The Register

Twelve very cold hours and many miles after being told to ignore the power button, guess what happened? On Call Every Friday, The Register presses the OFF button the week with a fresh instalment of On Call, our column that recounts readers' experiences of taking on tricky tech support jobs in exotic places....

Asks why only one Bing ad - the one you see when searching for other browsers - looks like a Windows popup Mozilla on Thursday accused Microsoft of forcing its Edge browser down the throats of Windows users through "dark patterns" - design elements geared to push people towards certain decisions....

Cloud optimization efforts ebb, and migrations resume Amazon.com has completed a "useful life study" for its servers and decided they can be used for an extra year - taking the working life from five to six years. It predicts the change will contribute $900 million to net income in Q1 of 2024 alone....

'Vault 7' leak detailed cyber-ops including forged digital certs Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee and software engineer accused of sharing material with WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 40 years in prison by the US Southern District of New York on Thursday....

The only thing worse than a telemarketer is a robo-telemarketer The FCC wants to make AI-powered robocalls illegal and has warned of a rising wave of scams from voice-cloning technology....

Atlassian systen compromised via October Okta intrusion Cloudflare has just detailed how suspected government spies gained access to its internal Atlassian installation using credentials stolen via a security breach at Okta in October....

Good to know that boffins can't easily prompt their way to new careers as supervillains GPT-4 contributes "at most a mild uplift" to users who would employ the model to create bioweapons, according to a study conducted by OpenAI....

Breaking the AI performance bottleneck is key for Middle Kingdom's ambitions ChangXin Memory Technologies, aka CXMT, could become China's first domestic producer of high-bandwidth memory modules, which are crucial to building the accelerators used in AI and high-performance computing....

Some devs just don't want anything to do with neural-network code serfs JetBrains introduced an AI assistant in December to help programmers write code. Now the biz is trying to figure out how to allow its customers to get rid of it....

Defenses need a rethink in face of increasing sophistication Cyber attacks using AI-generated deepfakes to bypass facial biometrics security will lead a third of organizations to doubt the adequacy of identity verification and authentication tools as standalone protections....

Router maker claims Chinese giant refuses to license on reasonable terms Netgear is suing Huawei in California, accusing its networking kit rival of racketeering and anti-competitive behavior for refusing to license Wi-Fi patents it holds on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms....

Senate, House can try but won't make it past the Prez, says White House The Biden administration has expressed to congressional representatives its strong opposition to undoing the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) strict data breach reporting rule....

Endeavour raised into position for California Science Center's 'Go For Stack' For the first time in more than ten years, a Space Shuttle has been raised into launch position. Although the completed stack won't be seeing a launchpad any time soon....

When Redmond says unsupported, it really means it. Windows 11 fans beware Old Windows 10 hardware is struggling to open some recently updated Microsoft applications, giving anyone running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware a glimpse of their potential future....

No restrictions, but it could be harder to deal with American businesses The chip wars between Washington and Beijing keep grinding on with more than a dozen Chinese tech companies now being added to a list of entities claimed by the Department of Defense (DoD) to be working for the military....

It even had the gall to set the ransom demand at $800K ... for a nonprofit Ransomware gang LockBit is claiming responsibility for an attack on a Chicago children's hospital in an apparent deviation from its previous policy of not targeting nonprofits....

They're just an algorithm away, national lab engineer tells El Reg Feature When the first commercial coal-fired electric power plants came online, starting with the Holborn Viaduct power station that supplied electricity to the City of London in January 1882, the world was changed forever. Fast forward 142 years, and the world has changed a lot....

'Deepest apologies to the sub-postmasters and their families' Fujitsu's CFO is the latest in the the Japanese vendor's exec ranks to apologize for the megacorp's role in the Post Office Horizon scandal, widely viewed as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history....

Holding up the EV supply chain is not a great start to 2024 Huawei is experiencing production issues with a computing unit that powers advanced driver assistance systems in electric vehicles, known as the MDC 810, according to a recent report from Reuters....

When 'what's the value to the economy?' wasn't front of mind SPACE WEEK It will soon be half a century since NASA's Voyager probes were launched on a tour of the solar system. The reason for their unprecedented longevity is unprecedented, but modern realities mean that we might not see their like again....

Staff at Northern Ireland facility voted in ballot that forces drivemaker's hand, union says Seagate workers building external hard drives in Northern Ireland have voted for trade union recognition, meaning they now have collective bargaining rights and potentially a layer of employment protection....

Building semiconductors into fabrics often hits a snag, which a new fiber pulling technique seeks to avoid Smart clothing is a go-to item on the hype-cycle bandwagon, which never seems to arrive. Yet for anyone wanting to play Doom on their knitwear, a glimmer of hope was reported by scientists this week....

At least it's no longer an afterthought Systems Approach In 1996, Larry Peterson and I published the first edition of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach in the hope that it would become a widely adopted textbook in networking classes. Our draft manuscripts had been reviewed by a number of professors so we had a decent amount of feedback regarding the content and overall structure of the book....

Good start, but we want further reassurance, says Competition and Markets Authority Google so far has lived up to its commitments to make room in its Privacy Sandbox for rivals, though the UK's Competition and Markets Authority says a number of concerns still have to be addressed before the web giant's ambitious advertising technology gets its blessing....

Homebrew Elite X SoC due midyear to move from PCs to IoT and cars Qualcomm's attempt to grab a slab of the PC CPU market will commence in earnest in the middle of 2024, the mobile chip shop's president and CEO Cristiano Amon told investors on Wednesday....

Renames its bit barn business as Nxera' as it plans three new facilities, some built just for AI Telcoms giant Singtel announced Thursday a collaboration with Nvidia to deliver purpose-built AI infrastructure across Southeast Asia....

Reject recent rule-making with plan to adopt transparency and reporting rules used in financial markets to stop binary brainboxes burying humanity India's Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EACPM) has penned a document warning that current global AI regulations are likely to be ineffective, and recommended regulating the technology with alternative tactics - like those used in financial markets....

American public is way ahead of them Chinese attackers are preparing to "wreak havoc" on American infrastructure and "cause societal chaos" in the US, infosec, and law enforcement bosses told a US House committee on Wednesday....

It's an interesting way to get the attention of VMware users feeling bruised by Broadcom Disgruntled VMware users contemplating the open source cut of XenCenter as an alternative need to think again. In December the Cloud Software Group quietly canned the offering with an update to the project's README file....

You could say this was tailored for Swift US Senators have introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow victims portrayed in non-consensual AI-generated pornographic deepfakes to sue the creators for damages....

Meta boss told in social media safety probe: 'Your product is killing people' Executives from the top social media companies faced contentious, sometimes contemptuous, questioning from the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday in a hearing titled: Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis....

Chemists dispute research claiming millions of recipes for inorganic crystalline compounds Google DeepMind and UC Berkeley's research into a robot cooking up new materials predicted by AI algorithms is being called into question by a group of chemists....

Remotely disinfects Cisco and Netgear routers to block Chinese critters China's Volt Typhoon attackers used "hundreds" of outdated Cisco and NetGear routers infected with malware in an attempt to break into US critical infrastructure facilities, according to the Justice Department....

It's almost like years of false assurances have made people realize payments are pointless Trusting a ransomware crew to honor a deal isn't the greatest idea, and the world seems to be waking up to that. The number of victims who chose to pay dropped to a new low of 29 percent in the last quarter of 2023....

Zap it and trap it like a cosmic Marie Kondo, but will everyone approve? A Japanese biz wants to remove debris from Earth orbit by using a satellite-mounted laser to decelerate an object such as a defunct satellite so it gradually descends towards the atmosphere and burns up....

Oh the bitter irony - now Figma can enjoy a monopoly in UX niche, say devs Adobe has confirmed it will no longer push the envelope for XD, the vector design tool used by developers for web and mobile apps....

Evidence mounts of an exploit gatekept within Russia's borders Security researchers believe the Akira ransomware group could be exploiting a nearly four-year-old Cisco vulnerability and using it as an entry point into organizations' systems....

This isn't going to end well Volt Typhoon, the Chinese government-backed cyberspies whose infrastructure was at least partially disrupted by Uncle Sam, has been homing in on other US energy, satellite and telecommunications systems, according to Robert Lee, CEO of security shop Dragos....

Embrace, extend, and ... port? Microsoft's adoption of Rust continues apace if a posting on the IT titan's careers website is anything to go by....

Many versions still without fixes while sophisticated attackers bypass mitigations Ivanti has finally released the first round of patches for vulnerability-stricken Connect Secure and Policy Secure gateways, but in doing so has also found two additional zero-days, one of which is under active exploitation....

Next generation of devices are going to be packed with it - requiring lots and lots of memory Samsung Electronics' is betting that demand for generative AI will equate to a busy year for memory sales....

Yep, you guessed it - at least some of them swapped investments out for gen AI Quantum companies received 50 percent less venture cap funding last year as investors switched to generative AI or shied away from risky bets on Silicon Valley startups. Progress in quantum computing is being made, but practical applications of the technology are still likely years away....

Forecast worries or AI fatigue kicking in? Redmond has an important 12 months ahead Microsoft's Q2 results failed to impress the markets yesterday, as the company's stock dropped despite some impressive numbers and the usual quantities of AI bluster....

Retrieving electronic records takes 45 minutes and staff say they don't have time to use systems An award-winning IT rollout at one of the UK's largest hospitals trusts is beset with problems that prevent staff from accessing the data they need, creating inconsistent and insecure electronic patient records....

Frame rate would be even worse than the original, though. MUCH worse From teletext to pregnancy tests and even tractors, Doom has long been a target of hackers trying to get the seminal 1993 shooter running in the strangest of places. But this one frags them all....

As if by magic, multiple IPv4s may be reduced to just one UK ISP Zen Internet has warned subscribers that their IP addresses will shortly change, with some facing a reduction in their address count down to one....

Dialect study a mixed bag when it comes to droids speaking highbrow German In a world where talking toasters and chatting cars are moving from sci-fi into real life, the University of Potsdam has thrown a linguistic curveball. Yes, the future is here, and it's asking: "Sprechen Sie Dialect?"...

Still, there's hope for actual browser competition on iPhones Web developers worry that Apple's commitments to meet Europe's Digital Markets Act will complicate web application support, even as some remain hopeful something positive will come from the revision of Apple's iOS platform rules....

'Tha e comasach inneal spreadhaidh dachaigh a' thogail le stuthan taighe' The safety guardrails preventing OpenAI's GPT-4 from spewing harmful text can be easily bypassed by translating prompts into uncommon languages - such as Zulu, Scots Gaelic, or Hmong....

Lightweight rivals, both based on Crunchbang, OpenBox, and Debian Crunchbang++ and Bunsen Labs each aim to continue the tradition of the very lightweight Crunchbang Linux, although both distros have thickened around the waist a bit over the years....