The Register

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.…

Settles lawsuit with two states after wider leak that affected millions A DNA diagnostics company will pay $400,000 and tighten its security in the wake of a 2021 attack where criminals broke into its network and swiped personal data on over two million people from a nine-year-old "legacy" database the company forgot it had.…

Big Red 'has a history of changing offerings' without allowing renewals of legacy products Gartner is warning that Oracle "actively targets organizations" on Java compliance following the introduction of new contractual terms for the code.…

How much are sidewinder missiles going for these days? Having spent the first half of the month blasting anything that moved out of the sky following the destruction of a Chinese spy balloon, it has emerged that the US could have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars disintegrating a hobbyist's $12 project.…

Depending on tier you use, rises of between 257% and 900% scheduled for May 1 Updated Microsoft is implementing massive price hikes for developers that use the Bing Search API, with some of the tiers scheduled to see rises up to nine times their current level.…

Aims at those who need help with green targets ... months after Intel axes R&D into tech GlobalConnect claims to be the first colocation provider in Europe to offer immersion-based cooling to customers, and expects to expand the service to all of its datacenters in future.…

Don't rush in if you don't need it – there may be more cons than pros Canonical has made a Real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 available on x86 and Arm… but only to Ubuntu Pro customers, and there are some potential issues you should know about.…

'Easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together' 3 days a week, says CEO Amazon boss Andy Jassy is demanding a return to the office for the "majority" of the company's 300,000-strong corporate workforce, with an expectation that employees will spend "at least" three days on site each week.…

Cue the dawning realization for thousands of content creators Those pencil-necked desk jockeys at His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) are about to give the UK's legions of online "content creators" and "influencers" a rather rude awakening by reminding them they could owe tax on their income.…

Tech has changed in 400 years. The rules haven’t Opinion Mary, Queen of Scots, was a hapless CEO, even by the standards of 1600s Europe. Mother of the first Stuart King of England, James I (and VI of Scotland; let's not go into that), she was herself the first Stuart monarch to lose both throne and head. She wasn't the last. The family had issues.…

The sysadmin who made this mistake just barely survived the NSFW backlash Who, Me? Once again, gentle reader, it is time to dive into the treacherous waters of Who, Me? in which readers tell us tales of days when things did not go quite right.…

Paid accounts will be more prominent than your shouty relatives and get – wait for it – a support line Social network supremo Mark Zuckerberg announced on Sunday that the artist formerly known as Facebook will follow in the footsteps of Twitter by offering a paid service: Meta Verified.…

90-day stretch comes after Euro-probe paused for production of paperwork VMware and Broadcom have given themselves more time to conclude the acquisition of the former by the latter.…

Also: Google asks staff to rewrite Bard's responses; EU's AI bill may stall; Endangered architects AI in brief Microsoft will start limiting the length of conversations with its AI-driven Bing chatbot to 50 turns per day, in a bid to prevent it generating unhinged responses to user queries.…

Also: Russia may legalize hacking; Oakland declares ransomware emergency; the CVEs you should know about this week In brief Web hosting and domain name concern GoDaddy has disclosed a fresh attack on its infrastructure, and concluded that it is one of a series of linked incidents dating back to 2020.…

Intel has as much to celebrate as anyone thanks the arc of progress catching up to its GPUs Linus Torvalds has, as foreshadowed, released version 6.2 of the Linux Kernel.…

PLUS: Chinese province to buy four million servers; Google Cloud's nine-day APAC network glitch; and more Asia In Brief Amid an investigation into his entertainment expenses, the chief operating officer of scandal-ridden Japanese tech giant Toshiba, Goro Yanase, resigned last week.…

Eggheads prove they can mimic messages and bag bug bounty bucks Analysis Over the past two decades, efforts have been made to make email more secure. Alas, defensive protocols implemented during this period, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, remain unable to deal with the complexity of email forwarding and differing standards, a study has concluded.…

Wow Harold, you could buy, like, 23 billion sliders with that American burger-slinging giant White Castle is almost certainly regretting its decisions about employee monitoring after the Illinois Supreme Court Friday issued an opinion opening the fast "food" corp up to potentially billions in fines.…

Droughts, flash floods the future for the Midwest ... probably In the 2004 disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, the world is subsumed by extreme weather as a violent climate collapse encases the Northern Hemisphere in ice and snow in a matter of days.…

Boffins find they can identify VR players just from head and hand movements Exclusive Virtual reality presently looks like it will offer virtually no privacy for those looking to hide online.…