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Experts' job made 'straightforward' by crooks failing to update encryption schema after three years Security researchers have put out an updated decryptor for the Babuk ransomware family, providing a free solution for victims of the Tortilla variant....

'Tech visionary and pioneer' replaced by former comms president, as company faces pressure from activist investors Jeff Lawson has stepped down as CEO of Twilio with Khozema Shipchandler filling that less-than-comfy executive chair with immediate effect....

Move comes months after software licensing scandal Video game software company Unity is laying off a quarter of its workforce, it confirmed in a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing....

This one time at band gap... we managed to use wonder stuff as an electronic material for semiconducting Researchers say they have discovered a way to produce semiconductors using graphene that could - at some stage further down the road - deliver high performance devices able to outmatch those made from silicon....

Tribunal nixes appeal from provider of network that cops and firefighters can't seem to migrate from... Motorola's appeal against price controls on the longstanding mission-critical Airwave network used by the UK emergency services was dismissed by a tribunal, meaning the cap imposed by the regulator must stand....

Networking kit maker would be biggest potential acquisition since Autonomy - but hopefully goes better than that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is in the late stages of talks to buy California networking hardware maker Juniper Networks for $13 billion, according to reports....

A little more speed and less latency CES Just in time for CES this year, the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun certifying hardware for Wi-Fi 7, the latest update to the global wireless networking specification....

Plus: Deloitte rolls out homegrown AI for its 75K workers to dogfood CES Volkswagen says it intends to inject ChatGPT into its vehicles in Europe this year, allowing drivers to ask questions about life, the universe, and everything, and have them answered by the software, maybe....

Also: Huawei in patent deal with Nokia, and China slates 2025 as year for mass produced flying cars ASIA IN BRIEF The Indian government's commercial space agency arm, NewSpace India, has spilled the details [PDF] on how the country would launch a broadband communication satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket....

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's GPUs with slightly better specs CES Nvidia revamped its RTX 40 series GPU lineup at CES on Monday with three "Super" cards, which boast higher performance and memory upgrades over their predecessors....

As IEEE study shows super lab's neural nets can emit 'plagiaristic output' OpenAI has said it would be "impossible" to build top-tier neural networks that meet today's needs without using people's copyrighted work. The Microsoft-backed lab, which believes it is lawfully harvesting said content for training its models, said using out-of-copyright public domain material would result in sub-par AI software....

Astrobotic's Peregrine packed with NASA science gear and other payloads may be a bust Updated The first commercial American Moon lander - built by startup Astrobotic to carry NASA instruments and private payloads to the lunar surface - is in trouble: the spacecraft's propulsion system malfunctioned shortly after launch on Monday....

Kit sucked out of Alaska Airlines 1282 found on the side of the road Apple has become the first smartphone manufacturer to pass the three-mile drop test after one of its iPhones was found on the side of a road by volunteers helping to recover debris from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 over the weekend....

Once again, export restrictions are having the opposite to intended effects Nvidia is caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to China, banned from shipping its most capable products but discovering that the Chinese may not want to buy those it is allowed to sell....

Issue has been patched so be sure to check your implementations SonicWall says it has observed thousands of daily attempts to exploit an Apache OFBiz zero-day for nearly a fortnight....

Pandemic overhiring + AI-generated cuts at the entry level = A bad year to be a techie, says Janco A mere 700 IT jobs were added in the US last year compared to 267,000 the year prior, it's claimed. It'd be easy to blame layoffs, but that's not all there is to it, says tech consultancy Janco Associates....

Generative AI - huh - what is it good for? Premium priced PC sales, apparently says Canalys The AI-capable PC is coming to save a shrinking market, according to Canalys, although vendors need to be far clearer about any benefits to charge higher margins for the devices....

The House of Zen's aging Ryzen 5000 processors get some love too CES AMD unveiled its first desktop processors with integrated neural processing units alongside refreshed 5000-series CPUs and a new entry-level graphics card at CES on Monday....

NTSB chair pushes for 25 hours of cockpit voice and flight data recordings On Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the temporary grounding of approximately 171 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes one day after an emergency exit seal, known as a door plug, blew out of one operated by Alaska Airlines mid-air....

Your turn, Starship The relief was palpable as United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched the first of its next-generation Vulcan rockets....

Authors continue to lose out on owed payments as rebuild of digital services drags on The British Library is denying reports suggesting the recovery costs for its 2023 ransomware attack may reach highs of nearly $9 million as work to restore services remains ongoing....

Renewed focus follows TV drama UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has promised to speed up the process of exonerating Post Office employees wrongfully convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud decades after after faulty software led to one of the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history....

Plus: A virtual Elvis Presley animated using AI to perform in shows, and the most popular chatbot on Character.ai AI in brief Adding visible or invisible watermarks to images to identify whether they're made by AI won't prevent content from being manipulated to spread misinformation online, experts warn....

FOSS's license to exist depends on helping users. It has to learn to think that way Opinion Bruce Perens is unhappy. He sees the spirit and potency of FOSS decaying into obsolescence as the big guns learn to game the system and users don't see the point....

How the hyperscalers derailed Europe's cloud infrastructure train Interview Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek is blunt about the future of Europe's Gaia-X project: it doesn't have one. At least, not in the way many of its founders hoped....

Old BT green boxes to be repurposed The BT Group has made good on its promise to repurpose street cabinets into EV charge points by kicking off a pilot to demonstrate the concept actually works....

How badly do you want your name in the About box? Who, me? Welcome, gentle reader, and rejoice, for with the new year comes a new instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers recount tales of tech trouble for your edification....

When record labels go bananas over brief samples, good luck generating tracks built from today's culture Comment Generative AI models are most known for knocking out text and pictures, though they're also getting some way with audio. Music is particularly tricky, arguably: as humans, we can be relatively forgiving with machine-imagined imagery and some forms of writing, but perhaps not so much with audio. People can be very picky about the sounds they like listening to....

Also: Twitter hijackings, BEC arrest, and critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief We gather everyone's still easing themselves into the New Year. Deleting screens of unread emails, putting on a brave face in meetings, and slowly getting up to speed. While you're recovering from the Christmas break, Meta has been busy introducing fresh ways to monetize your web surfing habits while dressing it up as a user experience improvement....

It'll also cost billions, but perhaps a price worth paying? Let's say that you and your political leaders are committed to reducing the effects of the "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide (CO) and methane (CH) that are indisputably toasting our Earth....

Won't stop the chaos, may lead to attacks with more dire consequences Opinion A general ban on ransomware payments, as was floated by some this week, sounds like a good idea. Eliminate extortion as a source of criminal income, and the attacks are undoubtedly going to drop....

An electric airplane on Mars, micrograv hibernation, and plenty others NASA is funding 13 ambitious projects that could potentially lead to space missions one day, ranging from scanning for signs of life on Mars to exploring a nearby exoplanet with thousands of swarming spacecraft....

Remember the good old days when ransomware crooks vowed not to infect medical centers? Extortionists are now threatening to swat hospital patients - calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims' homes - if the medical centers don'tpay the crooks' ransom demands....

You really think someone would do that? Go on the internet and tell lies? Predictive and generative AI systems remain vulnerable to a variety of attacks and anyone who says otherwise isn't being entirely honest, according to Apostol Vassilev, a computer scientist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)....

Stockpiled TSMC silicon from 2020 shock! Did Huawei's domestic fab partners somehow develop the means to mass produce a 5nm laptop chip in spite of US sanctions designed to prevent just that? No, they most certainly did not....

The advent of generative AI has made the attack far more pervasive The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is promising a $25,000 reward for the best solution to combat the growing threat of AI voice cloning....

Perfect timing - now BYD can rub that in Tesla's face along with stealing the global EV sales crown A hot new Tesla import has arrived in China in the form of a pair of forced software updates for nearly every car the US EV maker has sold in the Middle Kingdom....

Decades, gone in a flash: Longlived mission was almost derailed by file system whoopsie It is 20 years this week since NASA's Spirit rover landed on Mars, kicking off years of exploration before ending its mission stuck in the sand....

So long, and thanks for all the sanctions as PR and government relations teams decamp Chinese tech giant Huawei has reportedly stood down much of its public and government relations teams in the US and Canada, in a sign it may have given up trying to persuade Washington to soften its stance....

Remember when Microsoft said that about FTC (and then walked it back)? SpaceX has sued America's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent federal agency responsible for protecting private sector employees' rights, just 24 hours after the body accused Elon Musk's company of treating employees unfairly....

Fitzpatrick faces potentially decades in prison later this month, so may as well get some foreign Netflix in beforehand The cybercriminal behind BreachForums was this week arrested for violating the terms of his pretrial release and will now be held in custody until his sentencing hearing....

Throwback word processor ditched from clean installs, soon to be removed on upgrade Microsoft has begun ditching WordPad from Windows and removed the editor from the first Canary Channel build of 2024....

Self-driving car biz says Q1 orders to drop 50% amid widening operating losses Mobileye shares tanked by up to 27 percent yesterday in pre-market trading after the self-driving tech biz surprised Wall Street by warning that customers are chewing over excess inventory and cutting orders....

86-DOS version 0.1-C found and archived - all nine files of it An intrepid code archaeologist has found and uploaded an early ancestor of what became MS-DOS, which later sparked the IBM PC-compatible computer industry....

Research warns not to make the same mistakes as other electronic patient record systems A leading expert has warned that the value of the NHS's Federated Data Platform (FDP) will depend on usability testing if it is to improve patient safety and efficiency in the UK health service....

But we also have a bit to say about Dark Souls, Starfield, Foxhole, and more The RPG Greetings, traveler, and welcome back to our occasional gaming column The Register Plays Games....

Read the manual, they said. If only they'd said it about the right manual On Call 2024 has commenced, but in today's edition of On Call - The Register's reader-contributed tales of tech support strife - a reader we'll Regomize as "Stuart" shared a tale caused by a temporal anomaly....

'Almost everything' wiped in the telecom attack, says Ukraine's top cyber spy Russia's Sandworm crew appear to have been responsible for knocking out mobile and internet services to about 24 million users in Ukraine last month with an attack on telco giant Kyivstar....

'Conversational engine' still hallucinates, cites its sources at least AI search engine startup Perplexity has raised $73.6 million in a series-B funding round led by Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and other investors....

India's IT outsourcers have an exec poaching problem A Bengaluru civil court has ordered Indian IT outsourcer Wipro to go into arbitration with its former CFO, Jatin Dalal, over accusations the latter violated a non-compete clause by joining competitor Cognizant....