and behavior perplexed astronomers, led some folks to believe it was alien spaceship The cigar-shaped 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object in recorded human history to whizz through the Solar System, is a comet after all, a pair of astronomers declared in research published in Nature on Wednesday.…

This is that rare announcement that's far more significant than it sounds Updated Which of these appeals more: a new, free, Javascript framework for writing network-enabled 3D games, complete with integrated physics modelling and spatial audio… or, a complete, mature, dynamic programming platform that can implement the metaverse?…

Terminal maker General Bytes shutters its cloud business after second breach in seven months Unidentified miscreants have siphoned cryptocurrency valued at more than $1.5 million from Bitcoin ATMs by exploiting an unknown flaw in digicash delivery systems.…

All aboard the chatbot hype train! Next stop: Fraud Google has removed a ChatGPT extension from the Chrome store that steals Facebook session cookies – but not before more than 9,000 users installed the account-compromising bot.…

Didn't disclose payments as mastermind pumped up value of tokens with fake trades Eight very B-list celebrities have agreed to cough up fines after being accused of shilling a cryptocurrency without disclosing they were paid to do so, while the chap who apparently paid them has been charged with fraud.…

Now all it has to do is land The possibility of the world's first successful privately funded and operated Moon landing is looking a little more likely after Japanese aerospace outfit ispace announced its Hakuto-R lander successfully completed a lunar orbit insertion maneuver on Tuesday.…

Builds its own seat at the standards development table India's government has presented the nation with a challenge: to lead development and deployment of 6G, both within its borders and elsewhere.…

British American Tobacco, Samsung, also burgered up their infosec South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission has fined McDonald's, British American Tobacco, and Samsung for privacy breaches.…

We each grab a mic and take apart the Bard stewards responsible for this hype Register Kettle AI-powered chatbots are 2023's hot tech topic, although users report the results they produce are mixed. At best.…

Respected hands-on outlet tossed under the layoff bus Photography community website DPReview will shut down on April 10, 2023, in conjunction with layoffs announced by parent company Amazon.com in January.…

Maybe this is deserved given the problem's in a hidden telnet service Public proof-of-concept exploits have landed for bugs in Netgear Orbi routers – including one critical command execution vulnerability. …

Now that's a flash bang Police in Ecuador are investigating attacks on media organizations across the country after a journalist was injured by an exploding USB flash drive.…

Alerts telling folks their 'device may be vulnerable' triggered by KB5007651 A recent security update to Windows 11 has put the scare on some users by warning that Microsoft's Local Security Authority (LSA) feature is turned off and their system is vulnerable to attack.…

A good watchdog does blame the tools, or something like that America's Federal Trade Commission has warned it may crack down on companies that not only use generative AI tools to scam folks, but also those making the software in the first place, even if those applications were not created with that fraud in mind. …

Database shortcuts built in popular environment in hopes of scoring devs who want an easy life Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike has boosted functionality and engineering support for its real-time database within the popular Java development environment Spring Framework.…

JWST? Whatever, I found ET in my dustpan If we want to find evidence for alien life we don't need to keep looking for chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres or distant radio signals, says a Japanese astronomer. Instead, we should be studying the thousands of micrometer-sized bits of interstellar dust that hit Earth every year.…

Smartphones and tablets would also be added to the EU's list of devices that must be repairable under new rule The European Commission has adopted a new set of right to repair rules that, among other things, will add electronic devices like smartphones and tablets to a list of goods that must be built with repairability in mind.…

Server price hikes, rival hardware makers locked out ... haven't we been warning that for a while? Britain’s competition watchdog fears Broadcom’s proposed $61 billion purchase of VMware may lead to higher prices for servers and damage potential innovation.…

You'd think there'd be more techies on the market, but many cuts were in business areas While the tech sector job losses ticker has clocked up a global body count of 150,000 so far for 2023, those looking to hire IT staff are not out of the woods yet, according to Gartner.…

Armed with GPT-4, Microsoft's AI 'pair programmer' can tag pull requests, parrot documentation, talk about code Microsoft GitHub has trained its Copilot programming model to perform new tasks, making the already widely adopted AI assistant all the more unavoidable for developers.…

And it's not the only hybrid synthetic biomaterial scientists are targeting Scientists are using AI algorithms to design new materials, including synthetic proteins to make fake blood plasma and biological liquids found inside of cells.…

Country's super strong data rights under magnifying glass after half a dozen complaints filed Remember the Who Targets Me browser extension from privacy activists at Noyb? The group yesterday filed explosive complaints based on log records from the extension that claim six of Germany's political parties broke European data law when they targeted voters on Facebook's adtech platform.…

Releasing 4% of workforce Marvell Technology is the latest chipmaker to open a redundancy process, blaming a slowdown across much of industry for the decision to erase some four percent of its workforce.…

Stop the presses: Billionaires think sharing is a great idea, until a rival billionaire wants to share SpaceX has tried to shoot down Amazon's attempt to speed up approval of its rival satellite broadband constellation.…

'Creator' machine is lovely, but seems unsuited to life on the periphery Desktop Tourism ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X OLED (UX7602) is a sleek beast of a laptop that invites you to take it head-on and go all-in – an offer that should give you pause before accepting.…

Digital rights org criticizes use of fill-in-the-blank template used to quell separatist protests Police in the Indian state of Punjab hunting the leader of a Sikh separatist group have imposed a state-wide shut down of mobile internet and SMS services since Saturday, in order to pursue a single man.…

If this is Kyiv's work, Russia can Crimea river A cyber espionage campaign targeting organizations in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine is using novel malware to steal data, according to Russia-based infosec software vendor Kaspersky.…