The Register

Gelsinger reckons pandemic-era supply chain snarls helped demonstrate the sector's importance The COVID-19 pandemic was a decisive factor in Intel's decision to re-emphasize its own manufacturing prowess, after decades in which US and European nations failed to recognize the importance of the semiconductor industry and allowed Taiwan and Korea to become global leaders, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab in Davos on Wednesday....

CEOs believe generative AI will make their companies more efficient, but more energy is needed to power the tech The one question on leaders' minds as they debate the future of generative AI at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos is how the tech might change the future of employment....

Pen-equipped Ultra is this year's hero, helped by Circle to Search' that lets you Google without exiting apps Samsung has made AI the centerpiece of its annual premium handset launch and featured its Galaxy Ultra, the heir to the Galaxy Note, as the hero of the day....

Pipelines are full, but hiring has slowed Indian IT service outfit HCL's share price hit a record high this week, and scrip for its peers Infosys, TCS and Wipro also spiked, after the four announced quarterly results that revealed strong deal pipeline fueled by demand for AI, along with very slow headcount growth...

Nvidia raked in the boatloads of cash, but the rest of the industry is still hurting 2023's copious chatter about generative AI has not translated into surging semiconductor revenues across the industry, according to analyst firm Gartner....

Series 9 and Ultra 2 models cannot be imported to the US starting from 18 January Apple will not be allowed to sell its latest watches containing blood oxygen sensors starting from Thursday, judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ordered....

Aerial delivery kit doubles payloads Alphabet's drone delivery biz, Wing, has unveiled a drone capable of carrying up to five pounds (2.26 kg) of payload, almost doubling the capacity of its existing fleet....

Mmm, Zuck up that data The startlingly extent to which websites and brokers hand over details of people's habits to Facebook was revealed Wednesday....

Pen-tester accessed more than 650,000 sensitive messages, and still can, at Indian outfit using Toyota SaaS Toyota Tsusho Insurance Broker India (TTIBI), an Indo-Japanese joint insurance venture, operated a misconfigured server that exposed more than 650,000 Microsoft-hosted email messages to customers, a security researcher has found....

So much for isolation A design flaw in GPU drivers made by Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, and likely Imagination can be exploited by miscreants on a shared system to snoop on fellow users....

Let's be realistic: If the EU can't regulate it well, America definitely won't Comment If anything could compel the US government to regulate facial-recognition technology, a report sponsored by federal law enforcement urging just that may do the trick....

Big Blue staffers aren't pleased to lose out on potential bonuses Exclusive IBM has canceled a program that rewarded inventors at Big Blue for patents or publications, leaving some angry that they are missing out on potential bonuses....

'Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam,' says study Updated No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded....

Middle Kingdom can make market moves too... as potential global price battles loom China's chip manufacturing capacity is expected to more than double within the next 5 to 7 years, according to TrendForce, and this could lead to a market oversupply that would spell trouble for semiconductor companies elsewhere....

Caltech looks back on the highs and lows of the SSPD-1 project A year after the launch of the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is revealing the highs and lows of the mission....

Tech to shift storage to compute has so far failed to catch on in a big way The NVM Express consortium has updated its specifications by adding a Computational Storage Feature, creating a standardized way for applications to talk to storage devices that include some processing capability....

Update on Linux distro's next major version heralds big changes ahead The future of openSUSE is firming up, but possibly not in the direction that existing users of the distro will enjoy....

Paying one that lied to you and only saved the first 20 rows of each table Publicly exposed PostgreSQL and MySQL databases with weak passwords are being autonomously wiped out by a malicious extortion bot - one that marks who pays up and who is not getting their data back....

Imagined impact of GenAI on GDP is over-optimistic, analyst firm says Gartner thinks the ever-expanding GenAI ecosystem is being hyped with real customer deployments not emerging in earnest until next year....

How OpenAI, Microsoft, and others are trying to combat deepfakes and more Analysis Tackling AI disinformation is more crucial than ever for tech companies this year as they brace for the upcoming US presidential election....

CEO stays tight-lipped in front of MPs while Fujitsu admits moral responsibility for compensation Post Office chief exec Nick Read left British politicians shocked with his evidence before a Parliamentary committee yesterday after he admitted he could not say when the public body at the center of the historic miscarriage of justice knew when its system was at fault....

Millions have perfectly serviceable PCs running Windows 10 at home Microsoft's desperation to persuade customers that migrating to Windows 11 is a painless process has taken a new turn, thanks to a relentlessly perky video: "Make Your Move to Windows 11 Easier."...

Uninstall the update or edit the Windows registry to restore order The latest Windows Server 2022 patch has broken the Chrome browser, and short of uninstalling the update, a registry hack is the only way to restore service for affected users....

...though bonkers conspiracies on solving date-field problem never died down Retro Tech Week Forty years ago, both Jerome and Marilyn Murray saw their brainchild reach the light of day. In 1984, their book, Computers in Crisis, was published, becoming the first authoritative guide to the Millennium Bug coding problem, which, in the final year of the century, would consume media, political and business attention....

None of this inflation-linked percentage nonsense, says Ofcom Updated BT is ditching mid-contract price hikes linked to inflation before Britain's comms regulator issues a blanket ban in pursuit of greater transparency for customers....

ICO slaps penalties on two businesses that collectively made more than 3 million cold calls Another week and yet another couple of pesky cold callers face fines from the UK's data privacy watchdog for "bombarding" unsuspecting households with marketing messages about home improvements....

Slowdowns apparently due to a bug afflicting browser extensions, not retaliation against filters Google claims users of popular ad-blocking extensions have wrongly blamed YouTube for slow video streaming speeds - and that the content filters themselves are the reason for stuttering playback....

Standby to be amazed: Lotus Notes is still being developed Kettle It's Retro Tech Week here at The Register, and we've got four of our vultures together to talk about old computers and software that, in one form or another, thankfully refuses to die....

.SBS gTLD once owned by Australian broadcaster is another source of strife Scammers are buying up cheap domain names to host sites that sell dodgy health products using fake articles, according to cybercrime disruption outfit Netcraft....

After settling privacy lawsuit now admits you're observable even when trying for anonymity Google has altered the text describing data collection when users employ Incognito Mode in its Chrome browser....

No consultants were mauled or eaten but some were quite scared Indian forestry authorities have laid traps for a leopard that was spotted prowling near campuses used by tech services giants Infosys and TCS....

It pays not to be Huawei, and the US military can be lucrative, too Comment A vendor establishing a business unit dedicated to government sales is not new or unusual. But Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia's decision to do so in the USA this week tells a bigger story about Washington's paranoia regarding the security of critical communications infrastructure security....

Infecting networks via years-old CVEs that should have been patched by now Crooks are exploiting years-old vulnerabilities to deploy Androxgh0st malware and build a cloud-credential stealing botnet, according to the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)....

Video game record keepers Twin Galaxies finish messy four-year fight with Billy Mitchell Retro Tech Week The world-beating video game scores of self-styled arcade legend Billy Mitchell have been reinstated following a settlement with record-keeping org Twin Galaxies, which had wiped his achievements in 2018 following allegations of cheating....

Just days after ban on 'military and warfare' applications goes away, Davos hears the details OpenAI is developing AI-powered cybersecurity capabilities for the US military, and shifting its election security work into high gear, the lab's execs told the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this week....

Today's safety guardrails won't catch these backdoors, study warns Analysis AI biz Anthropic has published research showing that large language models (LLMs) can be subverted in a way that safety training doesn't currently address....

No, that does not mean machines can replace primary care physicians An AI chatbot was better at diagnosing medical ailments and communicating results than human physicians in text-based conversations, a research paper from Google claims....

Banking giant believes Quantinuum key to optimizing investment portfolios The wave of generative AI may have captured the world's attention, but that hasn't stopped the flow of capital into quantum computing as JPMorgan Chase and others plow more cash into the emerging tech....

Get ready for links to non-Cupertino payment systems, America, hopefully Updated Apple fans in the US may soon see links appearing in some of their iOS apps to non-Apple payment systems through which they can purchase stuff. That's because the nation's Supreme Court has decided not to hear appeals from the iGiant and Epic Games in the pair's long-standing spat over this processing of in-app payments....

You didn't have anything else to do this Tuesday, right? VMware and Atlassian today disclosed critical vulnerabilities and, while neither appear to have been exploited by miscreants yet, admins should patch now to avoid disappointment....

Makes sense since the global market fell 11% in 2023 China's imports of semiconductors and integrated circuits were hit by their largest ever drop last year, although chips are said to remain the country's biggest import item....

Majority of public-facing devices still unpatched against critical vulns from as far back as 2022 More than 178,000 SonicWall firewalls are still vulnerable to years-old vulnerabilities, an infosec reseacher claims....

SpaceX gets chance to prove the FCC was wrong for rejecting its $885m rural broadband subsidy bid Farm equipment maker John Deere has signed a deal with SpaceX to use its Starlink satellite internet service to keep combines and other farm equipment connected to the internet in underserved rural areas....

Unlikely to be a stop-the-slurpage button, but look at the wallpaper A visualization of what Windows 12 - or whatever Microsoft decides to call its upcoming OS - might look like has arrived, and it is expectedly heavy on AI integration....

Shipments grow in Q4 after near two years of declines, and Huawei making a comeback in China Apple's iPhone is the frontrunner in the global smartphone market for the first time after demand finally returned to a sector that has shrunk for almost two years....

Customers still patchless and mitigation only goes so far There's a "reasonable chance" that Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN users are already compromised if they didn't apply the vulnerability mitigation released last week, experts say....

Not all batteries like subzero temperatures This week's frigid winter conditions in North America exposed the shortcomings of certain electric vehicles, particularly Teslas....

Calls for stronger team play in the global economic tournament The EU needs to get serious and act more decisively and collectively if it wants economic security, especially in advanced technology, as it is trailing global rivals such as Japan, China, and the US....

AI for customers and staff, while Euro bitbarns shifted to Azure Microsoft and Vodafone have inked a 10-year deal worth $1.5 billion, resulting in the telecommunication giant shuttering physical datacenters across Europe in favor of virtual ones using Azure....

Good progress for penguinistas keen on Macs The Asahi Linux team has followed up the release of Fedora Asahi Remix with a post detailing the progress of the project to bring Linux to Apple silicon....