The Register

Hopes to get itself off an international naughty list - as you would when you want foreign investment in your chip sector Vietnam's Ministry of Finance has raised the prospect of prohibiting or regulating virtual assets by May 2025, as part of a drive to boost anti-money laundering (AML) efforts....

So much for the 'commitment to support news organizations' made in just 2020 Meta has killed its Facebook news service in the United States and Australia....

Everybody's so happy they're not mentioning start dates, subsidy levels, or other useful details India's government has approved the construction of the nation's first semiconductor wafer fabrication plant, to be built by Taiwanese foundry-as-a-service outfit Powerchip (PSMC), together with Indian giant Tata's electronics business....

Court order means ad giant will have to cough evidence of possible market manipulation It has not been a great week for Google's Ad business. After being served a 2.1 billion lawsuit in Europe, Canadian regulators have expanded an investigation into whether it abused its market position to quash rival platforms....

Cloned then compromised, bad repos are forked faster than they can be removed A malware distribution campaign that began last May with a handful of malicious software packages uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) has spread to GitHub and expanded to reach at least 100,000 compromised repositories....

$675 million to accelerate development of machine that can lift, but can't keep up with humans If you thought blue collar jobs were safe from AI, think again. Robotics startup Figure aims to replace millions of workers with its humanoid automatons and has just received $675 million in funding to accelerate development....

Workers allege discrimination, missing payments To say Elon Musk's business empire is having a week of legal woe may be an understatement, after filings revealed yesterday suggest his social network X and electric car outfit Tesla both face potentially expensive court battles....

Those little popups may reveal location, device details, IP address, and more More than 130 petitions seeking access to push notification metadata have been filed in US courts, according to a Washington Post investigation - a finding that underscores the lack of privacy protection available to users of mobile devices....

Choose your own FISA Section 702 adventure: End-run around lawmakers or business as usual? The Biden Administration has asked a court, rather than Congress, to renew controversial warrantless surveillance powers used by American intelligence and due to expire within weeks. It's a move that is either business as usual or an end-run around spying reforms, depending on who in Washington you believe....

Dating app Bumble also finds breaking up is easy to do for a third of its crew It's been a bad week to work in the video game industry. First Sony closed its London studio and cut staff, and now Electronic Arts is letting workers go....

No Chinese automakers sell cars in the US, but the feds are still going to investigate whether they're a threat Concerned over the chance that Chinese-made cars could pose a future threat to national security, Biden's administration is proposing plans to probe potential threats posed by "connected" vehicles made in the Middle Kingdom....

The big new version of the other desktop, complete with improved HDR and a spinning desktop cube The latest major release of KDE Plasma is here, a decade after KDE 5. This is only the fifth February 29 since KDE 4 in 2008, making this a rare event....

Chipzilla resurrects Altera brand as former datacenter chief takes the helm Sandra Rivera, a longtime Intel veteran and chief executive of the chipmaker's FPGA business, reprised the Altera brand during a webcast Thursday in which she shared her vision for the newly spun-off company....

Analysts warn of big leap in cred-harvesting malware activity last year There appears to be an uptick in interest among cybercriminals in infostealers - malware designed to swipe online account passwords, financial info, and other sensitive data from infected PCs - as a relatively cheap and easy way to get a foothold in organizations' IT environments to deploy devastating ransomware....

Fuel pumps refuse payment, smartwatches stop - all part of the rich tapestry of computer calendars Today is February 29, an unusual day in that it is added to the common 28 in years that are multiples of four to keep the calendar in sync with the astronomical year....

Mega makers already operate in water-scarce areas, and worry is they'll drink us dry Water supply is seen as a growing risk factor for the chip industry with consumption rising by up to ten percent each year, and many of the biggest producers already operating in areas prone to water scarcity....

CEO Frank Slootman announces retirement as former data cloud rising star sees value sink The value of cloud-based data warehouse vendor Snowflake plunged 24 percent in extended trading in the US last night after it announced lower-than-expected forecasts for product revenue as well as the departure of CEO Frank Slootman....

One of them, One Point CEO David Layani, tried to buy rudderless integrator The long-running Atos saga took another twist today after it announced the nomination to its board of One Point CEO David Layani, who previously made an audacious bid for the ailing integrator and outsourcing biz....

GDPR claim alleges Facebook parent's 'commercial surveillance practices are fundamentally illegal' Consumer groups are filing legal complaints in the EU in a coordinated attempt to use data protection law to stop Meta from giving local users a "fake choice" between paying up and consenting to being profiled and tracked via data collection....

Too late to prevent Q1 from being 7th straight decline for US titan HP Ink recorded its seventh quarter of shrinking revenues as enterprise customers voted to sweat their assets for longer amid economic uncertainty, but with a new all-in-one print sub coming and AI PCs it is feeling bolder....

Global 'Resource Actions' to hit Europe hard, with Enterprise Ops & Support, CIO, HR and Real Estate in firing line Exclusive IBM is asking staff who want voluntary redundancy to raise their hand as it embarks on a new round of global job cuts, though roles in Europe and within a handful of departments are expected to shoulder the brunt....

Following in the same direction as the good ship KDE Plasma The next major release of the LXQt desktop should arrive in April. Like the imminent KDE Plasma 6.0, it will use version 6 of the Qt toolkit....

Doctors voiced concern over lack of Red-Amber-Green rating system, says report A coroner's report into a death at a hospital in northern England has said patients are at risk unless concerns about the implementation of a new Oracle Cerner patient administration system are addressed....

Meanwhile, the Google News Initiative is pushing AI tools for publishers A group of more than 30 European media organizations has sued Google for 2.1 billion, seeking damages for lost revenue they say was caused by the search giant's anticompetitive advertising technology....

Very low Earth orbit birds could sip the outer atmosphere on their way up Electric propulsion systems that generate power from the scant air in the outer edges of the atmosphere could power satellites in very low Earth orbit (VLEO), without the need for conventional propellants - at least in theory....

Beats guidance as renewals grow and waits for Broadcom and Cisco to bring more bucks Nutanix doesn't expect a rush of VMware users to adopt its platform, because many signed up for long-term deals before Broadcom acquired the virtualization giant....

This might solve its twin problems of low growth and short-term customers Alibaba Cloud has made significant price cuts for those willing to use its datacenters in mainland China and commit to multi-year deals....

Execs swear Chinese cloud will beat local rivals with a superior software stack that makes AI sing Chinese web giant Baidu has told investors its long-term planning assumes it won't be able to access leading-edge GPUs, but that it can beat local rivals with its superior software stack....

Tried to speed boot times, maybe by messing with 'Windows source code', ended up building a viral on-ramp Chinese PC maker Acemagic has admitted some of its products shipped with pre-installed malware....

Japan's government slapped it for using the wrong code to produce too-powerful results Toyota apologized on Wednesday for an incident involving the fraudulent certification of its diesel engines that resulted in a corrective order from Japan's transport ministry....

And accuses a former Australian politician of having 'sold out their country' The director general of security at Australia's Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has delivered his annual threat assessment, revealing ongoing attempts by adversaries to map digital infrastructure with a view to disrupting important services at delicate moments....

The Intercept, Raw Story, AlterNet want damages and to have their content removed from models Three digital publishers have sued OpenAI over claims that it stole their copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT in two separate lawsuits filed on Wednesday....

Brags it lifted 6TB of data, but let's remember these people are criminals and not worthy of much trust The ALPHV/BlackCat cybercrime gang has taken credit - if that's the word - for a ransomware infection at Change Healthcare that has disrupted thousands of pharmacies and hospitals across the US, and also claimed that the amount of sensitive data stolen and affected health-care organizations is much larger than the victims initially disclosed....

Talk about gone in 60 seconds Computer scientists have developed an efficient way to craft prompts that elicit harmful responses from large language models (LLMs)....

Fujian Jinhua escapes prosecution tho remains on the US sanctions list A Chinese chipmaker accused of stealing DRAM secrets from American memory manufacturer Micron has been found not guilty, bringing a five-year long legal saga to an end....

Subzero temperatures and batteries don't mix - but there may be a solution Researchers have discovered that using "small molecule" solvents could help improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries, speeding up charging and ensuring they work at low temperatures....

Comes after US probe into biz's dealings with SMIC Applied Materials was served with multiple subpoenas relating to Chinese shipments, the chip factory equipment maker disclosed today....

Expert panel finds 'a lack of awareness of safety-related metrics at all levels,' and more, at plane maker "Inadequate," "confusing," "disconnect," and "lack of awareness" aren't words passengers would like to hear associated with aviation safety, but according to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that's exactly what the situation is like at Boeing....

Lawsuit alleges it misled investors with claims new AI products were 'facilitating greater platformization' and more Updated Palo Alto Networks (PAN) is facing a proposed class action lawsuit that alleges investors were deceived about the traction of its platform tactics and hurt by an unexpectedly low billings forecast that crashed the share price....

But beware - Gparted Live hasn't been updated yet There's a new bugfix release of Gparted, a FOSS replacement for PowerQuest's wonderful Partition Magic....

Charlie and the AI factory flop compared to 'meth lab' In the most flagrant case of false advertising since The NeverEnding Story, cops were called to a Wonka-themed "Willy's Chocolate Experience" in Glasgow, Scotland, because promotional material was made entirely from AI-generated slop....

Trevor Milton bought it for cash and stock options, and he wants the cash back Try not to weep into your morning coffee, but convicted fraudster Trevor Milton might lose a ranch that a fresh filing claims he bought after lying to its owner "about Nikola's business" to persuade the man to sell to him....

Stock awards front loaded, get five years in one go Broadcom's boss Hock Tan more than doubled his total compensation package in fiscal 2023, which will no doubt be well received by the thousands of small VMware customers and cloud providers he's upset....

Czech billionaire buyer walks away from ailing Tech Foundations division Troubled tech giant Atos confirmed today that negotiations with the prospective buyer of its legacy IT operation have ended prematurely, coming after the recent cancellation of its rights issue to raise cash....

Train-wreck public sector project was forecast to save 'bankrupt' council money Europe's largest local authority has allocated 5.3 million ($6.7 million) in next year's budget to pay for manual workarounds deemed necessary after its effort to transition from SAP to Oracle ended in an expensive disaster....

New versions of both Overstreet's baby and OpenZFS will hit the street soon New versions of the two leading next-generations filesystems are coming: both OpenZFS 2.2.3, and some time afterwards, an improved bcachefs....

Motor-mouth CEO Alex Karp claims Palantir stopped 'innumerable' terror attacks in Europe The CEO of controversial data-mining firm Palantir has claimed that the company's technology has prevented terrorist attacks in Europe, thereby implicitly saving the continent from the return of fascism....

Biden readies executive order targeting China, Russia, and pals US President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order today that aims to prevent the sale or transfer of Americans' sensitive personal information and government-related data to adversarial countries including China and Russia....

Report points out the difficulties of getting such a system right Using waste heat from datacenters for district heating makes sense from an environmental standpoint, yet there are implementation challenges and potential pitfalls introduced with any government regulations covering it....

Cash-for-Azure-access deal went through just as latest LLM landed The European Commission is investigating Microsoft's 15 million ($16.3 million) investment in French startup Mistral, which came just after the latter released a large language model to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT....