The Register

CWU deputy secretary demands better pay for staff amid cost-of-living crisis The Communication and Workers Union (CWU) will this week publish the timetable to run an industrial action ballot over the pay rise BT gave to members recently, with the telco's subsidiaries to vote separately.…

Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of ML? Er, nobody Opinion Machine learning's abiding weakness is verification. Is your AI telling the truth? How can you tell?…

When being helpful can mean being shown the door Who, Me? Going above and beyond in IT can sometimes lead to also going directly out of the door, as one Register reader found when discovering that sometimes efficiencies can be less than rewarding.…

Plus: IBM's CEO says we have to tackle ML ethics or intelligent systems will become monsters In brief The AI algorithms used by Google Docs to suggest edits to make writing more inclusive have been blasted for being annoying.…

Plus: Cisco Umbrella flaw patched, lid blown off TeamTNT, and ICS security folks join JCDC party In brief The BlackCat ransomware gang, said to be the first-known ransomware group to successfully break into networks with Rust-written malware, has attacked at least 60 organizations globally as of March, according to the FBI.…

Now that's a race condition The number of zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in the wild reached an all-time high last year, according to Mandiant.…

Team America: Solar System Police The US Space Force has created a unit, the 19th Space Defense Squadron, to monitor activity in the region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit, all the way out to the Moon and yonder.…

A fair price to get everyone to stop talking about Moore's Law for good Researchers in the US have received a $15 million National Science Foundation (NSF) award to develop superconductor chips that ought to be much faster and use significantly less energy than the hardware the world today relies on for computing.…

Not a social network or an instant-chat app used by tens of millions, so scrutiny it is, then Federal regulators are taking a closer look at Google's planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant, a deal designed to boost the web giant's public cloud's cybersecurity capabilities.…

Now you're talking our language Samsung's IT services arm and other companies are said to be testing out a processor that sports more than 1,000 general-purpose RISC-V cores to deliver what the chip's designer claims is faster and more energy-efficient AI inference performance than power-hungry specialty silicon.…

Nope, not Delta – it's a regional semi-private jet operator and service 'won't require' logins SpaceX has signed its first Starlink contract with an air carrier, and despite recent news it isn't Delta. …

26 years and only two external exploits is not to be (packet) sniffed at The OpenBSD Project has released version 7.1 of its eponymous OS for 13 different computer architectures, including Apple's M1 Macs.…

Part of a Low Carbon Patent Pledge with Meta, Microsoft, and others Chinese tech giant Alibaba is joining a coalition pledging to freely distribute energy efficient and green technologies, and has made nine patents available as part of the deal. …

Japanese owner may not believe it would get the valuation it has been seeking for a full sale SoftBank is said to be planning to keep a controlling stake in Arm after its public offering, rather than divesting itself of the chip design firm as had been thought. The move may indicate that SoftBank does not believe it would get the valuation it has been seeking for a full sale of Arm.…

Threat actor exploited known vulnerabilities in the Microsoft software to compromise multiple systems An affiliate of the aggressive Hive ransomware group is exploiting known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange servers to encrypt and exfiltrate data and threaten to publicly disclose the information if the ransom isn't paid.…

Nobody wants flappy bits during an engine burn of Trojan asteroid explorer Engineers are to double down on efforts to get Lucy's solar array fully deployed amid worries regarding potential damage during a main engine burn of the Trojan asteroid explorer.…

Outlook unaffected by decisions which followed pressure from Ukraine's vice prime minister SAP has reaffirmed its 2022 outlook for revenue, despite seeing a €130 million ($141 million) reduction resulting from its decision to withdraw cloud services and on-prem software support from Russian customers.…

Bytesnet working with Boston to recycle residual heat in Groningen district Dutch datacenter firm Bytesnet is using expertise from computer maker Boston Ltd to recycle heat from its facility in the Groningen district of the Netherlands that could be used to heat thousands of homes.…

It's not like Apple was a player in the market since the demise of Xserve Apple is finally killing off the venerable macOS Server, directing users still clinging to Profile Manager toward Mobile Device Management solutions.…

Hey hey 16k, what does that get you today? Prepare yourself for a weekend of wobbly power connectors and Daley Thompson digit-mashing: tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.…

Move coincides with NHS England's procurement of a far-reaching data platform US surveillance-tech supplier Palantir has hired a one-time director of AI for NHSX – the former UK health service digital agency.…

Apps pre-installed in the device will still be able to have call recording functionality Google has made changes to its Play Store policies, effectively banning third-party call-recording apps beginning May 11, claiming it seeks to close alternative use accessibility APIs for things other than accessibility.…

Predictive code messes up audio just enough to derail automatic transcription The thought that our gadgets are spying on us isn't a pleasant one, which is why a group of Columbia University researchers have created what they call "neural voice camouflage." …

Analyst house warns of unrealistic expectations moving Big Red’s enterprise workhorses to SaaS Big business users of Oracle wares are failing to understand that moving applications to the cloud means a business transformation – notoriously tough and organizationally complex – not just a technical project.…

We know where we stand with wonky-faced hardware. It's the ones we don't recognize as AIs we should worry about Something for the Weekend Robots want my face. This is horrifying – not just for me, but for you too. Just imagine: it means robots will be walking around with my face, stuck on their face.…

Doing the floppy fandango On Call We take a trip back in time to the era of floppy disks and cabinets of PDP-11 hardware for an On Call where knowing the difference between hard and soft makes all the difference.…

Months after arrests, gang – or someone mimicking them – now active The notorious REvil ransomware gang appears to have returned from the bowels of the dark web, three months after the arrest of 14 of its suspected members, with its old website forwarding to a new operation that lists both previous and fresh victims.…

In Soviet Russia, bear pokes you Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky are among the latest US citizens to be added to the increasingly bizarre Russian sanctions list.…

Acknowledgement of shutdown almost a week after backend powered off Smartlabs, Inc, parent of vanished internet of things vendor Insteon, is unable to meet its financial obligations and has assigned its assets to a financial services firm to be sold.…

x86 giant hopes for 'open, collaborative and forward-looking' relationship with (checks notes) Nvidia and AMD With Intel starting to get serious about the discrete GPU market, the chipmaker has put together a research group that is pledging to improve the "entire field" of graphics, and that includes making games look even more realistic.…

This speech isn't free The world's richest man Elon Musk has said how he can get his hands on $46.5 billion to take over Twitter, explaining that more than half of that figure will come from banks via debt financing. …

Who will win? Staff unions or $1bn of venture capital? Amazon today announced the creation of a $1 billion venture investment program with the aim to spur innovation in three areas close to its heart: fulfillment, logistics, and the supply chain. …

No dark patterns, no Google nonsense ... Wow, what a superpower Alphabet's Google on Thursday said it has rolled out a new cookie consent banner for YouTube visitors in France and will soon deploy the popup for its online properties throughout Europe.…

I mean, there's still so many, many IT depts to suck up into our cloud Amazon is not planning to spin off its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud division. Instead, AWS is likely to make acquisitions of its own in order to keep ahead in the cloud services market, according to its chief executive Adam Selipsky.…

Commercial life in Putin Land not exactly a bed of roses, warns Russia's Google Yandex, Russia's Google, has withdrawn its financial guidance for 2022 due to uncertainty over what this year will yield for the corporation.…

Azure trusted with food giant's sauce code US food behemoth Kraft Heinz has signed a multi-year agreement with Microsoft to shift much of its datacenter assets to Azure.…

Tests in Belgium might mean carbon-free backup power for its other DCs The pilot of a new emergency battery power system at a Google datacenter in Belgium may be the first of many steps toward eliminating diesel generators from similar facilities around the world.…

While heaping praise on Big Red, analysts find room to criticize licensing, negotiations, and integration Oracle's pricing models and contracts can be "challenging to navigate" and "frustrating for customers," according to a Gartner report that otherwise heaps praise on the omnipresent enterprise software company.…

It's hoping CSPs will consume platform as a service via public or private cloud HPE has revealed details of its HPE RAN Automation, a service management and orchestration platform created to help network operators implement a disaggregated radio access network (RAN).…

Google cites US sanctions while Beijing and John Lee Ka-chiu are miffed YouTube has blocked the campaign account of Hong Kong's only candidate for the Special Administrative Region's (SAR) head of government, John Lee Ka-chiu, citing US sanctions.…

The last LTS before a Canonical float in 2023? Canonical has finally pushed "go" on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, making the Linux distribution generally available and a handy update for careful users still running 20.04 LTS.…

SpaceX and Kuiper in the $278.5m mix to replace space agency's Tracking Data and Relay Satellite fleet NASA is lavishing a combined $278.5m on six US companies for near-Earth space communication services.…

We've passed peak chip shortage, though, insists Gartner analyst A large industrial conglomerate is being forced to take increasingly desperate measures to satisfy their needs for chips, according to ASML, a manufacturer of chip-making equipment.…

UK prime minister visits country to 'welcome' contract, namecheck commercial pacts, talk up trade OneWeb has agreed with the commercial arm of Indian Space Research Organization, New Space India Limited, to deploy its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband satellites from the country's launch pad outside Chennai.…

Botnet infrastructure shut down last year, now central to a fast-spreading email scam, researchers say More than a year after essentially being shut down, the notorious Emotet malware operation is showing a strong resurgence.…

Software? Ticked. Hardware? Ticked. Kitchen sink? Oh go on then, why not The British government is looking to speak with suppliers in preparation for a multi-year procurement that could be worth up to £8 billion in technology products and services.…

Meanwhile, Elon Musk says we need to crack real-world AI to get fully autonomous cars to work The UK government has confirmed planned revisions to the Highway Code to accommodate self-driving vehicles, including allowing drivers to watch TV while an AI takes the wheel.…

It's 2036 and another hijacked AI betrays its operators Boffins from UC Berkeley, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study in the United States have devised techniques to implant undetectable backdoors in machine learning (ML) models.…

Someone's got to keep, say, Nvidia on its toes In the race to provide the best machine-learning accelerators, one of Nvidia's top challengers has claimed a victory in the biotech space, London firm LabGenius, which said Graphcore's intelligence processing units (IPUs) provide significantly faster performance for AI-based drug discovery than some unidentified traditional GPUs.…

Who knew what when and what did they do? Analysis GitHub says it has identified and alerted developers who have had their private repositories accessed and downloaded via stolen authentication tokens.…