The Register

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....

Talk about an unholy social media alliance Faced with mounting legal troubles and a sputtering special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal, former president Donald Trump reportedly turned somewhere unexpected last year to offload his flailing social media platform, Truth Social: X owner and Tesla technoking Elon Musk....

War of words wages on between vendors divided Last week, we wrote about how security outfit Rapid7 threw JetBrains, the company behind the popular CI/CD platform TeamCity, under the bus over allegations of silent patching. Now, JetBrains has gone on the offensive....

Hyperscalers increasingly looking over shoulders as workloads grow AI and its effect on datacenter energy consumption are a concern at Google's parent Alphabet, with the search giant seeking a manager to lead on AI/ML Carbon Reduction and Net Zero efforts....

But Artemis is still OK, so that's alright then NASA has published its budget request for the fiscal year 2025, and it is not good news for the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-ray Observatory....

Forget the piffle about real world results, lets look at the potential of wundertech Oracle disappointed Wall Street analysts after its latest quarterly revenue haul missed market estimates, although teasing an AI deal with en vogue Nvidia proved enough to bolster Big Red's share price....

Think this'll help you escape the fees? Nope - Apple still wants a cut for letting devs install things on user devices Apple's compliance measures with the EU's Digital Markets Act haven't exactly been universally well received, so the iMaker is making a few tweaks to appease the software-developing masses....

Company might even turn a profit this year Telegram's CEO has begun discussing an initial public offering (IPO) as the messaging platform's user count nears the billion mark....

IP sold to founders in pre-pack administration, product warranties unaffected The founders of Bullitt Group and subsidiary Bullitt Satellite Connect bought the IP for 210,000 ($269,000) excluding VAT in a pre-pack administration on the same day that PWC was appointed to liquidate the biz....

Targeting recovery this week, officials still trying to 'dentify the nature of the incident' Leicester City Council says IT systems and a number of its critical service phone lines will remain down until later this week at the earliest following a "cyber incident"....

If it has a GPU and NPU, plus VNNI and DP4a instructions, it qualifies. But it's not a brand like vPro or Ultrabook If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies - at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing....

Amid reports emerge of technical issues, immigration teams keep 24-year-old legacy system up and running Technical issues with the Home Office's new case management system for immigration is causing delays to claims and frustration for staff....

Plaintiffs seek termination of permissionless and unpaid AI data harvesting In early February, Microsoft accused the plaintiffs suing the software maker and its partner OpenAI over alleged AI privacy violations of evoking "doomsday hyperbole about AI as a threat to civilization."...

Some simply chop cables in ducts, others pour in petrol and set 'the whole lot alight' Alternative network providers are calling on UK government to help protect against a growing number of local physical attacks on fiber infrastructure....

Award winning tech turns out to be less than accurate Network Rail has become the latest company to flag the risks of smart technology implementations despite receiving a safety award for geofencing applications....

Russia and Sudan top the list of suspects Several French government websites have been disrupted by a severe distributed denial of service attack....

Shared cultural values sealed the deal and we're struggling to figure out what they are Singapore-based semiconductor packaging company Silicon Box announced on Monday it will invest $3.6 billion to build a manufacturing facility in Northern Italy....

Promises quarterly lookbooks of branded tat, powered by branded kit Cisco has become a fashion retailer....

LLMs show promise, but are 'not yet capable of providing credible explanations for their own predictions' A senior policymaker at Singapore's central bank, the Monetary Authority, has suggested that artificial intelligence technology is not yet suitable to inform its policy development work....

US senator calls cyber attack 'inexcusable,' calls for mandatory security rules The Biden administration and US lawmakers are turning up the pressure on UnitedHealth group to ease medical providers' pain after the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, by expediting payments to hospitals, physicians and pharmacists - among other tactics....

No more creepy snooping? Be my guest Airbnb guests will be delighted to know that their short-term rentals don't contain indoor security cameras - once a change to the platform's community policy takes effect at the end of April....

Don't worry, we have a strong suspicion Putin's still gonna win The Kremlin has accused the United States of meddling in Russia's upcoming presidential election, and even accused Uncle Sam of planning a cyberattack on the country's online voting system....

And perhaps we should be worried that this model is happy to grab a gun and start blasting, says Microsoft bod You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself working with GPT-4. And you may ask yourself, "Will GPT-4 run DOOM?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"...

TA-1 test ticks off all the primary objectives, but hypersonic flight will have to wait Stratolaunch has finally completed the first powered flight of the Talon-A test vehicle - TA-1 - which was dropped from its carrier aircraft - the monstrous Roc - for a planned dunking in the Pacific....

Claims allegedly pirated content from Books3 dataset trawled by its models Nvidia is the latest tech giant to face allegations that it used copyrighted works to train AI models without obtaining the permission of the authors....

It fell through a timewarp from an alternate and very different computing universe The earliest known release of Microsoft's 32-bit version of OS/2 is now out there, and intrepid code archeologists have it running. It's a glimpse into an alternatve computing universe....

Plus: Pilots on Lion Air's Batik fall asleep and miss Jakarta Alaska Airlines is reportedly cooperating on a US Department of Justice (DoJ) criminal investigation into Boeing regarding an incident which saw an aircraft plug blow out of a 737 MAX 9 mid-flight in January....

Water? Like from the toilet? Fancy a cold one? Would it change your mind if that frothy, frosty beer was brewed using treated wastewater?...

CEO defends decision in difficult tech market Distributed database vender PlanetScale has made work-force lay-offs and ended its free-tier services in an effort to achieve sustainable profitability....

Time to start spamming those reposts: Top users are getting early access to 1.76 million shares Redditors hoping to get in early on the company's upcoming IPO had better hope they have a lot of karma in reserve....

Those using African American vernacular more likely to be sentenced to death, if LLMs were asked to decide AI models may consume huge amounts of energy, water, computing resources, and venture capital but they give back so much in the way of misinformation and bias....

Five months in and the mammoth post-ransomware recovery has barely begun The British Library says legacy IT is the overwhelming factor delaying efforts to recover from the Rhysida ransomware attack in late 2023....

Commission has until December 9, 2024, to put its house in order The European Commission has been reprimanded for infringing data protection regulations when using Microsoft 365....

Damage to DNA, mutations, uncontrolled cell division and malignancy. Is space tourism worth the risk? International regulations governing space flight lack rules to protect space tourism passengers from the ill-effects of cosmic radiation, according to researchers....

And does it count as consent? The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has opened a consultation on "consent or pay" business models. We're sure readers of The Register will have a fair few things to say....

Good news, everyone! The world's favorite daemon, systemd, is coming to phones. The team behind the leading replacement OS for end-of-life smartphones are to adopt systemd - to make working with GNOME and KDE easier....

Terms and conditions apply. Lawyers need not Opinion It's a good rule of nostril that if your litigation department is a source of revenue, your business model stinks. The law is there to discourage delinquent behavior when all else fails, not to amplify power for profit. If there's a better, fairer way to stop naughtiness, you should try that first....

Older and wiser colleagues couldn't see the funny side Who, Me? Aaah ... Monday! That wonderful week-opening day that brings with it so many possibilities. Including, as Register readers know all too well, the chance to make errors that must then be discreetly buried - the subject of our Who, Me?, our weekly reader-contributed tale of career-threatening bullets you've managed to dodge....

But for now, smaller customers have been cut off from on-demand training content Exclusive VMware by Broadcom will soon launch a new training experience that will offer more training at a fraction of the cost they used to pay."...

Bejing allows easier access to AliPay and Tencent's Weixin, and higher spending limits too China's main payment systems, Alipay and WeChat Pay, eased access for foreign users on Friday, a day after Beijing issued new guidelines for its payment industry....

PLUS: NSA shares cloud security tips; Infosec training for Jordanian women; Critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief Cybersecurity researchers informed Microsoft that Notorious North Korean hackers Lazarus Group discovered the "holy grail" of rootkit vulnerabilities in Windows last year, but Redmond still took six months to patch the problem....

PLUS: Microsoft bars prompts to make Copilot less violent and NSFW AI in brief OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has returned the company's board and will serve alongside three new members....

For now, have Linux 6.8, which Linus Torvalds could find no reason to delay Linus Torvalds has released version 6.8 of the Linux Kernel....

PLUS: Chinese tops Steam's language charts; HPE opens Saudi server factory; Indian government apps have flaws Asia in brief Australia's Federal Court last Friday dismissed Singtel's appeal against a past ruling that it engaged in transfer pricing and therefore owes millions in tax....

Cooked in a math lab, here's an open source LLM that knows the law Machine-learning researchers and legal experts have released SauLM-7B, which they claim is the first text-generating open source large language model specifically focused on legal work and applications....

Lots of pats on the back for the CHIPS Act too US president Joe Biden used the State of the Union address on Thursday to call for a ban on AI voice impersonation....

Chatting to Anmol Taploo about the race to develop tech for satellites Interview Will satellites be capable of generating their own thrust with propellant created out of thin air one day? Scientists at the George Washington University (GWU) and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory reckon so....