The Register

Zut alors! Department for registering and helping unemployed people broken into A French government department - responsible for registering and assisting unemployed people - is the latest victim of a mega data breach that compromised the information of up to 43 million citizens....

Booster hit the water hard and monster rocket lost during re-entry, but otherwise a success! SpaceX has launched its third Starship Super-Heavy rocket on a test flight that went almost entirely to plan....

Will the WEF experiment work? The Cybercrime Atlas, a massive undertaking that aims to disrupt cybercriminals across the globe, enters its operational phase in 2024, two years after organizers laid the groundwork at the RSA Conference....

If you don't pay attention, your lovely little Teams app will stop working Time is running out for developers and administrators to prepare themselves for Microsoft's one domain to rule them all - cloud.microsoft....

Services slowly coming back online but providers still struggling Change Healthcare is being investigated over the alleged 6 TB data theft by the ALPHV ransomware group as it continues recovery efforts....

Veteran spacecraft shows signs of sanity with poke from engineers Engineers are hopeful that the veteran spacecraft Voyager 1 might have turned a corner after spending the last three months spouting gibberish at controllers....

SteveTok? TikMnuch? breaking news On the heels of the US House of Representatives passing a TikTok ban bill, former US Treasury secretary and private equity mogul Steve Mnuchin is apparently thinking about buying the platform....

We thought everyone was thrilled about being spied on and having their jobs taken by bots A survey of UK workers suggests that quality of life declines as exposure to newer technology including wearables, robotics, and AI rises in the workplace....

Microsoft IP addresses on the spam naughty step If you're an Exchange Online user wondering why emails to Yahoo and AOL users haven't been getting through, don't worry - it isn't just you. Stricter security rules have tripped up Microsoft's email service....

Ewe-nique endeavor aimed to create Jurassic Baaa-rk experience for hunters In a case that could have been lifted from a bad movie about a "mad scientist," a Montana rancher has pleaded guilty to wildlife trafficking charges in his quest to genetically engineer an ubersheep for hunting....

Complainant moved to 'retire in place' role after Sarbanes Oxley Act report, filing alleges SAP is being sued for age discrimination and retaliation by an employee that alleges he was moved to a meaningless role after he asked for an investigation of potentially anti-competitive practices....

Thanks to Europe forcing Apple to offer a browser choice screen. Now, about ditching WebKit ... Since Apple implemented a browser choice screen for iPhones earlier this month to comply with Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), Brave Software, Mozilla, and Vivaldi have seen a surge in the number of people installing their web browsers....

Windows preview delivers one app to handle multiple accounts, boosts Copilot's capabilities Microsoft is on the cusp of addressing a major frustration caused by its Teams app by introducing a version capable of simultaneously logging in to multiple personae....

Australian minister singles out Meta - where Zuck has 600,000 Nvidia GPUs ready to roll The governments of ten nations have called on social media operators to improve their ability to detect and prevent fraud from flourishing on their platforms....

The Chaebol that also runs chipmaker SK hynix lacks energy to run multiple middle kingdom entities SK Innovation, part of the same Chaebol as chipmaker SK hynix, has liquidated its Chinese battery subsidiary, Blue Dragon Energy....

Plans to digitally transform trees South Korea's Forest Service announced on Wednesday it plans to establish a real-time forest resource management system and an AI-based forest fire monitoring platform....

Bill proposes to do to China what China already does to the US - make life hard for foreign social networks The United States House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act - a law aimed at forcing TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance to sell the app's US operations or face the prospect of a ban....

Akira ransomware crooks brag of swiping thousands of ID documents during break-in Over the next few weeks, Nissan Oceania will make contact with around 100,000 people in Australia and New Zealand whose data was pilfered in a December 2023 attack on its systems - perhaps by the Akira ransomware gang....

Cloud exit toll booth bypass built by EU regulators Microsoft on Wednesday said it will no longer charge customers an egress fee to remove their data from its Azure cloud, following similar declarations earlier this year from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google....

Would put those AI accelerators out of Arm's reach, at least Opinion After a difficult 2023, things may be looking up for RISC-V chip designer SiFive, which expects AI to drive strong revenue growth in 2024....

What's good for quantum optimization could help make models leaner Analysis Quantum computing has remained a decade away for over a decade now, but according to industry experts it may hold the secret to curbing AI's insatiable appetite....

A $2M drop from previous year. So ... things are more secure? Google awarded $10 million to 632 bug hunters last year through its vulnerability reward programs....

Vehicle electronics and software becoming ever more complex Chip designer Arm is bringing its Neoverse architecture to the automotive sector along with the first Armv9 processors for in-vehicle applications, claiming these will provide better performance for AI....

Bitcoin Fog washed hundreds of millions for criminals The operator of the world's longest-running Bitcoin money laundering service faces a 50-year prison sentence after being found guilty in a US court....

Automated AI helper intended to make security more manageable Microsoft Copilot for Security, a subscription AI security service, will be generally available on April 1, 2024, the company announced on Wednesday....

Rules were not bent for Big Tech, politicians say The European Parliament has enacted the world's first legislation designed specifically to address the risk of artificial intelligence, including biometric categorization and manipulation of human behavior, as well as stricter rules for the introduction of generative AI....

Unlikely to survive hexavalent chromium dip, officials ask residents to keep an eye out A cat covered in toxic chemicals is wandering the streets of Fukuyama in Japan, and locals are being warned not to go near....

Media giant's counterfiling accuses AI darling of 'spin' in copyright infringement case The New York Times has fired back another legal salvo at OpenAI after the ChatGPT maker accused it of manipulating the chatbot to regurgitate the media group's content....

Plus: Trump reportedly gave chipmaker license to sell to Huawei back in the day... The Pentagon has reportedly declined to grant $2.5 billion to Intel for the production of defense-related semiconductors, which could leave the Department of Commerce to foot the entire bill....

Microsoft prepares to replace an old faithful with something shiny, new, and lacking key features. Sound familiar? Analysts have warned that some enterprises have a mountain to climb ahead of Microsoft's planned phase-out of the classic Outlook for Windows. 2029 is the earliest cut-off date for support, but some key functionality is still missing from the veteran app's replacement....

Startup is also working with Qualcomm on optimized models for its Cloud AI 100 Ultra inference chips Cerebras revealed its latest dinner-plate sized AI chip on Wednesday, which it claims offers twice the performance per watt of its predecessor, alongside a collaboration with Qualcomm aimed at accelerating machine learning inferencing....

And here you were saying tech hadn't yet made a difference to someone special Larry Ellison's personal wealth is inextricably linked to Oracle and yesterday it ballooned by more than $15 billion following a 12 percent rally of Big Red's stock on the news that it is building an AI datacenter and has a deal with AI darling Nvidia....

27,000 individuals had data stolen, which for some included names and social security numbers Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months....

Might be wishful thinking from finance exec following two-year computer sector recession AI could be the mechanism to shorten notebook replacement cycles, according to the chief financial officer at Dell....

Unicorn Kingdom prime minister fails to provide 300 million of magic software beans promised A local software subsidy scheme launched by UK PM Rishi Sunak, designed to help struggling small businesses following the pandemic, has spent less than seven percent of its 300 million budget....

Don't worry, you can still put it back, but it's an accessibility snag The Fedora development team is discussing dropping the GNOME on X11 session in Fedora 41, meaning that the flagship edition will be Wayland-only....

Infosec folk aren't thrilled that if you poke APIs enough, you learn AI's secrets Boffins have managed to pry open closed AI services from OpenAI and Google with an attack that recovers an otherwise hidden portion of transformer models....

Language models are entirely happy on the desktop What is it that makes a PC an AI PC? Beyond some vague hand-waving at the presence "neural processing units" and other features only available on the latest-and-greatest silicon, no-one has come up with a definition beyond an attempt to market some FOMO....

KAIROS detonated a few seconds after clearing the launchpad Video On another bad day for Japan's space industry, the nation's first private satellite launch failed within seconds of launch....

100,000 Chinese drivers join queue just to check out the 'SU7' in a showroom The electric vehicle subsidiary of Chinese consumer electronics brand Xiaomi on Tuesday announced its first product - the Speed Ultra 7 (SU7) sedan - will be ready for deliveries this month....

Seoul wants AliExpress and Temu to step up customer service, maybe Meta too South Korea's Fair Trade Commission has announced a raft of measures aimed at ensuring offshore e-commerce services meet their service and support obligations. And it looks to be aimed squarely at Chinese retailers....

Extra zeroes added to transaction values, just a handful of days before a payment deadline India's income tax collection efforts hit a snag this week when it was found that an automated data feed somehow added an extra two zeroes to the value of taxable transactions, resulting in the issuance of notices to individuals that wrongly overstated their tax liabilities....

Went down yesterday, too, longer and harder. Maybe we should call it GitFlub? GitHub is experiencing a second day of degraded performance, following a bad update that threw the code locker into chaos....

Proxmox box sees fresh dedicated hardware become part of the market for Virtzilla alternatives Exclusive Every vendor capable of spelling "virtualization" has spent a good chunk of 2024 making a pitch for its products as a fine alternative for folks discomfited by Broadcom's takeover of VMware. Canadian outfit 45Drives has taken matters a step further by creating an entire product - the Proxinator - to lure those considering the open source Proxmox hyperconverged infrastructure stack....

Critical bugs galore among 61 Microsoft fixes, 56 from Adobe, a dozen from SAP, and a fistful from Fortinet Patch Tuesday Microsoft's monthly patch drop has arrived, delivering a mere 61 CVE-tagged vulnerabilities - none listed as under active attack or already known to the public....

Exec accused of using own work PC to swipe confidential AI and staffing docs for stealth cloud startup An ex-Meta veep has been sued by his former bosses for "brazenly disloyal and dishonest conduct" - and by that, they mean he allegedly stole confidential documents to help him build and recruit colleagues for an AI cloud startup....

Next logical step after rounds of voluntary layoffs IBM is back in the layoff headlines after reportedly slashing jobs in its marketing and communications divisions....

Reports indicate Korean giants fear 'backlash' from US over resale of lithography equipment to Middle Kingdom Just a week after it emerged that Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML was under US pressure to stop servicing and reparing its tech sold to customers in China, Samsung and SK hynix are feeling the squeeze too....

Plus almost $1.5b for health-care cybersecurity US President Joe Biden has asked Congress to approve an extra $103 million in funding for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, bringing CISA's total budget to $3 billion....

When almost everyone has the same engine, are benchmarks so important? The latest Speedometer, a benchmark measuring web responsiveness, is out in version 3.0. However, some browser makers have questioned how helpful such benchmarking is in the era of shared rendering engines....