The Register

In a weird way, we can blame this on AI being a better bet than blockchain India's IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar will ask WhatsApp to explain what's up, after the Meta-owned messaging service experienced a dramatic increase in spam calls.…

Judge won't toss out two key charges, software source slurping case is on The judge overseeing the lawsuit challenging the legality of GitHub Copilot, and its underlying OpenAI Codex model, "borrowing" people's code samples has refused to dismiss two claims in the case and sent most of the other allegations back for revision.…

Talk about going against the Grain Google recently changed the default setting for adding invitations to its Calendar service in a way that interferes with third-party products. The Big G said it's just trying to block spam while some in the industry are calling foul.…

HAVA go at breaking electronic ballot box security US voting machines would undergo deeper examination for computer security holes under proposed bipartisan legislation.…

We've got four words for you: Insert coin to continue The European Union and the United Kingdom are at odds again, this time over whether to approve the proposed $68.7 billion merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.…

The threat is coming from inside the supply chain Black Hat Asia Miscreants have infected millions of Androids worldwide with malicious firmware before the devices even shipped from their factories, according to Trend Micro researchers at Black Hat Asia.…

Messy system is forcing VA pharmacies to work overtime to deal with poor IT, committee told The US Department of Veterans Affairs' ill-fated electronic health record upgrade hasn't just proved a problem for clinicians - it's also causing serious disruptions at VA pharmacies that have led to veterans not getting needed medication.…

Database hygiene matters, says Percona expert With less than six months to go before support for version 5.7 of relational database MySQL runs out, it appears users are ignoring recommendations to upgrade.…

Potential meteorite excites everyone but the insurance company Residents of a home in New Jersey have been left shaken after a possible meteorite crashed through the roof, ricocheted off a hardwood floor, and dented the ceiling before coming to a rest.…

And what next for cooling, datacenter placement, and more – tune in and find out direct from our vultures Register Kettle This week Timothy Prickett Morgan over at our sister site The Next Platform wrote a fantastic in-depth analysis of the effect this latest AI hype is having on datacenter GPUs.…

Time for AWS and pals to start thinking about JVs? Cloud services providers that aren't based in Europe — like the Big Three — may have to team up with a cloud that is operated and maintained from the EU if they want ENISA's stamp of approval for handling sensitive data.…

Despite billions of dollars in profit, Satya Nadella points to those pesky 'macroeconomic uncertainties' Call it the endless drive to sate Wall Street types or sensible business planning in the face of a cooling economy – either way Microsoft says it will freeze the salaries of full-time employees this year.…

Official Cinnamon, Edubuntu reborn, and an updated Kylin The "Lunar Lobster" release of Ubuntu has welcomed two new official remixes, as well as the first updated Ubuntu Kylin in a year or so.…

But what about the Brits? A lawyer gives their take on the privacy minefield Analysis A new EU-US transatlantic data flow agreement is expected to be finalized by the spring of 2023. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework will enable the flow of personal data from "data exporters" in the EU to "data importers" in the US who have signed up to the agreement.…

He still gets paid 94 times what his median workers do It sucks to be Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's president and CEO, who could have made almost 25 million greenbacks in the latest financial year, but because of missed financial targets had to settle for a bit less.…

Wheels come off plan to explore Enceladus – in a good way Video The latest in high-concept automated space exploration tech from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory looks to have been screwed up and twisted – by design.…

Why sign up for ChatGPT when LLaMA and a multicore beast can do as well? Column This time last year the latest trend in computing became impossible to ignore: huge slabs of silicon with hundreds of billions of transistors – the inevitable consequence of another set of workarounds that kept Moore's Law from oblivion.…

Where feature phones remain prevalent, Spotify is not an option and the 'net is little use in an emergency India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has issued an advisory reminding mobile phone manufacturers they should include an FM radio tuner in their products.…

But it's up to NASA to approve a rescue mission. Cue Aerosmith Momentus and Astroscale, two startups specializing in space infrastructure and orbital debris, want to collaborate and help boost NASA's aging Hubble Space Telescope into a safe orbit.…

As protests roil, connectivity has been cut with no relief in sight Pakistan has blocked internet access across much of the country – perhaps indefinitely – as protests erupt over the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan.…

‘To further strengthen and diversify the supply chain’ which is just what India loves to hear Cisco announced on Wednesday it will start manufacturing some hardware in India.…

WebGPU, Chrome extensions, Android, Dart, Flutter, and more Google's developer keynote at its IO show on Wednesday focused on Android and on web technology, which suddenly looks much more capable thanks to WebGPU, an API that allows web applications to tap into local GPU hardware.…

30 days with three other people in a double-width shipping container built by a crypto billionaire. What's not to like? Aerospace startup Vast has announced plans to launch the world's first commercial space station atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.…

Just a small experiment – for now? YouTube has begun showing a pop-up to some viewers warning them that "ad blockers are not allowed" on the video-sharing site.…

We sat through the Chocolate Factory's PR blitz so you don't have to At its downsized developer conference on Wednesday, Google showed off present and planned Pixel hardware – a foldable Pixel among them – and PaLM 2, a large language model that follows in the footsteps of last year's initial Pathways Language Model (PaLM) and now whispers to various Google products.…

Workers slam 'horrendous' handling of layoffs that left even 'engineering managers in the dark' Exclusive Software supply chain management biz Sonatype has laid off 14 percent of its global workforce, according to internal documents seen by The Register.…

Updates said to be rolling out now... if your gateway hasn't already bricked itself An expired security certificate is threatening to wreak havoc with Cisco customers' wide-area networks. For a change, turning the equipment off and back on again will only make things worse.…

Teams gets a bot, OneNote gets a bot, PowerPoint gets a bot, Outlook gets a bot, everybody* gets a bot! Two months ago, Microsoft sprinkled AI-powered Copilot-branded features all over its 365 cloud service, and worked with 20 enterprises including Goodyear, General Motors, and Chevron to get feedback on the digital assistants and work out some of the kinks.…

Its 20,000-node cluster uses outdated MariaDB – for very good reasons Established 80 years ago this year, Los Alamos National Labs remains most famous for its central role in developing the first atomic bomb. But that belies the breadth of scientific research it has undertaken since, encompassing physics, chemistry and biology, and addressing the threat of COVID-19.…

We'll believe our DMs are encrypted when someone provides proof, thanks Twitter has rolled out some quality of life updates for direct messages on the platform, and CEO Elon Musk reckons the site is to start encrypting DMs, beginning today, without providing proof that's the case.…

Build your own ‘golden images’ and then connect 'em to more stuff, says Microsoft Microsoft has introduced customization capabilities in Azure designed to make it easier for developers and admins to mold their projects to their will.…

Some say return to the office is a soft layoff, others blame Gen Z Less than three years after an exec promised the majority of Dell staff would forever work mostly from home, the company has called workers back into the office for at least three out of five days per week.…

Play designed to swat CockroachDB and tempt users over from hyperscaler DBaaS systems MariaDB is previewing a PostgreSQL-compatible front end in its SkySQL Database-as-a-Service which provides a globally distributed RDBMS on the back end.…

Admits to cyberstalking, wire fraud charges as Feds take $700k off him A 23-year-old British citizen has confessed to "multiple schemes" involving computer crimes, including playing a part in the July 2020 Twitter attack that saw the accounts of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, and former President Barack Obama hijacked by an unidentified crew.…

Employees are wasting literal days on meetings and email – but in rides AI like a knight in shining armor, right? As an eminent producer of "workplace productivity" tools, Microsoft is well placed to understand how they are used thanks to its data-harvesting proclivities.…

Analyst says expense 'no small drop in ocean' but reputational damage could be 'far greater' Britain's leaky outsourcing behemoth Capita is warning investors that the clean-up bill for its recent digital break-in will cost up to £20 million ($25.24 million).…

Global investment company KKR picks up CoolIT Systems for $270M Liquid cooling has become a hot topic as processors and other datacenter kit consume ever more power and generate more heat that needs to be dissipated. Yet perhaps the clearest sign that the tech is set to become a growth area is when investors start throwing their money around.…

Building a wall... of code The UK's Home Office has awarded a £37 million ($46.6 million) tech contract to Capgemini for its borders and immigration management as the services strive to recover from past failings.…

Wait... what? Confidential computing will become the standard for all tasks rather than a specialized feature used for certain sensitive workloads, and Mark Russinovich, Microsoft's Azure CTO, has hailed it as "the future of advertising."…

Stuck in the middle or not, supply chains – and the Korean economy – must carry on South Korean chipmakers believe they are likely to receive a waiver on US semiconductor tool related sanctions for an undisclosed period, according to the country's industry minister Lee Chang-yang.…

Switchzilla takes a stab at inclusive language. Sorry, that should be 'makes a first pass' If you like this story, don't say it blows you away. And if you don't like it, please don't give your correspondent a kicking.…

To make matters worse, other bits of the same region have wobbled Two weeks after the unwelcome "water intrusion" inside a Parisian Google Cloud datacenter, the stricken facility remains offline – with no indication when it might resume operations.…

Fujitsu in the frame for foul up with government document dispersal app Japan's minister for digital transformation and digital reform, Taro Kono, has apologized after a government app breached citizens' privacy.…

All these analysts know is that their gut says... maybe Comment Meta Platforms, Inc., which changed its name from Facebook two years ago to signal its commitment to the so-called metaverse, continues to insist that the vaunted digital environment has economic potential.…

Final Cut, Logic to land on fondleslabs – in subscription form Apple has finally seen fit to bring Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to its iPad range.…

Let's face it, Big Blue has plenty of experience in that area IBM has made it no secret that it believes AI will supplant workers, and during its annual Think event this week, the IT titan revealed how it plans to help enterprise managers do the same.…

On the plus side, this month's update batch is a bit smaller than usual Patch Tuesday May's Patch Tuesday brings some good and some bad news, and if you're a glass-half-full type, you'd lead off with Microsoft's relatively low number of security fixes: a mere 38.…

What's worse for humanity: The slow, cruel eradication of labor, or those square patties? Wendy's and Google have together built a chatbot for taking drive-thru orders, using large language models and generative AI.…

This could be the way to get HCI out of its ghetto Nutanix, which made its name with hyperconverged infrastructure that bundled compute and storage in single nodes, has decided the time is right to offer dedicated storage and compute nodes.…

Perseus to the rescue as Snake eats itself The FBI has cut off a network of Kremlin-controlled computers used to spread the Snake malware which, according to the Feds, has been used by Russia's FSB to steal sensitive documents from NATO members for almost two decades.…