The Register

Website whack-a-mole getting worse BreachForums is back online just weeks after the notorious dark-web marketplace for stolen data was seized by law enforcement....

Russian info slinger could be on the hook for posting disinformation The European Union is reportedly looking into messaging app Telegram, and whether it has more users than the platform lets on....

You keep the towers, we'll bag the customer list, says T-Mo T-Mobile US says it will buy US Cellular's wireless business and 30 percent of its spectrum assets for $4.4 billion....

One tricky cluster is causing outrage among longstanding customers Over a month after an April datacenter upgrade coincided with problems with some of its customers' backups, secure storage biz SpiderOak still isn't fully operational, and some angry users say they're ready to cut ties....

AI biz forms Safety and Security Committee to succeed Superalignment team as it trains latest GPT model OpenAI has created a new safety group as it works on the successor to GPT-4 while grappling with the recent departure of high-profile members who criticized its commercial intent....

Will Boeing's Padstayer become Padleaver on June 1? NASA and Boeing have set another date - June 1 - for the first crewed launch of the Starliner CST-100, a capsule more noted for its reluctance to leave the ground than for its commercial crew capability....

Just because you could doesn't mean you should Windows Recall has been coaxed into life on a computer lacking the AI hardware shown off by Microsoft at its recent unveiling event....

Rivalry in Windows on Arm space would intensify once GPU giant enters the fray Competition could be heating up in the Windows on Arm space amid talk in the industry that Nvidia is readying a chip pairing next-gen Arm cores with its Blackwell GPU architecture....

Centuries-old institution dodges questions on how it happened as ransomware gang claims credit International auctioning giant Christie's has confirmed data was stolen during an online attack after a top-three ransomware group claimed credit....

As Lenovo says it'll cram hybrid AI into multiple devices, CIOs and analysts remain unconvinced Morgan Stanley is betting AI PCs will drive the next wave of commercial fleet refreshes after Microsoft made public its line-up at Build, and is forecasting the machines will comprise 65 percent of total sales by 2028....

Investors continue to buy into the AI hype Elon Musk's xAI has announced a series B funding round of $6 billion that takes the company to a valuation of $24 billion, according to the billionaire....

Digital age of consent at 13 not even enforced, committee finds A committee of MPs has urged the next government to consider a total ban on smartphones for under-16s in the UK....

The planet can wait, pal, we've got other problems Survey results While Big Tech wrings its hands about things like greenhouse gas emissions, IT teams out in the trenches aren't nearly as concerned about the eco-sustainability of their infrastructure....

And guess who has highest margins? Some interesting findings from fresh market watchdog report Microsoft is achieving the highest margins while at the same time achieving the strongest growth in the UK cloud market, according to a working paper from the competition watchdog....

In evolving smarter security, open source is the missing link Opinion Some ideas work better than others. Take DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Launched by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 response to Sputnik, its job is to create and test concepts that may be useful in thwarting enemies. Along the way, it's helped make happen GPS, weather satellites, PC technology, and something called the internet....

Prepare for the HyperAssistant of the future, maybe Half a decade hence, software development will be transformed by AI assistance, argue four academics from the University of Lugano in Switzerland....

Custom 2U boxen with Tofino inside are in production and mean Chinese cloud has more space for servers Alibaba Cloud has revealed the hardware design it uses to run networking at its edge locations, and those devices' reliance on Intel Tofino ASICs....

Nation of 17,000 islands operates 27,000 bits of software Indonesian president Joko Widodo on Monday ordered government officials to stop developing new applications....

Third 'Big Fund' is close to the level of US and EU subsidy programs China has allocated a big pool of money, hoping to spur domestic semiconductor development....

Meanwhile, North Korea's latest rocket fails South Korea launched its first unified space agency on Monday, when the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) took flight in the city of Sacheon....

Former Pentagon deputy CIO Rob Carey tells us guardrails should steer Feds away from bad ML Interview President Biden's October executive order encouraging the safe use of AI included a ton of requirements for federal government agencies that are developing and deploying machine learning technologies....

Suggested heir is Putin-approved and hard to download outside Russia Venerable instant messaging service ICQ has announced it will shut down for good in June....

No, nothing's broken. I'm just working under this desk for ... reasons Who, Me? As a fresh working week commences, The Register understands that many readers may feel like giving the kit they tend to a good thump. Which is why each week we offer a fresh and hopefully cathartic instalment of Who, Me? so you can take heart from fellow readers' tales of tech support agonies rather than letting irritation overwhelm you and create your own....

Invests $350 million in Flipkart Google has invested in Walmart's Indian e-commerce operation Flipkart, which holds almost half of the market for e-commerce on the subcontinent....

Blame AI. No, seriously Tape - as a digital storage medium - has been considered dead for your correspondent's entire 29-year career. But that didn't stop manufacturers behind the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standard shipping 152.9 exabytes worth of the stuff last year....

Plus: US water systems fail at cyber security Infosec in brief More than a dozen big pharmaceutical suppliers have begun notifying individuals that their data was stolen when US drug wholesaler Cencora was breached in February....

PLUS: Indian TV channel adopts 24x7 AI anchors; Google building first Africa-Australia sub cable; Singtel's strategy reset; and more Asia In Brief Samsung has disputed a report which claimed its high-bandwidth memory products are not performing to Nvidia's satisfaction....

Blast (processing) from the past Retro interview Just a few weeks ago, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was ported to the TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator....

Our vultures weigh in on the week that was more 'what we Built' than 'what you can Build' Kettle Microsoft held its annual Build developer conference this week with that bizarre Copilot+ PC launch tacked on the side....

FCC wants to hit this political genius with first-of-a-kind punishment The political consultant who admitted paying $150 to create a deepfake anti-Biden robocall has been indicted on charges of felony voter suppression and misdemeanor impersonation of a candidate....

But criminals posing as Microsoft workers scored the most ill-gotten gains The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shared data on the most impersonated companies in 2023, which include Best Buy, Amazon, and PayPal in the top three....

Which rival would be so bold as to snatch its business Huawei? Nvidia has cut the price of special GPUs it makes for the Chinese market in the face of local competition from Huawei....

An open and shut case, but the perps remain at large - whoever they are Justice is served... or should that be saved now that audio-visual software deployed in more than 10,000 courtrooms is once again secure after researchers uncovered evidence that it had been backdoored for weeks....

Mission Extension Vehicle to fuel up helpless but functional sats Northrop Grumman has signed a four-year contract renewal with Intelsat to continue providing on-orbit extension services for satellites....

Enjoy some Noble Numbat novelty now - but excluding GNOME 46.1 It comes a bit later than usual, but if you are running Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur, you should start seeing prompts to upgrade to the new release....

Tesla CEO would have preferred no tariffs, even though they're beneficial to his company Tesla supremo Elon Musk is criticizing the import tax that the Biden administration has levied against Chinese electric vehicles, saying Tesla doesn't need them....

ChatGPT? Write me a really horrid nondisparagement exit clause OpenAI has told former and current staff that it won't enforce nondisparagement agreements that could have cost employees dearly....

Case brought by Netlist involved DRAM modules in computer systems Chipmaker Micron is being ordered to cough up a total of $445 million after losing a patent litigation case involving memory module technology brought by rival Netlist....

If hiring more people to work fewer hours isn't appealing, you could always make a robot do it Datacenter outages remain a perennial problem, with human error among the top contributors. Analyst outfit the Uptime Institute suggests the key to curbing these disruptions could be as simple as shortening shifts....

Pesky 'macro' stuff forces SaaS biz to yank revenue forecast, share price plunges double digits SaaS application biz Workday is lowering revenue forecasts for the year after saying it is feeling the squeeze of larger customers taking longer to sign off on deals amid a wavering economy....

Installation problems with non-English language systems resolved Microsoft has released a fix to fix the fix for NTLM traffic spikes on Windows Server 2019 after the original fix failed to install on some devices where Windows was not set to English language....

Surging demand, the AI plan, and spinning FPGAs into gold AMD claims it is touching 33 percent in server CPU market share as it looks towards the launch of its next-gen "Turin" processors, and is promising a GPU roadmap for what comes after the MI300 product line....

Because not everyone has time to be a tech guru Manjaro Linux is the DIY-spirited Arch Linux distro, but made easier - so that those still on their way to guru status will be able to say: "I run Arch, BTW."...

Here's the tea, for all open sourcers inclined to drink it Opinion Oracle is dropping Terraform for OpenTofu, and IBM's CEO is talking up open source. What does all this mean for both programs? Here's what I see happening....

Tory comms leaked thanks to a barefooted Johnny Mercer's wayward situational awareness In setting the date for the UK's next general election, prime minister Rishi Sunak this week essentially announced the start of open season for political reporters all hunting for the top scoop of the day by any means necessary. He may need, however, to brief his ministers on basic opsec if he's going to stop any more internal memos from reaching the front pages....

That's half a billion from generous taxpayers in 2.5 years The UK's tax collector has awarded tech consultancy and service provider Capgemini a contract worth up to 245.5 million to keep legacy systems up and running....

Slow and steady wins the race, but sometimes flooring it saves the day On Call In case the working week has given you bad vibrations, The Register devotes Friday mornings to a fresh instalment of On Call - our (hopefully) cathartic reader-contributed tales of tech support chores that left your peers shaken and stirred....

Much of the money will go to mountainous Aragon - not mainly in the plain Amazon announced it will invest 15.7 billion ($16.9 billion) in the Spanish branch of Amazon Web Services (AWS)....

More AZs in its Asian backyard also planned Alibaba Cloud announced on Wednesday it will open its first region in Mexico and expand with building new datacenters across Southeast Asia....

Shinkansen maintenance tricks boost reliability on the ground, so why not? Japan's space agency JAXA has teamed up with West Japan Railway Company to apply the latter's AI-powered failure-prediction technology to operating spacecraft....