The Register

Two-wheelers outnumber cars three to one in India, so promised licences mean Uber and Ola aren't off-road forever On Monday, the Transport Department in India's capital city Delhi banned private bike taxi services effective immediately – delivering a swift and sudden blow to ridesharing platforms in the city of over 30 million souls.…

Did the financial watchdog just do the impossible and herd cats? More than 80 law firms say they are "deeply troubled" by the US Securities and Exchange Commission's demand that Covington & Burling hand over names of its clients whose information was stolen by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.…

Closes takeover of One Medical, has your shopping habits and medical data Amazon's $3.9 billion deal to buy its way into the healthcare world is complete, as it and US healthcare chain One Medical on Wednesday announced the consummation of a merger the pair have been working on since 2022.…

Cap on daily interactions also lifted slightly – to 60 questions per day Microsoft is integrating its Bing chatbot into iOS and Android apps, allowing users to access AI-powered search features on mobile devices. …

Warrantless data harvesting, you say? Feds have their secret reasons and we're OK with that America's Supreme Court has declined to hear Wikimedia Foundation's challenge of the NSA's "upstream" surveillance program, effectively exempting the agency's data collection from review as a state secret.…

Sales will only be down 37 percent next quarter Pat promises After tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks and hefty dividends for shareholders over the last years, Intel on said Wednesday that it's cutting its quarterly dividend to $0.125 per share in an effort to cut costs while also funding its expansive foundry construction plans.…

$20k Pwn2Own prize for the humans, zero for the AI It was bound to happen sooner or later. For what looks like the first time ever, bug hunters used ChatGPT in a successful Pwn2Own exploit, helping researchers hijack software used in industrial applications and win $20,000.…

Just as everyone looks to optimize what they spend for computing services Microsoft is previewing two new Azure general-purpose virtual machines that will give organizations running compute-intensive workloads more options for balancing costs and performance.…

Pay no attention to that Supreme Court case about Twitter's algorithmic liability If Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk is to be believed, the social media platform's algorithm is finally going open source, and it's happening "next week." …

'We reached the break-even point' on roadmap, say boffins in peer reviewed paper, but it's still 'not good enough' Google is claiming a new milestone on the road to fault-tolerant quantum computers with a demonstration that a key error correction method that groups multiple qubits into logical qubits can deliver lower error rates, paving the way for quantum systems that can scale reliably.…

Galaxies got big much sooner than expected, new observations Formed between 500 and 700 million years after the Big Bang, objects at the extreme limits of human observation have showed up on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), designed to uncover the early life of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.…

Company claims that's the best way to put 'historical' legacy in the hands of the global public Comment What does the Titanic have in common with NFTs? Not much. One lives on in the collective psyche as a monument to hubris while the other refuses to just sink already.…

If a phone is as mighty as a laptop, why not make it convertible and use it as one Freedom and privacy-oriented kit vendor Puri.sm has put out a device that turns its Librem 5 smartphone into a laptop.…

Prototype private network uses single board computer with software-defined radio circuit hardware Vodafone will lift the covers off a prototype 5G base station built on a Raspberry Pi at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in a bid to showcase how small businesses could run their own private 5G network.…

While app development is faster and easier, security is still a concern Analysis Open source components play an increasingly central role in the software development scene, proving to be a boon in a time of continuous integration and deployment, DevOps, and daily software updates.…

£1.1M ambition to recruit 10,000 pros 'inadequate' says committee The NHS in England has more than 3,000 vacant tech roles, according to a Parliamentary report that describes its progress against government-set digital targets as "inadequate."…

Cheap'n'cheerful option for bare-metal debugging – on anything with SWD connections The Raspberry Pi Foundation has a new gadget: a cheap, easy USB probe for debugging bare-metal code on a Pi Pico… but it should work with several other devices too.…

Antonio Neri bags $17m+ in compensation in fiscal 2022 versus $64,000 average for the grunts Hewlett-Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri was compensated to the tune of $17.36 million to run the company during its fiscal 2022, equating to the average annual pay of 271 employees.…

As good time as any for European Space Agency to announce a 2030 asteoroid-spotting mission A meteorite measuring two-feet-wide hurtled towards Earth at 27,000 miles per hour with an energy equivalent to eight tons of TNT and exploded into pieces over McAllen, Texas.…

Entry-level hires were IT services giants' answer to enormous staff attrition rates. Now they're being squeezed Last week, top performing entry-level hires waiting to onboard at IT services giant Wipro were given four days to decide if they wanted to take a 46 percent salary cut in exchange for immediate work placement.…

Doesn't the world have enough problems? Video Microsoft, having committed to a "multi-year, multi-billion dollar" investment in OpenAI, is so besotted with large language models like ChatGPT that it sees such savvy software simplifying how we communicate with robots.…

There's no way this could be abused, right? Tiny, inexpensive wireless tracking devices like Apple's AirTags or Tiles have changed the way we keep track of our belongings, and now Qualcomm wants to put this tech to work in the enterprise sector.…

Not doing the sums on repatriation is 'financial malpractice at this point' Spending $600,000 on servers, and more to have them hosted, will save SaaS project management outfit 37 Signals over $7 million, according to CTO David Heinemeier Hansson.…

The Unified Payments Interface takes an important stride forward – as does India's soft power tech push India's use of government-created tech to expand its sphere of influence advanced yesterday, when Singapore agreed to link the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to its own PayNow scheme – enabling real-time cross-border payments between the two nations.…

Almost 200 staff let go with emails that landed late at night Google's Asia Pacific headquarters has laid off an estimated 190 employees – around six per cent of staff – and did the deed by email.…

AFRINIC situation has links to the APNIC snafu – and The Reg has more evidence of astroturfing The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) has no board, no CEO, cannot pay its staff, could fail, and as of two weeks ago was being funded on a week-to-week basis by other regional internet registries, according to John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).…

Any sufficiently advanced chatbot is indistinguishable from spam Science fiction and fantasy periodical Clarkesworld Magazine has temporarily paused submissions from authors after being inundated with AI-generated stories.…

Maybe one day war will just be machines fighting machines The US Navy has just taken delivery of a ship designed to operate autonomously at sea for up to 30 days. …

Will Section 230 immunity just be revoked? We can answer that The US Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in Gonzales et al. v. Google, a case likely to reshape the internet if it goes against the search ad giant.…

iGiant shuts dev beta loophole Sorry, early adopters, cash-strapped developers or anyone else that wants to test developer builds of iOS and iPadOS before public betas are available – the latest beta is doing away with configuration profiles that allow any device to download dev-only builds.…

If the Ribbon is your sort of thing, penguin-flavored options include this and WPS Office There are new versions of both OnlyOffice and the Chinese WPS Office. If LibreOffice looks and feels clunky and old-fashioned to you, there are other options.…

Leaving another Russian craft in orbit for months ... what could go wrong? Crew trapped on the ISS due to a leaky Soyuz capsule ought to settle in for a longer than planned stay: Russian space agency Roscosmos announced today that the trio won't be coming home until September.…

Analyst haus Trendforce sees DC gain where there's consumer pain Server memory products are likely to overtake mobile memory in share of the overall DRAM bit output this year, as the datacenter market sees continued demand while consumer devices are hit by the economic downturn.…

'Almost anywhere on land' ... that's a bold promise The Starlink satellite network has invited customers to try out a service that will allow them to take advantage of an internet connection "almost anywhere on land in the world" for $200 per month.…

Redmond fixed the spam filtering problem, but it was a wild day-long ride for some Many Outlook users around the world woke up Monday morning to find a flood of spam and junk messages filling up their inboxes and they took to the internet to air their complaints.…

Pret and Starbucks rubbing hands with glee as some cash will go to larger London HQ UK quantum computing startup Quantum Motion has raised £42 million ($50.5 million) in equity financing to help fund development of its silicon-based quantum chips and expand the size of the company's central London HQ.…

Study in Chile desert finds NASA Mars mission instruments unlikely to detect signs of life in Earth's most arid regions A study in Chile's Atacama Desert has found that instruments taken to Mars on NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance missions might not be sensitive enough to find signs of life.…

Struggling to keep staff? Pilot brings huge dive in attrition, sick leave The massive British trial of a shortened four-day work week is over – and it's food for thought for companies battling to attract and keep high value employees as one of the side effects was a large drop in staff attrition.…

More to come in other country ops? Company talks of admins 'sweating assets' and slowdown in 5G network builds Swedish networking kit maker Ericsson is laying off 1,400 employees in its home nation amid wider efforts to reduce expenses, and ahead of a deeper round of redundancies in other countries expected in the coming days.…

This is just a sliver of the $400,000 allegedly owed for branded merch Canary Marketing is the latest entity to join the orderly queue asking Twitter to pay its invoices – this time to the princely tune of $400,000.…

4 million contract migration went as planned, spokesperson insists Despite declaring the problems resolved, German financial institution Postbank is receiving complaints about poor service following its migration to a new technology platform.…

Blame it on phone number recycling (yes, that's a thing, too) A stranger may be receiving your private WhatsApp messages, and also be able to send messages to all of your contacts – if you have changed your phone number and didn't delete the WhatsApp account linked to it.…

TCI Fund says buying stake in tech biz would be 'extremely inefficient use of shareholder funds' Airbus should "immediately terminate negotiations" to buy a minority stake in Atos's breakaway security, big data and digital transformation business, Evidian, because it would be a costly mistake.…

Thank you, Microsoft and Meta, for firing thousands and then sharing your very finest inventions Sometimes The Register cannot help but stand, slack-jawed, in amazement at Big Tech's latest gifts to the world.…

System back online with money still there, thanks to Japanese regulations FTX's Japan outpost announced on Monday it would once again allow withdraw of both fiat and crypto assets, beginning at noon local time on Tuesday.…

Suggest fundamental semiconductor physics research is needed if China is to build viable local industry China’s Academy of Science has offered a blueprint to create a semiconductor industry that circumvents the USA’s bans on exports of technology to the Middle Kingdom.…

Threats to voters also reported as vote for regional internet registry heats up Regional internet registry the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has appointed external lawyers to consider allegations of multiple breaches of its election nominee code of conduct, including threats related to the election.…

Crashes like FTX and Terra have made regulation necessary, say authorities, even as Territory seeks to become a virtual asset hub Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has called for feedback on a plan to require virtual asset trading platform operators to acquire the same sort of licenses the territory requires securities traders to obtain.…

Vietnam has also struggled with four out of five cables in strife Scenarios in which China invades Taiwan, and inducing strategic, diplomatic, economic, and tech supply chain crises, often imagine that Taiwan’s main island would be the main site of any kinetic action.…

Amateur fleshbag defeats synthetic in 14 of 15 games Think that puny humans don't stand a chance when playing strategy games against an AI? You may have to think again. One person in the US beat an AI at the ancient game of Go by simply distracting it from the attack he was making, a tactic that would be unlikely to work on another meatbag.…