The Register

So says a study by boffins at Carnegie Mellon University

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have likened today's large language model (LLM) chatbots to "that friend who swears they're great at pool but never makes a shot" - having found that their virtual self-confidence grew, rather than shrank, after getting answers wrong.…

Goal is 'to enrich our workplace experience'

Exclusive  Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced an instant five-day return-to-work mandate for US workers, and warns that staff will be monitored and called out if they don't comply.…

Some coyotes hunt squirrels, this one hunts users' financial apps

A new variant of the Coyote banking trojan abuses Microsoft's UI Automation (UIA), making it the first reported malware to use UIA for credential theft.…

Palantir, data brokers, and judicial overreach are all on the horizon, executive director Cindy Cohn warns

Interview  In July 1990, before the World Wide Web even existed, an unusual alliance was formed to fight for the rights of the emerging online community.…

Malicious actor reportedly sought to expose AWS 'security theater'

The official Amazon Q extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) was compromised to include a prompt to wipe the user's home directory and delete all their AWS resources.…

Turn that Copilot or Scroll Lock key into a media control or extended character.

HANDS ON  In the era of laptops and tenkeyless keyboards, many of us are living with fewer keys than we had years ago. But even on a small keyboard, you'll find keys that you just don't need. …

If it passes, the law would redefine the boundaries of fair use

A bipartisan pair of US Senators introduced a bill this week that would protect copyrighted content from being used for AI training without the owner's permission. Content creators from large media companies to individual bloggers could effectively block Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others from appropriating their work.…

French fashion house dishes out notices after hackers raided a client database – ShinyHunters suspected

Updated  Fashion house Dior has begun dropping data breach notices after cybercrooks with a taste for high-end targets made off with customer data.…

'Industry, national governments, and the EU' must pay for maintainers. El Reg says charity shouldn't start at home

GitHub, owned by money-bags Microsoft, has called upon the European Union to create a publicly funded "Sovereign Tech Fund" (EU-STF) to boost the open source software ecosystem.…

You don't become a 'superpower' overnight

Significant hurdles stand in the way of the UK government's push to become a global AI superpower, including energy constraints, planning difficulties and the datacenter investment required for it all.…

How the MITS Altair 8800, a $264 RAM board, and some BASIC changed the world

This week marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of several empires. On July 22, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen signed a deal with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems.…

The "is" package was infected with cross-platform malware after a scam targeting maintainers

The popular npm package "is" was infected with cross-platform malware, around the same time that linting utility packages used with the prettier code formatter were infected with Windows-only malware.…

Sometimes, one small tweak can make a very big difference.

There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow to make IT better, and it would become better. Not better for some, not better for a while, but better for all and forever.…

176.5 Exabytes of the stuff shipped in 2024, another double-digit jump

Shipments of tape storage media increased again in 2024, according to HPE, IBM, and Quantum – the three companies that back the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format.…

G-Cloud on track for $50 billion revenue as AI creates a new generation of Google-eyed youth

Google’s parent company Alphabet has increased its capex budget for the year by $10 billion and now expects to spend $85 billion this year, and more in 2026.…

Nvidia's Jensen Huang just had a win with his argument that the world needs China’s AI brains, now this

Amazon Web Services has closed its AI lab in Shanghai, China.…

But it has no way to compel scofflaws to comply

In a sweeping and unprecedented legal opinion, the United Nations' highest court has decreed that "The consequences of climate change are severe and far-reaching" and constitute an "urgent and existential threat." What's more, it stated that action must be taken to not only ameliorate that threat but also to determine the legal consequences for those states whose actions harm others.…

A working copy of your site can run under Windows Subsystem for Linux

hands on  If you're building a website that will eventually be hosted on a Linux server (as so many are), you have a couple of choices about where you do your development work. You can create a beta version of the site at your web host and upload all of the files there or you can create a local test server that sits in your home or office.…

From scams to violence, the crimes extend beyond the digital realm

A subset of an online group that recruits children and teens for contract shootings, kidnappings, and other real-life violent crimes poses a growing threat to youth, according to the FBI.…

No screenshots for you!

In an effort to protect user privacy, Brave browser 1.81 will prevent Microsoft Recall from screenshotting it by default.…