The Register

Also, the FBI just admitted to bypassing warrants by buying cellphone location data, and this week's actionable items in brief Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's director Jen Easterly has been outspoken in her drive to bring more women into the security industry, and this year for International Women's Day her agency formalized that pledge by announcing a partnership with nonprofit Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS).…

Standards that cut across technology could help avoid confusing industry, MPs hear The UK government should create laws common to autonomous vehicles to avoid a patchwork approach to specific technologies, according to industry figures speaking to MPs.…

Any sufficiently stupid technology is indistinguishable from magical thinking Opinion Around the world, a vital technology is failing. Just as massive solar flares fry satellites and climate-change superstorms overwhelm flood defences, so a new surge of ridiculous IT-related events is burning out irony meters across the globe.…

Hardware, software, kitchen sink: it's all in there The UK government has launched the tendering process for an agreement set to be worth up to £12 billion ($14 billion) for the tech suppliers that make it onto the contract.…

A missed migration mitigated the mistake Who, me? Why hello, Monday! You beastly harbinger of another week of work and associated woes, which The Register each week welcomes with an instalment of “Who, Me?”, our reader-contributed tales of techies who make mistakes and mostly mollify their masters.…

Consultation for the long-awaited Digital India Act is finally under way although the draft law's still not been revealed India's government has started to consult some proposed details of its long-awaited Digital India Act, including a declaration that the bill needed a dedicated adjudicatory tool for offenses committed online.…

Some training in refreshed certification platform to be free, including short how-to vids Cisco will shortly open the doors of a new online training service called Cisco U.…

Vietnam, Malyasia, and Singapore roll out the welcome mat The Biden Administration's efforts to starve China's domestic semiconductor industry have reached an inflection point as allied nations join the cause.…

'I am the Chinese Communist Party. I will be with you forever' - Beijing's new propaganda vid says the quite part out loud The Cyberspace Administration of China has continued its drive to clean up the internet, on Sunday taking aim at the behaviours of independently operated content producing accounts on sites like Weibo and WeChat, known as “self-media.”…

Plus: DuckDuckGo launches its own AI web search chatbot, and more In-brief GPT-4, the long-awaited successor to OpenAI's generative models will be unveiled next week, according to Microsoft.…

‘Wouldn’t be profitable, or exist, if our products were 100% on AWS’ Singaporean search engine optimisation tools vendor Ahrefs has claimed that keeping its infrastructure on-premises, rather than using Amazon Web Services, will save it $400 million over three years.…

Feds say this won’t cost taxpayers a dime Customers of collapsed startup-centric Silicon Valley Bank will be able to access their deposits on Monday, US authorities announced on Sunday.…

PLUS: Singapore tests AWS quantum network; Honda bulks autonomous truck; India tightens crypto laws; and more Asia In Brief The president of Indian tech services giant Infosys has left to join rival Tech Mahindra as CEO.…

Luckily this rock is only about the size of the Arc de Triomphe, let alone the 600-to-1 chance Astronomers have another near-Earth object on their ones-to-watch lists: a newly discovered 50-metre-wide asteroid that could hit Earth on Valentine's Day ... in 2046. …

Caveats apply, your mileage may vary Python is among the one of the most popular programming languages, yet it's generally not the first choice when speed is required.…

Why do experiments and all that work when a model could just invent convincing data for you? Feature Generative AI poses interesting challenges for academic publishers tackling fraud in science papers as the technology shows the potential to fool human peer review.…

Or how you'll spend your copious free time running CP/M on a cheap computer There's more to inexpensive single-board computers than the Raspberry Pi. Some DIY projects are just for fun, but others also have immediate practical value – like a low-power, self-updating desk calendar.…

Where there's disaffected twits there's potential revenue, and Facebook parent smells blood – er, profit Not content to sit on the sidelines while Twitter falters, Facebook parent Meta is working on a text-focused competitor, based on the decentralized bones of fediverse favorite Mastodon.…

Stormy clouds ahead? Microsoft is bringing ChatGPT, with all its promises and shortcomings, to world-plus-dog as a cloud service in Azure.…

If your name's not on the entity list ... you're OK to do business with American companies The US is tightening the net on Chinese server maker Inspur after its addition to the entity list of proscribed businesses, taking aim at the company's affiliates that may not be explicitly covered by the ban.…

Times have changed and unwanted software on Windows is a rarity (unless you count Windows itself) Google is bidding adieu to an application that enabled Chrome users on Windows systems to get rid of unwanted software.…

Your boss owns you AND your home – is this Texas utopia? Comment Remember Elon Musk's "extremely hardcore" edict for staff who hoped to stay on at Twitter after his takeover? To some, this extended to sleeping on the office floor – and even then it didn't save their jobs.…

Building a watertight SoC? You'll have to go through IP-slinger now Rambus, perhaps best known for its patent litigation, has acquired the CryptoCell and CryptoIsland Root of Trust technology from Arm, and will be offering these as part of its own security IP portfolio in future.…

File under cost of doing business Blackbaud has agreed to pay $3 million to settle charges that it made misleading disclosures about a 2020 ransomware infection in which crooks stole more than a million files on around 13,000 of the cloud software slinger's customers.…

2023, just like 2008 Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was shut down on Friday by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation because it ran out of money.…

Gotta go fast! The growing popularity of generative AI and availability of smart features in virtualization platforms like VMware's vSphere will help to drive faster networking into enterprise servers in 2023.…

Singapore's central bank has a gloomy vision of the future According to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), trade barriers between US and China have resulted in geoeconomic fragmentation and will likely result in slower global growth and higher inflation.…

No DUV for you The Dutch government has formally joined US efforts to deny China access to equipment and software essential to expanding the Middle Kingdom's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.…

That's equivalent to 271 Big Blue workers IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna's 2022 financial package was a healthy $16.58 million – equivalent to the median pay for 271 of his employees.…

IQE says collapse in smartphone sales may wipe one-third off revenue in first half of 2023 Plunging demand for semiconductors is taking an obvious toll on the chip sector, and Brit compound semiconductor wafer maker IQE is warning of a serious dent in sales.…

Is Lenovo's fastest, thinnest, lightest flagship good at this sort of thing? Hands-on The Reg FOSS desk took Lenovo's new Alder Lake-powered executive laptop for a spin. It's a lovely machine… but with some significant limitations.…

Industry upstart preferred... for now Register Debate This week, Register readers debated the motion Graph databases do not provide a significant advantage over well-architected relational databases for most of the same use cases.…

Like so many of his promises, it's probably one he can't keep Opinion On February 21, Twitter god-king Elon Musk proclaimed "our algorithm is made open source next week." He added it wouldn't work well at first, "but it will improve rapidly!" That hasn't happened.…

Even a hundred-volt jolt couldn’t convince one of them that hardware was the problem On Call As Friday rolls around it's natural to feel a little low on energy. But this week's On-Call – The Register's weekly tale of tech support trauma – is positively crackling with electricity to pep you up before the weekend!…

Now drink your space juice It looks likely that the water on Earth is older than the Sun and the stuff we drink today probably isn't all that different than it was over 4.6 billion years ago when our star formed.…

It’s red, it’s fast, it packs 4th-gen Xeons and Nvidia RTX 6000s, and it looks like it’s been run over by a sports car Lenovo has updated its range of desktop workstations, given them fourth-gen Xeon CPUs, the ability to handle four Nvidia GPUs, and a grille designed by Aston Martin.…

Local clouds reportedly offering surprisingly cheap access to their banned comrades Chinese companies named by the US as prohibited from acquiring certain technologies are reportedly renting them instead from local cloud providers.…

Silicon Valley Bank sold billions in bonds as startups struggle, crypto-centric Silvergate Bank just gave up Two tech-centric financial services operations have hit trouble, giving confidence in the sector another kicking.…

Company CISO acknowledges compromise of a single customer's creds, says incident is contained The CISO of Swiss cybersecurity firm Acronis has acknowledged a breach of the company’s systems but stated the incident only impacted a single customer and that all other data remains safe.…

Religious non-profit allegedly hoovered up location data from dating apps to ID clerics A Catholic clergy conformance organization has reportedly been buying mobile app tracking data to identify gay priests, and providing that information to bishops around the US.…

Malware-seekers were diverted to the Feds, severing a Croatian connection International law enforcement agencies have claimed another victory over cyber criminals, after seizing the website, and taking down the infrastructure operated by crims linked to the NetWire remote access trojan (RAT).…

Inclusion is good business Microsoft offers an enormous portfolio of software and services, used by billions of people – a substantial proportion of the world's population. As a substantial number of people have accessibility needs, so too do Microsoft's customers. That's the impetus behind the software behemoth's Ability Summit – held this week for its 13th year.…

Engineers who contribute to public projects told to enroll Microsoft's GitHub code hosting biz plans to begin requiring developers who contribute to public projects secure their accounts using two-factor authentication (2FA) by Monday, March 13.…

Tells folks not to worry, it was very old and boring data AT&T has confirmed that miscreants had access to nine million of its wireless customers' account details after one of its vendor's networks suffered a security failure in January.…

Data for sale via dark web, Senate in line of fire, too Health data and other personal information of members of Congress and staff were stolen during a breach of servers run by DC Health Care Link and are now up for sale on the dark web.…

Cheap as chips? Not in this case Intel is looking to balance investments in technology with cost cutting to offset reduced revenue as it prepares to introduce a number of new production nodes over the next few years.…

It could be worse, at least Autopilot is ... oh If you needed another reminder that Tesla vehicles might not have the highest of quality control standards, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it is investigating steering wheels falling off of two low-mileage 2023 Tesla Model Ys. …

Notorious botnet starts spamming again after a three-month pause Emotet is back. After another months-long lull since a spate of attacks in November 2022, the notorious malware operation that has already survived a law enforcement takedown and various periods of inactivity began sending out malicious emails on Tuesday morning.…

In theory, this should reduce the number of servers needed to package apps VMware has turned to containerization to improve the performance of virtual desktops and apps.…

CTO warns chips and process technology must be designed together more closely thanks to Moore's Law AMD is talking up internal engineering advances as it looks forward to the introduction of its first hybrid CPU-GPU datacenter chip and more Epyc products, just as rival Intel confirms delays to its own GPU lineup.…