The Register

Fasten your seat belts, secure your tray table, and try not to give away your passwords Australia's Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi networks on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest fliers' credentials for email and social media services....

President has ordered a datacenter audit and made backups mandatory Indonesia's president Joko Widodo has ordered an audit of government datacenters after it was revealed that most of the data they store is not backed up....

Plus: US auto dealers still offline; Conti coders sanction; Rabbit R1 hardcoded API keys; and more security in brief It took a while, but Microsoft has told customers that the Russian criminals who compromised its systems earlier this year made off with even more emails than it first admitted....

Plus: Singapore launches global regulatory blockchain; China gets new SciTech boss; India spectrum auction fizzles Asia In Brief China's Ministry of State Security has asked citizens to stop posting info about the nation's spy satellites and national security installations online....

Prioritizing Mexico and Southeast Asia Alibaba Cloud has revealed that it will soon close its datacenter operations in Australia and India - despite previously telling The Register its Australian operations remained intact....

A picture is worth a 1,000 words... or was that a 1,000 TOPS Hands On The launch of Microsoft's Copilot+ AI PCs brought with it a load of machine-learning-enhanced functionality, including an image generator built right into MS Paint that runs locally and turns your doodles into art....

I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time! Despite a European Commission review in April clearing Microsoft of trying to exert control over OpenAI by the backdoor, the duo's $13 billion partnership hasn't escaped regulatory scrutiny just yet....

Impact studies crucial for accurately determining Red Planet's age Seismic data from Mars indicates that our neighboring planet is hit about three hundred times a year by meteorites the size of basketballs....

Yes, Joe totally had editing help that night, he was certainly impresszzz.... Poll OpenAI's ChatGPT fell for an inaccurate claim that Thursday night's US presidential debate between Trump and Biden on CNN would have a one to two-minute delay, rather than the usual few seconds....

Unless you've got a lawyer, that is Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, said this week that machine-learning companies can scrape most content published online and use it to train neural networks because it's essentially "freeware."...

Funny what happens if you take Tesla out of the numbers, though Interest in electric vehicles has waned slightly among US motorists for the first time since 2020 says Pew Research, with only three out of ten Americans right now saying they're considering a battery-powered ride for their next purchase....

So, so many lines of memory-unsafe routines in crucial open source, and unsafe dependencies The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has analyzed 172 critical open source projects and found that more than half contain code written in languages like C and C++ that are not naturally memory safe....

Same APT29 crew that hit Microsoft and SolarWinds. How close were we to a mega backdoor situation? TeamViewer says it was Russian intelligence that broke into its systems this week....

Starlink rival slips again, but service still set for 2025 The first full-scale mission of Amazon's Project Kuiper has slipped to the end of 2024, a year after the company finally got its prototype satellites into orbit....

So that's fine then Bill Gates says the massive power draw required for AI processing is nothing to worry about as AI will ultimately identify ways to help cut power consumption and drive the transition to sustainable energy....

Nobody would want a roller coaster ride in one of these long-promised flying cabs NASA is testing what makes air taxi passengers comfortable - and uncomfortable - with a custom VR simulation rig....

Move comes weeks after Mozilla blasted certificate authority for failings Google is severing its trust in Entrust after what it describes as a protracted period of failures around compliance and general improvements....

Seeing weird warnings in Microsoft 365 and Office Online? That'll be why Microsoft has expiration issues with its TLS certificates, resulting in unwanted security warnings....

Horizon system expert denied tailoring evidence in convictions later quashed Gareth Jenkins, former distinguished engineer at Fujitsu Services Ltd, said he "clearly got trapped into doing things that I shouldn't have done" when giving technical evidence that led to the wrongful conviction of Post Office workers in one of the biggest IT scandals to hit the UK....

Aims to expand optical networking biz, particularly in North America Nokia is set to buy optical networking biz Infinera in a $2.3 billion transaction, the companies have confirmed....

Tech giants can't play the RAG-time blues until they pay their dues - in this case to quality publishers OpenAI and Google on Thursday independently announced fresh collaborations with major publishers as they work to expand paid access to information used by their AI products and services....

Cooling tech left to sweat the details AI is currently the big driver in datacenter investment and will push capital expenditure on the facilities up by nearly 30 percent this year, and is also on track to become the top server workload by deployment within a few years....

Get your hands off my computer, Microsoft! Opinion I've been pointing out Windows security bugs since Windows for Workgroups showed up in 1992 and I showed how you could steal data from your coworker's spreadsheets using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). You'd think Microsoft would have figured security out by now....

And ordered so rudely this techie had little interest in sticking around to fix the subsequent chaos On Call Techies are often beset by undeserving and despicable dolts who demand daunting feats of tech support. Which is why each Friday The Register brings you a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of defeating those dunderheads....

Simple jailbreak prompt can bypass safety guardrails on major models Microsoft on Thursday published details about Skeleton Key - a technique that bypasses the guardrails used by makers of AI models to prevent their generative chatbots from creating harmful content....

When your chatbots outshine their human trainers, you could pay for expertise ... or just augment your crowdsourced workforce To help catch code errors made by ChatGPT, OpenAI uses human AI trainers in the hope of improving the model. To help the human trainers, OpenAI has developed another AI model called CriticGPT - in case the humans don't spot the mistakes....

Staff were told of lucrative partnership before the rest of us Infosys CEO Salil Parekh has agreed to pay a fine of 25 lakh ($30,000) for failing to implement adequate insider trading controls, according to Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) documents filed on Wednesday....

This has happened before after Moscow made a mess with a missile Astronauts on the International Space Station were told to duck and cover on Thursday after a Russian satellite broke up....

No supply-chain attacks to see over here! After having its website shut down, the polyfill.io owner is fighting back against claims it smuggled suspicious code onto websites all across the internet....

Normally it's the iGiant's prices that give the ol' ticker a hard time A quartet of heart doctors are trying to resuscitate health-monitoring tech outfit AliveCor's antitrust lawsuit regarding the Apple Watch, by arguing changes made to the iMaker's gadget "resulted in a loss of access to a potentially life-saving product."...

Claims customer data, prod environment not affected as NCC sounds alarm TeamViewer on Thursday said its security team just "detected an irregularity" within one of its networks - which is a fancy way of saying someone broke in....

Software techie claims he was snubbed because he wasn't on an H-1B Meta is headed for a legal showdown after judges ruled a hiring discrimination case in the US shouldn't have been dismissed and can go to trial....

Should you stay or should you go now? If Rosenworcel gets her way, there won't be trouble Long-term carrier lock-in could soon be a thing of the past in America after the FCC proposed requiring telcos to unlock cellphones from their networks 60 days after activation....

Taxi app wants to prove it itself is cheaper, greener than owning a motor Comment Uber is launching a month-long trial dubbed the "One Less Car" challenge to demonstrate people are better off using its app-hailed rides rather than each owning a personal vehicle....

Now the 2028 deadline is at risk Engineers at the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) continue to ignore concerns about their next-generation missile interceptors, leaving serious technical shortcomings on the table and threatening the program's 2028 deadline....

Why all three at once? Blame Syniverse - everyone else is AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile US are today experiencing international roaming outages, leaving at least some American subscribers unable to use their phones as they expect while overseas....

Comms giant to dump undersea internet cable unit by early 2025 Nokia is planning to sell off its undersea internet cable business unit to France....

The database Big Blue doesn't like to talk about gets makeover in November IBM likes to be secretive about Db2, the 41-year-old database still used by some of the world's largest banks and retailers, but occasionally something leaks out....

Bot's arm used to free instrument's dust cover and return to science NASA engineers have performed another remarkable feat of remote debugging and restored the SHERLOC instrument of the Perseverance Mars rover to operation....

Likens tech to going from horse-drawn carriages to trucks Intel has demonstrated an optical chiplet co-packaged with a CPU capable of supporting 4 Tbps data links to feed the increasing datacenter bandwidth requirements of AI and high performance computing (HPC) applications....

Congressman warns tech is getting the 'Huawei Playbook' treatment US Congress members warned against Chinese dominance of the drone industry on Wednesday, elevating the threat posed by Beijing's control of the technology as similar to that of semiconductors and ships....

Not keen on smart weapons, more interested in stopping human trafficking Anthropic wants governments to think of it when they want AI to make the world a better place. No, seriously....

Tour of recovery options not supposed to be part of KB5039302 Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures....

Looming debt repayments and stalling restructure talks cause for concern The UK wing of Atos, the ailing IT services provider that has scored billions of pounds in government contracts locally, has pointed to a "material uncertainty" over its ability to continue trading as a going concern....

SpaceX wins contract for 'deorbit vehicle' at a pleasing price Elon Musk's SpaceX has won a NASA contract to de-orbit the International Space Station (ISS)....

Raymond Chen on cutting loose with a copy of the code Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has dropped another nugget of Microspeak - the "fun fork."...

Pay up or go away, pretty please? For many Reddit has become the go to repository of community and crowdsourced knowledge, a fact that has no doubt made it a prime target for AI startups desperate for training data....

15,000 GPUs per DC, in hosts packing eight apiece, plus nine NICs - helped by switches with custom heat sinks Exclusive Alibaba Cloud has revealed the design of an Ethernet-based network it created specifically to carry traffic for training large language models - and has used in production for eight months....

Cultural traditions clash with manufacturing ambitions Updated India's Ministry of Labor and Employment has ordered an investigation of Foxconn - the contract manufacturer supplier also known as Hon Hai Precision and one of Apple's main suppliers - after reports emerged alleging the company will not hire married women to work at its main iPhone assembly plant on the subcontinent....

NAS vendors, healthcare software vendors, and government buyers join the march to silicon sovereignty Chinese chip shop Loongson, which has built modest CPUs based on its own MIPS-like architecture, is on the march towards enterprise workloads....