The Register

$1.3 billion lost as identity fraud - and greed - saw 57,000 or more seek unearned tax refunds One hundred and fifty people who worked for the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) have been investigated - and some prosecuted - for participating in a tax refund scam promoted on Facebook and TikTok....

Scribes may have a point about unfair competition, will need to try again on infringement A US judge has dismissed some of the claims made by writers in a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, though gave the wordsmiths another chance to amend their complaint....

SAP, Adobe, Intel, AMD also issue fixes as well as Google for Android Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed 73 security holes in this February's Patch Tuesday, and you better get moving because two of the vulnerabilities are under active attack....

Firefox Mobile also getting increased attention Firefox maker Mozilla has laid off "approximately 60" staff, or around five percent of its workforce....

'You don't have to do more than that to disconnect an entire network' El Reg told as patches emerge A single packet can exhaust the processing capacity of a vulnerable DNS server, effectively disabling the machine, by exploiting a 20-plus-year-old design flaw in the DNSSEC specification....

You can use neural networks to help, sure, but not do all the work The US Patent and Trademark Office this week repeated loud and clear it will only accept patent applications that list actual real humans as the inventor and not AI....

Two new flaws, one zero-day, countless different patches, but everything's fine! Network-attached storage (NAS) specialist QNAP has disclosed and released fixes for two new vulnerabilities, one of them a zero-day discovered in early November....

Gang still going after critical infrastructure because it's, you know, critical Updated Canada's Trans-Northern Pipelines has allegedly been infiltrated by the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware crew, which claims to have stolen 190 GB of data from the oil distributor....

Demands investigation into iPhone maker for potentially breaching regulations over Beeper Mini Brendan Carr of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has called on the authority to take a closer look at Apple's actions in the Beeper Mini affair....

Robocar company lost license to operate in California Autonomous vehicle biz Cruise has hired a Chief Safety Officer following the dramatic incident last fall when a pedestrian was dragged under the wheels of one of its cars, precipitating a suspension of its US fleet....

AT&T, Verizon leading new initiative to finally commercialize OpenRAN technology, sans timeline The Biden administration is keeping America's dreams of a future filled with open radio access network (OpenRAN) kit alive after awarding $42.3 million to a new consortium dedicated to commercialization of the tech....

RP2040-based Video Game Module brings game controller functionality and video output A Video Game Module (VGM) containing a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller is out today for the Flipper Zero pentester multi-tool....

Time to look elsewhere for an operating system for that ancient CPU If you're running a very old PC but have managed to persuade Windows 11 to boot, it looks like the rug could soon be pulled from under you, judging by a post claiming that Microsoft's code will now require an instruction not found on old CPUs....

Failure rates are consistent with aging - something we can all relate to Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published a report on hard drive failures for 2023, finding that rates increased during the year due to aging drives that it plans to upgrade....

Plenty of successful attacks observed with dangerous follow-on activity The number of senior business executives stymied by an ongoing phishing campaign continues to rise with cybercriminals registering hundreds of cloud account takeovers (ATOs) since spinning it up in November....

'Literally bulletproof' but needs constant cleaning to stave off corrosion It's only been a few months since Tesla's long-awaited Cybertruck made its way to those at the front of the queue, but the arrival has been tarnished for some....

Linked to the prime minister's wife, the Indian firm achieves contract wins in open and fair process Tech services biz Infosys enjoyed a 49 percent increase in its invoices from the UK government for 2023, according to research figures....

Some users will pay for AI tools, but more worry about their future employment prospects What a difference a year makes. Analysts at Jefferies have run a survey showing that nearly all US office workers have heard of ChatGPT - up from just over half a year ago - yet the flipside is that some now fear automation is coming for their jobs....

Creator of the Hacker Diet and sponsor of pre-Web hypermedia system Xanadu Obit Polymath, pioneering developer of software and hardware, a prolific writer, and true old-school hacker John Walker has passed away....

MP calls on council to ensure education teams can plan their financial futures A letter from a former government minister to the head of education for one of the UK's largest local authorities reveals the financial disruption caused by the implementation of a Unit4 HR, finance, and payroll system....

Forget historic cloud downtime, latest contract with reseller to offer 'agile and flexible' approach The NHS in Wales has decided to send up to 450 million ($568 million) of taxpayers' hard-earned cash into the bank account of Microsoft via one of its resellers, the public sector organization has confirmed....

Leaves it to carriers, promoting a complaint to Irish data cops from Big Tech's bete noire Meta has acknowledged that phone number reuse that allows takeovers of its accounts "is a concern," but the ad biz insists the issue doesn't qualify for its bug bounty program and is a matter for telecom companies to sort out....

The Small Bodies Nomenclature Working Group has just given 29 space rocks names The Small Bodies Nomenclature Working Group (WGSBN) - the folks responsible for assigning names to minor planets and comets - last week published a bulletin [PDF] in which it gave 29 small celestial bodies their very own names....

I'd buy that for a $0.00000001 The team behind Chromium - the open source engine of Google Chrome and other browsers - has begun working on a way to enable those surfing the web to pay for the stuff they read or watch without any interaction....

Looks like LockBit took a swipe at an outsourced life insurance application Indian tech services giant Infosys has been named as the source of a data leak suffered by the Bank of America....

Certain licenses still allow tinkerers to taste the vStack. Whether they want to is another matter Broadcom has discontinued the free version of VMware's ESXi hypervisor....

Great news for victims of gang behind the big British Library hit in October Some smart folks have found a way to automatically unscramble documents encrypted by the Rhysida ransomware, and used that know-how to produce and release a handy recovery tool for victims....

First Amendment is a rule, not a guideline, says judge Digital pirates dropping anchor on Reddit for a bit o' parley can consider themselves harbored in relatively safe waters, as US courts have decided for a third time in the past year that they're protected from identification by the First Amendment....

Roses are red, violets are blue, a machine made my profile alluring to you Almost a quarter of US singles polled by antivirus slinger McAfee said they are using generative AI to smarten up their online dating profiles with hotter photos, more imaginative chat-up lines, and such stuff....

Pulls off RTX 2000 Ada's mask, gasp - it's you, RTX 4060 Nvidia expanded its GPU portfolio Monday with an itsy-bitsy workstation card it claims delivers a sizable uplift in performance while just sipping power, relatively speaking....

The bounty payouts may be high, but Project Jengo doesn't miss When it comes to defeating patent trolls with crowd-sourced prior art, Cloudflare is now two-for-two after winning its latest case against Sable Networks....

Could have been worse - IT giant was asking for five Lawyers for HPE are seeking $4 billion (3.17 billion) in damages from former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch and his ex-CFO Sushovan Hussain, after a court in the UK found the pair inflated the software maker's value ahead of its merger with HP....

No photos? No, second operation Dutch health insurers are reportedly forcing breast cancer patients to submit photos of their breasts prior to reconstructive surgery despite a government ban on precisely that....

Yep, cell carriers didn't have to do this before The FCC's updated reporting requirements mean telcos in America will have just seven days to officially disclose that a criminal has broken into their systems....

Bucks needed to keep an eye on Buck Rogers LeoLabs, a company noted for cataloging objects in low Earth orbit, has scored another $29 million in financing for its AI-powered tracking tech....

Pulls part of system offline as Black Basta docs suggest the worst Willis Lease Finance Corporation has admitted to US regulators that it fell prey to a "cybersecurity incident" after data purportedly stolen from the biz was posted to the Black Basta ransomware group's leak blog....

After lining up someone to fill Hasso Plattner's seat, German ERP giant finds candidate has 'difference in perspective' Enterprise software developer SAP has made a last-minute change to the planned replacement of its 80-year-old co-founder as chairman of its supervisory board, owing to a difference in perspective"....

The speedier computing cake is a lie... so we got software bloat instead FOSDEM 2024 The computer industry faces a number of serious problems, some imposed by physics, some by legacy technology, and some by inertia. There may be solutions to some of these, but they're going to hurt....

$5B investment part of $53B bet to reboot semiconductor industry The US government says it will inject more than $5 billion in the CHIPS R&D program, including funds to boost skills in the semiconductor sector to form the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), a new tech development testbed....

In an industry addicted to job cuts, 34,000 staff roles vanished in first six weeks of 2024 More than 34,000 tech staff who started 2024 in gainful employment are now looking for a new job - and that's before networking titan Cisco reportedly pulls the plug on thousands more to lighten the payroll....

Lawyers argue requests for more info are tantamount to harassment A federal judge has ruled in favor of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), ordering tech mogul Elon Musk to return for additional testimony in their investigation of his 2022 Twitter acquisition....

Experts also put an end to social media security updates The Caravan and Motorhome Club (CAMC) and the experts it drafted to help clean up the mess caused by a January cyberattack still can't figure out whether members' data was stolen....

Musk: No terminals have been sold to Russia 'to the best of our knowledge' SpaceX supremo Elon Musk has waded into controversy over the alleged use of Starlink by Russian forces....

Plus: Computer scientists win $700k in AI competition to decipher ancient scrolls destroyed in Mount Vesuvius eruption, and more AI in brief A dodgy website is claiming to use AI in creating images of fake IDs that could potentially be used to trick online verification methods....

Who needs the present when you can relive the '80s at warp speed? FOSDEM 2024 The PiStorm is an ingenious way to make real vintage Commodore Amiga hardware not only run again, but do it over three orders of magnitude faster - using cheap, open source hardware and software....

We've still got time to make it better before it does Opinion There is a thing that companies do, a pathological behavior that makes customers unhappy and makes things worse in general. It is so widespread and long-running that it should have its own name, much as an unpleasant medical condition. It does not, but you'll recognize it because it has blighted your life often enough: it's the unwanted new feature....

Sometimes you can have too many people in the room Who, Me? Welcome once again dear reader to yet another Monday and of course yet another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers confess the times when they perhaps weren't quite so on the ball as they might have been....

PLUS: Juniper's support portal leaks customer info; Canada moves to ban Flipper Zero; Critical vulns Infosec In Brief Nearly half the citizens of France have had their data exposed in a massive security breach at two third-party healthcare payment servicers, the French data privacy watchdog disclosed last week....

Second test flight for failed H3 booster after a run of bad luck Japan will on Wednesday try to reboot its space program with a second test flight for its H3 booster....

San Franciscans turn on empty robotaxi without apparent motive An angry mob has destroyed a Waymo self-driving taxi in San Francisco....