The Register

Wrecking foreign infrastructure? But that's Team America's job! Register Kettle Lately, we've learned of Russia's stockpile of cyber-weapons, and we're genuinely wondering if anyone's surprised by these revelations.…

Promises 11% pay rise after almost a year of negotiations and strikes over salary and conditions Amid rampant inflation, spiraling costs and stagnant wages, there was little bandwidth for April Fools' this year when every day can feel like a bad joke.…

It starts with a headlamp and fake smart speaker, and ends in an injection attack and a vanished motor Automotive security experts say they have uncovered a method of car theft relying on direct access to the vehicle's system bus via a smart headlamp's wiring.…

CMA initiates price cap amid spiraling costs, Motorola Solutions to appeal The price cap Britain's competition regulator imposed on Motorola's Airwave Solutions, whose tech provides comms between emergency services across the nation, could save taxpayers more than £1 billion by the time the successor is ready.…

ACRO says payment data safe, other info may have been snaffled ACRO, the UK's criminal records office, is combing over a "cyber security incident" that forced it to pull its customer portal offline.…

Luxury cars and designer duds don't seem very prince of thieves Spanish cops have arrested a 19-year-old suspected of stealing records belonging to half a million taxpayers and developing a database to sell stolen information to other cyber criminals.…

Even destroyed spare parts, then may have rubbed salt into the wound by filing for tax write-offs Cisco destroyed caches of spare parts, and even wrecked its own offices, when international sanctions on Russia saw it quit the country in June 2022.…

Well that didn't take long, now did it? Less than three weeks after Samsung lifted a ban on employees using ChatGPT, the chaebol has reportedly leaked its own secrets at least three times – including sensitive in-development semiconductor information.…

Also clambers aboard the RISC-V bandwagon India's government has decided not to regulate the growth of artificial intelligence in the country, after deciding that policy settings from 2018 don't need to be revisited.…

DaaS is SaaS, so expect constant change that makes numbers moot Microsoft has offered guidance for those trying to benchmark cloud PCs: don't bother.…

And Nvidia's having none of Big G's claims of superiority Google on Wednesday revealed more details of its fourth-generation Tensor Processing Unit chip (TPU v4), claiming that its silicon is faster and uses less power than Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU.…

Chatbot's overseers accused of collecting, using, disclosing personal info without consent The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating OpenAI's generative language app ChatGPT after the watchdog received a complaint claiming the software was collecting, using, and disclosing personal information without consent.…

Tributes paid to former Square CTO Bob Lee, 43 Tech exec Bob Lee has died after he was discovered stabbed in San Francisco in the early hours of Tuesday.…

Metaverse was plan A, is this plan B or C, or what? Meta is building a generative AI system capable of churning out online ads to order and will charge businesses to use it, according to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.…

Feds managed to image entire backend server with full details The FBI today released additional information about its takedown of the Genesis Market, a major online shop for stolen account access credentials, revealing that they'd pwned the marketplace for at least two years.…

How much, you ask? The answer to everything is $0.42 Boffins at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have enlisted ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot that responds to written instructions, to repair software bugs without breaking the bank.…

And commercial operators, with NASA a keen customer The US government has published a strategy for low-Earth orbit research and development, anticipating a transition from the International Space Station (ISS) to the use of private sector successors and investigating approaches to address the threat of orbital debris.…

Germany alleges systemic moderation failure, more vendors sue over unpaid bills, and a new WARN Act suit Twitter is facing a trio of legal challenges this week: German officials are going after the platform for not adequately handling user complaints, four vendors sued over unpaid bills, and another group of laid-off employees claim they were terminated without proper notice.…

Doug Beck definitely won't be transforming the US military into the iArmy, right? The US Defense Department is getting a shiny new director for its Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in the shape of Apple exec Doug Beck.…

Fewer newly funded startups too, according to report Global private investment and the number of AI startups decreased in 2022, while the industry's adoption of the technology has plateaued compared to previous years, according to new data.…

Prime real estate in England's capital after making 10,000 job cuts? Not a good look Microsoft has called off the search for a swanky 500,000 sq ft office in the heart of England's capital amid a cost-cutting drive that has seen thousands of employees forced out.…

As much as 80% in the hands of three companies – you can guess which UK communications regulator Ofcom is to refer the domestic cloud market to the government's competition watchdog over concerns that dominance by the big players may be limiting competition.…

Though he never said he went through with the idea to 'make a scrapbook' How does Sundar Pichai – Google CEO, engineer, dreamweaver – think users could squeeze the most out of the company's Bard "experiment"? Well, he asked the AI chatbot to come up with ideas for his father's 80th birthday party.…

Delays to OECD plan means interim fix could be found wanting Britain's parliamentary spending watchdog has warned that tech giants are set to "circumvent" the government's digital tax regime despite what appeared to be a successful introduction.…

And you wouldn't want that ... would you? Microsoft is updating a service introduced last year that shifts the responsibility of patching Windows devices from IT admins to the vendor itself.…

That means more space and less energy consumption Big iron is not always beautiful. Just ask IBM, which has updated its z16 mainframe and lifted the covers off a shiny new LinuxONE 4, both of which are built for rack mount and single frame configurations.…

Hardware biz trying to compete with cloud giants, wants to rid customers of data silos, reduce cost and complexity HPE is adding storage services to its cloud-like GreenLake subscription-based tech platform, powered by a disaggregated hardware architecture that it says is built to scale up to exabyte capacities if required.…

German-speaking heartlands fear they'll be paying again for features they've already built SAP is angering users in its German-speaking heartland as its push to migrate vital ERP systems to the cloud is hampered by confusion over the tools used to develop and manage systems in the new environment.…

Draganfly aims to help clear Ukraine's deadly harvest With the drone war in Ukraine In late April, representatives of Canada-based industrial drone firm Draganfly are scheduled to demonstrate how the company's Commander 3 XL drone can be used to map the location of landmines in Ukraine.…

Operation Cookie Monster crumbles stolen data-as-a-service vendor A notorious source of stolen credentials, genesis.market, has had its website seized by the FBI.…

China's tech giants show, yet again, they're as much a slave to silicon valley fashion as anyone Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei are reportedly ready to satisfy local demand for generative AI chatbots in coming weeks.…

G7 meeting agrees that sales bans are here to stay A meeting of G7 trade ministers has flagged researchers as a possible route through which tech trade sanctions are being circumvented.…

Investors and educators called on to think more broadly at think tank event Insufficient attention has been paid to the national security implications of private enterprise taking over from government as the main source of innovation for defence and intelligence applications, according to a panel at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)'s Sydney Dialogue on Tuesday.…

98% accuracy, but tests suggest a human touch will beat the teachers Academic plagiarism-detecting software vendor Turnitin demoed an AI-writing detection tool on Tuesday, with a claim of 98 percent accuracy at spotting machine-generated cheating.…

That must be why PC sales are down – the blacks just aren't inky enough Samsung Electronics will pour $3.14 billion into production of advanced organic light-emitting-diode displays (OLED) for use in tablets and notebooks by 2026, betting it's the future for fondleslabs and laptops.…

Thieves go nose-to-tail stripping cash from victims The US Department of Justice has seized cryptocurrency worth about $112 million from accounts linked to so-called pig butchering investment scams.…

But nothing a keen beginner couldn't do, anyway A Forcepoint staffer has blogged about how he used ChatGPT to craft some code that exfiltrates data from an infected machine. At first, it sounds bad, but in reality, it's nothing an intermediate or keen beginner programmer couldn't whack together themselves anyway.…

Employees doubt IBM's claim that current layoffs were announced already IBM services spinoff Kyndryl has confirmed it's laying off staff while Big Blue is also shedding employees, as part of the industry-wide job cut contagion that has plagued the tech sector over the past few months.…

Funny way to describe a company that makes toilet cleaner Multi-brand consumer megacorp Unilever says it has become a "cloud-only enterprise" with the help of Accenture and Microsoft.…

The White House and DoD move to bolster domestic biomanufacturing When the White House rolled out its 64-page plan outlining the goals for ramping up the country's biotech and biomanufacturing industry in early March, included were sections by such departments as Agriculture, Commerce, and Health and Human Services.…

Redmond claims service is (partially) restored, some users still stuck Updated If you're wondering why Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center isn't working, it's not just you: The service's login portal went down yesterday a little before 2200 UTC, and as of writing - nearly 18 hours on - Microsoft says the issue still hasn't been fully resolved.…

Ex-employee was offered $15M by judge in 2021, but asked for a new trial instead Tesla is being ordered to pay a former employee at least $3 million to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit at its assembly plant in Fremont, California – just a fifth of the amount the judge offered him in 2021.…

Staff WFH so internal cafes are baking too many muffins, says doc, while bus shuttles and yoga classes are empty Google's beancounters are hunting down ways to satisfy corporate expense bill reductions, with many staff asked to sweat PC assets and some noting things like availability of staples and sticky tape becoming more limited.…

Agency asks for industry input into medium Earth orbit system The US Space Systems Command (SSC) wants input from techies and the aerospace industry as it maps out the development of a new satellite-based missile detection and tracking system.…

Some 1.4 million under-13s used the app in 2020 by the ICO's estimates Fresh off the back of an embarrassing "grilling" by US Congress on national security grounds, TikTok has received a more concrete reprimand from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) – a fine of £12.7 million ($15.8 million) for "misusing children's data."…

Just as namesake ISP Virgin Media* falls silent out of respect Space launch outfit Virgin Orbit has filed for bankruptcy in the US just days after suspending operations and laying off most of its staff. The company said it intends to continue trying to sell the business while under Chapter 11 protection.…

That means next version of the most popular Linux distro is getting close Ubuntu "Lunar Lobster" is the middle release between the 2022 and 2024 long-term support releases so this is when Canonical tries out some new stuff.…

Yes, DoD admins, your users can ask for this now, but make sure your bots are in compliance Administrators at the US Department of Defense are just like you: soon they'll have the option to add chatbots and message extensions into Teams for users.…

Even managed to kick its own website into touch in spectacular fail Updated Liberty-owned UK broadband pusher Virgin Media has fallen on its face this morning, with users across the country reporting complete broadband failure for a number of hours, among them some of the reporters on this news desk.…

It's you, hi, you're the problem, it's you A public evidence session about artificial intelligence in weapons systems in the UK's House of Lords last week raised concerns over a piece of the AI puzzle that is rarely addressed: the effect of the technology on humans themselves, and specifically its potential to degrade our own mental competence and decision-making.…