The Register

We each grab a mic and take apart the Bard stewards responsible for this hype Register Kettle AI-powered chatbots are 2023's hot tech topic, although users report the results they produce are mixed. At best.…

Respected hands-on outlet tossed under the layoff bus Photography community website DPReview will shut down on April 10, 2023, in conjunction with layoffs announced by parent company Amazon.com in January.…

Maybe this is deserved given the problem's in a hidden telnet service Public proof-of-concept exploits have landed for bugs in Netgear Orbi routers – including one critical command execution vulnerability. …

Now that's a flash bang Police in Ecuador are investigating attacks on media organizations across the country after a journalist was injured by an exploding USB flash drive.…

Alerts telling folks their 'device may be vulnerable' triggered by KB5007651 A recent security update to Windows 11 has put the scare on some users by warning that Microsoft's Local Security Authority (LSA) feature is turned off and their system is vulnerable to attack.…

A good watchdog does blame the tools, or something like that America's Federal Trade Commission has warned it may crack down on companies that not only use generative AI tools to scam folks, but also those making the software in the first place, even if those applications were not created with that fraud in mind. …

Database shortcuts built in popular environment in hopes of scoring devs who want an easy life Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike has boosted functionality and engineering support for its real-time database within the popular Java development environment Spring Framework.…

JWST? Whatever, I found ET in my dustpan If we want to find evidence for alien life we don't need to keep looking for chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres or distant radio signals, says a Japanese astronomer. Instead, we should be studying the thousands of micrometer-sized bits of interstellar dust that hit Earth every year.…

Smartphones and tablets would also be added to the EU's list of devices that must be repairable under new rule The European Commission has adopted a new set of right to repair rules that, among other things, will add electronic devices like smartphones and tablets to a list of goods that must be built with repairability in mind.…

Server price hikes, rival hardware makers locked out ... haven't we been warning that for a while? Britain’s competition watchdog fears Broadcom’s proposed $61 billion purchase of VMware may lead to higher prices for servers and damage potential innovation.…

You'd think there'd be more techies on the market, but many cuts were in business areas While the tech sector job losses ticker has clocked up a global body count of 150,000 so far for 2023, those looking to hire IT staff are not out of the woods yet, according to Gartner.…

Armed with GPT-4, Microsoft's AI 'pair programmer' can tag pull requests, parrot documentation, talk about code Microsoft GitHub has trained its Copilot programming model to perform new tasks, making the already widely adopted AI assistant all the more unavoidable for developers.…

And it's not the only hybrid synthetic biomaterial scientists are targeting Scientists are using AI algorithms to design new materials, including synthetic proteins to make fake blood plasma and biological liquids found inside of cells.…

Country's super strong data rights under magnifying glass after half a dozen complaints filed Remember the Who Targets Me browser extension from privacy activists at Noyb? The group yesterday filed explosive complaints based on log records from the extension that claim six of Germany's political parties broke European data law when they targeted voters on Facebook's adtech platform.…

Releasing 4% of workforce Marvell Technology is the latest chipmaker to open a redundancy process, blaming a slowdown across much of industry for the decision to erase some four percent of its workforce.…

Stop the presses: Billionaires think sharing is a great idea, until a rival billionaire wants to share SpaceX has tried to shoot down Amazon's attempt to speed up approval of its rival satellite broadband constellation.…

'Creator' machine is lovely, but seems unsuited to life on the periphery Desktop Tourism ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X OLED (UX7602) is a sleek beast of a laptop that invites you to take it head-on and go all-in – an offer that should give you pause before accepting.…

Digital rights org criticizes use of fill-in-the-blank template used to quell separatist protests Police in the Indian state of Punjab hunting the leader of a Sikh separatist group have imposed a state-wide shut down of mobile internet and SMS services since Saturday, in order to pursue a single man.…

If this is Kyiv's work, Russia can Crimea river A cyber espionage campaign targeting organizations in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine is using novel malware to steal data, according to Russia-based infosec software vendor Kaspersky.…

Allows a little expansion of output from existing Middle Kingdom facilities The US Commerce Department proposed rules on Tuesday that would limit the amount of CHIPS Act recipients can invest to expand semiconductor manufacturing in countries the US considers “adversarial.”…

Do you Xi what I Xi? A slasher flick featuring Winnie the Pooh and other characters from A.A. Milne's beloved stories has mysteriously had its Hong Kong debut cancelled. Probably forever.…

CERT-In was told its six-hour notification requirement was a bad idea – now it knows just how bad India's rules requiring local organizations to report infosec incidents within six hours of detection have been observed by a mere 15 entities/…

'Technological sovereignty is the key to sustainability' states Russian despot Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have set themselves the goal of dominating the world of information technology.…

Admins decide reviving crime-mart is dangerous, hint at new chapter BreachForums has reportedly shut down for good, just days after US authorities arrested the online criminal marketplace's alleged chief administrator.…

Not quite as dramatic as AMD's Lisa Su and her visions of nuclear-powered supercomputers GTC On the surface, Nvidia's spring GPU Technology Conference was once again opened with a keynote dominated by generative AI technologies.…

Meanwhile, Bing can now output images, Adobe touts shiny art platform Firefly Google is offering Bard – its chat-driven rival to ChatGPT – to netizens in the US and UK who ask nicely.…

This article was not written by a computer, not that you could tell for sure either way The popularity of word salad prepared by large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Meta's LLaMa has prompted academics to look for ways to detect machine-generated text.…

And Google Cloud is next Microsoft has torn the wraps off its multi-cloud security benchmark (MCSB), which replaces the four-year-old Azure Security Benchmark. Crucially, as the name suggests, it now has usage and configuration guidance that reaches into rival environments.…

My goodness that's moist Peanut butter, Nutella, and strawberry jam represent squirtable media in a demonstration of 3D printing digital cooking, which has led to the odd dubious result.…

13 years of research at $40m/year only produced 2 cancelled projects, says oversight arm If you've ever wondered why NASA's recent space missions haven't made more aggressive use of nuclear power, the Space Administration's Office of the Inspector General issued a report this week that may have your answer. The decade-long project to develop better nuclear space systems is, to put it lightly, a bit of a mess.…

Don’t need a 700W fire-breathing GPU? It also launched an itty-bitty AI chip too GTC Nvidia's strategy for capitalizing on generative AI hype: glue two H100 PCIe cards together, of course.…

What's next – AI designing AI chips? Oh wait... that's exactly what's next GTC Nvidia's latest gambit? Entrenching itself as a key part of the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain.…

Still tumbleweed for PC industry right now, but maybe folks will buy computers-on-bikes? Acer is racing into virgin territory and – everybody look out – it's coming armed with AI: the Taiwanese PC maker is launching an E-bike that is apparently designed for urban commuting.…

The war in Ukraine is bad and wrong… but does blocking these contributions help Ukraine? Opinion Code is being refused if it comes from developers in sanctioned Russian companies… but it's not clear if this is an effective move. Cui bono?…

65 AA batteries and $10 Arduino processor power space debris solution A tiny satellite with a drag chute built by a team of students has been held up as one small possible solution to the thorny issue of space junk caused by defunct hardware cluttering up Earth’s orbit.…

The hope? Reducing piles of admin for clinicians freeing them up for medical work The University of Kansas Health System is set to trial software designed to help doctors automatically generate notes from conversations with patients, a move billed as "the most significant rollout to date of generative AI in healthcare" yet.…

Former Google veteran talks to El Reg about trends in bid data of the past decade Interview Jordan Tigani made his name as an engineer leading the team behind BigQuery, Google’s data warehouse, which was among a group of systems to transform the market by separating storage and compute. Despite helping win global customers including Vodafone, and taking on big-name rivals Snowflake, Azure Synapse and AWS Redshift, he’s begun to think the approach has run out of “magic beans” for some users.…

Staff and suppliers paid late last year, new requirements lead to contract price hike Vendors working on an Edinburgh University ERP project have been awarded around £8 million ($9.81 million) in additional fees following a troubled implementation which led to delays in paying staff and suppliers.…

A modern RISC computer trying desperately to pretend it's just another PC Lenovo's Thinkpad X13s is a lovely, if odd, little laptop. It's a modern Arm machine that is trying as hard as it can to resemble a vanilla x86 laptop… and it carries it off.…

Beware of Greeks bearing GIFs Meta's former security policy manager, who split her time between the US and Greece, is reportedly suing the Hellenic national intelligence service for hacking her phone.…

Utility that began as a personal project found its way into billions of devices Daniel Stenberg has observed the 25th anniversary of the curl open source project with the publication of curl 8.0.0, the 215th release of the command line tool, and a modest tele-celebration.…

Bot also botches some requests, but is about to be baked into cloud services anyway Fresh from the launch of its large language model-based chatbot, ERNIE, Chinese web giant Baidu is rolling out of a cloud service integrated with the AI tool.…

April Fools should use Russian or Chinese tech instead, Kremlin advises Advisors and staff to Russia's maximum leader have been told to ditch their iPhones by the end of the month. Or, for those who don't want to throw their Apple devices in the bin, the other option is to "give it to the kids," according to a local Kommersant report.…

Alleges it’s infected with malware – but not the version in its own digital tat bazaar Google has suspended Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo from its Play store because versions of the software found elsewhere have included malware.…

Latitude blames a 'major vendor' for its woes. Is that a vendor? A cloud? Whoever they are, they're in trouble Latitude Financial has blamed a supplier for leaking creds that caused vast PII leak Australian outfit Latitude Financial has taken itself offline, and even stopped serving customers, while it tries to clean up an attack on its systems.…

Speeds away from the very suggestion it would ever pay a ransom Italian automaker Ferrari has warned its well-heeled customers that their personal data may be at risk.…

Meta-made small language model can produce misinformation, toxic text The web demo of Alpaca, a small AI language model based on Meta's LLaMA system, has been taken down offline by researchers at Stanford University due to safety and cost concerns.…

A 'new deal for the night' needed Increasing levels of light pollution means Earth's surface has almost no practical locations for astronomical observatories, a group of astronomers said on Monday.…

Digital lending is only fine when we do it On Monday four of the largest book publishers asked a New York court to grant summary judgment in a copyright lawsuit seeking to shut down the Internet Archive's online library and hold the non-profit organization liable for damages.…

aCropalypse Now, starring any 2018-or-later device If you've owned a Google Pixel smartphone since the 3 series came out in 2018, bad news: any screenshot that you've cropped or redacted on your Pixel can be potentially restored without much fuss.…