The Register

Zurich’s Japanese outpost also leaks a couple of million records Global insurer Aflac's Japanese branch has revealed that personal data describing more than three million customers of its cancer insurance product has been leaked online.…

Call metadata can be ferreted out Boffins based in China and the UK have devised a telecom network attack that can expose call metadata during VoLTE/VoNR conversations.…

Plus: Intel, Adobe, SAP and Android bugs Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed 98 security flaws in its first Patch Tuesday of 2023 including one that's already been exploited and another listed as publicly known. Of the new January vulnerabilities, 11 are rated critical because they lead to remote code execution.…

Union claims bosses are flying the biz into 'graveyard spiral' In the wake of a Christmas meltdown that saw it cancel some 16,700 flights, one would expect heads to roll at Southwest Airlines, but that's not the case.…

Boffins find Twitter foreign influence campaign didn't have much pull Russian disinformation didn't materially affect the way people voted in the 2016 US presidential election, according to a research study published on Monday, though that doesn't make the effect totally inconsequential.…

Could ChatGPT be Google's nemesis? Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 billion into OpenAI as it looks towards integrating ChatGPT into its web search engine Bing and Office products.…

Climate change, drugs and immigration behind semiconductors on White House priority list The US, Mexico, and Canada have renewed talks on semiconductor manufacturing supply chains during the North American Leaders Summit (NALS) in Mexico City which kicks off today.…

US watchdog puts its foot down: Even a small possibility of interference means a fix is mandatory America's Federal Aviation Administration is directing all aircraft to get new altimeters, or install filters on existing ones, by February 1, 2024, to eliminate risks posed by C-band 5G networks.…

Look at our big claims, but don’t think about how AMD beat us in the DDR5, PCIe 5 race After dealing with multiple delays, Intel is finally marking the launch of its 4-Gen Xeon Scalable processors, and the x86 giant is hoping it can distract you long enough from its increasingly capable rivals with accelerators galore and self-anointed superlatives for the new server chips.…

Herman Hauser of Acorn fame among the investors providing cash injection A UK quantum startup has secured £30 million ($36.3 million) in Series A funding to help advance its technology, which it claims uses trapped ions as qubits but does not need lasers to control them, making it scalable through existing silicon manufacturing processes.…

A bit of sloppy JSON let security folk track, modify and delete Reviver's digital plates California's street-legal ink license plates only received a nod from the US government in October, but reverse engineers have already discovered vulnerabilities in the system allowing them to track each plate, reprogram them or even delete them at a whim.…

This is the company that claims: 'Privacy. That's iPhone' Apple "unlawfully records and uses consumers' personal information and activity," claims a new lawsuit accusing the company of tracking iPhone users' device data even when they've asked for tracking to be switched off.…

Who needs shiny new blowers when there bills to pay and kids to feed? Answer: fewer and fewer folk More and more cash-strapped people are opting to buy second hand and refurbished handsets in these tougher economic times with sales of used and refurbished devices estimated to have passed 282 million in 2022.…

Meanwhile, the regime is angling to pocket the money owed to rightsholders Life just got a whole lot better in Belarus – apparently piracy is now legal as long as the media being stolen is from a country that has been mean to the Eastern European utopia.…

Wouldn't home-grown silicon look pretty in our walled garden? Apple is said to be working to replace key wireless components in its devices with its own chips, a move that could see the Cupertino giant controlling most of the technology inside the smartphones and other mobile devices it makes.…

Maybe pursuit of health and wellness requires driving fast in an orange Corvette What's the point of owning an island if you don't get to make the rules? That's the question Larry Ellison must be asking himself after he was apparently pulled over for running a stop sign and speeding on Lanai, the Hawaiian island he bought 98 percent of for $300 million in 2012.…

Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 adds autofocus and wider field of view The Raspberry Pi has new cameras to capture images, attention, cash... and maybe your affection and/or admiration.…

SaaS CRM slinger blamed the pandemic for 10% workforce cull, but scattergun M&A strategy hasn't helped Opinion The philosophy behind tech industry leaders during the pandemic appeared to be, "never waste a good crisis." While the likes of ServiceNow scrambled to show the advantages of producing a new workflow on the fly, Salesforce reached for its checkbook.…

Both companies knew about the patent, claims lawsuit Media solutions company BSD Crown, best known for video encoding products as well as building Android smartphones in the Noughties, has filed a lawsuit against Amazon and livestreaming offshoot Twitch, claiming the pair infringed its patent.…

Code hosting service fed up with excessive bandwidth consumption Sourcehut, a code hosting service similar to GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and the like, plans to start blocking the Go Module Mirror, a proxy that fetches and caches code from git servers, because it has been using up too much network bandwidth.…

We might be looking at a new China for 2023 and the Year of the Rabbit After two chaotic years for China’s tech industry, a top Chinese central bank official has told state sponsored media Beijing’s regulatory crackdown is coming to a close.…

First sat launch from UK soil experienced ‘anomaly’ after entering space but did not deploy payloads Virgin Orbit, the Beardy-Branson-backed outfit that slings satellites into space from a 747, has failed in its first attempt to launch from the UK.…

Slurps ‘Fungible’, a manufacturer of DPUs and fabrics that will join Redmond’s engineering gang Microsoft has announced the acquisition of composable infrastructure and digital processing unit (DPU, aka SmartNIC) vendor Fungible.…

Synthetic media undermine's national security, says internet regulator China's new rules banning the creation of AI deepfakes used to spread fake news and impersonate people without consent will take effect on Tuesday.…

Advice follows embarrassing leak of audio from Prime Minister’s office Pakistan’s government has warned its agencies that the dark web exists, is home to all sorts of unpleasant people, and should be avoided.…

High-spec system is crucial to defending against the latest threats Two of the US government's leading security agencies are building a machine learning-based analytics environment to defend against rapidly evolving threats and create more resilient infrastructures for both government entities and private organizations.…

Social media as public nuisance? Seattle may be on to something Another lawsuit accuses Meta, Alphabet and other tech giants of harming kids in the interest of boosting profits. But this one takes it a step further and alleges that by contributing to the "youth mental health crisis," the companies' social media platforms are exacerbating US schools' counselors and clinics, and directly affecting their ability to educate kids.…

South Korean authorities warned locals to avoid falling space junk, which probably splashed down harmlessly A defunct weather-monitoring satellite came crashing back to Earth over the weekend, and reentered the atmosphere over the Bering Sea, the US Department of Defense confirmed on Monday.…

BMW i4, i7 and iX drivers need a fix BMW is starting off 2023 with a recall of 90 percent of the EVs it sold in the United States in 2022 thanks to battery software that could cause loss of power while driving.…

British developer uses homegrown scanning tool to check for risks The Python Package Index, or PyPI, continues to surprise and not in a good way.…

NSO maintains that it's all legit The US Supreme Court has quashed spyware maker NSO Group's argument that it cannot be held legally responsible for using WhatsApp technology to deploy its Pegasus snoop-ware on users' phones.…

American ambassador to Japan wants a unified front against the Middle Kingdom US efforts to starve China's semiconductor and tech industry of chips has entered a new phase: pressuring its allies to join its cause.…

The poles have ice but it's freezing up there, so why not grind gems for cocktails? A study of old data from the Curiosity rover is causing scientists to reassess their belief that Mars' relatively temperate equatorial region is devoid of water. …

Time has run out for users of legacy operating systems: will you upgrade or buy a new PC? Changes are imminent for users running legacy versions of Windows operating systems on their machines.…

Measures have been described as an answer to the US CHIPS Act Taiwan has become the latest nation to offer financial incentives to encourage semiconductor manufacturers to invest in facilities and new technologies within its territory, passing extra rules to let companies flip research and development costs into tax credits.…

Models 3 and Y are up to 24% cheaper than last year, and buyers said to want compensation Tesla owners in China took to the streets in protest this weekend over another round of price cuts they claim means they overpaid for their model Y and 3 vehicles. …

Virgin Orbit set to help UK county put pasty-munching image behind it In what is believed to be the first satellite launch from Western European soil, a hefty Boeing 747 is set to take to the skies from a regional airport on Cornwall's north coast tonight and deliver a payload capable of climbing into orbit.…

Is that a Google Home in your toilet? CES It wouldn't be CES without the introduction of gadgets that no one asked for.…

Holy cow! Memorandum of Understanding to give farmers access to 'diagnostic tools' and documentation In what looks like a victory for farmers in the United States, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) has struck a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with equipment vendor John Deere regarding the repairability of its machines.…

Settlement 'without admission of liability' followed court challenge to Microsoft mega-deal The UK government agreed to pay Atos £24 million ($29 million) in an out-of-court settlement following a challenge to its decision to award an £854 million ($1 billion) Met Office supercomputer contract to Microsoft.…

PM reportedly trying to twist CEO's er, arm The UK government is reported to be trying once again to have the London Stock Exchange play a part in the public offering of chip design company Arm, following delays to the process that are likely to see it go public later this year.…

Plus: Apple using fake AI voices to help indie publishers release audiobooks In brief OpenAI is building software capable of detecting whether text was generated by its ChatGPT model after New York City education officials announced it was blocking students from accessing the tool in public schools.…

Zhurongs don't make a right and suggest the mission may not have survived winter China’s Zhurong Mars rover may be struggling to emerge from sleep mode, a feat it was expected to accomplish around December 26th.…

Citation needed? Opinion There may be little to agree on in these fractured, fractious times, but nobody can deny the fact of progress. We see it in tech up close and personal: news keeps coming thick and fast from medicine, material science, energy, cosmology, palaeontology, environmental sciences, you name it. The speed of change is just breathtaking.…

Dark deeds are no way to close a deal Who, Me? Happy New Year, gentle readers, and welcome once again to Who, Me? – The Reg's regular roundup of rapscallions and rascals committing tech atrocities and (sometimes) getting away with it. This week it's got a sci-fi twist because the disaster in question involves lasers.…

Sees collaborationware as its route into foreign markets Would you be happy staging a Teams-powered videoconference on a hefty Android-powered touchscreen commercial display?…

'Corporate governance optimization' sees founder's role reduced, but not in pursuit of a listing Ant Group, the financial services biz spun out of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, said on Saturday that its founder Jack Ma would give up control of the org.…

PLUS Tesla China price cuts spark protests; Japan boosts cyber-defences; Google can’t overturn Indian fine Asia In Brief Singapore's tech community is in mourning – along with many around the world – after the sudden passing of Creative Technology co-founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo. The brand was behind the popular "Sound Blaster" range of PC sound cards and a significant force in the digital media revolution.…

Also, LastPass faces class action, and Louisiana says that, while the internet may be for porn, ID is still required In Brief The Federal Communications Commission plans to overhaul its security reporting rules for the telecom industry to, among other things, eliminate a mandatory seven-day wait for informing customers of stolen data and expand the definition of what constitutes an incident.…

Near-term vulnerability of RSA-2048 keys not so near, says quantum boffin Scott Aaronson Briefly this week, it appeared that quantum computers might finally be ready to break 2048-bit RSA encryption, but that moment has passed.…