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Sources slam aggressive 'back to school' grading system as HR vows to track VPN use, badge swipes Exclusive Dell has told workers it will track the onsite presence of hybrid employees - those who work part remotely, part in the office - using electronic badge swipes, VPN monitoring, and a rather creepy color-coding system....

Or at least it might well be if these trial programs work out, with some civil lib oversight etc etc etc RSAC AI is a double-edged sword in that the government can see ways in which the tech can protect and also be used to attack Americans, says US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas....

Avoid traffic-redirecting snoops who have TunnelVision A newly discovered vulnerability undermines countless VPN clients in that their traffic can be quietly routed away from their encrypted tunnels and intercepted by snoops on the network....

Short on cores, big on threads and matrix math Not to be left out of the AI infrastructure game, on Tuesday IBM unveiled a pair of tiny Power 10 servers designed to preprocess data at the network edge....

In the first year alone, that's saved us all a lot of money and woe Interview As ransomware gangs step up their attacks against healthcare, schools, and other US critical infrastructure, CISA is ramping up a program to help these organizations fix flaws exploited by extortionists in the first place....

Oh, right - there's new iPad Pro and Air models, a pencil and some other stuff Apple held its anticipated iPad event today, and the most attention-grabbing news wasn't the new device models or the refreshed iPad Air lineup - it was the unveiling of Apple's homegrown M4 chip with a surprisingly powerful neural processing unit (NPU)....

Nothing like folks in Beijing lecturing us on the Constitution TikTok and its China-based parent ByteDance sued the US government today to prevent the forced sale or shutdown of the video-sharing giant....

Perhaps just make sure the stuff that is already there works properly? Microsoft will temporarily halt the rollout of Copilot features based on feedback from Windows Insiders....

Chipmaker outlines plans to save hundreds of millions and, hey presto, share price magically jumps Infineon, maker of chips for the automotive and industrial sectors, told investors that it is embarking on a cost purge after lowering revenue estimates for the full financial year amid weakened demand....

First new version in almost a decade now boasts TLS The Dillo web browser has returned with a new release, version 3.1. It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015....

Part of the race with Beijing to set standards and advance norms RSAC The US State Department's latest cybersecurity strategy will not be wildly different from current stances, but offers an alternative path to those presented by the country's adversaries....

Musk continues quest to make Tesla leaner, meaner, more profitable Another week, another round of layoffs at Tesla to report, and this time engineers are caught up in the mix....

Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev's $10M question is answered at last Updated Police have finally named who they firmly believe is the kingpin of the LockBit ransomware ring: Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev....

Customers brace for bumpy ride Updated Broadcom has ended the right of Amazon Web Services to resell VMware Cloud on AWS, meaning customers will now have a direct relationship only with VMware by Broadcom, casting doubt over the long-term future of the product....

Problems with Centaur rocket keeps first crewed flight on terra firma Boeing's long-delayed Starliner crewed launch, which was scheduled for today, has been postponed yet again, this time due to a valve problem on the Centaur upper stage. Managers pushed back the next attempt to no earlier than May 10....

Oh, and Alex Karp's forecasts disappoint the market after strong revenue growth Analytics platform biz Palantir saw its share price dip yesterday despite posting on-the-nose revenue growth of 21 percent year-over-year to reach $634 million in the first calendar quarter....

TrendForce warns of 'potential crowding out effects on HBM' TSMC's advanced packaging capacity is fully booked for the next two years, thanks to Nvidia and AMD needs, according to reports that echo an earlier earnings call....

Group alleges anticompetitive behavior Updated Microsoft is facing a complaint over alleged anticompetitive practices in the Spanish cloud market....

More work to do as most deadlines are missed and worst bugs still take months to fix The deadlines associated with CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog only apply to federal agencies, but fresh research shows they're having a positive impact on private organizations too....

Thousands of guards' ID cards and CCTV snaps of suspects found online Exclusive A UK-based physical security business let its guard down, exposing nearly 1.3 million documents via a public-facing database, according to an infosec researcher....

Too many folks who should know better saying info-slurping tactics of Big Tech are just as bad Opinion Which China do you want? The innovative good global citizen, adding to the storehouse of knowledge while making better products and services? Or the autocracy, determined to advance the interests of the leadership through any and all means, untrammeled by legal safeguards within its borders and, wherever possible, outside them?...

Possibly its most helpful codename yet 9front, the most active project continuing development of the sequel to Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, emitted a new version. We did not follow its advice....

What next, trouble at tmill? A row in the UK has locals and council members at odds over apostrophes, and yes - this does actually have a tech angle....

Crims SIM swap execs' kids to freak out their parents, Mandiant CTO says RSAC Ransomware infections have morphed into "a psychological attack against the victim organization," as criminals use increasingly personal and aggressive tactics to force victims to pay up, according to Google-owned Mandiant....

And the iOS titan doesn't seem that bothered with data leaking out Last week, Apple began requiring iOS developers justify the use of a specific set of APIs that could be used for device fingerprinting. Yet the iGiant doesn't appear to be making much effort to ensure that Google, Meta, and Spotify comply with the rules, it's claimed....

Microsoft-backed super-lab gets direct access to answers - and code forum gets its own AI Stack Overflow, a community-driven Q&A site, and OpenAI, maker of AI models, have agreed to work to improve each other's products, the latest deal in a series of tie-ups to feed machine learning models' thirst for data....

After very boring first reveal, this could be the real deal Cops around the world have relaunched LockBit's website after they shut it down in February - and it's now counting down the hours to reveal documents that could unmask the ransomware group....

Fake it until you make it, literally The US government on Monday earmarked $285 million in CHIPS Act funding for the development of semiconductor digital twins....

Decentralization is great until everyone wants to grab data from your web server Updated Mastodon has pushed back an update that's expected to fully address the issue of link previews sparking accidental distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks....

'Used in a pro-social way, it's got terrific benefits to society. But, I don't know how you make sure that happens' Video You can add Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett to the list of folks worried about the implications of artificial intelligence on society....

And you thought consumer electronics suffered from depreciation The Cheyenne Supercomputer, a 5.34 peak PFLOPS behemoth that was once one of the fastest systems in the world, has just been sold at auction for $480,085....

Accused of stealing data after losing his job A cybersecurity expert could face a 20-year prison sentence after being accused of trying to extort a multinational IT infrastructure services biz to the tune of $1.5 million....

It's taking time, but isn't a dead issue, US Government Accountability Office security director Marisol Cruz Cain says interview It's been several years since President Biden signed an executive order to improve America's cybersecurity. The US Government Accountability Office said recently there's still a number of critical goals stemming from that order to accomplish....

Recent attacks on healthcare thrust infosec agency into alert mode CISA is calling on the software industry to stamp out directory traversal vulnerabilities following recent high-profile exploits of the 20-year-old class of bugs....

Users continue to give Microsoft's latest and greatest a wide berth According to market share figures from Statcounter, the gap between Windows 11 and Windows 10 usage is slightly growing, and not in a way we imagine Microsoft wants....

Testing platform for those 'unfamiliar with the subsea environment' Subsea Cloud is offering potential customers the chance to try out its underwater datacenter facilities for up to 90 days before making any further commitments, in a bid to attract new customers to the project....

Thankfully, luck - and a handy greybeard - came to the rescue Who, me? Welcome once again, dear readerfolk, to the sanctuary of Who, Me? in which Register readers can recount the times when their technical skills abandoned them, even if momentarily, without fear of judgment....

ALSO: Microsoft promises to git gud on cybersecurity; unqualified attackers are targeting your water systems, and more infosec in brief It was just around a year ago that a spate of allegedly Russian-orchestrated cyberattacks hit government agencies in Germany, and now German officials claim to know for a fact who did it: APT28, or Fancy Bear, a Russian threat actor linked to the GRU intelligence service....

PLUS: Taiwan's subsea cables, Paytm says goodbye to its CEO, China uses WhatsApp despite roadblocks, and more. ASIA IN BRIEF Google announced the layoff of 200 of its core team professionals last week while moving some roles to India and Mexico, according to reports....

When bad management meets bad software, even great hardware is useless Retrospective Ten years ago Microsoft absorbed the handset division of Nokia. The world's biggest operating systems vendor was going mobile in a big way, and buying the erstwhile world leader in mobile phones to ensure its success....

Internet Society's Robin Wilton tells us the war on privacy won't be won by the plod interview Police can complain all they like about strong end-to-end encryption making their jobs harder, but it doesn't matter because the technology is here and won't go away....

Privacy Not Included label slapped on 22 of 25 top lonely-hearts corners Interview Dating apps ask people to disclose all kinds of personal information in the hope of them finding love, or at least a hook-up....

Facial recognition based on body cam footage? Absolutely not ... in our cloud, says Microsoft An update to Microsoft's Azure Open AI Service code of conduct makes it clear who Redmond doesn't want using its hottest new tech: Cops....

Plus: What our vultures thought of the US v Google trial that's wrapping up Kettle Apple had a moderately glum first three months of the year, though the iGiant found a way to keep the most important people happy. Yes, we mean Wall St....

Say goodbye to 23c and hello to 23ai Oracle has celebrated the general availability of its latest database upgrade by renaming it....

Decline shown in data from StatCounter attributed to 'anomaly' Google's share of web searches appeared to suffer an unusually large drop in April, according to StatCounter. But the metrics biz now says that's incorrect....

Meanwhile, Alma Linux gets into supercomputers Good news for users of RHEL versions old and new - and for the freebie CentOS Linux 7, which is approaching its end of life next month....

Ready, set, sanctions? AI built by Russian infosec firm Kaspersky was used in Russian drones for its war on Ukraine, volunteer intelligence gatherers claim....

Devotees were speaking to an entity who didn't exist - imagine that An attempt by a Catholic advocacy group to spread the word of God using an AI model has backfired, and chat bot - Father Justin - has been pulled down and reworked....

Visual Small BASIC, Chloe System, and QB64 Phoenix all updated May Day 2024 was the 60th anniversary of the BASICprogramming language, and multiple FOSS BASIC-related projects released new versions in celebration....