The Register

Plus: Publisher using AI tools generated false health advice for men; how ChatGPT widens economic inequalities In brief Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been waiting for the chance to challenge Google's dominance of internet search, and just might have finally pulled it off this week with the launch of AI-powered Bing.…

PLUS: Toshiba acknowledges buyout bid; BTS member Jungkook's hat lands online seller in strife; and more Asia In Brief India's minister for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has insisted that the nation does not target Chinese apps for law enforcement action or bans.…

Neo4j v PureThink rumbles on Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, claims a California federal court has misinterpreted version 3 of GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3) by allowing it to be combined with the Common Clause software license.…

Valentine's Day is the moment to fall a little bit out of love with chatbots Opinion Valentine's Day could sour our romance with AI chatbots.…

Brit AI video tech caught up in pro-PRC disinformation campaign Deepfake videos online featuring AI-generated news anchors spouting pro-Chinese government propaganda are likely the creations of a prolific disinformation crew dubbed Spamouflage.…

You might say this thing sucks At first glance, TP-Link's Tapo RV10 looks a bit like a fallen Omada access point that's now leaking a mysterious substance on the floor. In reality, the white and black plastic puck is the company's entry into the robotic vacuum and mop arena.…

All that data coming soon to a darkweb crime forum near you? Several California medical groups have sent security breach notification letters to more than three million patients alerting them that crooks may have stolen a ton of their sensitive health and personal information during a ransomware infection in December.…

ASCENT propulsion system just didn't work A tiny NASA cubesat, sent to hunt for signs of water ice on the Moon, will not reach lunar orbit after all four thrusters in a miniaturized propulsion system malfunctioned en route.…

We wanted robot butlers and flying Deloreans ... and got internet-from-orbit instead Amazon's plan to launch a series of satellites to offer broadband internet service can move ahead now that the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has endorsed the web giant's plan to keep space tidy.…

And yes, sure, totally secure Microsoft's Edge browser will be getting a significant facelift in the coming months, thanks to Adobe.…

Surely this is how at least one Michael Crichton novel starts Neuralink, the Musk-founded brain implant company that's no stranger to controversy, is in hot water again, this time over allegations it may have illegally transported implants removed from deceased animals and infected with dangerous pathogens. …

Some devs object because they don't trust Mountain View Russ Cox, a Google software engineer steering the development of the open source Go programming language, has presented a possible plan to implement telemetry in the Go toolchain.…

30 months in prison for providing, um... enterprise mobile banking software dev tool A dual Iranian/US national has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for smuggling export-controlled technology products to end users in Iran.…

Sumo Logic attracts private equity investor while InfluxData and Onehouse raise VC cash Log management and analytics biz Sumo Logic has agreed to a private equity buyout valuing the firm at around $1.7 billion.…

Hundreds of thousands of techies looking for work, with ultimate cost to vendors not yet tallied It was another bad week for tech professionals amid further bloodletting by an industry feeling the squeeze of inflation and higher interest rates as Microsoft, Zoom and Yahoo all dished out the pink slips.…

After a long wait and some company problems, the latest member of the Pantheon appears Elementary OS 7, codenamed "Horus" and based on Ubuntu 22.04.1, is here at last after a longer than usual delay.…

Beat Microsoft. Set agendas. Became essential. Hiked prices. Now we wait for Broadcom's reign Special feature In a decade of watching VMware, I've encountered two unverified but irresistible legends about the company.…

Margaret Thatcher-founded body thinks it's solved the problem US and China couldn't A report by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) claims the UK can support a local chip industry without engaging in a "subsidy arms race" with other nations and proposes measures government should instead be taking.…

Data sovereignty and compliance gives CEO pause for thought as Deutsche Börse AG jumps in bed with Google Pan-European stock exchange Euronext says worries about data sovereignty and compliance means it will not follow rivals into signing contracts with US public cloud megacorps.…

As IT spending drops below promised billions, there's always room for those offering the right kind of feedback In response to the widespread controversy surrounding the UK health department's attempt to buy a Federated Data Platform (FDP) – a competition that incumbent supplier Palantir considers a "must-win" – NHS England has reached for a "critical friend."…

Blast 'corporate' types who are much more square than $5.14 billion HR corp Workday tasked itself with the challenge of what to do if you’re the third or fourth vendor in the global market for enterprise-grade finance and HR software and came up with the answer: Super Bowl ads.…

Cloud-native Vela specializes in developing and training large-scale AI models – in-house only, though IBM is the latest tech giant to unveil its own "AI supercomputer," this one composed of a bunch of virtual machines running within IBM Cloud.…

Who would willingly chews a 6:00AM Sunday callout? On-Call As the world gears up for a week that features a celebration of love, The Register brings you another instalment of On-Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of the thing IT pros hate most – being asked to fix silly problems at loathsome times of day.…

Any act that sends so much as a ruble to seven named netizens now forbidden The US and UK have sanctioned seven Russians for their alleged roles in disseminating Conti and Ryuk ransomware and the Trickbot banking trojan.…

State Dept already has one target, FBI is identifying sources of floating surveillance platform's components The Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the US last week looks set to spark a new round of sanctions against Middle Kingdom tech firms.…

Regulator wants to bust the oligopoly in mobile OS and app markets Japan's competition regulator has recommended big changes to local laws to reform the "oligopoly" it's assessed Google and Apple enjoy in the markets for mobile operating systems and the apps that run on them.…

The usual suspects - Hikvision and Dahua - named as a risk to national security, prompting the usual denials Australia's Defence Department removed all Chinese manufactured surveillance cameras after an audit detailed the number of Hikvision and Dahua devices installed in various government facilities.…

Don't trust your super-hot military boyfriend you've never met. He doesn't exist As Valentine's Day approaches, if your offshore oil rig worker "boyfriend" – who looks like Bradley Cooper in his online pics and has hinted at proposing to you for months, but you've never met in real life – suddenly needs money for "hospital bills" … Just. Don't. Do. It.…

For those relying on this cloud-based security thing It's difficult for security teams to quickly respond to potential threats if the data coming in and the detection rules around it are off.…

Phishing hooked internal documents, code, and some non-critical systems, but users' personal info safe Colorful web forum Reddit has revealed it has suffered a security breach.…

And the FCC ain't exactly helping, senators say Major US carriers are exaggerating the availability of fixed wireless services and leaving under-served communities at risk of missing out on billions in federal funding that would pay for improved services.…

Medical payments expected to resume ... soon? IBM retirees have been forced to pay for some medical expenses out of their own pockets as a result of the IT giant's handling of their healthcare funding.…

Translation: Please, please, Vlad, don't shoot down our satellites While SpaceX continues sending its Starlink terminals to Ukraine - provided the cash keeps coming in - it isn't okay with its satellite internet gear being used directly in war, such as piloting military drones.…

Plus: Microsoft's nu-Bing can't answer question on exoplanets correctly either Web content automatically generated by AI will be ranked according to its quality by Google Search, the internet titan confirmed this week, after previously suggesting it would blanket down-rank computer-created pages.…

If you're having trouble with your games, this may be why Windows users who installed an update from November 2022 may run into problems rendering content and running their games if their systems are using particular versions of Intel graphics drivers.…

A 31-day limit on how long you can be away from your home IP address is included too The age of freely sharing Netflix passwords is drawing to a close as the streaming service announced the expansion of account restrictions in four more countries alongside plans to roll restrictions out "more broadly in the coming months."…

A rippled rocky ridge suggests the presence of lakes and waves, all at a higher elevation than expected The Mars Curiosity rover has discovered what NASA said is its clearest evidence yet that the red planet used to be anything but dusty and dry - and it found that evidence in a place it didn't expect.…

Move means possibility of new WebKit-free iPhone browsers is even more likely The UK competition watchdog's proposed iOS remedies in a probe of its "substantial and entrenched market power" in the mobile ecosystem "would effectively turn Apple into a clone of Android," the iPhone maker told the CMA.…

Plus new developments in the world of the MNT Reform FOSDEM The Balthazar project is designing an all-Free Hardware laptop based around RISC-V and several existing standards.…

Who even buys their children an Apple Watch? Comment There comes a time when every parent will glance up from their mobile device or busy work schedule and take a moment to ask: "Where are my kids?"…

No experience? Doesn't matter, companies claim Microsoft has partnered with quantum outfit Classiq for the launch of a research and education program that offers educational institutions access to Classiq's software platform and Microsoft's Azure Quantum cloud.…

Structure appears to be so far out, the Roche limit may need revising A ring system has been spotted around dwarf planet Quaoar at a distance astronomers didn't believe was possible, defying astronomical theories on how these structures form.…

Tells residents to turn in dongles and uninstall apps, but keeps registration system alive – just in case Singapore's Ministry of Health (MOH) announced on Thursday that it was finally pulling the plug on its COVID tracking program.…

Sometimes it takes a war to make people pay attention FOSDEM The Open Source Policy Summit is an annual event which attempts to explain the importance of software freedom to governments and policy makers.…

Digital sleuths chop through crypto challenge in 'surreal' search A team of codebreakers discovered – and then cracked – more than 50 secret letters written by Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. …

It turns out electricity and heat aren't the only things getting more expensive Intel is holding out its cap for billions of euros in German subsidies – on top of what has already been committed – to get its planned Magdeburg "mega fab" back on track.…

Hey, Glaswegians, care to share those negotiating secrets with your counterparts in the US? After months of wrangling, Glaswegian Apple Store employees have signed a deal with their Cupertino parent to officially recognize the first Apple trade union in the UK. …

Far from ready, but developer thinks it's helping the whole Xen codebase If the open source RISC-V CPU architecture is to become a viable option for servers, its software ecosystem will need a solid hypervisor.…

$3.3 billion may or may not be on its way to expand Chipzilla's Ho Chi Minh City presence The Vietnam government appears to have jumped the gun by announcing a potential $3.3 billion investment by Intel.…

Those who think Big Tech has its thumb on the scales are going to love this Cloudflare has admitted that one of its engineers stepped beyond the bounds of its policies and throttled traffic to a customer's website.…