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Also, iOS spyware abused Apple's own ECC, breach victim says it can't figure out what hackers took, and some critical vulns Infosec in brief The US Federal Trade Commission has secured its first data broker settlement agreement, prohibiting X-Mode Social from sharing or selling sensitive location data....

The future's bright. The future's retro Interview Inspired at least in part by Pi creator Eben Upton's dalliances with the home computers of the 1980s, the Raspberry Pi casts a long shadow over the retro computing world....

If AWS, Microsoft, Google were anywhere close to capacity, their revenues would be way higher Cloud providers have deployed tens of thousands of GPUs and AI accelerators in their race to capitalize on the surge in demand for large language models....

Experiment is limited to the Insider Dev Channel. For now Microsoft is experimenting with having Copilot open automatically upon Windows startup....

Applications across chemistry, energy, and medicine await human-free acceleration Scientists have developed a platform based around a robot guided by an AI-based computer system, which could slash the time for engineering new proteins from months to weeks....

Meanwhile pending case from Cisco accuses Dexon of selling counterfeit kit CDW, the world's largest reseller, has reached a settlement with relative minnow in an antitrust case involving Cisco....

New versions and ports of the Plasma desktop ahoy The KDE dev team has spent many nights working on the first release candidate of the new Qt 6-based release, during which time a tiny, intrepid band of coders was able to bring the current stable release to OpenBSD....

If you think Sinclair's hardware was odd, you haven't met the people Opinion Following an unlikely series of events involving British Telecom, Prince Philip and a VTX-5000 modem, your teenage protagonist found himself at a drunken dinner party in 1984's West London. Across the table, excitingly, sat my boyhood hero Sir Clive Sinclair, and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say about the Sinclair QL, which was not thriving....

It's not like Gandhi ever saw his kids, says Narayana Murthy Indian billionaire and Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has doubled down on his comments that India's youth should voluntarily work 70-hour weeks....

Who's going to complain about free labor? Who, Me? As the year gets into gear, so does Who, Me?, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of getting away with tech shortcuts that should really have led to long career detours....

Net-taming firm lets staff go if they're bad at measurable performance targets' or aren't right for the team', which seems a tad contradictory Cloudflare has defended its HR practices after a former employee posted a nine-minute video of a phone call during which she was fired, asked for an explanation for being let go, but was told those who made the call were unaware of the reasons for her dismissal....

Roads are icy and drivers are dangerous. There will be no Starbucks run. Linus Torvalds has indefinitely postponed the merge window for version 6.8 of the Linux kernel after a winter storm knocked out power and internet near his work-from-home location in Oregon....

Infosec academic suggests Beijing's warning that iThing owners aren't anonymous deserves attention outside the great firewall too In June 2023 China made a typically bombastic announcement: operators of short-distance ad hoc networks must ensure they run according to proper socialist principles, and ensure all users divulge their real-world identities....

PLUS: It's difficult to make a bad LLM turn good; ELVIS Act seeks AI voice clone ban AI in brief OpenAI has changed the policies covering use of its models and removed "disallowed usages" of its models including "the generation of malware", "military and warfare" applications, "multi-level marketing", "plagiarism", "astroturfing", and more....

PLUS: Microsoft taps 700 million new customers in China; AI comes to Korean DMZ; India's semiconductor sector surges Asia in Brief Papua New Guinea (PNG) has implemented a two-week state of emergency after failure to reconfigure the nation's payroll system for government employees sparked riots that resulted in multiple deaths....

Boffins say the quiet part out loud: There's no room for the sonic boom NASA's X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft made its public debut on Friday in a media event at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, where the plane was designed....

Lack of skills, funding, and scrutiny - pick three Kettle This week the incredible scandal that is the UK's Post Office Horizon computer system, which ruined people's lives and drove some to suicide, finally exploded into the mainstream....

Snoops had no fewer than five custom bits of malware to hand to backdoor networks Two zero-day bugs in Ivanti products were likely under attack by cyberspies as early as December, according to Mandiant's threat intel team....

Phemedrone Stealer loots drives for passwords, cookies, login tokens, etc Criminals are exploiting a Windows Defender SmartScreen bypass vulnerability to infect PCs with Phemedrone Stealer, a malware strain that scans machines for sensitive information - passwords, cookies, authentication tokens, you name it - to grab and leak....

Microsoft and OpenAI fail to shake off AI infringement allegations The judge overseeing the AI code-copying case filed against GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft has dismissed some but not all of the aggrieved developers' claims, leaving the plaintiffs a more limited but still potentially potent opportunity to challenge the alleged algorithmic reproduction of their source code....

Cat flap fever, a streaming service for dogs, and other oddities on display in Vegas this week CES Ah, January: The start of a new year, crisp winter weather (if you live in the northern hemisphere, at least) and CES, with the latter giving us a look at what's in store from the biggest names in tech....

It's taken months for crims to hack together a working exploit chain Security experts claim ransomware criminals have got their hands on a functional exploit for a nearly year-old critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability that was this week added to the US's must-patch list....

Humboldt cable to zoom from Chile to Australia through the South Pacific Google says it is building the first ever subsea cable connecting South America to Asia-Pacific, in partnership with Chilean state-run infrastructure fund Desarrollo Pais and the Office of Posts and Telecommunications of French Polynesia (OPT)....

Criminal scored $2M in crypto proceeds but ends up in cuffs following property raid The criminal thought to be behind a multimillion-dollar cryptojacking scheme is in custody following a Europol-led investigation....

But Congress is on top of that, right? A US federal tax change that took effect in 2022 thanks to a time-triggered portion of the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may leave entrepreneurs with massive tax bills....

Company expects $245 million hit due to depreciation Rental giant Hertz is backing away from electric vehicles (EVs) and plans to sell off a third of its global fleet of battery-powered cars....

US senators want to know how chatbots represent an existential crisis to journalism and democracy Tech companies should compensate news publishers for training AI models on their copyrighted content, media experts told senators in a hearing this week....

Unhelpful error codes, complex fixes ... When did Windows turn into Linux? Microsoft sent yet another problematic patch into the wild this week in the form of KB5034441. However, rather than deal with a BitLocker vulnerability, the patch is failing to install for some users....

Microsoft says it's doing its best to crack down on crims The popularity of Github has made it too big to block, which is a boon to dissidents ducking government censors but a problem for internet security....

Our vulture spent a week in Las Vegas for CES 2024 - here are his key takeaways Column Every January in Las Vegas a few hundred thousand folks gather to learn about the latest innovations from an ever-broadening range of gadget makers, appliance manufacturers, automobile companies - and, these days, an ever-growing number of "wellness" purveyors....

Messaging menace used text and email to bombard people Food delivery company HelloFresh is nursing a 140,000 ($178k) fine by Britain's data privacy watchdog after a probe found it had dispatched upwards of a staggering 79 million spam email and one million texts in just seven months....

Using embedded medical technology, such as a pacemaker, defibrillator, or insulin pump? What's running inside is a complete mystery Opinion Software Freedom Conservancy's (SFC) Executive Director Karen Sandler was last year awarded an honorary doctorate by Belgium's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for her work for open source and software freedom....

And he would have got away with it, too, if it weren't for this one tiny backdoor On Call Welcome once more, dear reader, to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column detailing the delights and dangers of working in tech support....

Now that's a smart move CES Despite all the buzz around internet-connected smart cars at this year's CES in Las Vegas, most folks don't want vehicle manufacturers sharing their personal data with third parties - and even say they'd consider buying an older or dumber car to protect their privacy and security....

Heads up, this isn't about Elon When the World Economic Forum meets in Davos next week, global leaders are set to discuss how to prevent a future unknown "Disease X" the World Health Organization predicts could kill 20 times more people than the recent coronavirus outbreak....

Datacenter biz plans to deploy 32,000 Nvidia H100 and H200s next year Nvidia may not be able to sell its top-specced GPUs in China, but across the border in India, datacenter operators are buying up tens of thousands of accelerators to bolster their AI capabilities....

Seven words you can't say - This won't backfire and ruin art forever The makers of an hour-long AI-generated comedy special mimicking the late and great American comedian and actor George Carlin have been criticized for, apparently, not obtaining explicit permission from his family to impersonate his voice and style for the vid....

Anything to slow down the tech trash treadmill welcome at this point Google on Thursday voiced support for pending Right to Repair legislation in the US state of Oregon, calling it "a compelling model for other states to follow."...

Now you'll never have an excuse for missing that weekend work text or call SpaceX's Starlink has confirmed a successful test of its Direct to Cell (DTC) technology with a two-way text conversation held earlier this week....

Staff sent live cockroaches, porno - and more - in harassment campaign to silence pair eBay will pay $3 million to settle criminal charges that its security team stalked and harassed a Massachusetts couple in retaliation for their website's critical coverage of the online tat bazaar....

Hint: US, UK, European antitrust police are on the hunt Data egress fees aren't going away, but if you really want to ditch Google Cloud and take your data somewhere else, the search giant is willing to cut you a break....

Wonder when he's going to give that 28-year-old their skin back We're born, we work, we die. That biological injustice just doesn't mesh with the Silicon Valley mindset....

Plus: Analyst believes Samsung might give up on own cores and use Arm designs instead Arm has confirmed it is working on a CPU core expected to deliver a jump in performance, thus taking aim at the closing the gap between its own chips and those produced by Apple....

Speculation builds over whether a nearly year-old policy change was to blame Google-owned security house Mandiant's investigation into how its X account was taken over to push cryptocurrency scams concludes the "likely" cause was a successful brute-force password attack....

Benefits include no snacking on your sensitive data OpenAI is updating its subscription plans to add a "Team" tier for businesses to sit below its existing Enterprise level....

Real-life Kerbal Space Program? A Chinese startup has launched its first rocket from a sea-based platform, sending three satellites into orbit....

Oz online safety czar receives evidence of cull despite platform reinstating hundreds of banned accounts Twitter, the social media service now calling itself X, executed a 30 percent reduction in its Trust and Safety staff globally after Elon Musk's acquisition in October 2022....

Customers currently left patchless while attacks are expected to increase Security experts believe Chinese nation-state attackers are actively exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in security products made by Ivanti....

Power user excavates evidence of experimental 'Cowriter' feature Windows Notepad is set to be the next recipient of Microsoft's AI attentions judging by screenshots posted by a Windows Insider user....

Cuts are a continuation of late-2023 redundancies to help teams better 'align their resources' The 2024 layoff season appears to have only begun, with Google cutting hundreds of employees across multiple divisions yesterday....