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An ACE in the hole for miscreants The open source R programming language - popular among statisticians and data scientists for performing visualization, machine learning, and suchlike - has patched an arbitrary code execution hole that scored a preliminary CVSS severity rating of 8.8 out of 10....

Vastaamo villain more than doubled reported crime in Nordic nation A cyber-thief who snatched tens of thousands of patients' sensitive records from a psychotherapy clinic before blackmailing them and then leaking their files online has been caged for six years and three months....

Promises to train 850,000 workers and build datacenters Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company will invest $1.7 billion in expanding its presence and building datacenters in Indonesia....

Publishers want ChatGPT models destroyed after ML tech trained 'unlawfully' on articles Eight big-city American newspapers have banded together to sue Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming the tech duo unlawfully used the publishers' copyrighted articles to train AI models....

Congress to hear how Citrix MFA snafu led to massive data theft, $870M+ loss UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty will tell US lawmakers Wednesday the cybercriminals who hit Change Healthcare with ransomware used stolen credentials to remotely access a Citrix portal that didn't have multi-factor authentication enabled....

It's not like you need wonks to put driverless robotaxis on public roads or anything The organizational tree at Tesla keeps shedding leaves, and a surprising number keep falling from the top with two more high-profile executives reportedly leaving the firm....

Slotting in the module for ambitious next-generation compute goals Japan's Arm-based Fugaku supercomputer is to be paired with a newly developed quantum system from IBM as part of a project to research and develop future computing systems....

Tried to sell top secret docs for the low, low price of $85K A former NSA employee has been sentenced to 262 months in prison for attempting to freelance as a Russian spy....

Unless you live in Europe or Korea OpenAI's Memory feature is now broadly available for ChatGPT Plus users, meaning many more can feel vaguely uncomfortable about how much the chatbot is "remembering" about their preferences....

Big rise in valuation... for browser that won't let you Control-V any data copied inside it Insta-unicorn Island, with its browser built for the enterprise, has some interesting funding news: it just hit a $3 billion valuation in an era where it's AI or bust in the VC world....

Customers to get their light-up cyberpunk respirators refunded Remember when Razer, better known for overpriced peripheral hardware with RGB blinkenlights aimed at gamers, released an overpriced "N95-grade" face mask?...

15 to 30% won't touch the sides... 50%? Now you're talking Import duties of 40 to 50 percent will be needed to shield the European auto industry from China-based producers, according to a new report....

Second time lucky as competition from Starlink and pals increases Satellite operator SES is to acquire Intelsat for $3.1 billion, creating an entity with more than 100 Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and 26 Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites....

Software doyen hopes to achieve a third impossible thing Interview Bruce Perens believes he can do three impossible things, having already accomplished two of them....

There are many reasons why this is likely more trouble than it's worth EV carmaker Tesla is considering a wonderful money-making wheeze - use all of that compute power in its vehicles to process workloads for cash, like a kind of AWS on wheels....

Europe takes action after Facebook parent withdraws monitoring tool The European Commission has launched formal proceedings against Meta, alleging failure to properly monitor distribution by "foreign actors" of political misinformation before June's European elections....

This nearly Snap-free Ubuntu remix may be about about to win friends and influence people Xubuntu 24.04 is out, and offers a minimal installation option that is considerably more minimal than the other official flavors....

Even the least recyclable part of the process could be recovered 91 percent of the time A recent study proposes that vitrimer could potentially be used for making printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are much more repairable and recyclable than the ones we use today....

No it's not Birmingham this time. West Sussex County Council ERP replacement price to hit 40M A local authority on the southern coast of England expects the cost of swapping its ERP system from SAP to Oracle to go from 2.6 million ($3.26 million) to nearly 40 million ($50 million), as the council seeks a new implementation partner for a project that began nearly five years ago....

On-site generation plant aims to 'alleviate pressure on energy demand from the grid' Vantage Data Centers is joining the crowded Irish datacenter market with its first site in the Emerald Isle due to come online in 2024. In view of ongoing power constraints in the country, the project is to include on-site power generation....

Infosec eggheads find iGiant left EU iOS 17 users open to being tracked around the web Apple's grudging accommodation of European antitrust rules by allowing third-party app stores on iPhones has left users of its Safari browser exposed to potential web activity tracking....

And hatches 2030 plan to beat US for Mars rock retrieval China's space program will next week launch mission that aims to land on the Moon, take samples, and bring them back to Earth....

'This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation' Video Austria's foreign minister on Monday likened the rise of military artificial intelligence to the existential crisis faced by the creators of the first atomic bomb, and called for a ban on "killer robots"....

HBM will help too. Foundry biz? On track for 2nm but bruised Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions unit reported on Tuesday a 68 percent year-on-year increase in sales for Q1 2024, largely thanks to its memory sales - a result that confirms what many had predicted: an AI and server boom has brought the chip shop out of the lows experienced in 2023....

PsiQuantum's coming home Australian researchers pioneered the development of solar panels, but the nation now imports them in huge quantities - a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain....

Headcounts are down for the first time in ages, margins are up, and CEOs are happy When India's top four outsourcers - Wipro, HCL Tech, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) - announce their results, they often mention plans to hire thousands of new workers to both grow headcount and replace departed workers. But across 2023 and into 2024, that changed....

Carriers claim real culprits are getting away with it - the data brokers The FCC on Monday fined four major US telcos almost $200 million for "illegally" selling subscribers' location information to data brokers....

Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules....

Electric Mustang tech active right up to moment of crashes The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating an electric car maker whose self-driving-ish software was involved in a pair of fatal collisions. It's not Tesla this time, instead it's Ford's turn in the hot seat....

Whether the project will bear fruit is perhaps questionable Zilog's classic Z80 chip is soon to be dead, though it might not be gone forever if one open source project succeeds in its goal to clone the legendary processor....

Automaker could really do with the training data Tesla boss Elon Musk met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing to discuss electric vehicles and self-driving cars....

Canadian stores shuttered 'until further notice' Updated Canadian pharmacy chain London Drugs closed all of its stores over the weekend until further notice following a "cybersecurity incident."...

Who let the dogs out? When regular people have disputes with neighbors, the more reasonable party will grit their teeth, bite their tongue, and try to avoid conflict as much as possible. When billionaires have disputes with millionaire neighbors, they'll see you in court....

Do not disable safeguards by default, says chipmaker Intel is reportedly telling motherboard manufacturers to use its recommended BIOS settings by default to stop CPU instability issues with 13th and 14th Generation chips....

iFought the law, but the law wasn't particularly interested in my line of reasoning The European Commission just brought months of legal wrangling to an end with a decision to add Apple's iPadOS to the Digital Markets Act's list of gatekeepers....

Never mind the record revenues, costs must be cut Updated Google's latest round of layoffs have hit engineers working on its Flutter and Python teams....

Satirical news site asks everyone for a buck The former CEO of web comms tools provider Twilio has bought The Onion, the US satirical magazine that saw its popularity boom in the early days of the web....

Irresistible magical tech runs headlong into immovable personal data regulations Privacy activist group noyb (None of Your Business) has filed a complaint against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT service violates GDPR rules since its information cannot be corrected if found inaccurate....

Finance minister says government has interests in IT giant's 'sovereign activities' The French government has tabled an offer to buy key assets of ailing IT giant Atos after the company late last week almost doubled its estimate of the cash it will need to stay afloat in the near future....

At 34, things don't seem to work how they used to The Hubble Space Telescope has celebrated the 34th anniversary of its launch in the traditional way: by entering safe mode due to an ongoing gyroscope issue....

New laws mean vendors need to make clear how long you'll get updates too Smart device manufacturers will have to play by new rules in the UK as of today, with laws coming into force to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to break into hardware such as phones and tablets....

Sometimes Linux releases are like buses... frequently clustered together, and rarely as reliable as you might ideally want FOSS round-up Last week was a busy one for the open source community: EndeavourOS and TrueNAS Scale arrived on Tuesday, Fedora landed on Wednesday, and Ubuntu on Thursday....

Ad tech rewrite to replace web cookies still not to regulatory taste The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google's Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025....

Cabinet Office letter also reveals department lost money on unfinished database project The UK Cabinet Office has confirmed it is 17.5 million out of pocket after underwriting the official receiver of UKCloud, which went into liquidation in 2022....

Zed 80 is dead baby, Zed 80 is dead.... vulture claws over the astounding tech Opinion It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it. Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU. Readers may have owned one in an 8-bit microcomputer or showered coins on one in an early arcade video game....

Sometimes there's more than enough blame to go around Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we like to call Who, Me? wherein Reg readers may unburden themselves with tales of times their tech prowess might have let them down....

Researcher finds it beats Intel's Xeons for speed on one database-related tests, joins AWS Gravitons in cost-efficiency win The homebrew Yitian 710 CPU developed in 2021 and deployed by Alibaba Cloud is the fastest Arm server processor for rent in hyperscale clouds when handling database-related tasks, according to research published this week in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal Transactions on Cloud Computing....

'Remarkably similar' to the Kirin 9000 processor that shocked many last year A teardown of Huawei's Pura 70 smartphone by an IC research firm revealed the Chinese tech giant is relying on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp's (SMIC) HiSilicon Kirin 9010 processor, likely because US sanctions mean the Chinese company can't buy from other sources....

Core and boosters are on the pad ahead of (maybe) June launch The European Space Agency is ready to put together the first Ariane 6 rocket, and has declared the campaign to get it into orbit is under way....

ALSO: Infostealer spotted hiding in CDN cache, antivirus update hijacked to deliver virus, and some critical vulns Infosec in brief They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that appears to have been true in the case of Discord data harvesting site Spy.pet - as it was recently and swiftly dismantled after its existence and purpose became known....