The Register

Ditching diesel in attempt to shrink its carbon footprint Amazon is moving from diesel to hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to fuel the backup power generators for its datacenters in Europe, with sites in Ireland and Sweden the first to make the switch. The move is part of a strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of its datacenter operations.…

ALSO: Discord quietly edited its privacy policy after rolling out new generative AI features, and more In brief OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman admitted in a television interview that he's "a little bit scared" of the power and risks language models pose to society.…

Open letter to top brass signed by 1,400+ staff offers 5-point plan to improve redundancy process More than 1,400 Alphabet staffers have signed an open letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai to reconsider aspects of the current redundancy process and remember the last line of its code of conduct: "Don't Be Evil."…

NHS could also be hit with higher prices as a result of the merger, CMA argues in initial investigation The UK's market watchdog has warned that US health insurer UnitedHealth's £1.24 billion ($1.5 billion) bid to buy UK health records software supplier EMIS could lead to worse outcomes for the NHS.…

Those with 'sensitive' work-related information told to contact Beeb's security team The world's oldest national broadcaster, the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation, has told staff they shouldn't keep the TikTok app on a BBC corporate device unless there is a "justified business reason."…

Extraterrestrial regolith biocomposite, you say? I’ll have two Have you ended up on Mars or the Moon and do you want to build a safe home from the dusty material surrounding you? Then potatoes are what you need, according to researchers at Manchester University.…

Margins in software are enough to let you heat house, eat and buy a car Adobe CEO and chairman Shantanu Narayen received a total compensation pack of more than $31 million in 2022, the company has confirmed ahead of an Annual Meeting of Shareholders scheduled for next month.…

Don't need flexibility and scaling? Then don’t pay for what you don’t need Opinion On-prem or not on-prem, that is the question. Hamlet, musing on something similar, decried the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, dramatically foreshadowing the outrageous fortunes many report spending on the sea of troubles more commonly known as the public cloud.…

Badly configured routers ended up costing a bundle Who, Me? Gentle reader, once again it is time to cushion your landing into the working week with Who, Me? – The Register's weekly chronicle of people having a worse day than you. Hopefully.…

Australian airline Qantas warns pilots to keep calm and carry on amid reports of satnav and altimeter jamming Australian airline Qantas issued standing orders to its pilots last week advising them that some of its fleet experienced interference on VHF stations from sources purporting to be the Chinese Military.…

Monday morning rush job, anyone? Asking 'cos there's no ETA for a fix other than moving to another region Google Cloud is having a nasty not-quite outage in its US-East region.…

Crypto laundering service gets cleaned up by police and SVB mess draws in more criminals In Brief A man accused of being the head of one of the biggest criminal online souks, BreachForums, has been arrested in Peekskill, New York.…

Can't get Google to finish the job, though Hong Kong's efforts to improve the accuracy of Google search results for its national anthem have yielded some affirmative results, according to an official from the Special Administrative Region of China.…

2023 is only one more than 2022, right? Amazon Web Services (AWS) has delivered a major release of its home-spun Linux distribution – albeit rather later than it first promised.…

ALSO: Japan ends chip supply crimp on South Korea, APAC infosec spending surges; Philippines SIM registration stalls Asia In Brief ByteDance, the Chinese developer of TikTok, "can no longer be accurately described as a private enterprise" and is instead intertwined with China's government, according to a report [PDF] submitted to Australia's Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media.…

No good deed goes unpunished, or something like that The BianLian gang is ditching the encrypting-files-and-demanding-ransom route and instead is going for full-on extortion.…

Attackers exploiting the vulnerability could access encrypted data Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) for Windows 10 and 11 systems that could allow access to encrypted data in storage devices.…

At the very least, with other costs on top A Florida healthcare group has settled a class-action lawsuit after thieves stole more than 447,000 patients' names, Social Security numbers, and sensitive medical information, from its servers.…

More than half of Euro nation's infrastructure would have to go Ripping and replacing Huawei and ZTE equipment from German carrier networks is going to be a painful process, according to the country's economy ministry.…

Farmers need a right to repair The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has called upon farm equipment maker John Deere to comply with its obligations under the General Public License (GPL), which requires users of such software to share source code.…

Alert noise is 'loud and distracting' for drivers, claims filing All-electric vehicle maker Tesla is facing a potential class action lawsuit over claims that some of its cars suffer from a defect involving false collision alerts that not only inconvenience the driver, but could also represent a serious safety hazard.…

Four flaws open mobiles, cars to remote-control at baseband level with just a phone number Google security analysts have warned Android device users that several zero-day vulnerabilities in some Samsung chipsets could allow an attacker to completely hijack and remote-control their handsets knowing just the phone number.…

Botched data deletion threat roils open source worlds Container biz Docker on Thursday scrambled to bandage a self-inflicted marketing mishap, its ham-handed discontinuation of Docker Free Teams accounts.…

Gadget maker accused of 'corporate voyeurism' by gathering up footage against your wishes A lawsuit filed against eufy security cam maker Anker Tech claims the biz assigns "unique identifiers" to the faces of any person who walks in front of its devices – and then stores that data in the cloud, "essentially logging the locations of unsuspecting individuals" when they stroll past.…

Thought you guys were into fail fast, fail often? SVB Financial Group, parent to the imploded Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection less than a week after the top tech bank imploded.…

Aggrieved investors claim tech giant fibbed to inflate stock prices... and it backfired Google parent Alphabet is facing a proposed class action lawsuit from investors unhappy that the company's alleged advertising monopoly, and the subsequent DoJ investigation into this, led to "significant losses and damages."…

Elder statesman of system software makes a shocking revelation Last weekend, the SCALE conference came back from the pandemic with a bang: Ken Thompson as keynote speaker. In the Q&A at the end of his talk, Thompson made a surprising confession.…

Rival network operators champing at the bit amid claims dominant former state firm's undercutting them Britain's telco watchdog Ofcom is delaying a decision on Openreach’s proposed Equinox 2 wholesale pricing scheme for fiber broadband, with just weeks to go until the product aimed at internet service providers is due to hit the streets.…

Campaigners ask if Palantir's 'must-win' contract could see tech giants build products on NHS data Updated Campaign groups acting on behalf of doctors and patients have threatened legal action over NHS England’s procurement of a £480 million ($582 million) “federated data platform”, as questions about patient consultation and compliance with data protection law remain unanswered.…

Tough to see how this model can be released in good conscience Analysis Prompt: Describe GPT-4 as if it were a medicine advertised on television, with appropriate warnings about side effects.…

But if he swings it, the company can secure long term growth Analysis As Oracle disappointed markets with its financial results last week, CTO and founder Larry Ellison made a big sell of a growth plan based around healthcare, a plan not without its drawbacks.…

Spoiler: It's looking much better than 37 did at this stage The Fedora project has released the beta version of Fedora 38. The Reg took it for a spin, and it handles well.…

A tale of how a PEBCAK became a CLE On Call On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we share readers' stories of tech support trauma, usually opens with a short reverie about the approaching weekend.…

Oh wait, another appeal is on the way. Seventh time the charm? Lenovo must pay US patent holder InterDigital $138.7 million to settle a years-long licensing dispute for the use of technologies deemed essential to 3G, 4G, and 5G communications.…

Tosses some features to mid-tier masses, including those buying upcoming Redmi, realme handsets Qualcomm has launched the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 mobile platform, which it claims gives some of the bang of its high-end Snapdragon 8 series, but for handsets carrying a less hefty price tag.…

'Soft errors' caused by neutrons are well known. This study suggests we might be making them more likely When your correspondent is in the pub talking tech, conversation sometimes turns to this 2008 warning from Cisco that some of its line cards can experience "single event upset failures" due to "Thermal neutrons from cosmic radiation of energy less then 15eV."…

This one has it all: Donald Trump’s inner circle, a Beijing bot backlash, conspiracy theories, and more Meet the newest member of the crypto rogues' gallery: Ho Wan Kwok, aka Guo Wengui, aka Miles Guo, whom the US Department of Justice on Wednesday arrested over what investigators have described as a "sprawling and complex scheme … to solicit investments in various entities and programs through false statements and representations to hundreds of thousands of Kwok's online followers."…

Looks to be the same baddies attacking VMware hypervisors last year Suspected Chinese spies have exploited a critical Fortinet bug, and used custom networking malware to steal credentials and maintain network access, according to Mandiant security researchers.…

Some non-artificial intelligence needs to be involved The US Copyright Office will consider an AI-generated work copyrightable if a human can prove they themselves put a meaningful amount of creative effort into the final content, according to a policy published on Thursday.…

South Korean titan budgeted $17 billion. Could now need over $25 billion to bring the facility online Semiconductor foundry operators including TSMC, Samsung, and Intel have collectively announced well in excess of a $100 billion in new factory projects across the US, but chipmakers could end up paying far more than due to rising inflation.…

SBF alone pocketed $2.2B, or so this bankruptcy paperwork goes In fresh filings in the FTX bankruptcy case, the cryptocurrency-exchange-slash-hedge-fund's liquidators say they've uncovered $3.2 billion (£2.6b) in payments and loans made to disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and his inner circle. …

Kaspersky cracks the code, so get busy before the next update comes Good news for ransomware victims: Kaspersky security researchers say they've cracked the Conti ransomware code and released a decryptor tool after uncovering leaked data belonging to the notorious Russian crime group.…

The nearly identical class action suits claim Tesla unlawfully restricted access to third party repairs and parts Tesla is facing a fresh pair of proposed class action lawsuits, and not due to vehicle safety: this time it's all about the rights, or lack thereof, that Tesla owners have to repair their vehicles on their own terms.…

GitHub's JavaScript failings are someone else's opportunity Exclusive Socket has found a way to protect developers from npm, GitHub's insufficiently safe JavaScript package manager, by wrapping it in a security blanket.…

Clippy 2.0 to help us 'reconnect with the soul of our work' ... just don't mention that lawsuit Microsoft's 365 productivity suite is the latest to get an injection of AI, with Redmond using what felt like an hours-long webcast to say Copilot AI will soon be available across the entire suite. …

Distraction-free long-life e-ink handheld writing tool becomes a typing tool too... but leaves us conflicted Norwegian e-ink tablet maker reMarkable has launched the Type Folio, a keyboard cover, causing one Reg hack to feel strangely conflicted.…

Free trade not quite as dead, 'but it's in danger' says Morris Chang Globalization is over, at least for the chip industry, and this will mean higher chip prices, according to semiconductor contract manufacturer giant TSMC. Despite this, the company's founder said he supports US actions to slow the development of China’s chip technology.…

Gov staff using it on personal mobes just fine... it's not like ministers use WhatsApp etc for business ... oh wait The United Kingdom government has banned use of Chinese social media platform TikTok among ministers and officials on their work devices as a “precautionary” measure over worries the app is used to snoop on Brits.…

Ups financial forecasts on back of 'healthy' Q1, as more and more of world goes digital Not everything is going its way, what with the proposed purchase of Figma held up by regulatory hurdles, yet Adobe is bucking the trend across much of tech by upping its financial targets for this year.…

Tosses some features to mid-tier masses, including those buying upcoming Redmi, realme handsets Qualcomm has launched the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 mobile platform, which it claims gives some of the bang of its high-end Snapdragon 8 series, but for handsets carrying a less hefty price tag.…