The Register

Struggling to keep staff? Pilot brings huge dive in attrition, sick leave The massive British trial of a shortened four-day work week is over – and it's food for thought for companies battling to attract and keep high value employees as one of the side effects was a large drop in staff attrition.…

More to come in other country ops? Company talks of admins 'sweating assets' and slowdown in 5G network builds Swedish networking kit maker Ericsson is laying off 1,400 employees in its home nation amid wider efforts to reduce expenses, and ahead of a deeper round of redundancies in other countries expected in the coming days.…

This is just a sliver of the $400,000 allegedly owed for branded merch Canary Marketing is the latest entity to join the orderly queue asking Twitter to pay its invoices – this time to the princely tune of $400,000.…

4 million contract migration went as planned, spokesperson insists Despite declaring the problems resolved, German financial institution Postbank is receiving complaints about poor service following its migration to a new technology platform.…

Blame it on phone number recycling (yes, that's a thing, too) A stranger may be receiving your private WhatsApp messages, and also be able to send messages to all of your contacts – if you have changed your phone number and didn't delete the WhatsApp account linked to it.…

TCI Fund says buying stake in tech biz would be 'extremely inefficient use of shareholder funds' Airbus should "immediately terminate negotiations" to buy a minority stake in Atos's breakaway security, big data and digital transformation business, Evidian, because it would be a costly mistake.…

Thank you, Microsoft and Meta, for firing thousands and then sharing your very finest inventions Sometimes The Register cannot help but stand, slack-jawed, in amazement at Big Tech's latest gifts to the world.…

System back online with money still there, thanks to Japanese regulations FTX's Japan outpost announced on Monday it would once again allow withdraw of both fiat and crypto assets, beginning at noon local time on Tuesday.…

Suggest fundamental semiconductor physics research is needed if China is to build viable local industry China’s Academy of Science has offered a blueprint to create a semiconductor industry that circumvents the USA’s bans on exports of technology to the Middle Kingdom.…

Threats to voters also reported as vote for regional internet registry heats up Regional internet registry the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has appointed external lawyers to consider allegations of multiple breaches of its election nominee code of conduct, including threats related to the election.…

Crashes like FTX and Terra have made regulation necessary, say authorities, even as Territory seeks to become a virtual asset hub Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has called for feedback on a plan to require virtual asset trading platform operators to acquire the same sort of licenses the territory requires securities traders to obtain.…

Vietnam has also struggled with four out of five cables in strife Scenarios in which China invades Taiwan, and inducing strategic, diplomatic, economic, and tech supply chain crises, often imagine that Taiwan’s main island would be the main site of any kinetic action.…

Amateur fleshbag defeats synthetic in 14 of 15 games Think that puny humans don't stand a chance when playing strategy games against an AI? You may have to think again. One person in the US beat an AI at the ancient game of Go by simply distracting it from the attack he was making, a tactic that would be unlikely to work on another meatbag.…

Settles lawsuit with two states after wider leak that affected millions A DNA diagnostics company will pay $400,000 and tighten its security in the wake of a 2021 attack where criminals broke into its network and swiped personal data on over two million people from a nine-year-old "legacy" database the company forgot it had.…

Big Red 'has a history of changing offerings' without allowing renewals of legacy products Gartner is warning that Oracle "actively targets organizations" on Java compliance following the introduction of new contractual terms for the code.…

How much are sidewinder missiles going for these days? Having spent the first half of the month blasting anything that moved out of the sky following the destruction of a Chinese spy balloon, it has emerged that the US could have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars disintegrating a hobbyist's $12 project.…

Depending on tier you use, rises of between 257% and 900% scheduled for May 1 Updated Microsoft is implementing massive price hikes for developers that use the Bing Search API, with some of the tiers scheduled to see rises up to nine times their current level.…

Aims at those who need help with green targets ... months after Intel axes R&D into tech GlobalConnect claims to be the first colocation provider in Europe to offer immersion-based cooling to customers, and expects to expand the service to all of its datacenters in future.…

Don't rush in if you don't need it – there may be more cons than pros Canonical has made a Real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 available on x86 and Arm… but only to Ubuntu Pro customers, and there are some potential issues you should know about.…

'Easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together' 3 days a week, says CEO Amazon boss Andy Jassy is demanding a return to the office for the "majority" of the company's 300,000-strong corporate workforce, with an expectation that employees will spend "at least" three days on site each week.…

Cue the dawning realization for thousands of content creators Those pencil-necked desk jockeys at His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) are about to give the UK's legions of online "content creators" and "influencers" a rather rude awakening by reminding them they could owe tax on their income.…

Tech has changed in 400 years. The rules haven’t Opinion Mary, Queen of Scots, was a hapless CEO, even by the standards of 1600s Europe. Mother of the first Stuart King of England, James I (and VI of Scotland; let's not go into that), she was herself the first Stuart monarch to lose both throne and head. She wasn't the last. The family had issues.…

The sysadmin who made this mistake just barely survived the NSFW backlash Who, Me? Once again, gentle reader, it is time to dive into the treacherous waters of Who, Me? in which readers tell us tales of days when things did not go quite right.…

Paid accounts will be more prominent than your shouty relatives and get – wait for it – a support line Social network supremo Mark Zuckerberg announced on Sunday that the artist formerly known as Facebook will follow in the footsteps of Twitter by offering a paid service: Meta Verified.…

90-day stretch comes after Euro-probe paused for production of paperwork VMware and Broadcom have given themselves more time to conclude the acquisition of the former by the latter.…

Also: Google asks staff to rewrite Bard's responses; EU's AI bill may stall; Endangered architects AI in brief Microsoft will start limiting the length of conversations with its AI-driven Bing chatbot to 50 turns per day, in a bid to prevent it generating unhinged responses to user queries.…

Also: Russia may legalize hacking; Oakland declares ransomware emergency; the CVEs you should know about this week In brief Web hosting and domain name concern GoDaddy has disclosed a fresh attack on its infrastructure, and concluded that it is one of a series of linked incidents dating back to 2020.…

Intel has as much to celebrate as anyone thanks the arc of progress catching up to its GPUs Linus Torvalds has, as foreshadowed, released version 6.2 of the Linux Kernel.…

PLUS: Chinese province to buy four million servers; Google Cloud's nine-day APAC network glitch; and more Asia In Brief Amid an investigation into his entertainment expenses, the chief operating officer of scandal-ridden Japanese tech giant Toshiba, Goro Yanase, resigned last week.…

Eggheads prove they can mimic messages and bag bug bounty bucks Analysis Over the past two decades, efforts have been made to make email more secure. Alas, defensive protocols implemented during this period, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, remain unable to deal with the complexity of email forwarding and differing standards, a study has concluded.…

Wow Harold, you could buy, like, 23 billion sliders with that American burger-slinging giant White Castle is almost certainly regretting its decisions about employee monitoring after the Illinois Supreme Court Friday issued an opinion opening the fast "food" corp up to potentially billions in fines.…

Droughts, flash floods the future for the Midwest ... probably In the 2004 disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, the world is subsumed by extreme weather as a violent climate collapse encases the Northern Hemisphere in ice and snow in a matter of days.…

Boffins find they can identify VR players just from head and hand movements Exclusive Virtual reality presently looks like it will offer virtually no privacy for those looking to hide online.…

Looks like Musketeers jumped the gun, launched mission too early Video SpaceX may be fined $175,000 by America's Federal Aviation Administration for failing to hand over collision risk documents before it flew a group of Starlink satellites into space last year.…

How about the inside of the windshield instead? Are you sick of smudges on those unwieldy touchscreens making their way into modern cars these days? General Motors has filed a patent to clear them using UV light, though don't assume it'll actually ship.…

Move along, totally nothing to see here The FBI claims it has dealt with a cybersecurity "incident" that reportedly involved computer systems being used to investigate child sexual exploitation.…

Defect-detecting Swiss biz inhales a cool $14 mill A Swiss-based startup focused on cutting particle contamination in semiconductor manufacturing has raised $14 million in seed funding with Intel's venture capital arm leading the round.…

Some rules and whatnot about taking responsibility, tackling unreliability would be ace, yes A group of government, academic and military leaders from around the world spent the past few days talking about the need to address the use of artificial intelligence in warfare.…

In other words, script kiddies up to shenanigans again A series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks shut down seven German airports' websites on Thursday, a day after a major IT glitch at Lufthansa grounded flights.…

Supercomputer deadline's been and Argonne, but for now, here's a testbed for boffins Intel has yet to deliver the much anticipated Aurora supercomputer, but the chipmaker has a consolation prize for scientists in the shape of Borealis, a scaled-down testbed for the technology that allows them to make a start on research projects.…

The init system many love to hate intros tool to create Unified Kernel Image files The first systemd release of 2023 is here, and it introduces a brand spanking new tool for building Unified Kernel Image (UKI) files.…

Still waiting for word on those sweet, sweet subsidies Infineon hopes to secure €1 billion in subsidies for its upcoming chip fab in Germany, but it's not waiting around to get started.…

World's largest PC maker aims for $150m in cost controls, says never been a worse time to sell smart devices Lenovo is entering cost cutting mode following the second straight quarterly decline in sales, and plunging profits for the first time since 2020, as the industry faces weakening demand for personal computers.…

Dislike those messages about Ubuntu Pro? Then you won't like this Ubuntu and its various remixes remain free distros, but it's getting harder to remove the messages about the paid Ubuntu Pro offering… which is by design, and it's not going away.…

ThreatLabz finds free alternative to Cobalt Strike and other tools used in the wild There's a fresh open-source command-and-control (C2) framework on the loose, dubbed Havoc, as an alternative to the popular Cobalt Strike, and other mostly legitimate tools, that have been abused to spread malware.…

Committee: Something about complaints process being dealt with in total secrecy doesn't sit right Lawmakers in the European Parliament have urged the European Commission not to issue the "adequacy decision" needed for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) to officially become the pipeline for data to freely flow from the EU to the States.…

It ain’t half hot in the datacenter when an errant aircon engineer leaves the tech team to take the heat On Call Weekends are the time for fun in the sun – but before you get to that, The Register offers another instalment of our weekly On-Call column, in which readers share stories of being put under the hot spotlight of being asked to fix flare-ups, fast.…

Those billions just may have dissuaded iPhone giant from building rival search, beefing up Safari Exclusive Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using Google Chrome on iOS, according to a source familiar with the matter.…

Elon Musk takes issue with the word 'recall' given this will be an over-the-air update The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has sent Tesla a letter [PDF] in which it acknowledges Tesla will conduct a recall of the Full Self Driving Beta (FSD Beta) software in up to 362,758 cars, as the software is unsafe.…

Switchzilla hardware and software need attention, unless you fancy arbitrary remote code execution Antivirus software is supposed to be an important part of an organization's defense against the endless tide of malware.…