The Register

Could have been worse - last time researchers checked it was 98.6% Hospitals - despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private - frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to research published today....

Complainants smack back after hardware giant moves to dismiss lawsuit HP "sought to take advantage of customers' sunk costs," printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant....

Computing giant will appeal ruling, which found infringement was not 'willful' A jury has ordered Amazon Web Services to pay $525 million for infringing distributed data storage patents in a case brought by a technology outfit called Kove IO....

And rePalm may yet bring real PalmOS to new hardware ... even the Raspberry Pi PumpkinOS is a somewhat usable runtime environment that can run some Palm apps on top of Windows or Linux, without using or needing real PalmOS....

Agreement on consent and compensation has failed to materialize UK lawmakers have slammed the government for its lack of action in protecting copyright holders against the infringement of their intellectual property by developers of artificial intelligence technologies....

75 million in the offing in government tender The Post Office, the UK government-owned retail organization for post and banking, has kicked off procurement to help build the system replacing Horizon, the disastrous EPOS and back office system at the heart of one of the country's greatest miscarriages of justice....

High-profile individuals including MPs said to be caught up in leak Exclusive Taxi software biz iCabbi recently fixed an issue that exposed the personal information of nearly 300,000 individuals via an unprotected database....

Hydrotreated vegetable oil to power bit barns stateside after successful Euro trial Datacenter operator Digital Realty is replacing diesel with hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) at sites in the US in a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions following a successful trial in Europe....

Web titan rejects criticisms, insists AI-found compounds are legit AI on its own may not be as useful for discovering new materials as Google's DeepMind team has suggested....

Staff followed US lead and shared answers after move to online testing KPMG Accountants NV, the Netherlands-based arm of the global professional services firm, has been fined $25 million (23 million, 20 million) by the US's Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) for failing to prevent its financial auditors from cheating on exams....

Oh great - another potential kink in the silicon supply chain Samsung Electronics has struck trouble at home, potentially threatening the supply of semiconductors and smartphones....

Adds Hawaii stopover for another planned link Google announced on Wednesday it will invest $1 billion in two submarine cables to create new routes between the US and Japan....

Cryptic Biden hint came ahead of April 16 deadline for next step in extradition case The Biden Administration is contemplating Australia's request to end its bid to prosecute WikiLeaker-in-Chief Julian Assange, an Australian citizen....

Australian drivers given two days' notice, UK and New Zealand services also shuttered Indian ride-sharing outfit Ola Cabs is shuttering operations in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK as the company shifts focus to its domestic business....

With a pilot as backup of course - VENOM is still emerging tech The US Air Force is rapidly scaling up its plans to automate some of its fleet, and the civilian boss of the service says he's planning to fly in one of the robo-planes this northern spring....

Fresh silicon won't curb Zuck's appetite for GPUs just yet After teasing its second-gen AI accelerator in February, Meta is ready to spill the beans on this homegrown silicon, which is already said to be powering ad recommendations in 16 regions....

Go, go InSpectre Gadget Intel CPU cores remain vulnerable to Spectre data-leaking attacks, say academics at VU Amsterdam....

Proposed law doesn't include any ban on use of such stuff to build models, mind you A bill introduced in the US House of Representatives would require those training AI models to disclose any and all copyrighted works used, and it would apply retroactively....

ISPs are just going to have to swallow it The FCC's "nutrition labels" for broadband internet services are now a required part of doing business for American ISPs....

Something's gotta give in short-staffed, overworked healthcare industry, reckons Thoughtful cofounder and CPO Interview Companies are sticking AI everywhere they can right now - including injecting it into frontline healthcare. The benefits of healthcare AI are still up for debate, but Dan Parsons, cofounder and chief product officer at process automation firm Thoughtful, believes healthcare is the perfect place to start trialing new uses of the tech....

Now is the perfect time to review those permissions SharePoint users should beware since audit logs on the platform have proved relatively simple to circumvent, meaning malicious actors could exfiltrate your data without tipping off your security team....

Early figures post a $18.44B haul for industry bellwether Semiconductor giant TSMC looks to have rebounded from last year's doldrums with revenue up 16.5 percent for the first quarter of this year, compared with the same period in 2023....

All your PC needs for 40 TOPS is an M.2 slot Today, users who want to interface with AI usually do so through a cloud-based service like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, rather than locally....

The particle bearing his name lives on Obituary In a world dominated by instant gratification, Peter Higgs, who died earlier this week, had to wait more than half of his 94-year lifetime to see his theoretical predictions confirmed, thereby changing our understanding of the universe....

BatBadBut hits Erlang, Go, Python, Ruby as well Programmers are being urged to update their Rust versions after the security experts working on the language addressed a critical vulnerability that could lead to malicious command injections on Windows machines....

There's a new version of Canonical's LXD too, but its community fork seems to be thriving The community fork of what is now Canonical's in-house virtualization tool seems to be doing well, with major new releases of Incus, LXC and associated tools....

No computer part, even spinning rust, is safe from the hype cycle Hard drives are now being sold at elevated prices and the sector is even experiencing shortages thanks to AI-driven demand, which has similarly boosted prices for SSDs and GPUs....

Poorly implemented rule allowed miscreants to deceive users with trusted URLs Elon Musk's X has apparently fixed an embarrassing issue implemented earlier in the week that royally bungled URLs on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter....

8,000 roles affected worldwide, but Germany will bear heaviest losses A SAP transformation program has been slammed by the European Works Council as a mask for making job cuts....

And possibly replace entire business units too Intel Vision In his Intel Vision Keynote on Tuesday CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined a scenario in which AI will eventually automate entire offices - or potentially even whole businesses....

It's the region where stuff gets stressed at scale first, says Dave Brown, as he plots variants of Amazon's Outposts Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region is not a problem child - it's the region where the cloudy colossus often runs things at bigger scale than elsewhere and therefore stresses services the most, according to Dave Brown, global veep for compute and networking....

Paying for browsers is no longer a memory from the 1990s Cloud Next Hoping to upsell freeloading corporate users of its Chrome browser, Google has announced Chrome Enterprise Premium - which comes with a dash of AI security sauce for just $6 per user per month....

Battle with NetEase ends, peace deal will see games cross the Great Firewall - in both directions Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has produced an unexpected dividend: the developer's signature games will once again be playable in China....

Created during COVID to handle video boom and sliced bandwidth costs by 30 percent Huawei has released details of how it manages its own cloud with a dynamic traffic allocation system optimized by machine learning and developed in response to surging demand for its services during the COVID-19 pandemic....

2025 unlikely to see more money flow as Congress turns off the tap An increase in federal spending for the sciences in the US was short-lived, as the 2024 budget has seen significant cuts for many agencies - and 2025 looks to be on a similar track....

Pat Gelsinger claims 3x performance in next-gen silicon for AI PCs Intel Vision Intel claims its forthcoming Lunar Lake CPUs will have over 100 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI performance - 45 of them from its neural processing unit (NPU)....

Plus: Adobe, SAP, Fortinet, VMware, Cisco issue pressing updates Patch Tuesday Microsoft fixed 149 security flaws in its own products this week, and while Redmond acknowledged one of those vulnerabilities is being actively exploited, we've been told another hole is under attack, too....

Vendors rub hands at prospect of higher sales for pricier kit That AI PC pixie dust doesn't seem to be working its magic just yet as shipments were up for the first quarter of this year, but only by a few percent. But rising prices mean those who do buy will likely pay more to refresh their kit....

We're on a highway to ML Cloud Next Google's cloud business last quarter achieved an annual run rate of $36 billion, more than five times what it was five years ago, announced Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai at the Google Cloud Next 2024 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday....

Critical vulns spell bad news for circa 92,000 NAS users D-Link is telling owners of expired NAS devices to pack them away and replace them with newer kit following the publication of security vulnerabilities that together are now being actively exploited....

Imitator seemingly swiftly sunk from search after plea to users for help Updated The developer of popular text editor Notepad++ is warning users to beware of a "parasite website" that he says has dubious intentions....

Robot overlords demand more energy Arm CEO Rene Haas cautions that if AI continues to get more powerful without boosts in power efficiency, datacenters could consume extreme amounts of electricity....

It's the gold ticket favored by foreign techies - and IT giants suspected of gaming the system In depth The US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) last October proposed new rules to reform the H-1B visa program following its acknowledgement of widespread fraud in April last year....

Four fatal flaws allow TV takeover A handful of bugs in LG smart TVs running WebOS could allow an attacker to bypass authorization and gain root access on the device....

Hint: If someone says they're an assassin on the dark web, they're probably not A former Microsoft software engineer has been sentenced to seven years in prison after paying $16,000 in Bitcoin to arrange the murder of the parents of his adopted children....

Amount sealed because it would result in 'serious injury,' say company lawyers Tesla has settled an outstanding Autopilot fatality lawsuit before the case could end up before a jury, but on the condition that the settlement amount never sees the light of day....

Neoverse V2 cores available in GCP later this year Cloud Next Google lifted the veil on its long-rumored Arm CPU, dubbed Axion, during its Cloud Next event in Las Vegas on Tuesday....

Goodbye dedicated AI hardware and hello to a GPU that fuses Xe graphics DNA with Habana chemistry On paper, Intel's Habana Gaudi3 AI accelerators don't look like they're ready to take on Nvidia's H100 thanks to older process tech and slower HBM memory delivering fewer FLOPS. But Gelsinger's gang insists its latest parts can not only go toe-to-toe with the H100 in inference, but best it in training....

Documents from leaders including former CEO Paula Vennells among those handed over at the last minute Updated The Post Office Horizon inquiry may be forced to recall witnesses after the company delayed disclosing evidence - some relating to communications to and from former chief executive Paula Vennells....

Plus: Qualy punts a 'micro-power' Wi-Fi system for the industrial kit Qualcomm and Qt Group are looking to make it easier to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for embedded systems using Qt's cross-platform development tools, while Qualcomm has also unveiled a micro-power Wi-Fi system for IoT connectivity....