The Register

We, for one, welcome our distorted-letter-recognizing overlords Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - better known as the ubiquitous CAPTCHA we see standing athwart the doors to many websites - may now be a misnomer as researchers have found that computers are much better at completing them....

Norfolk and Suffolk constabularies admit to accidentally including raw crime data in FoI responses Norfolk and Suffolk police have stepped forward to admit that a technical issue" resulted in raw data pertaining to crime reports accidentally being included in Freedom of Information responses....

Abreezio? Maybe not, but it was a plea deal The former chief executive of a company that was sold to Qualcomm for more than $150 million has pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering relating to a $1.5 million transaction involving proceeds from the deal....

Time for some fresh GRUB Although it's not long after job cuts at Red Hat, the company's team in Mexico is looking for a developer to work on the Linux bootloader stack....

In unrelated news, agency wants to teach folks how to spot a pyramid scheme A Florida man is in hot water for allegedly raising $108 million from more than 800,000 investors for what he claimed was an artificial intelligence development company - but which America's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges was a fraudulent, unregistered securities offering....

Storms on Saturn last for hundreds of years, leaving long-lasting impacts and raising lots of scientific questions Scientists are reassessing theories of how gas giants form after observing that fallout from Saturn's cyclical mega storms can last for centuries....

Voting machines and their data allegedly accessed without authorization by keen golfer's gofers Authorities in the US state of Georgia have indicted a famous Floridian and his loyal associates on counts including theft of data, software, and personal information....

Digital safety org worries OpenAI and pals aren't doing enough Popular generative AI models produce problematic content when prompted with terms associated with eating disorders, according to research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) - a London-based non-profit focused on protecting people online....

Meanwhile, in China, electric auto outfit emphasizes local bit barn for storage Elon Musk's electric auto outfit Tesla appears to be building new datacenters....

Again labels America a hacker empire over alleged backdoors found in earthquake monitoring kit China's Global Times, a state-controlled media outlet, has teased an imminent expose of alleged US attacks on seismic data measurement stations....

Plus: Tome bans decided by ChatGPT, watch out who's listening to your keyboard hammering, and more AI in brief Amazon has removed multiple sham books that may have been AI-generated and were published with Jane Friedman as the author - after the real writer complained that someone was misappropriating her name....

Trio alleged to have blackmailed over 100 targets after threats of intimate image release Two Nigerian men have been extradited to the US and were scheduled to appear in deferral court on Monday, charged with sextortion and causing the death of one of their victims: a teen who was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound....

Music copyright bomb hits just as other court conflict leads to lending limits The Internet Archive was sued for copyright infringement by a coalition of music giants on Friday, just as it lost a similar copyright claim to a group of book goliaths....

Try out a hot new thing before official launch? Something smells phishy The FBI has warned of a scam in which criminals lure people into installing what they think are pre-release beta-grade phone apps to try out - only for the software to be laced with malware....

From one untrusted source to another ... and another Amazon is now using generative AI to produce written summaries of customer reviews for products on the shelves of its sprawling e-commerce empire....

Don't panic, says automaker, but if you do, just turn off wireless for now Ford has suggested owners of vehicles equipped with its SYNC 3 infotainment system disable the Wi-Fi lest someone nearby exploits a buffer-overflow vulnerability and hijacks the equipment....

How can a billionaire in his 50s be this much of a dweeb? Mark Zuckerberg isn't shying away from his supposed cage match with Elon Musk, though he wants the world to know it probably isn't going to happen - and it's not his fault....

Just a day after getting green light to expand autonomous ops A day after General Motors was given the green light to accelerate the roll out of its self-driving Cruise taxis in a US state, a congregation of the robo-rides broke down - holding up traffic on a busy night - after reportedly losing wireless connectivity....

Is that a firesale we smell? Intel has begun purging its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) lineup, issuing a slew of product discontinuation notices just weeks after abandoning its mini-PC division and handing the reins to Asus....

Blunder made bundled monitors more expensive than standalone purchases Australia's Federal Court has fined Dell AU$10 million ($6.5 million) for what the tech giant has called an error in its pricing processes....

Power-sipper still in the research stage, but findings are interesting IBM Research has developed a mixed-signal analog chip for AI inferencing that it claims may be able to match the performance of digital counterparts such as GPUs, while consuming considerably less power....

Oscars 2014 Ellen DeGeneres Selfie in oil, anyone? In case you were heretofore unconvinced that Twitter is dead and is never coming back, the latest sell-off of branded tat might sway you....

Summer Camp is over and what has been done? Have aspirations shriveled in the Sun? DEF CON A bomb threat against Caesars Forum, the main venue for this week's DEF CON hacking convention, led to the halls being cleared on Saturday evening and the building searched by fire crews and police officers....

Names, job titles and salaries included in unwitting leak Cumbria Constabulary inadvertently published the names and salaries of all its officers and staff online earlier this year, making it the second UK force in a fortnight to admit disclosing personal information about its employees....

'No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome' A non-profit called the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) has been formed by Oracle, SUSE, CIQ, and other organizations that make Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS rebuilds....

I am become Tux, destroyer of warez Opinion Indian mythology is rich beyond measure in tales of gods, demons, and humans doing battle. Deception, alliances, betrayal, supernatural weaponry, and devastating consequences tangle with morality and greed. If you think that sounds like today's global technology maelstrom, that's forgivable....

It can be so hard to tell one column from another in a spreadsheet. They all look the same Who, Me? Welcome once again, dear reader, to the sanctuary we call Who, Me? in which Register readers can safely share their burdens and tell the tales of technical not-quite-expertise....

India's close to landing one, too, and Japan is counting down to a launch If you're thinking of taking a trip to the Moon in the next few weeks, check the traffic report before you fly: three nations are currently preparing their attempts to land on Luna's surface....

Claiming affiliation with Anonymous, hackers want more public debate over radioactive water release plans Entities using the name and iconography of Anonymous (EUTNAIOA) claim to have conducted cyber protests against the Japanese government for actions related to the release of wastewater from the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant....

Browser has added multi-process support Mozilla has teased an upcoming plan to allow plugins developed for its desktop browser to run on its Android app....

PLUS: Phishing campaign targets the C-suite; Cybercrime arrests in EU and Africa; and more Infosec in brief The July breach of Microsoft Exchange Online by suspected Chinese hackers is the next topic up for review by the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB)....

Tencent keyboard app allowed eavesdropping; Australia, Japan, sour on TwitX; China seeks to ID app devs Asia In Brief Indian tech services giant Infosys has revealed the nation's Securities and Exchange Board (SEBI) rejected its claims of being unable to file regulatory paperwork on time due to COVID-19 lockdowns....

Trellix bods say it's not that hard to do, thanks to these vulnerabilities DEF CON It would be relatively easy for miscreants to break into critical datacenter power management gear, shut off electricity supplies to multiple connected devices, and disrupt all kinds of services - from critical infrastructure to business applications - all at the press of a button....

NOC, NOC ... Who's there? Black Hat Every summer, pandemics permitting, a group of volunteers gather in a Las Vegas hotel to run one of the more unusual examples of IT infrastructure on the planet: the Black Hat network operations center....

QC crypto-cracking coming in 5, 10, maybe 50 years, so act ... now? Google has started deploying a hybrid key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) to protect the sharing of symmetric encryption secrets during the establishment of secure TLS network connections....

Scientists: Martian mud cracked in a manner that only happens after repeated cycles of drying The Mars Curiosity rover continues to make discoveries that shed light on the early days of the Red Planet, this time having found evidence that the unforgiving dust world once experienced seasonal weather patterns and flooding....

It's like Tor and IPFS had sex and produced this thing' DEF CON Infosec super-band the Cult of the Dead Cow has released Veilid (pronounced vay-lid), an open source project applications can use to connect up clients and transfer information in a peer-to-peer decentralized manner....

AiO devices won't scan or fax without ink, and plaintiffs say IT giant illegally withheld that info from buyers HP all-in-one printer owners, upset that their devices wouldn't scan or fax when low on ink, were handed a partial win in a northern California court this week after a judge denied HP's motion to dismiss their suit....

Feds argue leaks to press amount to witness tampering Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), former chief executive of crypto-disaster FTX, who has been awaiting trial for his firm's failure while in home detention with his family, has been sent to jail for attempting to intimidate witnesses....

Worker bees protest that they were read the riot act even when they did come in Amazon has contacted staff it says are not clocking into the office three days a week "even though your assigned building is ready," according to a leaked memo which warns them they're falling short of expectations....

Depending on where you draw the line Virgin Galactic successfully launched its first-ever private commercial spaceflight on Thursday, flying three space tourists to altitudes high enough to experience zero-gravity conditions for a few minutes....

Bigger, bolder, and brimming with ports for hobbyists and devs alike Asus has released a new addition to its Tinker Board line of Arm-based single-board computer (SBC) systems, giving hobbyists and embedded developers another design option with a plethora of ports....

What are these gadgets running, Windows? Ka-boom-tsch Fifteen bugs in Codesys' industrial control systems software could be exploited to shut down power plants or steal information from critical infrastructure environments, experts have claimed....

What benefits the chip designer will trickle down to AWS's Graviton team Analysis One of Amazon Web Services' key differentiators is its use of custom silicon, including Arm CPUs throughout its cloud infrastructure....

Anyone with sizable audience in this surveillance economy is invited to stuff their add-ons with tracking and ads Interview In the past nine years, Oleg Anashkin, a software developer based in San Jose, California, has received more than 130 solicitations to monetize his Chrome browser extension, Hover Zoom+....

Software house transitions to BSL, and fundies are furious HashiCorp, the vendor of Vagrant, Terraform, and a number of other deployment-automation tools, is changing its software license to the Business Source License. You can still get the source code, but it's not technically FOSS any more....

An option if Ubuntu interim releases are too slow, easy and stable for your liking The first release of Rhino Linux brings the rolling release model of Arch Linux to an Ubuntu base, along with the do-it-yourself ethos....

PhD student admits he probably shouldn't have given this talk Black Hat A study into the feasibility of hacking low-Earth orbit satellites has revealed that it's worryingly easy to do....

ProxyNotShell vulnerability could be how UK body got pwned, suggests infosec expert The hacking of the UK's Electoral Commission was potentially facilitated by the exploitation of a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange, according to a security expert....

Really? You didn't bother to patch a 9.8 severity critical flaw? Ecommerce stores using Adobe's open source Magento 2 software are being targeted by an ongoing exploitation campaign based on a critical vulnerability that was patched last year, on February 13, 2022....