The Register

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.…

This speech isn't free The world's richest man Elon Musk has said how he can get his hands on $46.5 billion to take over Twitter, explaining that more than half of that figure will come from banks via debt financing. …

Who will win? Staff unions or $1bn of venture capital? Amazon today announced the creation of a $1 billion venture investment program with the aim to spur innovation in three areas close to its heart: fulfillment, logistics, and the supply chain. …

No dark patterns, no Google nonsense ... Wow, what a superpower Alphabet's Google on Thursday said it has rolled out a new cookie consent banner for YouTube visitors in France and will soon deploy the popup for its online properties throughout Europe.…

I mean, there's still so many, many IT depts to suck up into our cloud Amazon is not planning to spin off its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud division. Instead, AWS is likely to make acquisitions of its own in order to keep ahead in the cloud services market, according to its chief executive Adam Selipsky.…

Commercial life in Putin Land not exactly a bed of roses, warns Russia's Google Yandex, Russia's Google, has withdrawn its financial guidance for 2022 due to uncertainty over what this year will yield for the corporation.…

Azure trusted with food giant's sauce code US food behemoth Kraft Heinz has signed a multi-year agreement with Microsoft to shift much of its datacenter assets to Azure.…

Tests in Belgium might mean carbon-free backup power for its other DCs The pilot of a new emergency battery power system at a Google datacenter in Belgium may be the first of many steps toward eliminating diesel generators from similar facilities around the world.…

While heaping praise on Big Red, analysts find room to criticize licensing, negotiations, and integration Oracle's pricing models and contracts can be "challenging to navigate" and "frustrating for customers," according to a Gartner report that otherwise heaps praise on the omnipresent enterprise software company.…

It's hoping CSPs will consume platform as a service via public or private cloud HPE has revealed details of its HPE RAN Automation, a service management and orchestration platform created to help network operators implement a disaggregated radio access network (RAN).…

Google cites US sanctions while Beijing and John Lee Ka-chiu are miffed YouTube has blocked the campaign account of Hong Kong's only candidate for the Special Administrative Region's (SAR) head of government, John Lee Ka-chiu, citing US sanctions.…

The last LTS before a Canonical float in 2023? Canonical has finally pushed "go" on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, making the Linux distribution generally available and a handy update for careful users still running 20.04 LTS.…

SpaceX and Kuiper in the $278.5m mix to replace space agency's Tracking Data and Relay Satellite fleet NASA is lavishing a combined $278.5m on six US companies for near-Earth space communication services.…

We've passed peak chip shortage, though, insists Gartner analyst A large industrial conglomerate is being forced to take increasingly desperate measures to satisfy their needs for chips, according to ASML, a manufacturer of chip-making equipment.…

UK prime minister visits country to 'welcome' contract, namecheck commercial pacts, talk up trade OneWeb has agreed with the commercial arm of Indian Space Research Organization, New Space India Limited, to deploy its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband satellites from the country's launch pad outside Chennai.…

Botnet infrastructure shut down last year, now central to a fast-spreading email scam, researchers say More than a year after essentially being shut down, the notorious Emotet malware operation is showing a strong resurgence.…

Software? Ticked. Hardware? Ticked. Kitchen sink? Oh go on then, why not The British government is looking to speak with suppliers in preparation for a multi-year procurement that could be worth up to £8 billion in technology products and services.…

Meanwhile, Elon Musk says we need to crack real-world AI to get fully autonomous cars to work The UK government has confirmed planned revisions to the Highway Code to accommodate self-driving vehicles, including allowing drivers to watch TV while an AI takes the wheel.…

It's 2036 and another hijacked AI betrays its operators Boffins from UC Berkeley, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study in the United States have devised techniques to implant undetectable backdoors in machine learning (ML) models.…

Someone's got to keep, say, Nvidia on its toes In the race to provide the best machine-learning accelerators, one of Nvidia's top challengers has claimed a victory in the biotech space, London firm LabGenius, which said Graphcore's intelligence processing units (IPUs) provide significantly faster performance for AI-based drug discovery than some unidentified traditional GPUs.…

Who knew what when and what did they do? Analysis GitHub says it has identified and alerted developers who have had their private repositories accessed and downloaded via stolen authentication tokens.…

Cannot confirm reports of Tim Cook on the Midnight Train to Georgia Workers in Atlanta, Georgia, have become the first US Apple Store staff to file an official request to hold an union vote with America's National Labor Relations Board.…

If this is surprising to operators, we are doomed The Five Eyes nations' cybersecurity agencies this week urged critical infrastructure to be ready for attacks by crews backed by or sympathetic to the Kremlin amid strong Western opposition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.…

Webpage acceleration tech deemed harmful by rivals Brave, the browser maker, and DuckDuckGo, the web search service, have both taken aim at AMP, Google's controversial web publishing framework.…

James Baugh faced trial over campaign against newsletter couple A now-former eBay security director accused of harassing a couple who wrote a critical newsletter about the internet tat bazaar is set to plead guilty to cyberstalking.…

Remote code exec is so 2014. Have this container escape and privilege escalation, instead Amazon Web Services has updated its Log4j security patches after it was discovered the original fixes made customer deployments vulnerable to container escape and privilege escalation.…

Whole new meaning for zero consequences Java versions 15 to 18 contain a flaw in its ECDSA signature validation that makes it trivial for miscreants to digitally sign files and other data as if they were legit organizations.…

Production talent isn't here, costs are high ... so how's that multi-billion-dollar Arizona plant coming, eh? TSMC founder Morris Chang, a key player in the semiconductor industry since its inception, thinks America's attempt to grow its domestic chip production will be "a wasteful, expensive exercise in futility."…

Joining RHEL 9 in the preview barn AlmaLinux has released a beta for version 9 of its eponymous Linux distribution aimed at RHEL refuseniks still reeling from the dumping of CentOS by Red Hat.…

Case study in why price-performance matters in server chips AMD claims its Epyc CPUs played a role in the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team winning last year's Constructors' Championship race.…

Cyber-espionage gang using multiple variants of its custom backdoor to ensure persistence, Symantec warns A Russian-linked threat group that has almost exclusively targeted Ukraine since it first appeared on the scene in 2014 is deploying multiple variants of its malware payload on systems within the country.…

Months after spinning out infrastructure service division, IBM not bigger but feeling less blue Freed from the financial anchor that was its infrastructure services division - spun out as Kyndryl in November - IBM kicked off calendar Q1 of 2022 with something that has eluded it for years: decent growth.…

If you want to retain customers, Big Red recommends putting AI in charge The pandemic has made people more concerned about sustainability than ever, and businesses are the focuses of their collective ire, with most saying they don't take enterprise sustainability goals (ESGs) seriously. The solution, Oracle says, is to put AIs in charge.…

Yet another nail in the coffin for aged and unsecure file-sharing protocol Microsoft has taken another step toward the final eradication of the venerable SMB1 protocol with plans to disable it by default in all editions of Windows 11.…

Goal is to make natural language processing available in all the world's tongues Amazon released an open-source speech dataset supporting 51 languages on Wednesday, encouraging developers to build more third-party apps and services for its AI speaker device Alexa.…

PhaaS, SMiShing, and remote work drive increase in phishing attacks The number of phishing attacks worldwide jumped 29 percent last year as threat actors countered stronger enterprise defenses with newer methods, according to researchers with Zscaler's ThreatLabz research team.…

Growing enterprise demand for more complex cloud-native services carries a higher price tag Global spending on public cloud services will come close to $500 billion this year, according to research firm Gartner.…

Streaming giant plans to grow by adding new subscription tier and building up games unit Following a serious slump in subscriber numbers, Netflix execs are trying to boost financial growth by converting account sharers into paying users and building up its game division.…

Malware-laced recruitment emails are more Kim job ill than Kim Jong-un The North Korean-based criminal group Lazarus is expanding its attacks into the blockchain and crypto space, three agencies of the US government have warned.…

Friends are always tellin' me, you're a user ... Just be good to free() Google's bug hunters say they spotted 58 zero-day vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild last year, which is the most-ever recorded since its Project Zero team started analyzing these in mid-2014.…

UK High Court beckons for Windows vendor and reseller amid claims of on-prem software license skullduggery The ValueLicensing case against Microsoft is set to proceed in the UK after a judge dismissed the Windows vendor's jurisdictional challenge and strike-out application.…