The Register

Big Four consultancy billed Canberra top dollar, only for investigators to find bits written by a chatbot

Deloitte has agreed to refund part of an Australian government contract after admitting it used generative AI to produce a report riddled with fake citations, phantom footnotes, and even a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgment.…

Musk space biz: 'Anyone else that wants to use the spectrum must coordinate with us first'

EchoStar says it has met the regulatory conditions to maintain the spectrum it is selling to Musk's rocketeers.…

6GW chip pact sends AMD stock soaring, Nvidia has a rival for Altman biz love

AMD and OpenAI have forged a 6 gigawatt agreement to power OpenAI’s AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs.…

CRM giant insists its platform wasn’t breached

Despite multiple arrests and talk of retirement, a crew now calling itself Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has reemerged with a data-leak site listing about 40 companies’ Salesforce environments, and is demanding an extortion payment (amount unknown) to prevent what it claims is about 1 billion stolen records from being published online.…

gem.coop server promises continuity after Ruby Central’s takeover of key repos

A team including maintainers removed without notice from the RubyGems.org project has formed the Gem Cooperative and created a new gem server called gem.coop, compatible with RubyGems.…

Ransomware crooks utterly fail to find moral compass

First they targeted a preschool network, now new kids on the ransomware block Radiant Group say they've hit a hospital in the US, continuing their deplorable early cybercrime careers.…

Under the sea, under the sea... bit barnacle's better, down where it's wetter, take it from me

China is persevering with underwater datacenters - a deployment off the coast near Shanghai is expected to save on the energy costs of cooling compute infrastructure thanks to ocean currents.…

Outsourcing your helpdesk always seems like a good idea – until someone else's breach becomes your problem

Discord has confirmed customers' data was stolen – but says the culprit wasn't its own servers, just a compromised support vendor.…

AI and new wave of offshoring mean graduates can't get gigs

Feature  Shubh Kumar graduated from IIT Patna, one of India's famed Institutes of Technology – universities that attract millions of applicants but admit only 18,000 undergraduates.…

No confirmed date but workers expected to return in the coming days

Jaguar Land Rover is readying staff to resume manufacturing in the coming days, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Reg.…

Big Red rushes out patch for 9.8-rated flaw after crooks exploit it for data theft and extortion

Oracle rushed out an emergency fix over the weekend for a zero-day vulnerability in its E-Business Suite (EBS) that criminal crew Clop has already abused for data theft and extortion.…

Plus, PAN under attack, IT whistleblowers get a payout, and China kills online scammers

Infosec in brief  On August 29, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency fired its CISO, CIO, and 22 other staff for incompetence but insisted it wasn't in response to an online attack. New material suggests FEMA's claim may be false.…

Microsoft's Copilot is helping workers perfect the ancient art of doing sweet f all

Opinion  It has been less than three years since ChatGPT lit the fuse of the current explosion of AI everywhere. AI years move even faster than internet years, so there's been time not only for the forcible injection of AI into the workplace courtesy of Microsoft, but the first scientific studies of the effect. Productivity may not have gone up, but anxiety, confusion and annoyance most certainly have.…

UK Treasury called time on troubled integration scheme after £240M sunk

Analysis  In 2020, the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS), which provides data vital to form public sector policy and allocate resources, launched a plan to integrate government data and provide "high quality analysis that reflects the diversity of economic and social experience in our country."…

Consumer group Which? says owners of Apple and Samsung devices overcharged by £480M

Qualcomm is facing a UK trial over allegations that it abused its dominant position in the smartphone chipset market to charge inflated license fees, ultimately driving up device prices for Brit consumers.…

Big Blue turned the air blue

Who, Me?  Oh, bother, it's Monday. But rather than curse about another working week rolling around, The Register welcomes it with another instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace whoopsies and reveal how you survived them.…

Cupertino yanks ICEBlock citing safety risks for law enforcement

Apple has deep-sixed an app that tracks the movements of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents – apparently bowing to government pressure.…

Exploding valuations and mountains of debt, and yet....

Analysis  In an employee share sell-off this week, OpenAI achieved a nominal value of $500 billion. In terms of valuation, the posterchild of GenAI — which is yet to make a profit — left in its dust companies like Toyota, the world's largest automaker.…

570GB of data claimed to be stolen by the Crimson Collective

A hacking crew claims to have broken into Red Hat's private GitLab repositories, exfiltrating some 570GB of compressed data, including sensitive documents belonging to customers. …

'Seems like you should at least run that through ChatGPT to reword it'

A new hacking contest has caused a social media kerfuffle over allegations of rule copying and plagiarism.…