The Register

That's what we call a static shock Even ransomware operators make mistakes, and in the case of ransomware gang the Key Group, a cryptographic error allowed a team of security researchers to develop and release a decryption tool to restore scrambled files....

While ASML says it can keep selling DUV kit to China through 2023 You can add parts of the Middle East to the list of regions where you can't buy Nvidia's top-specced A100 and H100 accelerators, judging from a regulatory filing by the chip designer for investors this week....

Not so much X gon' give it to you, you gonna give it to X As August and summer in the northern hemisphere draw to a close, Elon Musk's Twitter is making several changes to its platform, including a privacy policy update noting that it plans to begin collecting biometric data and employment information from the people still using the site, if provided....

DoD is dead last for tech support, equipment, communication, and function, say staff When it comes to US government employee satisfaction with IT services, one agency finds itself continually at the bottom of the heap: The rather crucial Department of Defense....

Five Eyes nations warn of hit against Ukrainian military systems Russia's Sandworm crew is using an Android malware strain dubbed Infamous Chisel to remotely access Ukrainian soldiers' devices, monitor network traffic, access files, and steal sensitive information, according to a Five Eyes report published Thursday....

Everybody chill, we're still in the cart Data cloud vendor Snowflake has felt the need to publish a clarification following statements on payments from key customer Instacart, which are likely to add up to $100 million over four years....

CRM vendor might find itself pushed to the margins to keep investors happy Salesforce has posted upbeat results and raised its forecasts for revenue, operating margin, and operating cash flow for next year. But price rises announced earlier this year are yet to affect customers, the CRM giant said....

He praised Apple for its 'open source' tech - now he'll oversee AI use to defend Britain from its foes Comment British politician Grant Shapps, who once told The Register that an incoming* Tory government would be the "most tech-savvy in history," has been appointed as the UK's new defense chief....

Breaking up is hard to do: Redmond reluctantly lets EU play matchmaker for software suite flings Microsoft has blinked first in its dispute with the EU over bundling Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and will now allow European customers to buy the two software suites without it. It also pledged to make it easier for rival meeting tools to work with the two suites....

Maria Markstedter spent years writing about chip biz's ISA, is a tad miffed by heavy-handed takedown tactics If you fancy creating a blog or website to discuss the Arm architecture or the Softbank-owned outfit that develops it, keep the British CPU designer's name out of the domain name you choose - or draw the wrath of its lawyers....

It also beats its main rival in some speed tests now The latest version of the flagship FOSS browser is out, and it's picked up one of the main features for which we keep Chrome around....

May as well give up already A fully autonomous flight AI has steered a drone through a racetrack faster than human pilots in the fledgling sport of first-person view (FPV) drone racing....

iFixit takes aim at the John-Deere-for-frozen-milk situation Having won victories for iPhone and tractor owners alike, the right-to-repair crusaders at iFixit are turning to the really important stuff as summer enters its last death throes - ice cream....

Scientists one step closer to cracking the case of these atomic swine You may be surprised to know that Germany's wild boars are too radioactive to eat - and Chernobyl may not be solely to blame. Fallout from nuclear weapons testing decades ago during the Cold War is a significant contributor to that radiation, it turns out....

Exec chuffed regulators accepted perhaps-overstated lame duck argument "You write what you need to win."...

CEC-IDE is re-skinned Visual Studio Code with added censorware to spot terms like Taiwan Independence' Chinese consultancy Digital Guandong has apologized after publishing a product based on open source code from Microsoft without properly disclosing that fact....

This sort of group usually sees members share IP and vow not to sue each other, to accelerate innovation Nine of China's most prominent explorers and purveyors of processors built on the permissively licensed RISC-V architecture have formed a patent alliance....

ChatGPT's prose harvesting protected by fair use, super-lab argues OpenAI is trying to dismiss various claims in two legal actions launched by authors and comedians, who sued the machine-learning super-lab for scraping their books to train ChatGPT without explicit permission....

Storm that passed through Sydney saw clouds sleep early and struggle to wake up Updated Oracle, Netsuite, and Microsoft's clouds have gone down, hard, in the Sydney, Australia, region likely due to an issue at a datacenter provider in which both are tenants....

Backdoors detailed, plus CISA releases more IOCs for IT depts to check Nearly a third of organizations compromised by Chinese cyberspies via a critical bug in some Barracuda Email Security Gateways were government units, according to Mandiant....

Could a Surface mobe with one of these displays eliminate all that bad press from the Duo? Microsoft's first attempt at a folding phone didn't go so well, though a fresh patent from the Windows giant suggests it might be holding out hope that a 360-degree foldable screen could make the difference....

Clicking a URL from a system service will actually open in your chosen browser. For some. How fancy Microsoft has released a Windows 11 preview build that will open links generated by Windows system components in the user's default browser - but only for those in the European Union and a few other countries....

Could be used to put ethical hackers, and citizens, behind bars A controversial United Nations proposal has a new foe, Microsoft, which has joined the growing number of organizations warning delegates that the draft version of the UN cybercrime treaty only succeeds in justifying state surveillance - not stopping criminals, as originally intended....

NHTSA is already worried Autopilot and FSD make drivers irresponsible - this surely won't help matters The discovery of a secret Tesla Autopilot configuration that allows the self-driving system to operate without driver attention isn't sitting well with US regulators who have cut a special order to get more information for their ongoing investigation....

At least the cost-cutting scissors are still sharp HP is putting a brave face on its third quarter 2023 results, claiming it's making progress to long-term growth priorities while enacting structural cost savings, despite revenue being down nearly 10 percent year-on-year....

Third-party and bespoke apps most likely candidates for the switch Google is looking to capture some of Oracle's workloads by promising to help users migrate from Big Red's databases to PostgreSQL with a set of services and automation tools....

Alive and still quite vigorous considering its age The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network....

Former BA boss slams resilience, says explanation 'doesn't stand up from what I know of the system' Mystery still surrounds the technical issue at the UK's National Air Traffic Service (NATS) on Monday, which is being blamed on incorrect flight plan data being received, leading to the system reverting to manual processing and causing delays and cancellations of flights....

Though this is still a preview so another provider could swing it Interview Google looks set to become the first cloud provider to offer virtual machine instances powered by Ampere's 192-core AmpereOne datacenter chip, which Ampere is now pitching as a solution for AI inferencing workloads....

Presence of aluminium isotope might help age other objects from space At 4.6 billion years old, meteorite Erg Chech 002 is among the oldest found on Earth. A new analysis of its composition promises to help understanding of the early solar system and date other space rocks....

Keeping full self-driving dream on the road just needs more graphics chips? Tesla still dreams of fueling its motors with actual full self-driving (FSD) capabilities, and it's blowing piles of cash on AI infrastructure to reach that milestone....

Black Mirror? Never heard of it Sometimes it feels like the most terrifying ideas from science fiction are simply fodder for the future of the military - case in point, word reaching us that the US Army wants to strap its next-gen service rifle to the top of robot sentry dogs....

Scalene, Scalene, Scalene, Scalene, I'm beggin' of you please improve my code Interview To make Python code run faster, you can now get performance optimization advice from the Scalene Python profiler and its associated chatbot - and mostly its recommendations help....

A queue gone mad leads to surprising results for 3D printing - but still no regulation Opinion Just like an owner of a new puppy waking up to a scene of destruction, 3D printer users who leave long jobs running overnight may be appalled to see what they find in the morning....

First you'll live in a headset. Then come the chip implants ... The number of screens people use each day has probably peaked, according to Alvin Wang Graylin, global vice president of Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC....

Meanwhile its Moon rover dodges a crater and spots sulphur India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is already busy running its successful Chandrayaan-3 Moon mission, but still plans to put even more items on its to-do list with the launch of Aditya-L1 - a mission to observe the Sun....

Malfunction took 14 plants offline for 36 hours. Oh, what a ... nah, too obvious Toyota Japan has recovered from what it's described as a "malfunction in the production order system" that halted production on 28 lines across 14 plants starting on Monday evening....

Replaces surveillance systems installed after 9/11 - and years before drones became a threat The Pentagon will upgrade the air surveillance technology it uses around Washington DC with a computer vision system that can identify and warn officials of suspicious objects flying around or near the capital....

Claims to have taken down two colossal networks, with 'Secondary Infektion' schooling 'Spamouflage' Russia appears to be "better" at running online trolling campaigns aimed at pushing its political narratives than China, according to Meta's latest Adversarial Threat Report....

Hopes cool-running Zen cores can socket to Intel's Xeon-D - maybe with a smaller socket Hot Chips At the Hot Chips conference this week AMD teased its upcoming edge-friendly Siena family of Epyc processors, revealing modest power consumption and designs that allow them to nestle into relatively small devices....

And adds rivals Claude 2, Falcon, Llama 2 to Vertex AI Cloud Next Google is rolling out a bunch of generative AI models and tools across its Workspace apps and Cloud, including an expansion of the promised Duet AI, its personal virtual assistant....

Halls of learning are stuck offline, but go Wolverines! The University of Michigan has isolated itself from the internet but, hey, everything's fine!...

'We will continue fighting this case' global chief's lawyer tells us An appeals court has reversed a 2021 decision to drop a bribery charge against Apple's head of global security, who is accused of donating iPads worth up to $80,000 to a sheriff's office in exchange for giving his Cupertino agents concealed carry weapon licenses....

Totally plucked: Agents remotely roast Windows botnet malware on victims' machines Uncle Sam today said an international law enforcement effort dismantled Qakbot, aka QBot, a notorious botnet and malware loader responsible for losses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, and seized more than $8.6 million in illicit cryptocurrency....

Llama 2 avoids errors by staying quiet, GPT-4 gives long, if useless, samples Computer scientists have evaluated how large language models (LLMs) answer Java coding questions from the Q&A site StackOverflow and, like others before them, have found the results wanting....

See hot singles in your area! Well, -453.8 F singles at least NASA's laser-based, gigabit-speed space internet is set to get its first orbital users just as soon as a new refrigerator-sized piece of hardware makes it to the International Space Station....

Demand may be 'tepid at best' but analyst sees return to pre-2019 levels next year The PC market is expected to return to growth in 2024, according to estimates from IDC analysts....

TPU v5e, A3 VMs, and GKE Enterprise headline first in-person shindig since pandemic Cloud Next Google is razor-focused on AI at this year's Cloud Next, with a slew of hardware projects, including TPU updates, GPU options, and a bevy of software tools to make it all work....

On AWS Firecracker - but there are other new micro-VM engines around, too Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more... and although it's aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone....

All 47,000 Met Police officers and staff reportedly accessed in break-in London's Metropolitan Police has said a third-party data breach exposed staff and officers' names, ranks, photos, vetting levels, and salary information....