The Register

Visions of immortality are uniformly dull. But this is gonna get ugly

Opinion  Real versus virtual. Stolen versus synthesized. Generative AI is blurring the lines we used to think we could read between. Now, it's getting its teeth into life versus death. …

The real lesson here is how little some companies care about training

Who, Me?  Welcome to Monday and another instalment of Who, Me? It’s The Register’s reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes and reveal if they derailed your career.…

Brits wake to a beeping nightmare as Amazon’s AI assistant forgets how to set – or stop – alarms

Amazon's Alexa is on the fritz, bungling alarms and timers and leaving some UK users trapped in an endless wake-up call.…

If you wanted to hurt Putin’s ransomware racketeers, these info-stealing npm packages are one way to do it

Researchers at software supply chain security outfit Safety think they’ve found malware that targets Russian cryptocurrency developers, and perhaps therefore Russia’s state-linked ransomware crews…

Vidchat hosts probably know Otter.ai records everything and feeds it into AI. Their guests may not

Voice transcription service Otter.ai has found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit that claims it trains its speech recognition tech without securing permission to do so.…

Prime Minister promises first local silicon will appear this year, decades after Fairchild Semi's Robert Noyce made polite inquiries

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has celebrated the nation’s independence day by pointing out that the nation is finally becoming a global chipmaking contender – 60 years after blowing the chance to be a global leader.…

PLUS: Philippines bans gambling payments; Indonesia warns Roblox; China lures young scientists; And more!

Asia In Brief  Google on Monday admitted to anticompetitive conduct in its dealings with Australian telcos.…

The non-profit has a new look but still stands up for the open web

interview  The Mozilla Foundation has changed its look, but its goals remain the same – supporting an internet that's open and inclusive, and that prioritizes the interests of people over corporations.…

Handy tool for when only a dedicated device will do

hands on  Timekettle's lightweight T1 interpreter has received the AI treatment and will now perform offline translations. But unless you have deep enough pockets, both figuratively and literally, for another device and a frequent need for translation, it's not for you.…

A large and unfortunate mistake in the kernel development management process is underway

comment  The first release candidate of Linux 6.17 is out, without any bcachefs changes… but not for any technical reasons. This is bad.…

'Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,' one tells The Reg

Feature  Bill Gates, an Arizona election official and former Maricopa County supervisor, says that the death threats started shortly after the 2020 presidential election.…

Nowhere to hide

Codeberg, a Berlin-based code hosting community, is struggling to cope with a deluge of AI bots that can now bypass previously effective defenses.…

AI will take your salary in capex before it can take your job

Oracle issued layoff notices for more than 300 people in Washington State and California this week, according to state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings in those states.…

Is that a JuicyPotato on your network?

A suspected Chinese-government-backed cyber crew recently broke into a Taiwanese web hosting provider to steal credentials and plant backdoors for long-term access, using a mix of open-source and custom software tools, Cisco Talos reports.…

Or, more? Eventually, AI companies will stop selling their services as a loss leader, and then the AI "cost-savings" will disappear like dew on a hot summer morning

Bosses throughout the world love the idea of using AI to replace employees. They can talk all they want about how much more efficient everyone will be with AI, but the truth is if they can fire staffers, their bottom line looks better, their stock price goes up, and the CEO makes a ton more money.…

Gotta pay for all those GPUs somehow

Analysis  For all the superlative-laden claims, OpenAI's new top model appears to be less of an advancement and more of a way to save compute costs — something that hasn't exactly gone over well with the company's most dedicated users.…

When one GPU translates into three to five of the fastest switch ports money can buy, can you blame them?

Nvidia is expected to ship somewhere north of 5 million Blackwell GPUs in 2025. But before those GPUs can train the next GPT, Gemini, or Llama, they need to be networked — and that's quickly becoming big business for Ethernet switch vendors like Cisco, Arista, HPE ... and Nvidia itself.…

System prompt engineering turns benign AI assistants into 'investigator' and 'detective' roles that bypass privacy guardrails

A team of boffins is warning that AI chatbots built on large language models (LLM) can be tuned into malicious agents to autonomously harvest users’ personal data, even by attackers with "minimal technical expertise”, thanks to "system prompt" customization tools from OpenAI and others.…

Switchzilla's summer of perfect 10s

Cisco has issued a patch for a maximum-severity bug in its Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to inject arbitrary shell commands on vulnerable systems.…

You have until Thursday August 21 to respond if you do

NASA's plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon have moved on – the agency has now put out a Request For Information (RFI) to gauge industry interest in the project.…