The Register

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.…

Staff reportedly furloughed as firm scrambles to find funding after failed launch Virgin Orbit has hit the pause button on the business to "conserve capital" while it seeks funding and explores strategic opportunities.…

Um, folks? All this tech kinda needs semiconductors The UK government is upping investment in quantum by £2.5 billion ($3 billion) over the next 10 years, and also putting up £900 million ($1.08 billion) for AI Research and the country’s own exascale computer.…

We all owe three things to this pioneering machine – two more than you might think Feature Although it only gets credited with one of them – because Steve Jobs slipped up* – all modern end-user computers owe three defining aspects of their design to the Alto.…

Disc-trawling expedition of 30-year-old data turns up trumps Astronomers have uncovered the first evidence of an active volcano on Venus, using computer images captured more than 30 years ago by a NASA spacecraft.…

Online ad colossus hopes it can still make money when users want privacy Google says it has partnered with Fastly, a content delivery platform, to support its effort to deliver targeted ads in its Chrome browser with a greater measure of privacy.…

We're headed for models-as-a-service, apparently, and the OS doesn't matter Chinese web giant Baidu has launched ERNIEbot, its chatbot based on a large language model, and claimed it represents not just a fine chatbot but also a reinvention of computing.…

Shocking! Talking robots designed to interact and help boost employees' moods at work are more effective if they don't look like humanoids, according to a British research paper.…

Charcoal gray with orange highlights – so chic, and so deliberately fake NASA and its spacesuit provider Axiom Space have revealed what the astronauts on the Artemis III mission will wear if, as planned, they reach the surface of the Moon in 2025.…

In case of apathy, break Glass Google has halted sales of its business-grade augmented reality specs, the Glass Enterprise Edition.…

Active Directory privilege de-escalation will run for nine days in May before taking June off Microsoft's delayed effort to ensure its partners don't enjoy unduly privileged access to their clients' systems will run for just nine days before pausing for a month.…

Why patching matters: Everyone seemingly had a crack at security bug Multiple criminals, including at least potentially one nation-state group, broke into a US federal government agency's Microsoft Internet Information Services web server by exploiting a critical three-year-old Telerik bug to achieve remote code execution.…

Machine-learning safety and controls now everyone's problem Microsoft has eliminated its entire team responsible for ensuring the ethical use of AI software at a time when the Windows giant is ramping up its use of machine learning technology.…

Good news, unless trees or walls get in the way Wireless spectrum is a finite and tightly regulated resource and that makes it a hot commodity anytime one of the standards bodies opens another swath of it to auction.…

Victim offered two years of credit monitoring after highly sensitive records dumped online A cancer patient whose nude medical photos and records were posted online after they were stolen by a ransomware gang, has sued her healthcare provider for allowing the "preventable" and "seriously damaging" leak.…

However, those Ryan Reynolds commercials aren't going anywhere Video Mint Mobile, the prepaid budget wireless company that counts actor Ryan Reynolds among its owners, is being bought by T-Mobile US in a deal expected to close later this year for as much as $1.35 billion (£1.1b), giving the "uncarrier" yet another prepaid offering. …

Bring back keys! Bring back keys! The first keys and locks appeared some 6,000 years ago and continue to work well. We use them to secure our homes and cars among many other things valued by us.…

Can't be bothered with cam? Replace yourself with a 3D diligent worker Microsoft Teams users are getting more ways to express themselves to other participants on those increasingly frequent video calls.…

Don't worry about Tim – executive's rewards are reportedly unaffected. Phew Apple still isn't giving into Silicon Valley peer pressure to lay off swaths of its staff to cut costs, and is instead reportedly extending its hiring freeze and changing the way it awards employee bonuses.…

Oh gosh. Looks like that bot just spilled that you plan to fire 20k staffers in Q4 The UK government's spy agency is warning corporations of the risks of feeding sensitive data into public large language models, including ChatGPT, saying they are opening themselves up for a world of potential pain unless correctly managed.…

LuSEE in the sky with ... data Firefly Aerospace has won a second NASA contract to take hardware to the Moon – including the hotly anticipated Lunar Pathfinder satellite that will serve as a communication relay between future Lunarians and Earthlings.…

Teen arrested yesterday while another man suspected of being a ViLE crime group member still 'at large' A 19-year-old suspected of belonging to the "ViLE" crime group told a man authorities think is in the same gang that he "jacked into a police officer's account" and "the portal had some fucking potent tools" according to a complaint unsealed today in the Eastern District of New York.…

Chances its Arm that maker community is looking for a fresh SBC Asus has unveiled a RISC-V model in its range of Tinker Board single board computer (SBC) systems, which up until now have all been Arm-based. However, it seems users should not expect too much in the way of performance from this first device.…

Penalty paid for misclassifying tens of millions of dollars of costs, and for 'inadequate' controls missing the error IT services biz DXC Technology has paid $8 million to settle a dispute with the US Securities Exchange Commission after being charged with making "misleading disclosures" about its non-GAAP financial results.…

Will build out domestic industry while it builds out US domestic industry... Samsung Electronics is slated to invest $230 billion over the next 20 years to build five semiconductor plants in South Korea as part of a wider plan from the government to beef up domestic supply.…

It's also 17… and 18… and actually rather cool The developers of specialized security-testing distro Kali Linux have released the first version of 2023, which marks the project's tenth anniversary… but only in this incarnation.…

Poor interface, lousy lyrics, and bland answers mean this won't be the tool that makes Edge mainstream First Look I've taken Microsoft's OpenAI-powered Bing search engine for a spin, and quite enjoyed its attempt at providing context to a list of links – but was frustrated by the low quality of its sources, suggestions, and user interface.…

Perfect timing – we could use another bank run The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange has just become a bit smaller as Binance will suspend deposits and withdrawals in pounds for customers in the United Kingdom.…

NASA expects to spend about $1 billion to bring it down safely NASA expects to spend around $1 billion to deorbit the International Space Station as the orbiting laboratory reaches its end of service in the 2030s.…

Phishing, dodgy domain names, and sophisticated attacks already deployed The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) late last week sent tremors through the global financial system, creating opportunities for short-sellers – and numerous species of scammer.…

Mutant offspring of a semi and a trolleybus suggested as emission-cutting future of commercial transport China's march into the future of everything moved forward yesterday with the debut of an electric vehicle that can draw power from either on-board batteries or overhead wires, plus a demo of roads set up to handle such traffic.…

Outgoing president alleges Beijing is systematically bullying strategically located island paradise The outgoing president of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), David Panuelo, penned a lengthy letter last week accusing Beijing of rampant bribery, spying and other tactics – including an attempt to take control of the nation's submarine cables and telecoms infrastructure.…

Project Kuiper satellite broadband coming next year, maybe Amazon has unveiled three antennas for the internet super-souk's upcoming Kuiper satellite broadband service.…

The outlook is grim for Outlook - and SAP, Adobe. Android, and Chrome - so get ready for a long update party Patch Tuesday Microsoft's March Patch Tuesday includes new fixes for 74 bugs, two of which are already being actively exploited, and nine that are rated critical. Let's start with the two that miscreants found before Redmond issued a fix.…

Can we blame social media for this? We can try Register Kettle The collapse and re-spawning, to a degree, of Silicon Valley Bank in the US and UK sent shockwaves through the tech industry, with startups and established players relying on the institution fearing the worst.…

HCI upstart adds a hybrid option that could be of interest to nervous VMware customers Nutanix's ambition to bring its stack to all major clouds has taken an important step forward with news its Cloud Clusters (NC2) are now generally available in Microsoft’s Azure.…

Weirdly coy about the AI model's size and what went into making it, tho OpenAI on Tuesday announced the qualified arrival of GPT-4, its latest milestone in the making of call-and-response deep learning models and one that can seemingly outperform its fleshy creators in important exams.…

PaLM springs forth Google has promised to offer API-level access to its large language model PaLM so that developers can build it into their apps and workflows, and thus make the ChatGPT-like text-emitting tech available to world-plus-dog.…

Successful invasion would make China 'the OPEC of silicon chips' The US would sooner see TSMC fabs destroyed than fall into Chinese hands should Xi Jinping invade Taiwan, according to a former national security advisor to the Trump administration.…

Not-so-smart SmartScreen flagged up by Googlers Criminals are exploiting a Microsoft SmartScreen bug to deliver Magniber ransomware, potentially infecting hundreds of thousands of devices, without raising any security red flags, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).…

Fancy playing with some space Lego? We're going to need a lot of robots to handle dangerous tasks once we get to the Moon, and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a solution: Modular, wheel-free walking robots made from a bunch of reconfigurable parts. …

That's one way to counteract rising energy prices – but do you want to sit next to a DC? A UK cloud startup is offering to install its edge server hardware physically within organizations to provide free heat, in exchange for reducing its own location and cooling costs.…

The Year of Efficiency may also include sending engineers back into the office Meta – which claims without irony to be "building the future of human connection" – is laying off 10,000 more staff and will close open vacancies on 5,000 roles as it hunkers down for a "Year of Efficiency."…

Seriously, this tech makes your phone camera look like it's from the stone age To capture fast moving objects — say a cheetah sprinting across the savanna — it's not uncommon for photographers to employ shutter speeds as high as 1/8000th of a second.…

'Today's ruling certainly isn't going to stop us' says campaigner Local gig workers got some bad news yesterday: a bid to overturn California's Prop 22 failed in the appeals court, a major win for Uber and other companies who sell rides and deliveries in their cars.…