The Register

They go down, down, down, with the burning pull of gravity ... or do they? Astronomers will direct NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to peer at Saturn in an attempt to discern when its iconic rings might vanish.…

Dare we say that's a master stroke Smut surfers in Utah are facing disappointment if attempting to visit Pornhub lately. Rather than their planned, er, viewing, they're instead greeted with a video informing them all access to the site has been blocked within their state.…

This top-drawer AI tech has a major science-fiction habit Boffins at the University of California, Berkeley, have delved into the undisclosed depths of OpenAI's ChatGPT and the GPT-4 large language model at its heart, and found they're trained on text from copyrighted books.…

Maybe you're just installing it wrong? Apple on Monday pushed to some iPhones and Macs its first-ever rapid security fix.…

Oracle and Apache holes also on Uncle Sam's list of big bad abused bugs The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is adding three more flaws to its list of known-exploited vulnerabilities, including one involving TP-Link routers that is being targeted by the operators of the notorious Mirai botnet.…

Student app maker says it's 'not a sky falling thing,' customizes own LLM just in case Chegg's stock price plummeted 49 per cent on Tuesday, wiping nearly $1 billion off its market valuation, after the education technology biz blamed a slowdown in subscriptions on ChatGPT.…

We moved fast and broke things, people got harassed and murdered, so let's revisit privacy Apple and Google have come together to develop an industry specification to prevent "unwanted tracking," otherwise known as stalking, via Bluetooth location tracking tags.…

US tells criminals it 'will find you' and has a particular set of skills In an international operation 288 people have been arrested across the US, Europe and South America after allegedly selling opioids on the now-shuttered Monopoly Market dark web drug trafficking marketplace, according to US and European law enforcement.…

World's largest semiconductor contract manufacturer also gives details on 3nm nodes Taiwanese chip manufacturing behemoth TSMC has given an update on its process technologies, indicating that it is still on track to start production of 2nm chips in 2025, and expanding its 3nm portfolio to include nodes optimized for high performance computing (HPC) and another aimed at automotive applications.…

It's now easier to whip up the conversational tool of your HR department's dreams Developers who want to create their own chatbot are getting help from Microsoft, a company itself deeply mired in AI and large language models (LLMs).…

NEPA was violated by letting SpaceX do its own impact study, suit alleges A group of environmental nonprofits and an indigenous nation have sued America's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over the fallout from SpaceX's failed Starship launch last month.…

Others also blocked as company works on its own generative AI tech Samsung has imposed a "temporary" ban on generative AI tools like ChatGPT after what appears to be an accidental source code leak.…

Long-suffering Big Red customers 'may finally be ready,' says analyst EnterpriseDB, a support and services company for database PostgreSQL, has launched what it calls a "risk-free" approach to migrating applications from Oracle's database to the open source relational system.…

Entertaining offers from 'untrusted suppliers' could cause damage, according to US and EU envoys The Malaysian government has reportedly been warned against allowing Huawei a role in the country's 5G network rollout by the EU and US amidst continuing efforts to limit the influence of Chinese technology companies.…

Ransoms, investigations, and breach-related lawsuits are hitting companies in the wallet, law firm says Data loss – particularly from ransomware attacks – has always been a costly proposition for enterprises. However, the price organizations have to pay is going up, not only in terms of the ransom demanded but also for the cost of investigating attacks and the lawsuits that increasingly follow in the wake of such breaches.…

Issues remain in the costs for development and quality assurance in the cloud Nearly half of SAP users in its German-speaking heartlands are either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the software giant’s cloud pricing strategy, according to the latest survey.…

Brit regulator is merely heeding the Call of Duty Opinion If IT was a perfume market, there'd be little to touch Petulance du Big Tech for a strong and unmistakable fragrance. Amid overtones of sour grapes and crocodile tears, the bitter almonds of injured innocence and aromatic arrogance linger long on the nose.…

Software vendors and the EU weren’t interested, so giving it away became the best option The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Sunday celebrated the 30th anniversary of releasing the World Wide Web into the public domain.…

Nasty emails designed to infect systems with info-stealing malware The Kremlin-backed threat group APT28 is flooding Ukrainian government agencies with email messages about bogus Windows updates in the hope of dropping malware that will exfiltrate system data.…

Thousands of back-office jobs to go as Big Blue replaces them with brainboxes For decades, IBM's slogan has been a single word: "Think". Now its CEO wants to replace thousands of human workers with AI.…

What else are you going to do while waiting for it to charge? What are you going to do in the 90-odd minutes it takes to charge your electric car?…

119,000 instances of homeland snooping as the power to do so comes under review Warrantless searches of US residents' communications by the FBI dropped sharply last year – from about 3.4 million in 2021 to 119,383 in 2022, according to Uncle Sam.…

The 1990s are back, baby Microsoft plans to make web links in the Outlook for Windows app and Teams open by default in its Edge browser, regardless of the default browser chosen in Windows Settings.…

NewsGuard finds 49 websites spewing robo-written garbage to scoop ad money Makers of the content rating tool NewsGuard warned on Monday that "a new generation of content farms is on the way" after it found 49 news sites publishing content that appears to be completely fabricated by AI.…

'Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary' Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in machine learning who is best-known for his research of neural networks, has resigned from Google to speak freely about the dangers of AI.…

You want this to go faster? OK, send in the contractors. That'll do the trick The US government's hypersonic weapons programs may have been lagging behind international rivals, but at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, there's a plan to accelerate the process by opening its doors to hundreds of contractors who've previously not been allowed inside the secure facility. What could possibly go wrong?…

Gee, you mean that surge to 800,000 applications in one year isn't entirely legit? Shocking The US has seen a surge in employers making multiple H-1B visa registrations to bring skilled foreign workers into the country, a trend that authorities fear reflects rising immigration fraud.…

Qualcomm acquisition dodges one bullet, Arm still coming for blood Apple has abandoned its lawsuit against its former chief chip architect Gerard Williams, just over three years after accusing him of breaching his contract to found Arm-compatible chipmaker Nuvia.…

Patient data 'was and is never endangered', says medical tech slinger German IT services provider Bitmarck has shut down all of its customer and internal systems, including entire datacenters in some cases, following a cyberattack. …

But don't toss out your silicon chips quite yet Talk about branching out: Swedish researchers have built what they claim is the world's first wooden transistor.…

Security posture management gets its due at RSA RSA Conference When talking about the idea behind security posture management in today's enterprises, Yotam Segev looks a few hundred years into the past.…

Ashlee Vance's When the Heavens Went on Sale paints an inside view of orbital startups Book review First, a disclaimer: Ashlee Vance worked for The Register in the early noughties. But he's also the chap who literally wrote the book on Elon Musk and has a new tome on the private space industry, When the Heavens Went on Sale, that's definitely food for thought.…

Also: Your Salesforce Community site might be leaking; a new CPU side-channel; and this week's critical vunls in brief You may have heard news this week that Google is finally updating its authenticator app to add Google account synchronization. Before you rush to ensure your two-factor secrets are safe in the event you lose your device, take heed: The sync process isn't end-to-end encrypted.…

Industry groups and biz aren't yet sold on reforms The European Commission late last week proposed rules governing patents on technical standards, ostensibly to ensure innovation, competition, and fair prices.…

There are pranks, and savage pranks, and this prank when the CTO and HR ganged up on a very stressed techie Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we call Who, Me? in which Reg readers can confess to the naughty or not-quite-competent things they did at work, knowing they will not be judged.…

Game benchmark suggests 'Ultra 5' could replace names like 'Core i5' Poll When Intel debuts its forthcoming Meteor Lake client processors, it could be the end of the chip giant's long-standing naming conventions for desktop and mobile processors.…

Watch the AI-generated anti-Biden advert from the GOP, and more In-brief European lawmakers recently added a clause to the AI Act – legislation proposed to regulate machine learning systems – requiring AI developers to disclose copyrighted data used to train their models.…

Japanese owner states float 'won’t have material impact,' suggesting small stake will be up for grabs Arm has secretly filed for a public listing that its owner, SoftBank, says will see the chip design firm remain a subsidiary.…

Combatting it is going to take more money. Lots of more money. China has 50 hackers for every one of the FBI's cyber-centric agents, the Bureau's director told a congressional committee last week.…

AWS adds Korean support; Singtel creates InfraCo; Philippines SIM registration drive extended Asia In Brief China's Zhurong rover may have succumbed to dusty solar panels, but while the robot explorer was operational it found potential evidence of water on Mars.…

Luckily CrowdStrike's CSO has a brighter outlook than we vultures RSA Conference The RSA Conference this year had a decidedly Black-Mirror-meets-modern-warfare feel to it, with AI permeating almost every session, and conversations about geopolitical threats happening as frequently as plans to meet for cocktails.…

Reg-turned-Bloomberg journo talks rockets, satellites, and more Interview Bloomberg journalist and former Register vulture Ashlee Vance has finished a five-year in-depth investigation into Earth's potentially multi-trillion-dollar private space industry, which will be published in the form of his upcoming book: When The Heavens Went On Sale.…

Time to shake, rattle, and roll the probe to remove pesky antenna pin A tiny pin stuck in place on ESA's Juice spacecraft may be preventing engineers from unfurling its 16-metre-long antenna as it zooms toward Jupiter.…

Joint site to produce low-power chips GlobalFoundries and STMicroelectronics will receive billions of euros in European funding to build a chip factory in Crolles, France.…

Rapid7 CSO Jaya Baloo on how to tackle this potential looming tech RSA Conference AI was all the rage at RSA Conference this year, though there was another tech buzzword that managed to make its presence felt: quantum computing, and the security threat those systems may or may not someday pose.…

Not today, AI RSA Conference Crooks are becoming more and more adept at using social engineering to hoodwink corporate executives into unwittingly helping the fiends break into organizations' networks — and it's not because the miscreants are using ChatGPT, according to folks at Kaspersky.…

Redmond ditches own line of mice, keyboards, webcams Microsoft is a brand synonymous with PCs, not just for its market-dominating Windows operating system, but also for the mice and keyboards we've used to interact with them over the past four decades.…

'Reject this capitalist logic' urges French legion within Linux slinger Exclusive Red Hat's decision to lay off around 800 people, or four percent of the company, has not only upset employees, it's fueled calls to unionize.…

Go on, Elon, tweet a meme, that'll straighten this all out Tesla broke US labor laws yet again, a watchdog concluded, this time not by suppressing labor organizing, but by prohibiting workplace discussion of wages and complaints, and blocking employees from appealing to higher-level managers. …

The Chinese tech giant has 'yet again increased investment in R&D' to make up for technology losses The first quarter of 2023 wasn't an easy one for Chinese tech giant Huawei, which saw its profits continue to plunge in the face of sanctions with sales largely stagnant, growing just 0.8 percent compared to the same quarter last year.…