The Register

Creepy developer offers evasive apps that track victims, crack their cloud storage, enable harassment and worse A New York man who developed several stalkerware apps has been ordered to pay $410,000 in civil fines to settle a court case against him, and must modify the apps to let people know they are being monitored.…

'The text we generated was a mistake, we are super embarrassed' Video The Seinfeld spoof Nothing, Forever - a sitcom developed using generative AI - has been temporarily banned on Twitch after one of the characters accidentally spewed transphobic profanities.…

'Perils of the job' we're told A top US cyber diplomat said his Twitter account was compromised over the weekend.…

Competition for AI-powered search between Microsoft and Google heats up On Monday, Google unveiled an AI chatbot, Bard, that will be integrated into its search engine soon in the face of rising competition from Microsoft's Bing and OpenAI's ChatGPT.…

And not the green hydrogen kind Unable to get the power it needs to feed its growing datacenter footprint, Amazon plans to transition some of its Oregon datacenters over to natural gas fuel cells.…

Put pro-Putin bots on the do not call list A free tool aims is helping organizations defend against KillNet distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) bots and comes as the US government issued a warning that the Russian cybercrime gang is stepping up its network flooding attacks against hospitals and health clinics.…

Data sovereignty – the Windows maker has heard of it Microsoft is continuing to change how diagnostic data from Windows devices is processed and controlled to keep its place in the European market amid stringent privacy and security regulations.…

Meanwhile, no one is thinking of the horrible emissions coming out of all these rockets, say scientists SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said over the weekend that, despite nearly two years since a successful launch, Starship will be flying again this March – with orbital ambitions.…

Tools like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have memories after all Generative AI models can memorize images from their training data, possibly allowing users to extract private copyrighted data, according to research.…

Memo tells staff freeze on hiring and travel expenses are no longer enough Dell is said to be planning to cut thousands of jobs, potentially as much as 5 percent of its entire workforce, in response to the falling global demand for PCs.…

Account posting pics of pet returning home convinces Musk to chill about access rules File the decision to withdraw free access to its API under "Twitter doing dumb things" because owner Elon Musk has partially walked back on it mere days later.…

STEP won't be complete until 2040, but here's a 'delivery body' in the meantime The UK government has set up a delivery body tasked with building a prototype fusion energy plant to be sited at West Burton in Nottinghamshire.…

Astronauts need better autonomy as ground control gets further away While astronauts are often engineers or scientists, they usually aren’t geologists, which is why the European Space Agency (ESA) is investing in training to make sure its next mission crew can accurately identify rocks and geological features.…

Suppliers competing for lucrative prize will rely on 'interoperability' of existing work from US spy-tech firm The UK's health service has confirmed it will require winners of the procurement for a Federated Data Platform (FDP) to migrate existing dashboards from the current platform by US spy-tech firm Palantir.…

Excuse me, citizen, did you packet this data yourself? Opinion The tech sector is failing at cybersecurity. Global spending on the stuff is at $190 billion a year, a quarter of the US defense budget. That hasn't stemmed an estimated $7 trillion in annual cybercriminal damages. People are fond of saying that the Wild West days of the internet are over, but on those numbers an 1875 Dodge City bank vault looks like Fort Knox.…

In the age of tractor-fed printers and perforated paper, telling a junior to tear it up was close to negligence Who, Me? Welcome back once again, dear reader, to the untidy corner of The Reg we call Who Me? in which readers' confessions are filed in the dusty shadows until rediscovered.…

Also: Atlassian says Jira has a 9.4 severity bug and the TSA issues milquetoast no-fly list security advisory When a Texas school district sold some old laptops at auction last year, it probably didn't expect to end up in a public legal fight with a local computer repair shop – but a debate over what to do with district data found on the liquidated machines has led to precisely that.…

You’ve had almost two years to patch and some of the software is EOL, now attackers déployer un rançongiciel France's Computer Emergency Response Team has issued a Bulletin D'Alerte regarding a campaign to infect VMware’s ESXI hypervisor with ransomware.…

Turns out the single brand ‘Uvance’ plan needs two groups to pull it off Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu last week announced a re-org, and The Register has mostly figured out what's afoot.…

Dear government, this thing is written by volunteers. Take it up with them. Also: shouldn't you know this already ? The Wikimedia Foundation released a statement on Friday confirming that, according to internal traffic reports, Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are no longer accessible to users in Pakistan.…

Plus: Cruise and Waymo's driverless cars have caused 92 reported incidents in San Francisco; China's Baidu reportedly set to launch ChatGPT rival In brief Google has hinted it will unveil AI-powered products and features in a live event next week.…

PLUS: India is the new China for Apple; Sushi licking vid scandalizes Japan; Chinese spy balloon shot down; India's new Amazon tax Asia In Brief Australia's government deliberately released personal information on citizens who protested a welfare payment debt recovery scheme that was linked to multiple suicides and later found to have no legal basis.…

From frameworks to new federal offices it's time to get busy The hack of SolarWinds' software more than two years ago pushed the threat of software supply chain attacks to the front of security conversations, but is anything being done?.…

Just don't expect foundry spending to stop anytime soon Analysis The semiconductor gold rush is all but over, and we've had our fill. Or so the past month of dismal earnings might have you believe.…

Same gang pestered US voters during 2020 presidential election Microsoft believes the gang who boasted it had stolen and leaked more than 200,000 Charlie Hebdo subscribers' personal information is none other than a Tehran-backed criminal group.…

Go on, bring on the FLAMEs Sooner or later, everything ends up in Microsoft Excel.…

'Wisdom of the people has prevailed' SpaceX supremo beams Elon Musk and Tesla have been found not liable by a jury in a securities fraud trial in which the billionaire and his automaker were accused of misleading investors.…

We devoting full time to floating under /etc A sneaky botnet dubbed HeadCrab that uses bespoke malware to mine for Monero has infected at least 1,200 Redis servers in the last 18 months.…

Allegations of stifled whistleblowing and disclosure failures end with no admission of guilt, as usual Rather than face proceedings before the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay $35 million to settle charges that it both failed to maintain appropriate misconduct reporting controls over so-called "frat boy culture," and also violated whistleblower protection laws.…

Chocolate Factory insists project is an internal testing tool, isn't extending middle finger at Cupertino Google's Chromium developers have begun work on an experimental web browser for Apple's iOS using the search giant's Blink engine.…

Don't mind us, we'll just have a quick look for unsupported installs and then disappear, we pwoooomise Microsoft wants everyone to know that it isn't looking to invade their privacy while looking through their Windows PCs to find out-of-date versions of Office software.…

... forcing users to insert their cards into less-secure PIN systems The reasons businesses and consumers like contactless payment transactions – high security and speed – are what make those systems bad for cybercriminals.…

Mango Markets still offline for now ... but v4 comeback release looms The man accused of bringing down decentralized crypto exchange Mango Markets through market manipulation has made his first appearance in court in connection with the theft of millions in cryptocurrency.…

Boffins find Dunning-Kruger effect makes us think we know better Human psychology may prevent people from realizing the benefits of artificial intelligence, according to a trio of boffins based in the Netherlands.…

As for Macs, CEO admits PC industry is shrinking Apple has reported its first decline in revenues since 2019 as sales of Macs and iPhones both slowed – the latter in the wake of a shutdown at iPhone City, Foxconn's factory in China, late last year.…

Decent upgrade from older versions, essential if you're still on OpenOffice The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.5 with a host of improvements. Windows and Mac users can just download it, and for Linux types the new version is already up on Flathub.…

When you say it's gonna happen now... when exactly do you mean? The UK government has come under further fire for dragging its feet on a national semiconductor strategy while other industrialized nations push ahead with investment in their own high-tech sectors.…

As tech giants 'optimize' workforces, world optimizes amount of money it spends on computing services Cloud giants Google and Amazon Web Services' latest financial results indicate the cloud computing adoption is finally slowing as customers press pause amid the economic downturn taking place across much of the West.…

It's... actually kind of funny, though When plague winds howl across the surface of cadaver world Earth, humanity long dead by its own hand, imperial archaeologists picking through the remnants will excavate a bunker. Inside they will find a primitive computer. The computer broadcasts AI-generated spoof Seinfeld episodes for eternity.…

Stop us if you've heard this one Qualcomm reported a 12 percent year-on-year slide in revenue for the first quarter of its fiscal 2023 amid weakening global demand in the smartphone market.…

Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Surely there won't be a third incident for roadside assistance company A former employee of RAC, one of Britain's major roadside recovery service operators, has pleaded guilty to data theft after he stored traffic accident information on his personal device that was passed onto claims companies.…

Wish you could IP Freely? What's the wording holding you back in your current job? As PayPal and NetApp join the latest tech multinationals shedding a portion of their staffers, the US Federal Trade Commission is proposing a local ban on non-competes.…

Along with DXVK 2.1, more and better compatibility comes to Linux – we'll drink to that The WINE Project has reached version 8.0 and DXVK version 2.1 of its Vulkan-based DirectX translation layer. If you'd give Linux a go except for one or two pesky but necessary apps, it's worth a try.…

Rack full of kit predictably became a network disruption center On Call With a whole month of 2023 already consigned to history, The Register brings you another instalment of On-Call, our weekly column in which readers share their stories of past deeds performed in the service of keeping computers copacetic.…

Crims put a February 4 deadline for software provider to pay up UK regulators are investigating a cyberattack against financial technology firm ION, while the LockBit ransomware gang has threatened to publish the stolen data on February 4 if the software provider doesn't pay up.…

Two months to reach 100 million active monthly users, but how many will stay? Last November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a free web interface and took the internet by storm. Data compiled in a study by UBS reported the chatbot had managed to reach 100 million monthly active users by January, which would make it the fastest-growing consumer app in internet history.…

Floats over missile silos, shooting it down ruled more dangerous than whatever it's up to A Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon, spotted drifting over the US, has caused concern about national security – but the Department of Defense says it will not be shot down by F22s at this time.…

Telecoms authority has 'degraded' access and threatened total ban while it waits for 'blasphemous' content to be removed Pakistan's Telecommunications Authority has "degraded" Wikipedia service in the country on the grounds that the crowdsourced encyclopedia was not censoring "sacrilegious" content, and warned it may block the site altogether.…

1,000 servers capable of 240 million transactions a second, because Beijing wants to watch everything China's ambition to record government and commercial activity on a blockchain has a new engine: a 1,000-server cluster in Beijing capable of handling 240 million smart contract transactions each second.…

Third party widgets are on the march in latest Windows Preview, which fixes some Arm64 FAILs too Microsoft's latest Windows 11 preview build has added a Spotify widget, more evidence of the software giant's increasing openness to third-party presences in its flagship OS.…