The Register

Surely there are quicker and more effective ways to end your co-workers Every office has one – the inexplicably cheerful, kind and generous co-worker who brings in cake and/or biscuits and leaves them somewhere for their weight-sensitive colleagues to graze on.…

Pet consultant took down the datacenter in attempt to find other people's errors On Call As the old saying goes, there are few certainties in life beyond death and taxes. But in this week's On-Call – The Register's regular reader-contributed tales of techies being asked to rescue the ridiculous – we shall consider another: new managers who needlessly change systems that work perfectly well.…

No principles or virtues, people accepting everything it says – this bot is perfect for political life OpenAI's conversational language model ChatGPT has a lot to say, but is likely to lead you astray if you ask it for moral guidance.…

Reed Hastings steps down as joint boss to become board chair The co-founder of vid-streamer Netflix, Reed Hastings, has announced he will step down as co-CEO.…

Thanks for putting all your data in one basket As enterprises around the world continue to move to the cloud, cybercriminals are following right behind them.…

Censors are on the lookout for showering under a waterfall of money, overeating, and more conventional sins The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has preempted celebrations for Lunar New Year – the Year of the Rabbit* commences on January 22 – by warning citizens to keep evidence of seasonal overindulgence off the internet.…

Google says don't worry, EFF warns of 'potentially horrific outcome' At least nine online pharmacies that sell abortion pills share information with Google and other third parties, such as search history and geolocation, that can be used to identify the websites' users, according to a ProPublica probe.…

Sixth snafu in five years? Crooks have this useless carrier on speed dial T-Mobile US today said someone abused an API to download the personal information of 37 million subscribers.…

Meanwhile, layoffs continue at Twitter, Meta, WeWork, many others Amazon on Wednesday emailed staff to explain what's said to be the largest layoff in the mega-corp's history.…

That passwordless option is looking really good right about now The personal information of 35,000 PayPal users was exposed in December, according to a notification letter sent to the online payment company's customers this week.…

Near 50% drop in extorted dosh ... or so it says here The amount of money paid to ransomware attackers dropped significantly in 2022, and not because the number of attacks fell.…

Investors use up all their continues, game over A California judge has tossed out a lawsuit filed by Activision Blizzard shareholders against the company's leadership accusing them of breaching fiduciary duties by allowing a hostile environment to develop that top brass tried to hide from the public.…

That'll definitely teach them to look out for their workers Amazon has been hit with a trio of citations from US safety inspectors who say their investigations found "serious violations" of the Occupational Safety and Health Act at warehouses in New York, Illinois and Florida.…

Lewis Rosenthal talks about why some companies still need to run OS/2 today – including on UEFI and GPT hardware Retro Tech Week Although the creator of OS/2 now owns Red Hat and has other fish to try, OS/2 lives on. The Reg spoke with Arca Noae's Lewis Rosenthal about the issues of updating OS/2 Warp for modern PCs in 2023 – and beyond.…

Hit up Cumulus Data if you want your racks running on low-cost, zero-carbon energy US-based Cumulus Data says it is constructing a datacenter campus adjacent to a nuclear power station in order to directly obtain low-cost, zero-carbon energy for prospective tenants.…

Bunfight over support for proprietary Unix operating system ends with a confidential whimper HPE and Oracle have settled their long-running legal case over alleged copyright infringement regarding Solaris software updates for HPE customers, but it looks like the nature of the settlement is going to remain under wraps.…

Great, now staff and students can stop scrolling and get back to work Faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) this week became the latest members of a public US university to lose access to Chinese video app TikTok via campus networks.…

Controversial policy change forces chief product officer to speak out Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky has responded to criticism of the company's content analysis policies by saying it has never used customers' creations to train generative AI models.…

Social engineering helped intruders break into customers' inboxes again Email marketing service Mailchimp has confirmed intruders have gained access to more than 100 customer accounts after successfully deploying a social engineering attack.…

Hey Siri, did you know know that swatting is a bug, not a feature? An Australian personal trainer's Apple Watch inadvertently summoned 15 police to a suspected shooting that was nothing of the sort.…

Bit factory giants see growth slimming in economically challenged times, but party still far from over Research from tech services membership and standards body The Uptime Institute is showing slowing growth in the major cloud providers, suggesting that the era of hyper-expansion is drawing to a close.…

Simulates the Sun's atmosphere, peers deep into Earth's interior, and can probably run Crysis Finland's LUMI supercomputer has hit a new milestone, successfully completing the pilot phase of its GPU partition that extends the processing power of the system.…

Get your eyepatch out: Cyber attacks on the high seas are trending A Norwegian maritime risk management business is getting a lesson in that very area, after a ransomware attack forced its ShipManager software offline and left 1,000 ships without a connection to on-shore servers. …

Server silos didn't see today's watt-gobbling, space-heater chips coming In pursuit of ever-higher compute density, chipmakers are juicing their chips with more and more power, and according to the Uptime Institute, this could spell trouble for many legacy datacenters ill equipped to handle new, higher wattage systems.…

More stock is NOT wanted as phone shipments plunge to lowest point in decade, Apple floats to top Against a backdrop of rising inflation and a less than certain economy in various parts of the world, the volume of global phones shipments is at the lowest rate in a decade.…

Companies want their data near them, but that doesn't mean they are going back on prem Businesses are moving IT infrastructure closer to their offices and therefore working with many local clouds and colocation facilities, but are not going back to on-prem, according to Acronis CEO Patrick Pulvermueller.…

History tells us it will flop. But success might not be the real goal, so much as poking Big Tech Analysis India's government has reportedly teamed with academia and startups to create its own mobile operating system dubbed IndOS, in the name of competition.…

It’s not Google's plan. There’s no way it’s Google's plan. It was Google's plan Google has begun broadly enabling case randomization in domain queries sent to authoritative name servers, in an effort to make cache poisoning attacks less effective.…

Worse still, human editors appear not to have caught the mistakes Consumer tech outlet CNET is reviewing all articles it published that were written with the help of AI, after it was found some contained incorrect information.…

Kerberos support in WAC and a host of other goodies also added Microsoft upgraded its Windows Admin Center, with a focus on protecting the vendor's Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) service from outside threats.…

Private services smeared for 'disorderly expansion and data security problems' China's government has announced it's built its own rideshare and transport-as-a-service platform.…

Meanwhile SBF proclaims he's both innocent and solvent Liquidators at bankrupt crypto exchange FTX say they've thus far located $5.5 billion in assets, and confirmed that $415 million stolen in a November hack is still missing. …

Damages and security improvements? Or maybe settle for a neon bird light A Twitter user has sued the troubled social media platform over an alleged data leak that exposed more than 200 million account users' information.…

Want to access Office tools? Don’t try to go back in time Users running the latest versions of Windows 11 are losing some Microsoft apps after running System Restore.…

As hundreds of staff axed this week More than 4,000 public-facing Sophos firewalls remain vulnerable to a critical remote code execution bug disclosed last year and patched months later, according to security researchers.…

Warrantless surveillance branded illegal, said to unfairly target the poor, immigrants, minorities US government investigators have been demanding and receiving millions of money-transfer records from Western Union and similar outfits. Now US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wants an investigation into this bulk financial surveillance.…

x86 giant wants to sub [spending], 10 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 Nearly two years after taking over as CEO, Pat Gelsinger's master plan to reinvent Intel is on uncertain footing as the chipmaker struggles financially and fights for government subsidies it says are necessary to keep its foundry expansion on track.…

Elon should stick to throwing rocks at his truck windows Allegations that Tesla staged a 2016 video demonstrating full self driving have resurfaced, and this time it's not an anonymous source making the claims – it's testimony from Tesla's own director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy.…

What is dead may never die, and it's all thanks to Jim Hall Retro Tech Week The last mainstream DOS-based OS was Windows ME, which went out of support 20 years ago. And yet, thanks to free software, DOS lives on. We spoke to FreeDOS founder Jim Hall about how the project started and how it's progressing.…

And no more geofencing around health clinics either A bill proposed by Washingston state lawmakers would make it illegal for period-tracking apps, Google or any other website to sell consumers' health data while also making it harder for them to collect and share this personal information.…

Study says this would give old power units years of useful life once unsuitable for cars EV batteries could help meet short-term electricity grid storage demand by as early as 2030 in most parts of the world, scientists are claiming.…

But tech research giant Gartner says spending still rosy despite job loss clouds Some enterprise tech CEOs suffered a degree of over-optimism in their hiring strategies during and coming out of the pandemic, according to a senior Gartner soothsayer.…

Remaining Redmonites told they need to ‘raise the bar’ Microsoft will cut the jobs of 10,000 employees by September. The move follows smaller rounds of layoffs at the software company last year as cloud growth slows due to the worsening economic situation.…

US research agency paying $42.4m for working full-scale aircraft that ejects air out of its surfaces DARPA has awarded Boeing research arm Aurora Flight Sciences a contract to build a full-scale demonstration aircraft for the experimental Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) project.…

Still no date for breaking ground, as chip giant reportedly confirms it will build once 'funding' worked out Intel has said it remains committed to the construction of its planned chip manufacturing plant in Germany, just weeks after a company spokesperson said the project was on hold.…

Discovery could provide better protection for power stations, airports and launchpads Video Scientists have for the first time demonstrated that a laser can act as a lightning rod to disperse these dangerous atmospheric discharges.…

Cloud sprawl will easily become bill sprawl if you don’t take active steps to clean up Sponsored Post The flexibility and convenience of having high speed, scalable compute infrastructure resources at our fingertips delivers huge benefits. But that instant, on-demand accessibility can be a problem for companies when software engineers constantly spin up new cloud instances to meet their business goals but create heartburn for the finance department by not tracking the rapidly accumulating bill.…

Cooperation could cost Netherland's ASML a billion + in sales US President Joe Biden brought his concerns over the threat of China's semiconductor industry to Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte during a White House meeting Tuesday.…

They gotta keep the fluffy white stuff running, right? Dell has lifted the covers off 13 freshly laid PowerEdge server systems, including models featuring Intel's 4th Generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, some tailored for cloud service providers, along with updated deployment and monitoring tools.…

Business case and competition said to be helping to close the shortfall One of the UK's top civil servants has claimed the government is closing the £100 million funding gap created by the Treasury when it offered £300 million for a vital ERP refresh in the November 2021 spending review.…