The Register

Will soldiers actually use these goggles? Asking for a watchdog The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren't actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned. …

Worth doing a lot of heavy lifting there, we know Crooks stole non-fungible tokens (NFTs) said to be worth about $3 million after breaking into the Bored Ape Yacht Club's Instagram account and posting a link to a copycat website that sought to harvest marks' assets. …

To truly understand virtual reality, first you need to go outside, interact with actual people... In a move sure to reassure those pushing for an all-virtual future, Facebook-owner Meta has announced it's opening its first physical store.…

Fly to some paradise, tweeting as you go, arrive, relax under the stars only to watch those same satellites in the sky SpaceX will provide free Wi-Fi for passengers flying internationally with Hawaiian Airlines as early as next year, using its Starlink broadband satellite network.…

Financial software giant slammed for 'poor security practices' Intuit is being sued in the US after a security failure at its Mailchimp email marketing business allegedly led to the theft of cryptocurrency from one or more digital wallets.…

Pretty cool that all other problems a billionaire could reasonably tackle are solved, leaving this one It's official. Twitter's board on Monday said it has accepted an offer from Elon Musk, the world's richest man, to purchase the micro-blogging website and take it private. …

Thinking of another word for this US govt department's name The first bug bounty program by America's Homeland Security has led to the discovery and disclosure of 122 vulnerabilities, 27 of which were deemed critical.…

Prepare your 'turn it off and on' jokes as engineers get ready to flip the heaters Attempts to recover ESA's stricken Sentinel-1B satellite are continuing and one of the failure scenarios engineers are considering will be familiar to some of us: possible leakage of a ceramic capacitor.…

100 self-driving cabs will wander streets of Guangzhou Residents of Chinese metropolises Guangzhou and Beijing may be in for a surprise the next time they hail a cab – some of them are now self-driving.…

Meanwhile, Intel is catching up to TSMC in leading-edge manufacturing nodes Apple and Intel are likely to become the first customers for TSMC's advanced 2nm manufacturing process when the node goes into production in late 2025, according to new reports.…

Report says social media platform's board close to accepting $54.20-a-share offer The weeks-long saga between Elon Musk and Twitter may be drawing to a close as soon as this afternoon with the sale of Twitter to the Tesla CEO thought to be imminent.…

Check Point uncovers web vulnerability that could have led to cryptocurrency theft A flaw detected in the browser version of the Ever Surf cryptocurrency wallet could have given hackers who exploited it full control over a targeted user's wallet, say threat hunters at Check Point Research.…

A new transmission protocol can work lightning fast, but only with very thorough records to pull from Companies that move and analyze huge volumes of data are always on the lookout for faster ways to do it. One Australian company says it has created a protocol that can "transmit terabytes per minute across the globe."…

Tool relies on platform getting everything right in real time, cautions analyst A report from cloud startup CAST AI claims companies running cloud-native applications typically spend three times as much as they need on resources because of over-provisioning.…

Factories were operating in 'closed loop,' now parts are being made in 'backup' facilities Foxconn, Taiwan's largest electronics manufacturer, has suspended operations at two factories just west of Shanghai in Kunshan City Country due to onsite COVID cases.…

Fines worth 6 percent of annual turnover survived draft in provisional agreement The EU's Digital Services Act is one step closer to becoming law with a provisional political agreement reached between the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament.…

Broadcom allegedly citing supply chain issues to lock customers in exclusively Chipmaker Broadcom is reportedly back under investigation with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding complaints it is illegally forcing exclusivity agreements with customers.…

Broken your headphone jack? No problem. Want some more RAM? Er, about that... Microsoft has reminded us once again of a time when enthusiasts could get into the guts of their hardware with a teardown of its Surface Laptop Studio, all in the name of repairability.…

Experts advise caution in sharing data with Big Red – it could be used in license audits Experts in software licensing are warning users against wholly adopting new tools Oracle promises will help map and size on-prem installations in preparation for a move to the cloud.…

Convenience or purity? You can only choose one A painful issue for Linux distros that are built on free software is firmware. This especially affects Debian, as outlined by former project head Steve Mcintyre here, and it's getting worse with time.…

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.…