The Register

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.…

'Does have a somewhat Lapsus$ish feel' we're told The Medusa ransomware gang has put online what it claims is a massive leak of internal Microsoft materials, including Bing and Cortana source code.…

Chocolate Factory can afford some staples now, or? Six years after a jury decided otherwise, Google has convinced an appeals court to reverse a $20 million judgment against the web giant after Chrome infringed some patents.…

They give off less UV, but more is absorbed by their planets’ atmospheres, boffins tell life hunters Scientists hoping to narrow down the hunt for life outside of our solar system have hit on an indicator that may guide the search: metal.…

NSO and others are still out there, but pariahs find it hard to do business Analysis Israeli spyware shop QuaDream is reportedly shutting down due to financial troubles.…

Zuck's 'Year of Efficiency' starts with saving time not learning coworkers' names in case they're booted Meta Platforms began another round of layoffs on Wednesday, focused largely on employees in technical roles.…

When it rains, it pours, huh, Pat? Unhappy that IBM licensed chip-making know-how to Intel and foundry upstart Rapidus, GlobalFoundries today said it is suing Big Blue.…

Meanwhile, available data suggests biggest spenders have largely stayed away from Twitter 2.0, er... X Corp Updated Elon Musk took to the stage at an advertising conference yesterday to try to reassure attendees that Twitter was a safe place to serve ads, while also warning the biz won't bow to pressure from advertisers who want to dictate its behavior.…

A bot shows up to help with a problem. Hopefully that's not two problems now Australian collaborationware slinger Atlassian has licensed OpenAI's tech and sprinkled generative AI functionality on its flagship products.…

Publishing provenance possibly prevents problems Developers who use GitHub Actions to build software packages for the npm registry can now add a command flag that will publish details about the code's origin.…

A year after Europe, two years after Korea ... but it's all because of this CMA probe The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says Google has promised to allow developers in the country to use alternative payment options after investigating the tech giant's control over Google Play in-app purchases.…

Now here's Bill with the weather Do you know your APT28 from your Fancy Bear? Your Pawn Storm from your Swallowtail? Your IRON TWILIGHT from your SNAKEMACKEREL? If you said yes, GTFO because they are all allegedly the same thing.…

OVH joins AWS, Microsoft and others in saying customer deals not dead... they're just resting OVH has clipped financial targets to reflect the slowdown in growth rates across the sector already noted by rivals including AWS, Microsoft and Google, pointing the finger of blame at customers postponing projects.…

Dutch lithography giant doesn't see China curbs affecting business either While some in the semiconductor market are struggling, ASML, which produces chipmaking gear, has beaten its guidance for the first quarter as demand for its products exceeds capacity. The company also said it is still awaiting guidance on curbing sales to China.…

Deal done as UK.gov negotiates new £12 billion framework The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has awarded reseller Softcat a contract worth £249.7 million ($310 million) for a variety of Microsoft software.…

Weather forecasting mission to end on April, but Aeolus-2 is on the drawing board The European Space Agency will destroy its Aeolus wind-measuring satellite by sending it hurtling back into Earth's atmosphere with its remaining fuel shortly after it reaches the end of its mission on April 30. …

Revenues one third of 2018 peak as US and UK sanctions weigh heavy on Chinese biz Huawei’s latest financial results for UK operations bear the claw marks of devastating multi-year sanctions levied against it by the US government and the British administration’s efforts to expunge the Chinese vendor’s kit from local 5G networks.…

Unfortunately... Drivers the length of Great Britain will sympathize with residents of Canning Town in London who, until Sunday, were believed to host the deepest pothole in the country.…

Sundiver spacecraft could snap the first surface pics using solar lens It's time to stop hemming and hawing about the monetary and temporal costs of exploring the outer solar system and beyond, say an international group of boffins. We've all the materials we need to do it faster and cheaper by combining modern smallsats with solar sails, and the end result could be actual photographs of exoplanets.…

If all goes well, Europe will double its market share in a decade The European Union has finalized a €43 billion bid to bolster domestic semiconductor production.…

Is this the way to take China’s title as top tech manufacturer? Maybe yes, maybe no The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has delivered a damning verdict on India’s tech import tariffs, ruling they’re out of order and must end.…

vCentre will go straight to GA while vSphere still does a two-step tango VMware has debuted the first major update to version 8 of its flagship vSphere suite and tweaked the product release cycle for future releases.…

Manufacturer’s close ties to China match the party position, perhaps not the public mood Terry Gou, the founder and former CEO of Taiwanese contract manufacturing titan Hon Hai Precision Industry (aka Foxconn) is making a second attempt to become president and therefore head of state of the democracy.…

Another one bytes the dust Intel has quietly announced it will end sales of its cryptomining hardware chips, less than a year after entering the business.…

Also a bunch of Russians plus someone giving free trips to the Motherland Four US citizens have been accused of working on behalf of the Russian government to push pro-Kremlin propaganda and unduly influence elections in Florida.…

End of free money era and end of free data for building billion-dollar models In a move seemingly designed to stop being used as a free training library for large language models, megaforum Reddit said it's going to begin charging companies who make excessive use of its data-downloading API.…

Boris Eldagsen tells El Reg why he did it A photographer selected as a category winner of this year's international Sony Photography Awards has rejected the prize, saying his entry was actually generated using AI.…

Spying on foreign targets? That's our job! The UK and US governments have sounded the alarm on Russian intelligence targeting unpatched Cisco routers to deploy malware and carry out surveillance.…

Boffins foretell LLMs infiltrating finance and politics with confidently held views If you want a picture of the future, imagine asking a large language model for a prediction.…

Surprised there's no ChatGPT angle and that it's not called MalwareTotal Security researchers and analysts can now search Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Defender database using file hashes and URLs when pulling together information for network intrusion investigations and whatnot.…

'My computer locked up and a siren went off,' one mark tells Better Business Bureau Two execs and a multinational payment processing company must pay $650k to the US government, says the FTC, which accuses them of knowingly processing credit card payments for Microsoft-themed support scammers.…

More than a third of US states now party to the lawsuit, which aims to break up Chocolate Factory's advertising arm Nine additional states have signed on to a Department of Justice lawsuit against Google parent Alphabet for monopolizing digital ad sales, bringing the total number of states suing the search giant (in this case) to 17.…

US PIRG slams Google for selling schools short-lived, repair-resistant kit Updated Google Chromebooks expire too soon, saddling taxpayer-funded public schools with excessive expenses and inflicting unnecessary environmental damage, according to the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund.…

Chip designer has until September to float or it's on the hook for parent company's borrowing Brit chip designer Arm could be on the hook for an $8.5 billion loan made to its parent SoftBank if the company's initial public offering (IPO) is delayed or canceled.…

Latest £16.5 million Post Office deal among many deals awarded despite MPs' calls and ongoing investigation The UK Post Office’s latest decision to extend Fujitsu’s controversial £2.3 billion Horizon contract follows the award of £142 million in wider government work to the Japanese supplier since the statutory inquiry into the disastrous project was first announced.…

Officers didn't know software was saving personal data and neither did people on other end Several police forces in Britain are being put on the naughty step by the UK's data watchdog for using a calling app that recorded hundreds of thousands of phone conversations and illegally retained that data.…

Waning 5G deployments in response to economic uncertainty blamed Ericsson has reported calendar Q1 financial results largely in line with earlier forecasts, but repeated warnings of a rough ride ahead for the rest of 2023 as spending on 5G deployments slackens off in some regions.…

Plus: Signal, WhatsApp, and Viber also write online protest over Online Safety Bill back door The UK’s chartered institute for IT has slammed proposed legislation that could see the government open a “back door” to encrypted messaging.…

The average pay of how many human employees = one humanoid CEO? 91 Meta boss and human person Mark Zuckerberg was paid a nominal $1 in salary again in 2022 and took home no bonuses, yet he cost the company tens of millions in compensation to cover expenses including security and private jet travel.…

New CFO sees interesting in-tray at 20 percent year-on-year growth database company Database vendor MariaDB has cut a number of jobs and reiterated a "going concern" warning over its medium-term financial viability.…

Industry intervention alone can't deal with harassment Depriving online hate groups of network services - otherwise known as deplatforming - doesn't work very well, according to boffins based in the United Kingdom.…

No worries, outsourcer only handles government tech contracts worth billions Black Basta, the extortionists who claimed they were the ones who lately broke into Capita, have reportedly put up for sale sensitive details, including bank account information, addresses, and passport photos, stolen from the IT outsourcing giant.…

Rules proposed in EU AI Act are not enough to control 'very powerful AI' Legislators from the European Parliament believe new laws are needed to regulate general purpose AI systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, as the technology is unpredictable and progressing faster than expected.…

UK operators are sweating about price, Nordics chill thanks to low ambient temperatures European datacenter operators are finding it harder to secure reliable, cost-effective power, according to a report by British electricity biz Aggreko has asserted.…

Charges laid against 44, including officers of China’s Cyberspace Administration The United States Department of Justice has charged 44 people over schemes prosecutors allege were run by China’s National Police to silence opponents of the Communist Party of China.…