The Register

Bring back keys! Bring back keys! The first keys and locks appeared some 6,000 years ago and continue to work well. We use them to secure our homes and cars among many other things valued by us.…

Can't be bothered with cam? Replace yourself with a 3D diligent worker Microsoft Teams users are getting more ways to express themselves to other participants on those increasingly frequent video calls.…

Don't worry about Tim – executive's rewards are reportedly unaffected. Phew Apple still isn't giving into Silicon Valley peer pressure to lay off swaths of its staff to cut costs, and is instead reportedly extending its hiring freeze and changing the way it awards employee bonuses.…

Oh gosh. Looks like that bot just spilled that you plan to fire 20k staffers in Q4 The UK government's spy agency is warning corporations of the risks of feeding sensitive data into public large language models, including ChatGPT, saying they are opening themselves up for a world of potential pain unless correctly managed.…

LuSEE in the sky with ... data Firefly Aerospace has won a second NASA contract to take hardware to the Moon – including the hotly anticipated Lunar Pathfinder satellite that will serve as a communication relay between future Lunarians and Earthlings.…

Teen arrested yesterday while another man suspected of being a ViLE crime group member still 'at large' A 19-year-old suspected of belonging to the "ViLE" crime group told a man authorities think is in the same gang that he "jacked into a police officer's account" and "the portal had some fucking potent tools" according to a complaint unsealed today in the Eastern District of New York.…

Chances its Arm that maker community is looking for a fresh SBC Asus has unveiled a RISC-V model in its range of Tinker Board single board computer (SBC) systems, which up until now have all been Arm-based. However, it seems users should not expect too much in the way of performance from this first device.…

Penalty paid for misclassifying tens of millions of dollars of costs, and for 'inadequate' controls missing the error IT services biz DXC Technology has paid $8 million to settle a dispute with the US Securities Exchange Commission after being charged with making "misleading disclosures" about its non-GAAP financial results.…

Will build out domestic industry while it builds out US domestic industry... Samsung Electronics is slated to invest $230 billion over the next 20 years to build five semiconductor plants in South Korea as part of a wider plan from the government to beef up domestic supply.…

It's also 17… and 18… and actually rather cool The developers of specialized security-testing distro Kali Linux have released the first version of 2023, which marks the project's tenth anniversary… but only in this incarnation.…

Poor interface, lousy lyrics, and bland answers mean this won't be the tool that makes Edge mainstream First Look I've taken Microsoft's OpenAI-powered Bing search engine for a spin, and quite enjoyed its attempt at providing context to a list of links – but was frustrated by the low quality of its sources, suggestions, and user interface.…

Perfect timing – we could use another bank run The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange has just become a bit smaller as Binance will suspend deposits and withdrawals in pounds for customers in the United Kingdom.…

NASA expects to spend about $1 billion to bring it down safely NASA expects to spend around $1 billion to deorbit the International Space Station as the orbiting laboratory reaches its end of service in the 2030s.…

Phishing, dodgy domain names, and sophisticated attacks already deployed The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) late last week sent tremors through the global financial system, creating opportunities for short-sellers – and numerous species of scammer.…

Mutant offspring of a semi and a trolleybus suggested as emission-cutting future of commercial transport China's march into the future of everything moved forward yesterday with the debut of an electric vehicle that can draw power from either on-board batteries or overhead wires, plus a demo of roads set up to handle such traffic.…

Outgoing president alleges Beijing is systematically bullying strategically located island paradise The outgoing president of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), David Panuelo, penned a lengthy letter last week accusing Beijing of rampant bribery, spying and other tactics – including an attempt to take control of the nation's submarine cables and telecoms infrastructure.…

Project Kuiper satellite broadband coming next year, maybe Amazon has unveiled three antennas for the internet super-souk's upcoming Kuiper satellite broadband service.…

The outlook is grim for Outlook - and SAP, Adobe. Android, and Chrome - so get ready for a long update party Patch Tuesday Microsoft's March Patch Tuesday includes new fixes for 74 bugs, two of which are already being actively exploited, and nine that are rated critical. Let's start with the two that miscreants found before Redmond issued a fix.…

Can we blame social media for this? We can try Register Kettle The collapse and re-spawning, to a degree, of Silicon Valley Bank in the US and UK sent shockwaves through the tech industry, with startups and established players relying on the institution fearing the worst.…

HCI upstart adds a hybrid option that could be of interest to nervous VMware customers Nutanix's ambition to bring its stack to all major clouds has taken an important step forward with news its Cloud Clusters (NC2) are now generally available in Microsoft’s Azure.…

Weirdly coy about the AI model's size and what went into making it, tho OpenAI on Tuesday announced the qualified arrival of GPT-4, its latest milestone in the making of call-and-response deep learning models and one that can seemingly outperform its fleshy creators in important exams.…

PaLM springs forth Google has promised to offer API-level access to its large language model PaLM so that developers can build it into their apps and workflows, and thus make the ChatGPT-like text-emitting tech available to world-plus-dog.…

Successful invasion would make China 'the OPEC of silicon chips' The US would sooner see TSMC fabs destroyed than fall into Chinese hands should Xi Jinping invade Taiwan, according to a former national security advisor to the Trump administration.…

Not-so-smart SmartScreen flagged up by Googlers Criminals are exploiting a Microsoft SmartScreen bug to deliver Magniber ransomware, potentially infecting hundreds of thousands of devices, without raising any security red flags, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).…

Fancy playing with some space Lego? We're going to need a lot of robots to handle dangerous tasks once we get to the Moon, and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a solution: Modular, wheel-free walking robots made from a bunch of reconfigurable parts. …

That's one way to counteract rising energy prices – but do you want to sit next to a DC? A UK cloud startup is offering to install its edge server hardware physically within organizations to provide free heat, in exchange for reducing its own location and cooling costs.…

The Year of Efficiency may also include sending engineers back into the office Meta – which claims without irony to be "building the future of human connection" – is laying off 10,000 more staff and will close open vacancies on 5,000 roles as it hunkers down for a "Year of Efficiency."…

Seriously, this tech makes your phone camera look like it's from the stone age To capture fast moving objects — say a cheetah sprinting across the savanna — it's not uncommon for photographers to employ shutter speeds as high as 1/8000th of a second.…

'Today's ruling certainly isn't going to stop us' says campaigner Local gig workers got some bad news yesterday: a bid to overturn California's Prop 22 failed in the appeals court, a major win for Uber and other companies who sell rides and deliveries in their cars.…

'ChatGPT is going to be in everything' says automaker Thanks to a partnership struck with Microsoft in 2021 on the commercialization of self-driving vehicles, General Motors is working to bring a "ChatGPT-like" voice assistant to its cars.…

Investors nervous in same week that Silicon Valley Bank failed In the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, this week is not the best time to spook jittery stock markets with weaker than expected financial forecasts, yet that's what GitLab has done.…

7-year availability as kit goes in hardware that hangs around much longer than average PC AMD has lifted the lid on variants of its 4th generation Epyc processors optimized for embedded applications, delivering greater performance and scalability – although device engineers may look askance at the power envelope ranging up to 400W.…

RSS pioneer Dave Winer sees Mastodon as a positive sign Special report Ten years ago, on March 13, 2013, Google said it was discontinuing Google Reader, a popular application for reading RSS and Atom feeds.…

The primary desktop in Ubuntu 23.04 and Fedora 38 is getting there GNOME 44 is reaching readiness, just in time for inclusion in the next versions of the two big distro daddies, Ubuntu "Lunar Lobster" and Fedora 38.…

Hopes to avoid paying up for crushing a rival while helping Huawei and ZTE to prosper Qualcomm on Monday began an attempt to convince the European Union's Court of Justice that it should not pay a €242 million ($258 million) fine imposed on it for anti-competitive behavior.…

Someone's still got some cash jangling about after the Silicon Valley Bank mess Qualtrics, the experience management company briefly owned SAP, will be acquired by Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).…

A threat that needs two orgs to tackle it: the 'Integrated Security Fund' and the 'National Protective Security Agency' Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5 will oversee a new agency tasked with helping local organizations combat Chinese cyber-spies and other threats]…

Commerce secretary says relationship with China is 'benign' and wants to be open to new possibilities The US's moves to secure closer trade ties with India do not indicate a desire to decouple with China's tech industry, US secretary of commerce Gina Raimondo said last week.…

As Alphabet's Wing wants to fly millions of small packages by 2024 Japan Post is closer to realizing its ambition of delivering letters – like actual, physical letters – by drone. It's futuristic and retro all at once.…

'We're looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus' – which increasingly means staving off TikTok Meta has decided non-fungible tokens (NFTs) don't have a future, and will wind down its efforts to support them.…

Aims to look at the universe's dark ages without interference from Earth NASA and the US Department of Energy hope to build a lunar telescope on the far side of the Moon that will hunt for ancient radio waves, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. …

And also, Ring hit with ransomware, too? No, says Amazon Ransomware gang Lockbit has boasted it broke into Maximum Industries, which makes parts for SpaceX, and stole 3,000 proprietary schematics developed by Elon Musk's rocketeers.…

The man leaking vital data before it was fashionable Comment Daniel Ellsberg, an American former military analyst who became one of the most significant whistleblowers in US history, has made peace with death.…

Names, addresses, SSNs all up for grabs Medical device and software maker Zoll Medical says the personal and health information of more than a million people, including patients and employees, may have been stolen by crooks in January.…

10k delivery vehicles this year isn't going to cut it and upstart really needs the cash Electric van maker Rivian and Amazon are reportedly in talks to scrap part of a 2019 deal that made the retail giant Rivian's sole customer for its electric delivery vans.…

Remember the storage class memory that never took off? It's back Memory startup Intrinsic Semiconductor Technologies has scored funding aimed at bringing its Resistive RAM to market, which it grandly states will enable a new generation of smart devices and systems with embedded intelligence.…

The protocol is simple, unreliable, insecure, and on its way out Microsoft recently outlined several new features it is building into Windows 11, from file recommendations and one-keystroke shortcuts for the XAML context menu in File Explorer to Local Security Authority (LSA) protection against secrets and credential thefts.…

Human lawyers: 'DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm' "Robot lawyer" DoNotPay is headed back to court – and not to prove its merits as a legally inclined chatbot. It's being sued for practicing law in California without a license.…

Government supplier said to be valued at $2.5B The owners of UK-based Ark Data Centres Ltd are locked in negotiations with suitors interested in buying the rack and cloud provider in an agreement said to value the business at around $2.5 billion.…

We don't need to trap customers to force loyalty, says boss A new ISP started by former BT execs claims to offer UK broadband customers a better deal with no contracts or installation fees, and "a Wi-Fi service that actually works."…