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Computers learning to spot sass - what could go wrong? Researchers from the University of Groningen's Speech Technology Lab say they have created a multimodal algorithm that can detect sarcasm in speech....

Already delayed, IBM and Deloitte's 'Single Trade Window' presents SaaSy challenge's to tax collector The UK's public spending watchdog is warning that the nation's tax collector needs be become an "intelligent client" in its handling of tech service providers contracted to create a "single trade window" for post-Brexit border arrangements already beset with delays....

Several people are typing. And something might be learning... Salesforce division Slack has responded to criticism by users outraged that its privacy principles allowed the messaging service to slurp customer data for AI training unless specifically told not to, claiming the data never leaves the platform and isn't used to train "third party" models....

It quickly realized dry' progress updates weren't cutting it CyberUK Emotional intelligence was at the heart of the British Library's widely hailed response to its October ransomware attack, according to CEO Roly Keating....

Has Cupertino been trolling us all along? Opinion Apple! What the hell were you smoking? How can a market leader worth $2.9 trillion make such a massive marketing mistake as the advert for the latest iPad?...

This is why all-nighters are a bad idea Who, me? Greetings and salutations, dear readers, and welcome to the sunny spot on the interwebs we like to call Who, Me? in which Reg readers share their tales of tech tasks gone awry....

Industry reportedly pressuring digital ministry not to cut the cord Germany may soon remove Huawei and ZTE equipment from its 5G networks, according to media reports....

Deleted about 40 networks that services needed, causing late Friday fun In the week after its astounding deletion of Australian pension fund UniSuper's entire account, you might think Google Cloud would be on its very best behavior....

PLUS: Connected automakers put on notice; Cisco Talos develops macOS fuzzing technique; Last week's critical vulns Infosec in brief Nissan has admitted to another data loss - this time involving the theft of personal information belonging to more than 50,000 Nissan employees....

PLUS: Grab's fintech profits surges; TSMC exec gets ASML sticker shock; US and China talk about AI, and more. ASIA IN BRIEF Jean Qing Liu, the president of China's top rideshare biz DiDi (and daughter of Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi) on Sunday "informed the Company and its board of directors her wish to resign from her current position as a director and president, with a view to focusing on the company's talent and organization, development of supporting functions and social responsibility work."...

The enemy of my enemy is my best friend Analysis With its newly formed partnership with Arm server processor designer Ampere Computing, Qualcomm is slowly establishing itself as AI infrastructure startups' best friend....

Follow us down this deep rabbit hole of privacy policy after privacy policy Feature In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library....

For starters: Crypto, import tariffs, and Microsoft shipping out staff Kettle It's been a fairly troubling week in terms of the relationship between China and the Western world....

The problem isn't just that LLM-bot generated code is bad - it's where it came from Comment The Debian project has decided against joining Gentoo Linux and NetBSD in rejecting program code generated with the assistance of LLM tools, such as Github's Copilot....

Feds scoff at blockchain integrity while software bug said to have been at heart of the matter The US Department of Justice has booked two brothers on allegations that they exploited open source software used in the Ethereum blockchain world to bag $25 million (20 million)....

Throw another healthcare biz on the barby, mate Australian prescriptions provider MediSecure is the latest healthcare org to fall victim to a ransomware attack, with crooks apparently stealing patients' personal and health data....

Yup, demand's that strong Since 2023, the leasing rate for datacenters in North America that haven't even been fully built yet has shot up and now stands at 84 percent for the first quarter of this year....

Now Google and OpenAI can slurp up your precious memes and priceless comments Still upset that Reddit decided to sell all its content to Google for training its AI? Well, bad news: Now OpenAI has jumped into the mix as well....

But incumbent is mentioned a lot more in attack material Although Joe Biden spends more on Facebook and Instagram ads than Donald Trump, ads attacking the US president outnumber those attacking his likely rival in this year's presidential election, according to data analysis....

Your local nail tech could be a secret agent for Kim's cunning plan Three individuals accused of helping North Korea fund its weapons programs using US money are now in handcuffs....

Funds to be used for purchasing servers and networking kit AI server startup CoreWeave has raised $7.5 billion in a debt deal from private equity companies Blackstone, BlackRock, and others....

Could 2030 bring touchdown at last? NASA and ESA have signed an agreement to finally send the long-delayed ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to the Red Planet....

You get a GPU, you get a GPU, everyone gets a ZeroGPU! Open source AI champion Hugging Face is making $10 million in GPU compute available to the public in a bid to ease the financial burden of model development faced by smaller dev teams....

Watchdog drops official probe but IT giant's deal with Inflection AI and Amazon's with Anthropic still in play Britain's competition watchdog does not think Microsoft's investment in Mistral AI constitutes a merger situation - just weeks after calling for industry views on the agreement....

Ensure there are no sperm whales in the area Underwater datacenters have yet to take off in any meaningful way, but it seems they could prove vulnerable to attack using sound waves, according to researchers....

Rival coders must have Europe-based staff to build and test non-WebKit surfing Exclusive Apple's grudging accommodation of European law - allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices - apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region....

TLDR: Peace in our time is really really hard Interview On Wednesday the FBI and international cops celebrated yet another cybercrime takedown - of ransomware brokerage site BreachForums - just a week after doxing and imposing sanctions on the LockBit ransomware crew's kingpin, and two months after compromising the gang's website....

It'll own the datacenters, but keep data and employees local AWS is to invest 7.8 billion in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany and make the first AWS Region in the State of Brandenburg available to all customers by the end of 2025....

Over-50s to get early retirement offer Toshiba says it will cut up to 4,000 jobs within Japan, a number that accounts for six percent of the company's national workforce, by offering early retirement packages....

How to handle sales pressure and licensing 'negotiations' to make sure it plays to your advantage Feature You might be able to tell what time of year it is by the blossom on the trees or bluebells in the woods. But for Oracle customers stuck in an office somewhere, there is another way of knowing that it's May without consulting a calendar....

The machine was so dead, hospital staff treated it like a corpse On Call The Register knows that tech support people are heroes. That's why each Friday we offer a new installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column featuring your stories of dutifully and selflessly taking on the endless and thankless challenge that is tech support....

Office could be decimated with around 800 offers reportedly made Microsoft is said to have offered up to 800 China-based employees the chance to relocate to the US, Australia, New Zealand, or Ireland....

Yet another technological self-sufficiency target for China The Chinese government says the country's car manufacturers should aim for a quarter of their chips to be sourced from China-based foundries by 2025....

Expansion set for Wuhan. Chances this will go smoothly? Chinese tech giant Baidu expects its robotaxi unit, Apollo Go, to be profitable next year....

Spoiler alert: it's not really IT support controlling your device A cybercrime gang has been abusing Microsoft's Quick Assist application in social engineering attacks that ultimately allow the crew to infect victims with Black Basta ransomware....

AST still only has a single test satellite in orbit, so don't hold your breath Not to be outdone by Starlink and T-Mobile, AT&T and AST SpaceMobile have finalized a deal to eventually bring a space-based connectivity option to AT&T, too....

Bitcoin cowboys now have guaranteed freedoms Oklahoma's governor has signed a bill into law defining legal rights for one of the most marginalized groups in the US - cryptocurrency holders....

Bit barns might end up adding to the grid's capacity Even before the AI revolution (or bubble) took off in 2023, datacenters already used a decent amount of electricity. And the industry's increasing appetite for machine learning will require even more power....

'Disappointed' by court's decision, video platform owner is complying, considering appeal Google has complied with a May 8th order from a Hong Kong court to ban the pro-democracy protest song often mistaken for a national anthem, "Glory to Hong Kong," by blocking 32 videos on YouTube....

Judge gives green light to lawsuit over autonomous ambitions Tesla is facing a lawsuit over claims made about its self-driving technology after a US judge rejected the company's motion to dismiss the case....

Browser ditches x64 blues for a snappier tune Opera has become the latest Chromium browser for Windows on Arm, fueling industry talk about Microsoft's plans for the neglected operating system....

Now that traders are drinking the Kool-AI-d, companies can either fuel the hype or face the consequences Comment Dell's share price surged sharply on Wednesday as market analysts telegraphed their confidence in the OEM's ability to capitalize on the AI market....

Fake science challenges academic publishing US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal....

Sustained workloads need not apply Updated Amazon Web Services added another set of cost-optimized instances to its EC2 lineup on Tuesday, aimed at customers whose workloads aren't pegging the CPU 100 percent of the time....

Has social media biz done enough to comply with Digital Services Act? Maybe not The European Commission has opened formal proceedings to assess whether Meta, the provider of Facebook and Instagram, may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to the protection of minors....

Bug or feature? Users looking for Windows repair tips via the Microsoft PC Manager app may be recommended to switch Edge's default search engine back to Bing....

Annual conference of cyber intel unit shows UK's alarm over China blaring louder than ever Regular attendees of CYBERUK, the annual conference hosted by British intelligence unit the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), will know that in addition to the expected conference panels, there is usually an interwoven theme to proceedings....

Meanwhile, the creator of Open Source Definition argues the real problem is unauthorized copying The Open Source Initiative - the non-profit overseeing the Open Source Definition, which lays out the requirements for software licenses - is taking its effort to define Open Source AI to the wisdom of the crowds....

After a smashing fiscal '24, we're surprised he didn't get more Nvidia's chief Jenson Huang received a 60 percent pay bump in the corporation's fiscal 2024 on the back of a massive rally in the share price based on demand for AI, and triple digit growth percentages for revenue and operating profit....

Also demonstrates success accelerating molecular dynamics Even as world leaders raise alarm bells about the impact of AI in war, waferscale startup Cerebras is joining forces with Aleph Alpha to develop sovereign models for the German armed forces....