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Comes mere months after Western intelligence agencies warned of attacks on water providers Southern Water confirmed this morning that criminals broke into its IT systems, making off with a "limited amount of data."...

Three years after leveraged buyout, $240M ERP plan yet to bear fruit Supermarket chain Asda has extended its deal with Walmart, the US retail giant that once owned the UK business, to support backend ERP systems after a project to replace them hit delays....

How to manage 740 million items of behalf of the Armed Forces? The UK Ministry of Defence's efforts to better manage its 11.8 billion ($15 billion) of inventory hinges, in no small part, on a sweeping digital transformation program that involves modernizing legacy tech systems, but the department's track record is worrying MPs....

So this is the AI revolution We know that "AI" is all the rage for now, but the recent experience of a DPD customer suggests that just because you can replace customer support with a chatbot doesn't mean you should....

16GB of RAM should be enough for anyone that wants to run models locally. GPUs, NPUs and more kit will be needed, too Comment What is an AI PC? What is its killer app? Both are open questions , although we do know that running AI models locally - not over the network like when you're playing with ChatGPT - requires significant grunt on your desk or lap....

Choice between seeing pitches or paying on Facebook and Instagram might break the law Meta has been accused of automatically enrolling Europe-based users of its Facebook social network into the ad supported version of the service if they've not yet chosen between the free and paid subscription options, an action which would violates EU rules....

Cloud-ready software and implementation from your preferred consultants, on one bill Amazon Web Services has made a bid for even more of the cloud business by allowing third-party services to be sold on its Marketplace....

JAXA plans to reveal whether mission nailed its self-selected landing site later this week Data from Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon has been downloaded, and the machine switched off - with just 12 percent of battery capacity remaining....

Goggle-eyed Beijing wants technical and identity standards China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released a list last Friday of 60 experts from academia, government and business selected by Beijing to define standards for the metaverse....

'Aleksandr Ermakov' isn't allowed down under after being linked to ten-million-record leak Australia's government has used the "significant cyber incidents" sanctions regime it introduced in 2021 for the first time, against a Russian named Aleksandr Gennadievich Ermakov whom authorities have deemed responsible for the 2022 attack on health insurer Medibank Private....

New York's LL144 rated too broad, but researchers hope others can learn from that mistake A study into the effectiveness of a New York City law targeting bias in AI hiring algorithms has found the legislation is largely ineffective....

Meanwhile, OpenAI is hiring an 'elections program manager' for $190,000+ Robo-calls featuring the faked voice of US president Joe Biden's are advising voters not to participate in the state of New Hampshire's Tuesday presidential Primary Election, the state's Attorney General Office warned on Monday....

If you're still running a vulnerable instance then 'assume a breach' More than 600 IP addresses are launching thousands of exploit attempts against CVE-2023-22527 - a critical bug in out-of-date versions of Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server - according to non-profit security org Shadowserver....

AI can only automate parts of some jobs, and the kit required is too pricey Human labor can accomplish some jobs more cheaply than computer vision systems, according to a study led by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....

Loanbase admits massive loss of customer data to thieves, too AerCap, the world's largest aircraft leasing company, has reported a ransomware infection that occurred earlier this month, but claims it hasn't yet suffered any financial losses yet and all its systems are under control....

Or, you could just rent an expensive Windows VM in the cloud - just a thought, says Redmond You can now officially run Windows 11 on an M-series Mac. Well, at least as a virtual machine anyway since Microsoft hasn't seen fit to allow Mac users to run the OS on baremetal just yet....

Handy feature as FAA expands inspections to 737-900ER aircraft On Sunday, the US Federal Aviation Administration recommended that air carriers operating Boeing 737-900ER aircraft conduct a visual inspection of mid-exit door plugs to be certain that doors on the aircraft are attached properly....

Biden's challenger model shot down despite super PAC support A ChatGPT-powered bot trained to mimic Congressman Dean Phillips (D-MN) - the long-shot challenger to Joe Biden - is dead before it had a chance to woo voters after OpenAI banned its developer for violating its T&Cs....

Effective altruism blamed for Silicon Valley's desire to heal humanity's woes Billionaire tech bros have a "tendency to play God," according to one of the Almighty's representatives on Earth....

Pop goes the test article. As planned Sierra Space has inflated a full-sized test article of its Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) habitat beyond bursting point to demonstrate how the module might behave in the harsh environment of space....

'The federal government has almost entirely abdicated its responsibility' For a country that prides itself on being free, America does seem to have an awful lot of spying going on, as the new Street Surveillance Hub from the Electronic Frontier Foundation shows....

Talking points echo those of Ramaswamy and DeSantis as they drop out of the race A Florida man has chosen the next cultural wars flashpoint he will rally behind in an effort to mobilize the 2024 US presidential electorate: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)....

Spotting and tackling a widespread problem is a challenge Open source burnout has reared its head once again, this time in relation to the Rust project. However, the issue is not new, nor are the solutions....

Critics claim now-fixed vulnerabilities weren't disclosed, flag up grouping of multiple flaws under one CVE Critics are accusing major tech companies of not sticking to the rules when it comes to registering vulnerabilities with the appropriate authorities....

'Substantial increase in AWS calls' triggers takedown notice A plugin and library to permit the control of Haier, Candy, and Hoover appliances recently received takedown requests from Haier Europe's Security and Governance department....

Fast food chain could face a footlong recovery process if allegations are true The LockBit ransomware gang is claiming an attack on submarine sandwich slinger Subway, alleging it has made off with a platter of data....

Committee wants to know which were awarded without competition and more British MPs have written to the country's Treasury to demand details of all public sector contracts with Fujitsu as the Japanese tech supplier struggles in the wake of the Horizon Post Office Scandal....

Every little helps. Especially testing and talking to customers It was a tricky weekend for techies - not only did Microsoft's Azure Resource Manager fall over across the globe on January 21, 2024, local UK retailing giant Tesco also suffered an outage, cancelling multiple customer deliveries and orders due to "technical difficulties."...

Most advanced semiconductor facility in Europe is being subsidized by Chips Act funding Water treatment company Gradiant has won a contract to build a plant providing ultrapure water for a chip fabrication facility being constructed in Germany by an unnamed "large semiconductor manufacturer."...

It's all very well offering 'Free Debt Help,' but recipients were unwilling, says watchdog... A financial services company that illegally dispatched tens of thousands of spam messages promising to help the recipients magically wipe away their debts is itself now a debtor to the UK's data regulator....

Waltham Cross bit barn part of Alphabet's plans for 'future capacity needs' Google has commenced construction of a $1 billion datacenter complex on the outskirts of London it says is needed to provide a reliable service to Google Cloud customers and users of Google in the UK....

Never let a good crisis go to waste Opinion Nine hundred people have had their lives blighted, even destroyed. One of the world's oldest independent judicial systems has been perverted as a publicly owned company - the Post Office - used prosecutorial powers against postmasters. At the heart of it all is a brutal corporate cover-up of a broken IT system....

Product to protect Oracle virtualization is already on the backup vendor's roadmap Exclusive Backup software vendor Veeam is doing early research on VMware alternative Proxmox, potentially with a view to creating a product to protect data created using the tool....

Didn't you fix that? Me? I thought you fixed that! Who, Me? Greetings and salutations, mighty reader, and welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Register readers like you share tales of the times your effort to deliver tech support went awry....

Touts custom kernel that creams Linux, coming soon for devs and later for punters Huawei last week detailed a major release of its HarmonyOS that will see the Chinese giant break with the Linux ecosystem....

ALSO: Google's geometry reasoning breakthrough; Amazon debuts experimental shopping AI AI In brief OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that a breakthrough in energy production is required to advance increasingly capable and power-hungry AI models....

ESA makes its own discovery: the most water ever found on Mars NASA regained contact with its Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, on Saturday two days after after it lost communication as the vehicle descended from its most recent flight....

ALSO: Another UEFI flaw found; Kaspersky discovers iOS log files actually work; and a few critical vulnerabilities in brief Conor Brian Fitzpatrick - aka "Pompourin," a former administrator of notorious leak site BreachForums - has been sentenced to 20 years of supervised release....

PLUS: Singapore union tackles Google, Alibaba, layoffs; Thai digital cash plan stalls; AI to consume bulk of APAC IT budgets Asia In Brief The alliance struck by Tencent and Meta to bring the latter's Quest VR hardware to China is reportedly faltering....

Land of the rising profit? Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to invest 2.3 trillion yen ($15.5 billion) to extend its cloud empire in Japan....

Models will need to swallow a lot of it, mind you University of Chicago boffins this week released Nightshade 1.0, a tool built to punish unscrupulous makers of machine learning models who train their systems on data without getting permission first....

Maybe the AGI can finish that Metaverse, haha - oh wait, they're serious Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg is redirecting Meta-wide efforts to build artificial general intelligence and wants to secure a whopping 350,000 or more Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of the year to make that happen....

All those neural network weights aren't much without ample decent silicon OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly seeking billions of dollars in capital to build out a network of AI chip fabs....

Plus: Uncle Sam says Ivanti exploits 'consistent with PRC' snoops A VMware security vulnerability has been exploited by Chinese cyberspies since late 2021, according to Mandiant, in what has been a busy week for nation-state espionage news....

The real SLIM's shady Japan soft-landed a probe on the Moon today - a first for the nation - though its spacecraft is struggling to generate power from its solar arrays....

Account manager and pals blew it on hotels, cruise, fancy meals and more allegedly Five people have been accused of pulling off a "brazen" scam that involved submitting more than $7 million in fake work expense claims to an IT consultancy to bankroll hotel stays, a cruise, visits to strip clubs, and more....

Instead of 100% renewables, most will reach around a tenth of that Two-hundred and fifty US cities have committed to transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 in the face of slow global progress. However, researchers have now concluded most will fail and are likely to meet just 10 percent of their targets in the next 30 years....

Now its functions are shattered between innumerable vendors Retro Tech Week It may seem that progress in technology proceeds in a linear fashion, with new developments replacing older ones. From this viewpoint, newer technology will always be better, since it is presumed to have built upon what came before it and improved on it....

Malware threat from third-party cartridges nothing compared to threat to HP's bottom line HP CEO Enrique Lores admitted this week that the company's long-term objective is "to make printing a subscription" when he was questioned about the company's approach to third-party replacement ink suppliers....

More details emerge as Horizon IT scandal inquiry continues The Post Office proposed suing Fujitsu over missing data from its audit trail that could be used in the prosecution of victims of the Horizon scandal, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history....