The Register

'This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process' says Choc Fact. No sh%t... About 10 percent of Alphabet's market value – some $120 billion – was wiped out this week after Google proudly presented Bard, its answer to Microsoft's next-gen AI offerings, and the system bungled a simple question.…

Evil code hits more than 3,800 servers globally, according to the Feds The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a recovery script to help companies whose servers were scrambled in the recent ESXiArgs ransomware outbreak.…

Putting theory into practice, hopefully without a lithium fire As researchers continue to debate the merits of turning old electric vehicle batteries into energy storage for renewables like solar and wind, a California startup says it has already built out a facility to do just that.…

Competition and Markets Authority isn't buying promises of equal access to Call of Duty The UK's competition watchdog is throwing more water on Microsoft's controversial $69 billion bid for Activision Blizzard, saying an acquisition could hit gamers with higher prices and fewer choices.…

If you were hoping for more info about the ChatGPT competitor, keep hoping Not to be outdone by Microsoft's announcement of new AI-powered search features coming to Bing, Google held an event today to show off some of its own moves to embed AI into search.…

Euro players are not happy about US green tech subsidies... and everybody's worried about China The US and Europe could be moving towards another area of cooperation, this time over critical minerals needed for electric vehicles and other technologies, with the creation of a de facto free-trade status for such resources.…

What would possess a nonprofit to go after Mark Zuckerberg's empire? Dfinity Foundation's lawsuit against Meta over their logos is probably the most publicity the "infinite blockchain" outfit has received, but the extra attention is over for now after a judge dismissed the complaint with prejudice.…

Torrenting is still a thing, it still works, and if streaming vendors get mean, it's still an option Version 4 of the most widely used FOSS BitTorrent client is here, and it's worth a look if you have any difficulties with streaming media services.…

Growing indication power-sipping CPUs are catching on in crowded datacenters Three major hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – deliver as much as 5 percent of the world's computing power using Arm CPUs.…

Demand to display wallet full of coin facilitated mystery heist Ahad Shams, the co-founder of Web3 metaverse gaming engine startup Webaverse, discovered in late November 2022 that someone had stolen $4 million of his cryptocurrency – during a real world interaction.…

GDPR rejig and Online Safety Bill concerns, semiconductor strategy basically sorted then. Right? Right? UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has used a reshuffle of his cabinet of ministers to also usher into existence a dedicated department to focus on science and technology policy for the country, although when that will happen wasn't immediately clear.…

Facebook parent could then offer that data to other advertising clients, complaint alleges Patients of Cedars-Sinai did not want third parties to target them with advertising that may be related to their medical conditions, a would-be class action lawsuit against the Los Angeles teaching hospital says.…

Meanwhile, Euro supercomputer project makes a call for developing an HPC ecosystem based on the architecture Analysis The RISC-V architecture looks set to become more prevalent in the high performance computing (HPC) sector, and could even become the dominant architecture, at least according to some technical experts in the field.…

As Google and Microsoft make us all AI consumers, remember that to err is human, but to really mess things up at scale takes a computer Opinion There is an old saying: when giants fight, it is the grass that suffers. For us little people watching, there is little to do but run for cover and grab the popcorn.…

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should Video Stripping down operating systems to run on old, forgotten, or low-end hardware is nothing new, and has spawned a whole community of Linux aficionados. But what about full-fat Windows 11?…

Suomi sentence expected for shrink records theft French police have arrested a 25-year-old Finnish man accused of hacking a psychotherapy clinic, stealing more than 22,000 patients' therapy notes, demanding ransom payments from them and also leaking this very private info on a Tor website.…

So much for the workers' paradise: Big Tech gives its discards months of severance pay Adding insult to injury, staff laid off by Chinese memory-maker Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YTMC) not only lost their jobs, but were evicted from their company-subsidized apartments in Wuhan, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin.…

Technical paper says blockchain probably isn't up to the job The Bank of England and HM Treasury have declared the UK will probably need a digital version of the pound at some point, and commenced a consultation process to advance plans for the currency so the nation is prepared if a decision is taken to greenlight what's jokingly been called "Britcoin".…

Modems and pagers soon to beep their last, ATM switches on the outer too China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology tolled the bell on Monday for network access reforms that will mean the end for some well-loved but arguably obsolete communications technologies.…

At least those who live in Phoenix and Atlanta Google is more likely to push ads for fake abortion clinics toward lower-income women in two major US cities in states that ban the procedure after six weeks, such as in the contested case in Georgia, and 15 weeks for Arizona, according to research by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) .…

CEO admits hyper-growth during pandemic was careless Video chat outfit Zoom has "made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15 percent and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues" – and communicated it in an email.…

Meta said it plans to close deal soon The Federal Trade Commission will not appeal a court decision approving Meta's acquisition of virtual reality fitness biz Within, paving the way for the deal to finally close.…

Maker of voice changing software says it has removed GPLv3 code "to alleviate any doubt" Voice.ai, maker of a voice-changing SDK and similar apps on several platforms, proclaims its commitment to ethics on its website.…

Redmond thinks OpenAI can be secret sauce to beat Google Microsoft has announced new AI chatbot-powered search features supporting its search engine Bing and the browser Edge on Tuesday, promising to revamp the way netizens surf information on the internet. …

First Bitcoin, next bit barns? Unlikely In a letter to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Monday a small group of Democrats called on the agency to enact policies designed to force US crypto-mining operations to report their annual energy consumption.…

When grep isn't good enough, try Blackbird GitHub has a lot of code to search – more than 200 million repositories – and says last November's beta version of a search engine optimized for source code that has caused a "flurry of innovation."…

NOTAM chance in hell this stuff is getting sorted soon despite outage The aging computer system that was behind the grounding of flights across the US last month will need until 2030 to be fully upgraded, the Federal Aviation Administration said, leaving US government leaders questioning why.…

Great: Fewer paywalls. Not great: Long-term funding is still a question Academic publisher the MIT Press has announced a new initiative to move from subscription-funded journals to open-access papers that are free of charge.…

You're a high-risk worker who wants access to that file? Computer says no Microsoft is adding a machine learning-based technology to its Purview data governance tool, hoping to appeal to customers who are worried about insider security risks.…

The big get bigger Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services slowed in the fourth quarter of 2022, but that didn't stop the big three platforms from taking two-thirds of the entire market.…

New entry-level firewalls to follow Fortinet this week unveiled a custom ASIC it says will power its next-generation of firewalls debuting later this year.…

Lawmakers said to be trying to align on the basics by 'early March' The EU's upcoming artificial intelligence legislation will define how the world regulates AI, warned GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who thinks open source developers should be exempted from the AI Act.…

Lessons learned could be applied to a next-gen fighter, says company Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), a core company within Japan's Mitsubishi Group, announced on Tuesday that it was finally killing its regional aircraft, the SpaceJet.…

Meanwhile, parent company continues to bleed billions Arm is claiming strong royalty and licensing growth for the last quarter of 2022, plus revenue growth in all its target markets, while parent SoftBank reports another quarterly loss due to the volatile tech sector.…

We're down to Microsoft 364 again by first week of February If you sat down to work this morning and attempted to do something as routine as check your emails with Outlook, you'd be bang out of luck.…

You may have already known this... but did you know you'll lose data migration unless you switch to paid? Microsoft will officially kill its legacy free Teams app for business, Teams Free (classic), on April 12, with all chats, files and other data lost unless you switch to a paid version.…

Work on a Gecko-based version of Firefox for iOS is underway, again Updated Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS.…

German and Dutch authorities say the app was a favorite of organized criminals and drug smugglers An encrypted messaging service that has been on law enforcement's radar since a 2019 raid on an old NATO bunker has been shut down after a sweeping series of raids across Europe last week. …

Probably bilingual bot will be called ERNIE outside China, Wenxin Yiyan within Chinese web giant Baidu, which has “AI” in its name and has made AI the focus of its hyperscale cloud, has revealed it will launch a generative AI chatbot later this year.…

And a few non-Chinese lending apps that appear to have been scooped by accident India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has commenced the process to ban and block 138 betting apps and 94 loan lending apps with Chinese links, but has drawn criticism for a lack of transparency and the inclusion of several non-Chinese platforms.…

Cabinet committee gets to find a solution after years of bans didn’t achieve a lot Pakistan’s years-long whack-a-mole attempts to prevent its citizens seeing some content online gone up a level, after the nation’s prime minister intervened to overturn a fresh ban on Wikipedia.…

‘Food does not change no matter what bowl it is served in’ says regulator South Korea’s Financial Services Commission yesterday revealed plans to regulate crypto assets as if they are securities.…

Best to revisit that plan to bring home a cheap OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, or Realme handset from your holiday Don't buy an Android phone in China, boffins have warned, as they come crammed with preinstalled apps transmitting privacy-sensitive data to third-party domains without consent or notice.…

Creepy developer offers evasive apps that track victims, crack their cloud storage, enable harassment and worse A New York man who developed several stalkerware apps has been ordered to pay $410,000 in civil fines to settle a court case against him, and must modify the apps to let people know they are being monitored.…

'The text we generated was a mistake, we are super embarrassed' Video The Seinfeld spoof Nothing, Forever - a sitcom developed using generative AI - has been temporarily banned on Twitch after one of the characters accidentally spewed transphobic profanities.…

'Perils of the job' we're told A top US cyber diplomat said his Twitter account was compromised over the weekend.…

Competition for AI-powered search between Microsoft and Google heats up On Monday, Google unveiled an AI chatbot, Bard, that will be integrated into its search engine soon in the face of rising competition from Microsoft's Bing and OpenAI's ChatGPT.…

And not the green hydrogen kind Unable to get the power it needs to feed its growing datacenter footprint, Amazon plans to transition some of its Oregon datacenters over to natural gas fuel cells.…

Put pro-Putin bots on the do not call list A free tool aims is helping organizations defend against KillNet distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) bots and comes as the US government issued a warning that the Russian cybercrime gang is stepping up its network flooding attacks against hospitals and health clinics.…

Data sovereignty – the Windows maker has heard of it Microsoft is continuing to change how diagnostic data from Windows devices is processed and controlled to keep its place in the European market amid stringent privacy and security regulations.…