The Register

Restructure of finance teams will see some leave, and other roles created in Mexico City, Bangalore, and US cities Google is again firing the redundancy cannon for the second time this year, with a restructure being pushed through and teams in the finance and real estate units of the business understood to be impacted....

Platforms should not confront users with 'binary choice' over personal data use The EU's Data Protection Board (EDPB) has told large online platforms they should not offer users a binary choice between paying for a service and consenting to their personal data being used to provide targeted advertising....

Only good for calls and texts pretty much, and that's no mistake Those who find modern smartphones too distracting from real life might be interested in the Boring Phone (no relation to the smartphone of the same name), a novelty flip phone based on HMD's Nokia 2660 Flip....

Police mimic Spotify Wrapped videos to let crims know they're being hunted Feature Cops have brought down a dark-web souk that provided cyber criminals with convincing copies of trusted brands' websites for use in phishing campaigns....

2.9 gives a taste of what's to come Major updates to Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool don't come along very often, but APT 2.9 is here with a significant facelift....

Resist the pressure to jump on the bandwagon just yet warns, warns Forrester Forrester Research says that although 50 models of AI PCs are already on sale today there remains "no killer app" that would make any of them an essential tool for business users....

Open source Redis alternative gathers momentum Valkey, the value-key database pitched as an open source alternative to Redis, has acquired new backers and announced its first release candidate....

Hypershield detects bad behavior and automagically reconfigures networks to snuff out threats Cisco has developed a product called Hypershield that it thinks represents a new way to do network security....

Commissioner Thierry Breton likens click-to-earn version to cigarettes The European Commission on Wednesday gave TikTok 24 hours to explain the risk assessment procedures it used before launching a version of the made-in-China app that rewards users for using it in certain ways....

When you decide not to trust a big chunk of the supply chain, tech (and trade) get harder One of the biggest challenges Singapore faces is the potential for a split between tech stacks developed and used by China and the West, according to the island nation's Cyber Security Administration (CSA) chief executive David Koh....

One last software update installed safely, reconfigured it as 'stationary testbed' NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter concluded its mission on Tuesday, sending a final signal in its role as a companion to the Perseverance Rover....

Stymied by sanctions, it had to go ... but where? Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer Zhejiang Dahua Technology, which has found itself on the USA's entity list of banned orgs, has fully sold off its stateside subsidiary for $15 million to Taiwan's Central Motion Picture Corporation, according to the firm's annual report released on Monday....

Nobody cared enough to check why audits were out of whack A software glitch at Star Casino in Sydney, Australia, saw it inadvertently give away millions in cash without realizing it - for weeks....

Middle Kingdom biz accused of IP theft and changing names to evade sanctions Hewlett Packard Enterprise has filed a lawsuit against Inspur Group, China's largest server maker, for allegedly violating five of its server technology patents....

Opponents warn almost anyone could be asked to share info with Uncle Sam On Thursday the US Senate is expected to reauthorize the contentious warrantless surveillance powers conferred by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and may even strengthen them with language that, according to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), "will force a huge range of companies and individuals to spy for the government."...

Demand for bulk storage on wheels turned out to be wan Amazon Web Services is abandoning its fleet of Snowmobile data haulers, the trucks packed with petabytes of spinning disks designed to get large enterprises into the cloud....

Up to 24 outfits to bag taxpayer cash for projects 'developing a viable product or service' for US chip industry Small businesses wishing they could get their hands on some of those billions of dollars in semiconductor funding being doled out as part of America's CHIPS Act are in luck, as the White House has set aside $54 million for tiny firms with big ideas....

You can trust us, we're the good guys The NSA has released guidance to help organizations protect their AI systems and better defend the defense industry....

Damn you, network virtualization A law professor is warning a proposed reintroduction net neutrality in the US will allow cellular networks to create fast lanes" for some applications, and that this undermines the entire net neutrality principle....

The cutting-edge chipmaking tool for a secret customer Dutch semiconductor toolmaker ASML has shipped its second-ever high numerical aperture (NA) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine to an undisclosed customer....

Water tank overflowed during one system malfunction, says Mandiant The Russian military's notorious Sandworm crew was likely behind cyberattacks on US and European water plants that, in at least one case, caused a tank to overflow....

If the plan was to make this all-electric droid look mildly terrifying, mission accomplished Video Atlas, the humanoid robot that's been a centerpiece of Boston Dynamics' robot lineup for nearly a decade, has been retired. In its place is, well, Atlas - an all-electric version designed for commercial use....

Won't somebody please think of the shareholders Kettle The price of everything is going up because corporations gotta corp and produce record profits year after year. That means you and I are expected to cough up more....

Muted the audio? That's an advert. Paused a video? That's an advert Will Roku TVs of the future throw up targeted ads on the screen whenever you pause a video? We hope not but......

Whew! Relief for boffins as rotorcraft slated to arrive at Saturn moon in 2034 NASA has finally confirmed its Dragonfly rotorcraft mission will be heading to Titan, one of Saturn's Moons, meaning the team behind the project can finalize its design and get to work building the spacecraft....

Given the electric car maker's annus horribilis so far in 2024, does the chief even deserve it? A Delaware court may have voided Elon Musk's $56 billion Tesla pay package in February, but now the board is asking shareholders to reinstate it....

Hala Point system crams more than a thousand neurochips into a 6U chassis to tackle real-time AI Intel Labs revealed its largest neuromorphic computer on Wednesday, a 1.15 billion neuron system, which it says is roughly analogous to an owl's brain....

Guess what it's great for? Go on, have a guess... 20 points if you muttered an abbreviation starting with A and ending in I Samsung has revealed its upgraded LPDDR5X memory modules, which features improved performance, capacity, and efficiency....

There's something nice about seeing Web3 fanatics in ankle-deep water And the Lord looked down upon the crypto bros and He was grieved in His heart. So the Lord said, "I will send down upon thee a flood to wash out thy crypto conference."...

CIQ also has an alternative approach to compatible kernels with RockyLinux The bigger RHELatives continue to diverge slightly from Red Hat, with additional drivers and newer kernel versions....

Company rejects claims as 'inaccurate' A Boeing whistleblower has called for the embattled aircraft manufacturer's fleet of 787s to be grounded for gap checks....

Race on to patch as researchers warn of mass exploitation of directory traversal bug Various infosec researchers have released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits for the maximum-severity vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks' PAN-OS used in GlobalProtect gateways....

Except in China, where customers accounted for almost half of the photolithography giant's top line Chipmaking kit maestro ASML generated almost half of its sales from China in calendar Q1, amid a wider downturn in orders and plunging profits....

Anticompetitive remedies? We've heard of them Apple is turning on Web Distribution for iOS apps, allowing EU users to download applications directly from developer websites....

Fusion software misses another deadline, one external auditors for Birmingham City Council described as 'absolutely crucial' Birmingham City Council has failed to enter the new financial year with auditable accounting software after a disastrous implementation of Oracle Fusion, which has seen its expected project costs mushroom from around 20 million ($26 million) to around 131 million ($163 million)....

For when the AI service cannot grok what it's being asked Logitech has launched a free software tool to help existing users of its kit with ChatGPT prompts, but those that splash out on the upcoming Signature AI Edition Mouse, get a... dedicated AI prompt button....

While some other LLMs appear to flat-out suck AI agents, which combine large language models with automation software, can successfully exploit real world security vulnerabilities by reading security advisories, academics have claimed....

Proper old-school Unix, not like those lazy, decadent Linux types FOSDEM 2024 NetBSD 10 marks a new level of maturity for this venerable open source Unix system, which somehow manages to be both modern and retro at the same time....

The answer is not to hide from AI, but to be honest about it It's taken less than eighteen months for human- and AI-generated media to become impossibly intermixed. Some find this utterly unconscionable, and refuse to have anything to do with any media that has any generative content within it. That ideological stance betrays a false hope: that this is a passing trend, an obsession with the latest new thing, and will pass....

Comms services and AI contributing to increase, but vendors are taking 'risks' Gartner expects global IT spending to grow 8 percent in 2024 to $5.06 trillion in a revised forecast from the 6.8 percent uptick which the analyst predicted in January....

Not all at once, of course Google will eventually invest $100 billion in AI, according to DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis....

Just doesn't believe it will sort out the mess that saw data leak from LINE messaging app Japan's government has considered the proposed security improvements developed by Yahoo!, found them wanting, and ordered the onetime web giant to take new measures....

Almost 2,000 customers experienced outages Tencent Cloud has apologized for an outage that impacted customers last week - an unusual act by a Chinese cloud - and signalled it will review some aspects of its ops in the hope of avoiding future incidents of this nature....

AI is so good at drawing pictures and driving cars, why not let it govern a country? India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, used AI to help develop the nation's 25-year development roadmap, according to comments made during a live-streamed interview with news agency ANI on Monday....

With Apple lawsuit behind it, focussed on finalizing its designs RISC-V chip designer Rivos has raised $250 million in series-A funding to bankroll production of its first accelerator for generative AI and data analytics workloads....

Also warns of brute force attacks targeting its own VPNs, Check Point, Fortinet, SonicWall and more Cisco is fighting fires on a couple cybersecurity fronts this week involving its Duo multi-factor authentication (MFA) service and its remote-access VPN services....

Of course there's an enterprise plan for the Feds and AI trainers Updated Internet-scraping outfit Spy.pet claims to have harvested more than four billion public messages made by nearly 620 million users on more than 14,000 Discord chat servers - and is selling access to this trove....

What a twist! MGM Resorts wants the FTC to halt a probe into last year's ransomware infection at the mega casino chain - because the watchdog's boss Lina Khan was a guest at one of its hotels during the cyberattack, apparently....

EFF lambastes latest 'lazy and deliberately malicious move' YouTube says it will intentionally cripple the playback of its videos in third-party apps that block its ads....

Jetson module can efficiently process computational fluid dynamics models Analysis Researchers in China have reportedly demonstrated how a low-cost Nvidia Jetson module could theoretically be used to direct a hypersonic weapon....