The Register

Secretary worries about critical infrastructure being held to ransom In an address at the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday, secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas announced the department has created a task force to look for AI tools that can detect and defend against threats to national security – including those posed by China.…

Sapphire Rapids joins the fun, and there's even something for s390x users Developers of the open source machine emulator QEMU have hatched the project's 8.0 release.…

Also, Finland sentences CEO of breach company to prison (kind of), and this week's laundry list of critical vulns In Brief We thought it was probably the case when the news came out, but now it's been confirmed: The X_Trader supply chain attack behind the 3CX compromise last month wasn't confined to the telco developer.…

Preps for Intel's Meteor Lake, improves support for Chinese RISC-V silicon, and gets to the starting line with a racing wheel Linux 6.3 has arrived after a push that project boss Linus Torvalds characterized as "a nice, controlled release cycle" that required the seven release candidates he prefers and was supported by helpful developer behavior.…

Redmond wants you using Cloud PCs instead because they offer a better sustainability story At first flush it's an utterly bizarre argument for Microsoft to endorse, but the PC operating system giant has floated the idea that businesses buy fewer PCs.…

ALSO: Australia says offensive hacking is working; DJI hit with $279m patent suit; Philippines Police leak data; and more Asia In Brief Chinese scientists have estimated the mass of the Milky Way.…

Goodbye RHESSI, thanks for all the data NASA's defunct RHESSI solar flare satellite plummeted into Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated over the Sahara desert this week, the Department of Defense confirmed. …

Another cyber nuisance in support of Putin's war, nothing too serious Europe's air-traffic agency appears to be the latest target in pro-Russian miscreants' attempts to disrupt air travel.…

A welcome development, but let's not overdo it Chip maker TSMC in collaboration with ARK Power on Friday said it intended to source 20,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity from solar power.…

Laugh while you can, UK residents – you've got a nationwide emergency alert system test this weekend Florida residents – and a lot of them, in all likelihood – were awoken at 0445 local time on Thursday morning by an emergency alert. To make matters worse, it wasn't even a real emergency, just an incorrectly sent test.…

Redmond tops industry average, still got a way to go Microsoft has partnered with organizations around the globe to bring more women into infosec roles, though the devil is in the details.…

We're trying to run a chip business here Taiwan is keen for the US to scale back on its anti-China stance amid concerns that scare stories about the dangers of relying on chips made on the island nation are harming the country's business interests.…

Letting the calendar cycle for 45 years gives each planet a chance to complete a synodic cycle A pair of researchers claim to have deciphered one of the most mysterious of the Mayan calendars, which they believe represents a 45-year cycle of our neighboring planets. …

Next stop, Euro human rights court? UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch is running out of options in his efforts to avoid extradition to the US to face wire and securities fraud, conspiracy, and similar charges in connection with the $11 billion sale in 2011 of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.…

That's news to some as analysts claim on-prem will be here for the foreseeable SAP is telling investors that customers' migration to the cloud is only a matter of when – not if – despite evidence to the contrary from users, analysts, and other third parties.…

Agrees to pay $8 monthly sub for LeBron James, Shatner and Stephen King but others? Nope In the same day that Elon Musk’s Twitter snubbed the Pope by removing his legacy blue tick despite personally paying for some celebrities to keep theirs, the billionaire’s personal fortune shrank by the biggest amount this year.…

We node you want to test it out. (We're here all week.) Researchers waiting to get their hands on the much delayed Aurora supercomputer at the US Argonne National Laboratory now have a new toy at their disposal, a mini-Aurora codenamed Sunspot.…

Capgemini gets the job of saying goodbye to the Chocolate Factory The UK's Cabinet Office is to migrate away from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 — in line with the rest of central government — in a move set to cost up to £15 million in third-party project support alone.…

Some things should remain dead Comment This week witnessed the destructive potential of AI in action as someone thought it'd be a good idea to bring brainless Britpop bores Oasis back from the dead.…

Governments also have no theory on how nefarious groups might behave using the tech The proliferation of AI in weapon systems among non-state actors such as terrorist groups or mercenaries would be virtually impossible to stop, according to a hearing before UK Parliament.…

Why? Well, think of the children, of course An international group of law enforcement agencies are urging Meta not to standardize end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, which they say will harm their ability to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online.…

Palo Alto Networks spots suspicious activity spikes such as naughty domains, phishing, and worse ChatGPT fans need to adopt a "defensive mindset" because scammers have started using multiple methods to trick the bot's users into downloading malware or sharing sensitive information.…

Put the $26 million in the bag Video Hands up who wants to watch a CEO's mask of sanity crack. OK, roll the tape.…

Guessing the admin password is cool. Using it, even for good, is dangerous On Call It’s always twelve o’clock somewhere, the saying goes, but Friday comes around but once a week and only this day does The Register offer a fresh instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed tales of tech support torture and turmoil.…

Japan's Toyota, Honda, and Nissan, are already pondering what it takes to make a MoonMobile Hyundai Motor Group announced on Thursday that it has begun building a lunar exploration rover in partnership with major Korean research institutes, and hopes to launch it to the moon in 2027.…

Assures advertisers 'guardrails' will stop anything bad from happening With the rise of ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google's Bard, generative AI is seemingly inescapable, and it will soon power many of the ads you see on the internet.…

LinuxONE servers come to the Big Blue cloud IBM has taken a longer-than-usual stride towards making its proprietary hardware platforms cloudier, by offering bare metal LinuxONE boxes in the big blue cloud.…

Compares three-year development push to a famous battle that saw Communist forces triumph Huawei has announced it created a homegrown ERP in just three years, and that the app now runs its entire business flawlessly.…

Boffins warn of risks from chatbot model that, Dunning–Kruger style, fails to catch its own bad advice ChatGPT, OpenAI's large language model for chatbots, not only produces mostly insecure code but also fails to alert users to its inadequacies despite being capable of pointing out its shortcomings.…

Has found no evidence of alien tech or objects that defy the known laws of physics The Pentagon's recently-established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) - set up to investigate unidentified flying objects - has not found any evidence of aliens in its analysis, its director has said.…

Great minds in tech come together to solve hard problems – such as, why did anyone think Bard was a good name? Google Brain and DeepMind are merging to form a new unit named, predictably enough, Google DeepMind to accelerate the development of general AI, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai argued on Thursday. …

You may be all a Flutter over the installer Ubuntu 23.04, codenamed Lunar Lobster, has crawled out of beta and onto public release today.…

Martin, for it is him, tells El Reg: 'We've looked around for a real LLM-powered chatbot' Just because you're banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life, that doesn't mean you can't launch a medical chatbot to dispense advice.…

It's better than a one-way trip to the Graveyard Google might have a history of killing useful products, but its Fi mobile service has survived seven years and, as of today, a third rebranding.…

It’s not the caching. There’s no way it’s the caching. It was the caching Final update Microsoft is investigating an issue that is keeping some users from being able to fully use the Microsoft 365 cloud service and Teams admin centers on Thursday.…

Plus: Musk threatens lawsuit, claims Redmond trained models 'illegally using Twitter data' Opinion "Is Elon on crack? I'm not paying $42K PER MONTH for Twitter API access." These were the words of a Reddit user last night when it emerged that this was indeed the starting price for any more than zero pull requests on the "cheap" tier. Microsoft also swiftly erased Twitter access from its Ads platform with CEO Elon Musk then threatening to sue it for training "illegally using Twitter data."…

It'll also give staff career advice Keeping up with the must-have trend of 2023, Oracle has sprinkled a smattering of "AI" across its human capital and supply chain management applications.…

'Rapid unscheduled disassembly' could apply to much of Musk's world SpaceX's second attempt at getting the combined Starship and Super Heavy booster to orbit got further than its try earlier this week. That said, the two stages failed to separate, leading to yet another explosive end for a Starship flight.…

Admits criminals accessed 4% of servers from March 22 until it spotted them at month-end Business process outsourcing and tech services player Capita says there is proof that some customer data was scooped up by cyber baddies that broke into its systems late last month.…

The world's largest semiconductor contract manufacturer isn't immune to ongoing chip slump TSMC has posted mixed results for calendar Q1, representing a fall in revenue when reported in US dollars, although some analysts say the company exceeded lowered expectations in the current economic climate.…

Threat hunters traced it back to malware-laced Trading Technologies' software The supply-chain attack against 3CX last month was caused by an earlier supply-chain compromise of a different software firm — Trading Technologies — according to Mandiant, whose consulting crew was hired by 3CX to help the VoIP biz investigate the intrusion.…

Would you trust your life to the current generation of AIs? Yeah, we wouldn't either Comment Would you trust your life to an artificial intelligence?…

Faster GPUs don't mean much if you've got a network bottleneck Broadcom is aiming to capitalize on the AI-arms race with a switch chip tuned for large GPU clusters.…

There's a cost, and operators are worried it will fall on them As part of its 2035 energy targets, the EU wants the heating and cooling sector to be carbon-neutral, using renewable sources including waste heat from datacenters. Germany has gone even further and tried to mandate this with targets. How's it going?…

Are you still so keen to have generative AI write your emails, sales proposals, blog posts ... ? Problematic, racist, and pornographic web content is seemingly being used to train Google's large language models, despite efforts to filter out that strata of toxic and harmful text.…

The union doesn't fsck around Euro leaders officially opened the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) on Tuesday, an institution that will support the regulation of social media and search algorithms. …

But Dr Rachid Yazami, one of the key minds behind lithium-ion batteries, thinks this could be hot air The world’s top EV battery maker, China's Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), announced on Wednesday a battery it believes boasts sufficient energy density to power electric airplanes.…

Felt it was on the right side of the law when shipping seven million drives worth $1.1 billion. Oops The United States Department of Commerce has fined Seagate $300 million for selling disk drives to Huawei, despite the Chinese company’s presence on its list of entities to which certain products can’t be sold without first securing a license.…

$730 million plan includes secure quantum comms, the sort of thing you need when you live next door to China India’s government has signed off on a ₹6003.65 crore ($730 million) plan to make the nation a quantum computing and communications power by the year 2031.…

Coughs up $725 million to settle class action that covers 244 million users In 2018, Facebook was sued multiple times for allegedly selling access to account holder data, contrary to privacy commitments.…