The Register

Threat to data means submarine infrastructures should get status of 'highest possible national significance' The European Commission has issued recommendations to up the security and resilience of submarine data cables, but says private finance should fund projects to expand capacity, assisted by governments where necessary....

Don't want to learn how Windows works? Copilot can help you with that Windows Insiders are set to receive more Copilot in Windows features, following an update for the Canary and Dev Channels to add extra functions for users unwilling to click through icons....

London Stock Exchange listed Bytes Technology Group 'working to clarify details' after Neil Murphy resigns Neil Murphy, the boss of Bytes Technology Group - one of Microsoft's largest cloud and software licensing resellers - has quit with immediate effect, at the same time admitting to making secret stock trades in the company....

As bankrupt local authority slashes services and hikes taxes, consultants enjoy 1k-a-day while system still can't offer auditable accounts Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, is considering ditching Oracle as its main ERP and HR software after a disastrous implementation has left it unable to file auditable accounts, with the budget rising from 20 million ($25 million) to 131 million ($166 million)....

Machine-learning boffins find open source neural nets can optimize their own queries Large language models have given rise to the dark art of prompt engineering - a process for composing system instructions that elicit better chatbot responses....

Fedora, though, won't - until at least the version after next Installation remains a pain point for many Linux distros, but everyone is working hard on it. Some of those efforts are bearing fruit... but not all of them....

Absence of an on-board pilot will lower costs and raise blood pressure, starting soon in Texas Boeing-backed autonomous aircraft startup Wisk expects to be operational by the end of the decade, at which time it will provide customers with air taxi at a price point comparable to an UberX ride, according to APAC VP Catherine MacGowan....

Your own personal chatbot awaits Google has released a family of "open" large language models named Gemma, that are compact enough to run on a personal computer....

Trove reveals RATs that can pop major OSes, campaigns against offshore and local targets A cache of stolen document posted to GitHub appears to reveal how a Chinese infosec vendor named I-Soon offers rent-a-hacker services for Beijing....

His Majesty's Royal Cypher adopted the Tudor Crown, so a new icon was needed Logowatch GOV.UK websites this week started implementing a major change: a new crown icon....

Separation of church and state? More like separation of Product and Foundry FDC Pat Gelsinger wants to make Intel the world's second largest chip manufacturer by 2030, and that means serving businesses the x86 giant has traditionally seen as competitors....

Jensen Huang defends colossal GPU purchases made by hyperscalers, claims they're 'fairly allocated' Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has claimed responsibility for hyperscalers' decisions to extend the operating life of their server fleets, and suggested they've done so because they can't improve performance by persisting with general-purpose computing and must instead adopt accelerated machines....

This technology is all the rage right now, still too risky for armed forces The US Department of Defense is reportedly working with startup Scale AI to test generative AI models for military use....

Oh hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea President Biden has empowered the US Coast Guard (USCG) to get a tighter grip on cybersecurity at American ports - including authorizing yet another incident reporting rule....

Easy to defend against stuff that may never actually work - oh there we go again, being all cynical like Apple says it's going to upgrade the cryptographic protocol used by iMessage to hopefully prevent the decryption of conversations by quantum computers, should those machines ever exist in a meaningful way....

Now that definitely would be an encounter at far point Riverside, Iowa, self-proclaimed hometown of Star Trek's Captain James T. Kirk, has a erected a statue of their fictional hero, and Captain Kathryn Janeway has one in her future birthplace Bloomington, Indiana, as well....

Machine learning to smooth bumps in the update road Windows 11 users still clinging to the past are to be dragged into a bright, 23H2-shaped future by Microsoft, whether they want to or not....

Sent 5,000+ fake handsets to Apple for repair in hope of getting real ones back Two Chinese nationals are facing a maximum of 20 years in prison after being convicted of mailing thousands of fake iPhones to Apple for repair in the hope they'd be replaced with new handsets....

Urgent patching advised to protect attacks against setup wizards Infosec researchers say urgent patching of the latest remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in ConnectWise's ScreenConnect is required given its maximum severity score....

IF (orbit == wrong) THEN oops; A software error on the part of Firefly Aerospace doomed Lockheed Martin's Electronic Steerable Antenna (ESA) demonstrator to a shorter-than-expected orbital life following a botched Alpha launch....

More and more obvious what a key market ML is for the chip designer Chip designer Arm has unveiled two additional Neoverse Compute Subsystem blueprints in its portfolio, and is working with Samsung on its next high-performance Cortex-X core on the Korean chipmaker's 2nm production process....

Judge allows fraud case to continue after customer resubmits complaint A judge has allowed a fraud case against Oracle to continue after a customer resubmitted allegations that it was misled about the tasks Big Red's NetSuite software could perform....

Maria Martinez, chief operating officer, is out after role was 'eliminated' It isn't just the little people that switch and router Goliath Cisco is erasing from its ranks in the latest cost-cutting exercise - at least one person in the C-suite is getting the boot too....

Skips the 'intelligence' part of generative AI Sometimes generative AI systems can spout gibberish, as OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot users discovered last night....

Operation Cronos's 'partners' continue to trickle the criminal empire's secrets The latest revelation from law enforcement authorities in relation to this week's LockBit leaks is that the ransomware group had registered nearly 200 "affiliates" over the past two years....

And fails to clear up end-of-life debacle Microsoft has now admitted that its recent announcement about retiring a key plank of its Azure IoT platform was a mistake....

Old wives revise their official advice With smartphones these days moonlighting as in-flight entertainment when atop the porcelain throne, watery mishaps are bound to happen....

Hello room service? Can you call your provider? The Wi-Fi is down. Hello? BT has agreed to sell off its iconic BT Tower for 275 million ($346 million) to a company that intends to convert the central London landmark into a hotel....

UK demonstrates prowess at nuking the ocean A UK Ministry of Defence spokesperson said that a failed Trident missile test does not affect Britain's nuclear deterrent....

The future desktop of Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40 is nearly ready GNOME 46 has entered beta testing, and is expected to be released in just over a month....

A crash course on making Windows crash on demand Developers seeking a way of crashing Windows on demand for testing purposes have received a reminder from Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen: NotMyFault is your friend....

A better UNIX than UNIX isn't a UNIX at all FOSDEM 2024 To move forwards, you have to let go of the past. In the 1990s that meant incompatibility, but it no longer has to....

Hacking your way in is so 2022 - logging in is much easier Identity-related threats pose an increasing risk to those protecting networks because attackers - ranging from financially motivated crime gangs and nation-state backed crews - increasingly prefer to log in using stolen credentials instead of exploiting vulnerabilities or social engineering....

GDPR also slashed processing costs by over a quarter Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has led European firms to store and process less data, recent economic research suggests, because the privacy rules are making data more costly to manage....

Rivals aren't far behind and 5G numbers are huge, but growth is slowing Chinese mega-carrier China Unicom has claimed it's signed up the billionth subscriber for its "Big Connectivity" service, making it the second Middle Kingdom carrier to operate at that scale....

Exec in charge laments that in defence HPC down under, you can pay a veteran expert a mere web dev's salary Australia's Defence Science Technology Group will bring a supercomputer online in the second half of 2024, but when The Register asked for information on its specs the only response we received was "Next question."...

Complex overlapping bureaucracy sometimes lacks the funds and skills to do it right China's censorship regime remains pervasive and far reaching, but the bureaucratic apparatus implementing it is unevenly developed and is not always well funded, according to a report released on Tuesday....

Also urges customers to remove some of its software due to a critical vulnerability Scarcely a day passes without The Register's virtualization desk being approached by VMware's rivals seeking a chance to explain the merits of their products and cash in on assumed dissatisfaction with the licensing regime Broadcom has imposed. But last month, VMware quietly took a swipe at those rivals with an updated virtual machine conversion tool....

No time like the present, says central bank The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) advised on Monday that financial institutions need to stay agile enough to adopt post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and quantum key distribution (QKD) technology, without significantly impacting systems as part of cyber security measures....

Modders claim GTA: Liberty City Stories and Tekken 6 are running 'very smoothly' Three months after the November launch of the PlayStation Portal, Sony's game streaming handheld has been hacked by Google security engineers to run PlayStation Portable (PSP) games in emulation....

Employees feel frustrated by lack of communication and bosses' inability to tell them which offices are open Exclusive Dell's "return to office" mandate has left employees confused about which offices they can use and the future of their jobs - and concerned the initiative is a stealth layoff program that will disproportionately harm women at the IT giant....

Training machine learning on Redditors' musings - what could go wrong? Reddit has reportedly signed a $60 million deal with an unnamed AI biz to hand over user conversations for model training....

HPC satellites less about world domination, more high availability for comms Italy's Ministry of Defense is exploring a "military space cloud" and has commissioned state-backed aerospace contractor Leonardo to test the concept....

Wham, bam, hello MRAM, FERAM, and ReRAM Persistent memories can or will soon match DRAM in terms of speed, which could see it eventually replaced in many applications if one of these technologies can scale up and bring the costs down....

Feeding IBM's bottom line not in the list Red Hat has given five reasons for users to move from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, though it was initially reluctant to disclose them....

Venerable desktop publisher not going to get a Copilot any time soon Microsoft is confirming plans to deprecate its Publisher application in 2026....

$37.3M bid significantly down from SPAC flotation valued at $672M MariaDB has confirmed a possible offer of $37.3 million from private equity company K1 Investment Management to take the recently troubled database company private....

Authorities dismantle cybercrime royalty by making mockery of their leak site In seizing and dismantling LockBit's infrastructure, Western cops are now making a mockery of the ransomware criminals by promising a long, drawn-out disclosure of the gang's secrets....

Customers report feeling violated following the security snafu Smart home security camera slinger Wyze is telling customers that a cybersecurity "incident" allowed thousands of users to see other people's camera feeds....

Meanwhile, Intel looks set to bag more than $10B GlobalFoundries is pocketing $1.5 billion in CHIPS and Science Act funding from the US government to ensure continued supply of the chips it makes for the automotive, communications, and defense industries....