The Register

We speak to the boffins behind latest trick to fool Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa Academics in the US have developed an attack dubbed NUIT, for Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan, that exploits vulnerabilities in smart device microphones and voice assistants to silently and remotely access smart phones and home devices.…

Reports suggest Beijing may speed past rivals with supersonic helper for its air superiority weapon China may be aiming to match US efforts to operate pilotless aircraft alongside crewed fighter jets, by creating a so-called "loyal wingman" drone to fly with the nation's J-20 supersonic stealth fighter.…

OpenAI tech outperforms digital serfs toiling away on Amazon's estate Machine learning models can do content processing and data sanitation work better and more affordably than people participating in crowdsourcing platforms, according to a trio of researchers.…

First for women, people of color, Canucks NASA today named the Artemis Moon program's first crew of astronauts. Among them are the first woman, the first person of color, and the first Canadian set to blast off on a lunar mission…

Never mind software supply chain attacks, lawyers are the new soft target? Uber has had more of its internal data stolen from a third party that suffered a security breach. This time, the personal info of the app's drivers was swiped by miscreants from the IT systems of law firm Genova Burns.…

Only 35 of the trucks affected, but that might be most of the ones on the road Tesla's electric Semi truck, which has only been cruising highways since December, is facing its first recall over a faulty parking brake. Unlike other issues, this one won't be fixable with an over-the-air update.…

Hope you're all looking forward to another cold war Comment For years, the United States has leveled waves of sanctions and export bans on Chinese firms in an effort to squelch the Middle Kingdom's fledgling semiconductor industry, all the while rallying allies.…

New layouts for the original 'clickier than the Model M' keyboard What's even harder-core than the IBM Model M? The Model F, the keyboard that launched alongside the IBM PC in 1981. After a 2017 relaunch, new models with the original layout are here.…

Tactical#Octopus: Don't let users click on that zip file The last few days of America's tax season are stressful enough, dealing with deadlines and, increasingly, online scams. Now comes another one, a sophisticated and ongoing phishing campaign by a threat group dubbed "Tactical#Octopus" that is using tax-related lures to spread malware.…

89% of citizens want them gone – at least among the 7.46% who showed up to vote Citizens of Paris voted on Sunday to ban e-scooters from the City of Love, and Mayor Anne Hidalgo responded by promising that the fleets of rechargeable rentables would be gone come September.…

Contracts could be duplicate and poorly conceived, accountability report finds The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) signed 39 percent of its IT contracts – representing billions of dollars in spending – without the approval of the chief information officer (CIO) between 2018 and 2021.…

Staff regain access to Microsoft apps, tech outsourcer still working to restore services for some Capita – everyone's favorite outsourcing badass – is still working to restore services for some customers after admitting the IT outage of certain services on Friday was caused by a cyber attack and efforts to contain the infiltration.…

Researchers hope their code will be used for images taken with the upcoming Vera C Rubin Observatory An AI algorithm can help astronomers deblur images snapped by ground-based telescopes more accurately and more quickly than traditional methods, according to the latest research.…

Seals are totally yesterday's news - the Navy's latest critter is a Gecko video Never mind seals, the US Navy is turning to geckos to improve its ship inspection capabilities. Much like their amphibiously named comrades, these robots are geckos in name – and wall-climbing capabilities – only. …

Platform balks at April 1 deadline, tweaks wording instead Following an announcement last month that Twitter would be "winding down" its "legacy verified program" on April 1, those lucky enough to possess a coveted blue tick waited for the symbol to disappear off their accounts over the weekend.…

Thinks info from internal systems 'obtained' by miscreant, unsure of nature or scope data Western Digital is today dealing with a "network security incident" after detecting a break-in into its internal systems by an unauthorized third party.…

Lesson we've learned from Ukraine Not all defense tech is bleeding-edge cyber — or kinetic — warfare tools. Sometimes the best defense is as boring as ... backups.…

The only winning move is not to play Opinion “Discoveries of which the people of the United States are not aware may affect the welfare of this nation in the near future.”…

Realization they'd burned money for ages led to smoldering solution rather than angry conflagration Who, Me? Welcome once again, dear reader, to Who, Me? – The Reg's weekly attempt to soften your re-entry into the harsh reality of the working week with tales of workplace mirth.…

'It's not unusual for VoIP apps' says CEO The CEO of VoiP software provider 3CX said his team tested its products in response to recent alerts notifying it of a supply chain attack, but assessed reports of a malware infestation were a false positive.…

Oz upstart promised jira.domain.com, now offers something.jira.domain.com Atlassian customers' eleven-year quest for custom domains continues, with the Australian upstart's proposed solution failing to satisfy.…

ALSO: Synopsys releases AI tools for faster chip design, and Cerebras open sources family of language models In brief A Google engineer reportedly quit after warning CEO Sundar Pichai that the company was wrong to train its AI search chatbot Bard on text generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT.…

To scupper scams, account-holders must hand over personal info or else Almost two million mobile phone subscribers in Vietnam are at risk of having their services severed, thanks to a new government policy that seeks to curb spam.…

Microsoft's cloudy pal 21Vianet upgrades to M365 China somehow, unbelievably, made it through the COVID-19 pandemic without a local version of Microsoft's Teams collaborationware app, but thankfully it won't have to face the next crisis similarly unarmed. On Saturday Microsoft 365 made its debut behind the Great Firewall.…

ALSO: DJI forgets the 'B' in 'BCC,' and this week's critical known exploits In Brief The principal of a Florida science and technology charter school has resigned after allegedly writing a $100,000 check to an Elon Musk impersonator using school funds.…

PLUS Japanese PM grilled by ChatGPT; Singapore slams bank outage; WeChat adds paid tier; and more Asia In Brief The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Sunday successfully flew and landed an autonomous reusable spaceplane.…

Latest rules stop short of naming you-know-who Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry plans to enact export restrictions on 23 technologies used in the production of semiconductors.…

Looking for leaky memory, and possibly revenge The Chinese government has opened an investigation into US memory vendor Micron citing national security risks.…

If the price looks too good to be true, it probably is Ukrainian cops have arrested two suspects and detained 10 others for their alleged roles in a cybercrime gang that used phishing scams and phony online marketplaces to steal more than $4.3 million from over 1,000 victims across Europe.…

Manifest V2 will die another day Back in December, Google postponed its Chrome Extensions shakeup because the project was unfinished and beset by bugs, after a previous schedule setback three months earlier.…

CEO on industry shifts that allow open source and smaller players to gain a footing Interview In December, MariaDB floated on the New York Stock Exchange via the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Angel Pond Holdings. With the move came $104 million in funding and $18 million through private investment in public equity.…

Earning that nickname all over again Capita, a major business and IT services provider that has scored multi-million-dollar contracts with several UK government agencies, confirmed some of its systems fell over today due to "an IT issue."…

Fresh installation image for the rolling-release edition of OpenMandriva The project known as OpenMandriva has released new installation images for its rolling-release edition, with the latest kernel and the latest KDE Plasma – among many other choices.…

Who watches the watchmen? The Office of the Inspector General Back in July 2020, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act into law, which required the New York Police Department to reveal how it uses surveillance technology and to formulate surveillance policies.…

Rain of icy and rocky debris from rings was initially dismissed as bad data The infall of icy debris from Saturn's rings is heating the planet's upper atmosphere, according to astronomers, who discovered the phenomenon among old data that was once considered noise.…

A new version of very old software for a very old, but very important, computer The LM-3 project has announced version 100, the last ever release of the system software for the MIT CADR Lisp Machine. So, both a new release and a very old one all at once.…

Perché siamo il Garante, e tu sei pazzo Italian privacy enforcers have opened an investigation into OpenAI's ChatGPT for allegedly violating EU and Italian privacy laws by collecting personal data of the country's citizens without "a suitable legal basis".…

Stop sniggering at the back. 'We're going to stick with it', says Nick Clegg. Unlike Disney Meta’s head of global affairs was wheeled out this week to say the Metaverse is still going be a thing in the future, soon after Disney – once an exponent of this brave new virtual world – ditched its own plans.…

But wait! There could be more litigation as VirnetX isn't giving up yet On Thursday an appeals court upheld a ruling in favor of Apple, in a $503 million patent case with Nevada-based security software and technology vendor VirnetX that has been ongoing for thirteen years.…

If you build it, the applications and services will come Sponsored Post Data gravity is commonly defined as the concept that, like a planet, data has mass. And the larger that mass becomes, the greater its gravitational pull so that applications and services become attracted to it.…

Expenses slashed as hopes dashed for UK space pioneer Virgin Orbit — the UK’s big hope for space launches — looks set to suspend operations indefinitely, cutting the majority of its staff and keeping 15 percent as it seeks eleventh hour funding.…

Juicy private sector job vs … money off a season travel ticket Given the importance of the Treasury department's function to Britain, Reg readers might expect the Head of Cyber Security vacancy currently being advertised would come with a salary that reflects its criticality.…

Ravi Mayuram on work to make life easier for devs while sprinkling a bit of SQL on top Interview Couchbase is a JSON document database with global users including PayPal, eBay, and travel distribution system Amadeus, companies with a combined revenue of nearly $40 billion. Its total annual income was $154.8 million, so why is such a small database outfit trusted by big biz?…

'Serious breach of trust' says ICO, 'stakes too high' for mistakes in cases like this In a classic email snafu NHS Highland sent messages to 37 patients infected with HIV and inadvertently used carbon copy (CC) instead of Blind Carbon Copy meaning the recipients could see each other’s email addresses.…

The chap who took the support call for the SEV-1 incident survived – just On Call With another working week almost behind us, The Register has found another tale to tell in our On-Call column – the home of reader-contributed stories of thankless tech support tasks.…

Winter is coming for NATO countries A cyber spy gang supporting Russia is targeting US elected officials and their staffers, in addition to European lawmakers, using unpatched Zimbra Collaboration software in two campaigns spotted by Proofpoint.…

Except maybe in America, where life expectancy keeps dropping Boffins working on a mathematical model to predict future human lifespans say that longevity records may be broken by 2060 – and the sky's the limit from there. They don't think we've even approached the ceiling of how long a well cared-for human can live. …

Snowden-esque 'Vulkan' dossier links Moscow firm to FSB, GRU, SRV An unidentified whistleblower has provided several media organizations with access to leaked documents from NTC Vulkan – a Moscow IT consultancy – that allegedly show how the firm supports Russia's military and intelligence agencies with cyber warfare tools.…

'BingBang' boo-boo affected other internal Microsoft apps, too An Azure Active Directory (AAD) misconfiguration by Microsoft in one of its own cloud-hosted applications could have allowed miscreants to subvert the IT giant's Bing search engine – even changing search results.…

AI policy wonks slam chatty hallucination-prone model in formal complaint The Center for AI and Digital Policy, a non-profit research organization, has urged America's Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI, claiming the upstart violated commerce laws by releasing GPT-4, a product the center believes deceives and puts folks at risk.…