The Register

Brain-computer interface trial continues to display troubling lack of transparency Founder Elon Musk has announced that the first human to receive a Neuralink brain-computer interface has fully recovered and can control a computer mouse pointer with their thoughts....

Apple ousts Samsung as the people's choice in Q4, and the words 'refresh' and 'cycle' are whispered for 2024 Apple topped the European smartphone marketplace in Q4 as local shoppers opted to buy premium priced handsets....

Space scarcity and soaring build costs send rent through the roof Demand for datacenter space in Europe outstripped supply in 2023, with hyperscalers snapping up much of the available capacity and construction of new facilities hampered by difficulties in sourcing sufficient power and acquiring available land....

After saying they're very sorry, they escape with a slap on the wrist A former council staff member in the district where William Shakespeare was born ransacked databases filled with residents' information to help drum up new business for their outside venture....

Discounted from $2,600 down to just $650. What a bargain! A version of OS/2 2.0 from Microsoft, not IBM, just surfaced on eBay. This pre-release version came out after Windows 3.0....

Federated Data Platform agreement merits pre-action letter from Good Law Project British legal campaigners are preparing to take on UK government over its decision to redact swathes of a contract describing how Palantir would work with the country's enormous public health system, the NHS, under the controversial Federated Data Platform....

Bloc isn't happy with made-in-China network's efforts to protect kids and data Two days after its Digital Services Act (DSA) came into effect, the European Union used it to open an investigation into made-in-China social network TikTok....

Starlink isn't the biggest problem, but increasing numbers of orbiting transmitters isn't helpful The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) - a precursor project for the full Square Kilometre Array - has started work on techniques to help it cope with increased satellite traffic....

Multilingual service spans five nations and finds fancy graphics improve engagement If you're the kind of geek who takes delight in - or even notices - the animated graphics that accompany error messages, you may be interested to know it takes an entire work week for motion designers at Indonesian web giant Gojek to create one....

Iris scan, voice samples and blood type to be included in database The Vietnamese government will begin collecting biometric information from its citizens for identification purposes beginning in July this year....

Academy of Science calls for exascale system, which would cost more than current budgets for all supers Australia needs an exascale computer system, and a refresh of its current HPC fleet, but lacks a plan or the budget for either - and can't expect cloud providers or quantum computers to offer a suitable substitute for sovereign capacity....

Website has been seized and replaced with law enforcement logos from eleven nations Notorious ransomware gang LockBit's website has been taken over by law enforcement authorities, who claim they have disrupted the group's operations and will soon reveal the extent of an operation against the group....

Mission a step along the road to commercial orbit decluttering A Japanese satellite lofted by Rocket Lab is to monitor a chunk of space junk ahead of future missions designed to curtail orbital debris....

Careful prompting can beat training a model from scratch Interview Commercial large language models' abilities to solve competitive programming problems can be significantly boosted by carefully guiding its processes through clever prompt engineering....

It'll have 10K GPUs! No, 4,608! Err... 2,816? Analysis Nvidia can't seem to make up its mind just how big its Eos supercomputer is....

Danger to humans? Less than '1 in 100 billion', says agency ESA's ERS-2 satellite is heading back to Earth this week and some substantial fragments are likely to survive re-entry, although the chances of anyone being injured by a hunk of space junk are vanishingly small....

Ransomware group continues to exploit US regulatory requirements to its advantage The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group is claiming responsibility for attacks on both Prudential Financial and LoanDepot, making a series of follow-on allegations against them....

Four years after first approaching market for new system, public body hopes to start working with SI The City of London is searching for a systems integrator to help it make the leap to the cloud after selecting SAP to replace a predominantly Oracle enterprise application portfolio....

NetCo hoping to eat some of the pie by opening network plumbing to ISPs UK telco Virgin Media is opening up its fixed line broadband networks to other internet service providers (ISPs) for the first time, setting up a rival national infrastructure provider to BT's Openreach in the process....

Plus: How you can set up your own AI chatbot on your device, and more AI in brief The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected OpenAI's request to trademark "GPT," which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the architecture powering its large language models....

Keep calm and innovate or regulate before it's too late? With the UK launching its guidance for governing AI development and deployment last week, legal experts are warning that most organizations will look to the proposed EU AI Act as a means of complying with both regimes....

Like the reality, the concept is blown up out of all proportion. So who launched it this time around? Opinion Space nukes. You're kidding, right? Not if scary reports for last week are true, and Russia is indeed reviving some of the Cold War's more ominous ideas.What's more, Russian leadership is denying it all, and you know what those guys are like....

This is what happens when you get promoted too fast, too soon Who, Me? As the working week opens, The Register likes to help readers focus by offering a fresh edition of Who, Me, the weekly reader-contributed column in which readers share stories of the times they got it wrong....

Expect it to be stable in June, ready for release sometime after July Google has delivered the first developer preview of Android 15....

Paytm's merchant services will live on, but its main consumer product looks be toast India's government has effectively killed an e-wallet service used by over 300 million people....

Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and pals promise they'll try very hard to keep AI nasties off the 'net Twenty prominent names in tech have signed an accord outlining their intentions to mitigate the use of their platforms to create or distribute AI-bolstered misinformation affecting elections, days after the world's fourth- and fifth-most populous nations - Indonesia and Pakistan - went to the polls....

Application process gets a massive overhaul For decades, Australia has failed to train enough IT pros to satisfy local employers' needs. The nation's solution to the shortfall has involved issuing visas to skilled workers from offshore, under a process that's about to change in March....

ALSO: EncroChat crims still getting busted; ransomware takes down CO public defenders office; and crit vulns infosec in brief The US government is offering bounties up to $15 million as a reward for anyone willing to help it take out the APLHV/Blackcat ransomware gang....

PLUS: Australian Parliament calls for Assange release; Japan's H3 rocket soars; LINE leak worsens Asia In Brief Around one in three of the world's wearable devices is bought by someone in India....

Unsettling reading as Presidents' Day approaches In time for the long Presidents' Day weekend in the US there have been multiple warnings about what will undoubtedly be a challenging and potentially dangerous year for voting processes and government workers....

We speak to professor who with colleagues tooled up OpenAI's GPT-4 and other neural nets AI models, the subject of ongoing safety concerns about harmful and biased output, pose a risk beyond content emission. When wedded with tools that enable automated interaction with other systems, they can act on their own as malicious agents....

Cool, but it's 2024 - needs more hype, hand wringing, and flashy staged demos to be proper ML Google has open sourced Magika, an in-house machine-learning-powered file identifier, as part of its AI Cyber Defense Initiative, which aims to give IT network defenders and others better automated tools....

Fakers face the wrath of Khan The FTC is moving to make not only the fraudulent AI impersonation of government and business folk illegal but is also now asking the American public if they'd like some protection too....

Opening up code used in criminal prosecutions for scrutiny? But where's the text-to-vid hype and doomsaying? Democratic lawmakers once again have proposed legislation to ensure that the software source code used for criminal investigations can be examined and is subject to standardized testing by the government....

One giant leap for astronaut medicine The world's first remote-operated robot space surgeon has been successfully tested, the team behind the device said this week....

Rackscale system can be had with up to 2,048 cores, 32TB of RAM, and nearly a petabyte of flash Analysis Over the past few years we've seen a number of OEMs, including Dell, HPE, and others trying to make on-prem datacenters look and feel more like the public cloud....

Launch delays persist, but test space-based voice calls work Japan's Rakuten Mobile says it plans to offer a satellite-based mobile service that will support standard smartphones starting from 2026, although the satellites to provide this capability have yet to be launched....

Project hails from its original motherland of Russia Russian developer Maxim Dounin has announced a new fork of the Nginx web server and caching proxy, aimed at avoiding the corporate control of owner F5....

Nearly a decade on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List after getting banks to empty vics' accounts A Ukrainian cybercrime kingpin who ran some of the most pervasive malware operations faces 40 years in prison after spending nearly a decade on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List....

121 grams is the largest such sample secured, but NASA won't blow it all at once NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft snagged 121.6 grams of material from asteroid Bennu - the largest quantity ever retrieved by such a mission....

Who knows where they'll get the funds for $1B investment plan, though Quantum technology outfit IonQ has cut the ribbon on its Seattle manufacturing facility, claimed as the first factory for quantum systems on US soil. The move comes shortly after a report claimed that investors have halved the venture capital funding going to quantum companies....

Better visibility and performance caps would be good for regulation too In our quest to limit the destructive potential of artificial intelligence, a paper out of the University of Cambridge has suggested baking in remote kill switches and lockouts, like those developed to stop the unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons, into the hardware that powers it....

The lessons of yesteryear's OS are getting lost in translation FOSDEM 2024 There are vital lessons to be learned from the history of Unix, but they're being forgotten. This is leading to truly vast amounts of wasted effort....

Expert weighs in after Brianna Ghey murder amid worrying rates of child cybercrime The murder of 16-year-old schoolgirl Brianna Ghey has kickstarted a debate around limiting children's access to the dark web in the UK, with experts highlighting the difficulty in achieving this....

Saffire concludes after eight years of flaming good times NASA has concluded its Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment (Saffire) with a test onboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft after it departed from the International Space Station (ISS)....

3 in 5 workers getting strict orders to return to office and something is going to give If some of you think management started to tighten the screws on return to office this year then you aren't alone - three in five workers say they are feeling the squeeze too....

Ganja believe it? The customer couldn't when their box went up in smoke On Call The Register understands that by Friday afternoon readers may reasonably contemplate a drink or two. So to give you something to talk about should you visit a pub in search of such libations we therefore present a fresh instalment of On Call, the column in which you share your stories of tech support jobs that left you a little worse for wear....

iBiz expresses regret for the impact of its entirely avoidable decision Apple confirmed on Thursday it will not support Home Screen web apps - commonly referred to as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) - on iOS devices in European Union member states under its forthcoming iOS 17.4 release....

What's the wurst that could happen? Microsoft has promised to splash 3.2 billion (2.7 billion, $3.4 billion) on AI infrastructure and datacenters in Germany over the next two years....

Calls for collaborators willing to play buzzword bingo on project - 5G, IoT, AI, AR/VR, blockhain, Web3, and plenty more besides India's government has created a project it hopes will result in creation of a city-scale digital twin to help the nation improve future urban planning....