The Register

If Q1 was 'very solid,' what does a bad quarter look like? Electric truck maker Nikola had an absolutely dismal first quarter, leaving it to refocus its efforts by pausing production and backing out of a joint venture to produce vehicles in Europe. …

Mandatory measure against attackers who spam MFA folks into submission Microsoft is hoping to curb a growing threat to multi-factor authentication (MFA) by enforcing a number-matching step for those using Microsoft Authenticator push notifications when signing into services.…

Nearby system was thought to have an exoplanet, but that was wrong. Now NASA says there may be multiple The James Webb Space Telescope is stirring up more space mysteries with the discovery of an additional pair of debris belts around a young nearby star long believed to have only one.…

Why do this? Freeing up abandoned handles is 'important' Twitter will begin purging inactive accounts, owner Elon Musk has said, but the specifics are anyone's guess.…

Potential roles for IT pros and lawyers, European city location included Tired of working for an egomaniacal startup boss or dull enterprise biz? A new org has been proposed called the Tech Lab, where you'd investigate the worst kinds of surveillance by governments on their citizens. In which despotic state, you ask? Surprise! You could base yourself in any European city.…

hCaptcha researchers find that online labor platforms need work Online labor markets like Upwork have yet to formulate meaningful policies governing the use of generative AI tools to bid for and perform posted jobs. According to machine learning firm Intuition Machines, that lack of clarity is putting these platforms at risk.…

'Silent killer' Mark bags himself top medals in tournament Alleged human and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg won a little competition over the weekend.…

Analyst responds: perhaps not a fair fight as semiconductors cannot ever transition to 100% renewable Greenpeace and several other climate organizations have singled out TSMC for criticism, saying the world's largest semiconductor contract manufacturer needs to do more to reduce “its massive carbon footprint”.…

Basic InCareers app perfect candidate to be included in cost cutting Microsoft's social network for suits, LinkedIn, announced on Tuesday that its localized Chinese app is shutting down and the company is embarking on a layoff process.…

We chat to one of the Harvard Medical School researchers involved AI algorithms can screen for pancreatic cancer and predict whether patients will develop the disease up to three years before a human doctor can make the same diagnosis, according to research published in Nature on Monday.…

Delays to $1 billion replacement will see March 2024 contract deadline missed National Savings & Investment has extended its contract with French IT services and outsourcing provider Atos as the UK state-owned bank's struggle to find a replacement continues.…

Go, Team Robot Opinion Non-techies have discovered AI, and they're in a tizzy. A lot of that tizzy is about how AI is going to outsmart us in some sort of Hollywood dystopia, as deeply ironic as it is deeply wrong. The nature of LLMs isn't HAL-9000 self-awareness, but a giant predictive text machine. That in itself is both science and science fiction, where sufficient awareness of rules and distributions provides what science fiction calls working precognition or as physics has it, a working model.…

Here's hoping for fewer head-desk moments for devs GitHub's reworked Rust-based code search engine entered general availability on Monday, promising faster, more comprehensive explorations of software repositories.…

Retaliation or national security? Beijing sent a message to foreign businesses this week when it launched an investigation into Shanghai-based Capvision Partners on the grounds of national security, accusing the consultancy firm of failure to prevent espionage.…

If the goal was to make us feel sorry for these clumsy droids, mission accomplished Video Eggheads at Google's DeepMind have developed a deep learning curriculum that can teach robots how to play soccer badly – and it's wonderful to behold.…

'How did NASA do what they did in the 60s what they cannot do now?' The former director general of Russia's space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin has doubts as to whether NASA really landed astronauts on the Moon in its historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969.…

Prefers open peering – from which it profits Cloudflare has decided to oppose the European Union’s proposed network usage fees that would see generators of internet traffic required to help telcos pay for their network builds – but not for entirely altruistic reasons.…

One banned tool is already working on Android-to-Android meshes that survive internet outages India's government has reportedly banned 14 messaging apps on national security grounds, including some open source services.…

Show some ID or your Facebook feed might not make it across the border Vietnam's deputy minister of information and communications has indicated the nation will require all social media accounts to be registered – even those held on platforms run outside Vietnam but used within the country.…

Plus: Court-ordered domain seizures of DDoS-for-hire sites Intel is investigating reports that BootGuard private keys, used to protect PCs from hidden malware, were leaked when data belonging to Micro-Star International (MSI) was stolen and dumped online. …

Shareholders gotta get their dividends somehow, right? More layoffs may be imminent at Intel following the x86 giant's $2.8 billion Q1 loss.…

Which might explain what Qualcomm wants with Autotalks In the future vehicles will talk to each other, relaying key metrics between themselves, as they carry their passengers to their destinations – or so Qualcomm's automotive division hopes.…

Hard times for buyers of these hard drives Customer information was stolen from the IT systems of Western Digital in the March security breach we've previously reported, forcing the storage manufacturer to shut down its online store until at least next week.…

XSS marks the spot WordPress users with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on their website should upgrade after the discovery of a vulnerability in the code that could open up sites and their visitors to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.…

Perhaps one of the thousands of people laid off from the biz could have fixed it, just a thought Twitter has finally admitted a "security incident" caused some users' semi-private Twitter Circle tweets to show up on others' timelines.…

That kit ain't for chargin' your iPhone, Private! The US Army has long sought to give its soldiers a connected-tech edge, and has finally settled on a vendor to deliver a much needed piece of hardware to connect the various smart wearables it plans to field. …

Guess this'll have to do while we wait for *checks notes* ES 2025 Microsoft last year said that it was putting off the next version of Exchange Server until the second half of 2025 so engineers could continue bulking up the security of a product that has become a popular target of cybercriminals.…

Plus: Hollywood writers go on strike to fight against AI stealing their jobs, and more In brief Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris met with leaders from some of the top players in AI – Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic – this week to discuss AI safety risks as the government steps up efforts to regulate the technology.…

Anyone else heard of these microservices? The US Department of Labor is dipping its toes into a radical approach to software architecture for the nation's unemployment insurance (UI) systems: breaking down monolithic software systems into a bunch of modular services. …

Three power outages have hit NAIA in the past year. What was that about ramping up tourism? The replacement of an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) at the air traffic management center in a major airport in the Philippines will result in the entire country's airspace being shut down for two hours on May 17.…

Sometimes legacy systems must be preserved to safeguard a vital function. This was not one of those times who, me? Welcome once again dear reader, to the sanctuary of sympathy we call Who, Me? where tales of technical derring-do are shared alongside stories of derring-at-least-you-tried.…

Big i7 performance, tiny, tiny size Desktop Tourism Intel has delivered a fine mini-PC in the form of the NUC 13 Pro – but missed a trick to make a great one.…

Also, Capita's buckets are leaking, ransomware attackers deliver demands via emergency alert, and this week's critical vulns in brief We'd say you'll never guess which telco admitted to a security breakdown last week, but you totally will: T-Mobile US, and for the second time (so far) this year.…

PLUS: Smartphone sales slump in India, China; Singapore's Temasek denies crypto investment; Dyson's new battery plant; and more Asia In Brief Chinese state media on Monday announced the return to Earth of a reusable spacecraft after 276 days in orbit.…

Can't wait to see how these AI models hold up against a weekend of red-teaming by infosec's village people This year's DEF CON AI Village has invited hackers to show up, dive in, and find bugs and biases in large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others.…

It's time to take out the trash New York State Attorney General Letitia James has proposed a law that would ban cryptocurrency exchanges from trading their own tokens, which in turn might save folks from burning their fingers on erratic or errant assets and investments.…

Second time's a charm? An FTC lawsuit against Kochava, alleging the data broker harmed Americans by selling records of their whereabouts, has failed.…

Security hole ranks 9.8 out of 10 in severity, 0 out of 10 in patch availability There is a critical security flaw in a Cisco phone adapter, and the business technology giant says the only step to take is dumping the hardware and migrating to new kit.…

Dense debris left by Halley's Comet more than 3k years ago will produce more than 100 fireballs per hour The annual Halley's Comet-linked Eta Aquariid meteor shower will peak tonight and tomorrow, and for those able to see it, this year's show promises to be fantastic. …

Texas officials preach limited government ... but not this limited The city of Dallas, Texas, is working to restore city services following a ransomware attack that crippled its IT systems.…

Take it Huawei? Not if they don't think Feds will refund them FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel has warned US Congress that telco networks and service providers are not going to start projects to rip and replace kit made by ZTE and Huawei unless they are assured of federal reimbursement.…

Young mother only 10 million years old appears to have twins The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered evidence of planets emerging from a disk of dust and gas surrounding a young star nearly 200 light years from our solar system.…

IRIS² program aims to get the EU off other countries' infrastructure A bunch of European space and telecoms companies have banded together to answer the EU's call for a satellite constellation to guarantee "communications sovereignty" for the region.…

How to appease antitrust regulators by looking like you're doing something Microsoft is putting forward a plan to charge customers different prices for Office if it does or doesn’t come with Teams - the latest twist in its campaign to head off an EU antitrust probe at the pass.…

Putin FOSS to work when Microsoft et al abandoned pariah state Russia tops the global table for downloads of open source software over the last quarter, according to a survey tracking around 2,000 FOSS projects.…

Weeks after outsourcer admits 'cyber incident' more warnings issued Capita is telling pension customers that some data contained within its systems was potentially accessed when criminals broke into the outsourcing giant's tech infrastructure earlier this year.…

A preview of what Uranus Orbiter and Probe might find in the 2040s NASA revealed on Thursday that four of the largest moons of ice giant Uranus likely contain a layer of water beneath their surface.…

LLVM champ Chris Lattner is at the helm, so consider us intrigued Modular, an AI startup with above-average technical cred, has unveiled a programming language called Mojo that aspires to combine the usability of Python with the speed of C.…

National Savings & Investment contracting for massive tech deals as customers complain of 2FA failure Updated The UK National Savings and Investment bank is being bombarded with complaints over failing online security and authentication features which customers say have locked them out of their accounts.…

Jumping Jack had a gas, gas, gas when his wires crossed at the worst moment On Call The "P6 rule" states that Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. So as you prepare for the imminent weekend, The Register invites readers to run an eyeball over another edition of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support chores that involve another P – as in "going pear-shaped."…