The Register

Stanford academics peeved over LaMDA chatbot brouhaha AI chatbots are not sentient – they have just got better at tricking humans into thinking they might be, experts at Stanford University conclude.…

At least Switchzilla thinks they're salvageable, unlike the boxes it ordered binned back in June Cisco has revealed four of its small business router ranges have critical flaws – for the second time in 2022 alone.…

Moon probe will play BTS to test space internet. Also for fun South Korea's first lunar orbiter, which is about to test disruption-tolerant, network-based space communications, successfully made contact with its Australian ground station after launching on Thursday.…

Years after the company quit server virtualization, but may be handy for hybrid work Citrix has added a development stream to its hypervisor that promises fast and frequent enhancements, plus a cloud service to deliver them to users.…

Starts chasing industrial digitization as its next big opportunity Alibaba's cloud operation thinks it's reached market saturation among China's big internet companies, but sees a new wave of demand coming from industrial outfits.…

Now makes vague pledge to shove inactive repos into slow object storage Updated GitLab has reversed its decision to automatically delete projects that are inactive for more than a year and belong to its free-tier users.…

I got played via the Play store Last October, California resident Jacob Pearlman downloaded an Android version of a cryptocurrency wallet app called Phantom from the Google Play app store.…

Licencing snafu sends American invention overseas When US national laboratories develop a new technology, Uncle Sam is supposed to ensure it is commercialized in America. But that's not what happened with what's said to be a breakthrough battery design. …

Like a Geiger counter but for surveillance cameras With an estimated billion surveillance cameras capturing people's daily activities, chances are you're regularly recorded if you live in a densely populated area.…

These might be the 5nm Zen 4 desktop processors due to land this quarter AMD's Ryzen 7000 desktop processors will reportedly top 5.7 GHz in the case of the Zen giant's top-of-the-line 7950X, when they launch later this quarter.…

There'll be a welcome in valleys of Wales for language translation It's been a busy week for Microsoft Teams, as the Windows giant unveiled a version of the platform optimized for Apple Silicon as well as simplified human language translation for scheduled meetings.…

More expensive than a Pi but with a lot more oomph, platform to be embedded in devices at the edge Nvidia is rolling out a production module of its Jetson AGX Orin platform, designed to be embedded inside devices and enable AI acceleration for a variety of applications such as robotics and edge computing.…

If you're on the HWE stack, you'll get the Jammy kernel Ubuntu 20.04 is nowhere near end of life, but 22.04 is starting to hit its stride.…

Kyndryl and DXC Technology report declining revenues and worsening bottom line Infrastructure service providers Kyndryl and DXC Technology are off to an inauspicious start in their new financial year, recording double digit revenue declines as cloud giants continue to eat into their sales.…

Alleges Oracle did not register the patches it claims were infringed Hewlett Packard Enterprise has come out swinging two months after a $30 million verdict against it in a long-running case, saying claims by Oracle it directly infringed copyrights in the Solaris OS are not backed by enough evidence.…

The next server you buy will support it, but what's it good for? After more than three years of development, compute express link (CXL) is nearly here. The long-awaited interconnect tech will make its debut alongside Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids and AMD's Genoa processor families.…

Bit barns threatened by malware flingers, but fire, storms, or bad guys arriving at the sites are also bad news Proposed legislation in the US will seek to ensure greater protection for government datacenters from the threat of cyberattacks, but also physical dangers such as natural disasters and terrorism.…

Controversial visit to Taiwan continues to reverberate through cyberspace, the real world, and the semiconductor industry Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense confirmed it was hit by a DDoS attack on Wednesday in what has been an eventful week for the island nation, US-Sino relations, and semiconductors.…

And it only took 16 ASICs As port speeds creep ever higher to support larger hyperscale workloads and bandwidth-hungry 5G applications, Fortinet says its latest generation of firewalls should keep even the largest data flows safe from would-be attackers.…

Social media suspected as shares surge 20,000 percent and company admits there's no good explanation An obscure Asian financial services startup's share price has exploded, seemingly after social media users decided to pile into the stock.…

After a long and surprisingly varied dynasty, it's possible they're all FOSS now Its new licence says that "CP/M and its derivatives" are free for anyone to modify and redistribute. But which derivatives?…

We kept network running 'safely and effectively' on those days, nothing to see here, says Brit telco The two days of strike action by BT call center operators and engineers at the Openreach subsidiary should act as a “wake-up call” to the executive management team at the British telco but no further dates are yet scheduled.…

Thanks, we'll take any good news, large or small, right now Vid The aviation industry's attempts to go green are getting a boost from an unlikely place: carbon-neutral jet fuel pulled from thin air.…

Tech giants and digital rights groups didn't like it, but at least it was a law The government of India has scrapped the Personal Data Protection Bill it's worked on for three years, and announced it will – eventually – unveil a superior bill.…

Simple to exploit, enough to pocket $3,000 A Danish ethical hacker was able to work his way uninvited into a closed Cloudflare beta and found a vulnerability that could have been exploited by a cybercriminal to hijack and steal someone else's email.…

Plan to educate the children turned out to be a 'won't someone think of the children?' moment The UK's Parliament has ended its presence on TikTok after MPs pointed out the made-in-China social media service probably sends data about its users back to Beijing.…

Accenture roped in to find the weakest link One of the world's most prominent and mission–critical uses of the blockchain - The Australian Securities Exchange's (ASX) project to replace its CHESS core trading systems with a distributed ledger – has struck further trouble.…

SOL holders literally S.O.L. Millions of dollars worth of Solana cryptocurrency and other tokens were stolen from seemingly thousands of netizens this week by thieves exploiting some kind of security weakness or blunder.…

Hopes to save a quarter of hosting costs by binning repos that haven't been touched for a year Exclusive GitLab plans to automatically delete projects if they've been inactive for a year and are owned by users of its free tier.…

Or just see it as preparing them for the future What with American students increasingly subject to surveillance software, 15 advocacy groups want the US Department of Education to set monitoring policies that are consistent with civil rights laws.…

Beats screwing around actually crafting these unloved tokens A Bitcoin mining outfit said it made $9.5 million in credits selling electricity back to the power grid of Texas at a premium when energy demand rose to record levels during a heatwave last month.…

Tachyum blames deep conflicts of interest as source of Prodigy delays Exclusive Server chip startup Tachyum has been plagued by delays producing its Prodigy Universal Processor, which meshes CPU, GPU and AI-geared matrix units in a single architecture.…

Organizations can be more proactive in tracking threats, finding holes in their protection Microsoft says it will give enterprise security operation centers (SOCs) broader access to the massive amount of threat intelligence it collects every day.…

That's just the tip of the iceberg – and now he faces potentially years in the clink A now-former T-Mobile US store stole at least 50 employees' work credentials to run a phone unlocking and unblocking service that prosecutors said netted $25 million.…

Time to take another gander at that pitch deck Venture capital is the latest to feel the pinch from the economic downturn, with venerable Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator's Summer 2022 cohort consisting of less than 250 companies, down from over 400 last Winter's list - a drop of 40 percent.…

About one in ten computations for loans, credit cards, etc said to be wrong US credit agency Equifax says errant computer code led the company to provide inaccurate credit information about US folks to financial institutions for a period of about three weeks earlier this year.…

A $26m chunk of the infrastructure bill set aside to prove it can handle inverter-based energy The Biden administration is confident in the US's ability to demonstrate its power grid can run entirely on clean power, so it's giving the Department of Energy $26 million to stand up projects to do this.…

It's all fun and games until somebody gets their files encrypted Miscreants making use of typosquatting are being spotted by researchers at Sonatype, emphasizing the need to check that the package is really the one you meant to download.…

What would you do with an otherwise healthy spacecraft? ESA has admitted defeat and declared the mission of its Sentinel-1B spacecraft is at an end after attempts to deal with a borked power bus ended in failure.…

Ancient, yes, but its progenitor VMS isn't dead just yet There's a proposal to remove the code for the DECnet networking protocol from the Linux kernel… but what was DECnet anyway?…

How's that renewable energy transition going? Amazon increased its total carbon footprint by 18 percent during 2021, despite promises to transition entirely to renewable energy for its operations before the end of the decade.…

Monolith found in Australian field actually a piece of SpaceX vehicle Australian media has reported that space debris found in New South Wales was indeed junk from a SpaceX mission, including one piece measuring nearly three meters in length.…

Automotive makers say they still can't buy enough semiconductors to meet car buyers demands Infineon, the largest chip supplier to the automotive sector, has upgraded revenue and margin forecasts for 2022 as customers continue to struggle to source enough semiconductors to fulfill their needs.…

Small-town troubles go hyperscale in one Virginia county over land, resources, and noise Comment It's easy to think of zones and regions for cloud services in the abstract, as just another spot on the map to spin up virtual machines and services.…

Chairman reminds world that production depends on comms with US, Europe and Japan The chairman at TSMC - the company most crucial to global chip supply - has considered tech industry fears of a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan, concluding such an event would render its fabs inoperable.…

Also sniffs out stats and errors to help decide when failure is about to happen Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has published its latest quarterly report detailing the reliability of disk storage deployed in its datacenters.…

Plus: Even market authorities can't seem to keep up with Microsoft's Defender branding The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has given a provisional nod to the proposed merger of British cybersecurity company Avast and US rival NortonLifeLock.…

You'd wear a big clunky headband instead of invoking an assistant … why exactly? Chinese consumer electronics outfit Xiaomi has teased a device that it says will allow users to control their home using brainwaves.…

Eben Upton talks to The Reg about the little computer gaining version 1.2 conformance Updated Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton has trumpeted the arrival of Vulkan 1.2 conformance for the Raspberry Pi 4. Vulkan is an abstraction layer – like OpenGL – for game devs working on graphics-intensive apps.…

Offers 5MB Outlook Lite App that works on phones with only 1GB RAM Microsoft has made Outlook Lite available in select markets for low-powered Androids.…