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How OpenAI, Microsoft, and others are trying to combat deepfakes and more

Analysis Tackling AI disinformation is more crucial than ever for tech companies this year as they brace for the upcoming US presidential election.…

Paul Copplestone, co-founder of Supabase, writing in a blog post: On February 1st 2024, AWS will start charging for IPv4 addresses. This will cost $0.005 per hour -- around $4 month. A more accurate title for this post would be "Brace yourself, IPv4 is leaving," because I can't imagine many companies will pay to keep using the IPv4 address. While $4 is relatively small for an individual, my hypothesis is that AWS is a foundational layer to many infrastructure companies, like Supabase -- we offer a full EC2 instance for every Postgres database, so this would add millions to our AWS bill. Infrastructure companies on AWS have a few choices: 1. Pass on the cost to the customer. 2. Provide a workaround (for example, a proxy). 3. Only offer IPv6 and hope the world will catch up.

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CEO stays tight-lipped in front of MPs while Fujitsu admits moral responsibility for compensation

Post Office chief exec Nick Read left British politicians shocked with his evidence before a Parliamentary committee yesterday after he admitted he could not say when the public body at the center of the historic miscarriage of justice knew when its system was at fault.…

Millions have perfectly serviceable PCs running Windows 10 at home

Microsoft's desperation to persuade customers that migrating to Windows 11 is a painless process has taken a new turn, thanks to a relentlessly perky video: "Make Your Move to Windows 11 Easier."…

Uninstall the update or edit the Windows registry to restore order

The latest Windows Server 2022 patch has broken the Chrome browser, and short of uninstalling the update, a registry hack is the only way to restore service for affected users.…

...though bonkers conspiracies on solving date-field problem never died down

Retro Tech Week Forty years ago, both Jerome and Marilyn Murray saw their brainchild reach the light of day. In 1984, their book, Computers in Crisis, was published, becoming the first authoritative guide to the Millennium Bug coding problem, which, in the final year of the century, would consume media, political and business attention.…

None of this inflation-linked percentage nonsense, says Ofcom

BT is ditching mid-contract price hikes linked to inflation before Britain's comms regulator issues a blanket ban in pursuit of greater transparency for customers.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, Austria-based Swarovski Optik introduced the AX Visio 10x32 binoculars, which the company says can identify over 9,000 species of birds and mammals using image recognition technology. The company is calling the product the world's first "smart binoculars," and they come with a hefty price tag -- $4,799. "The AX Visio are the world's first AI-supported binoculars," the company says in the product's press release. "At the touch of a button, they assist with the identification of birds and other creatures, allow discoveries to be shared, and offer a wide range of practical extra functions." The binoculars, aimed mostly at bird watchers, gain their ability to identify birds from the Merlin Bird ID project, created by Cornell Lab of Ornithology. As confirmed by a hands-on demo conducted by The Verge, the user looks at an animal through the binoculars and presses a button. A red progress circle fills in while the binoculars process the image, then the identified animal name pops up on the built-in binocular HUD screen within about five seconds. In 2014, a famous xkcd comic strip titled Tasks depicted someone asking a developer to create an app that, when a user takes a photo, will check whether the user is in a national park (deemed easy due to GPS) and check whether the photo is of a bird (to which the developer says, "I'll need a research team and five years"). The caption below reads, "In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible." It's been just over nine years since the comic was published, and while identifying the presence of a bird in a photo was solved some time ago, these binoculars arguably go further by identifying the species of the bird in the photo (it also keeps track of location due to GPS). While apps to identify bird species already exist, this feature is now packed into a handheld pair of binoculars.

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ICO slaps penalties on two businesses that collectively made more than 3 million cold calls

Another week and yet another couple of pesky cold callers face fines from the UK's data privacy watchdog for "bombarding" unsuspecting households with marketing messages about home improvements.…

Slowdowns apparently due to a bug afflicting browser extensions, not retaliation against filters

Google claims users of popular ad-blocking extensions have wrongly blamed YouTube for slow video streaming speeds – and that the content filters themselves are the reason for stuttering playback.…

Standby to be amazed: Lotus Notes is still being developed

Kettle It's Retro Tech Week here at The Register, and we've got four of our vultures together to talk about old computers and software that, in one form or another, thankfully refuses to die.…

In a new paper published in the journal Science Progress, author Joseph Merz argues that climate issues are symptoms of ecological overshoot, driven by exploited human behaviors such as overconsumption, waste, and population growth. The paper emphasizes the need to change societal norms and behaviors through various means, including using marketing and media strategies to promote sustainable living, rather than solely focusing on technological or policy solutions. The Guardian reports: Merz and colleagues believe that most climate "solutions" proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three "levers" of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. "We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot," says Merz. "The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades -- they're not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand." "Overshoot" refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain -- or grow -- itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet's biocapacity can regenerate. Where discussion of climate often centers on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth's biosphere. "Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behavior," says Merz. "For decades we've been telling people to change their behavior without saying: 'Change your behavior.' We've been saying 'be more green' or 'fly less', but meanwhile all of the things that drive behavior have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction -- and we've been wondering why nothing's changing." The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signaling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviors which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one's status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behaviors incompatible with a sustainable world. "People are the victims -- we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction," says the evolutionary behavioral ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. "Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?" Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms. "We're talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they're trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint -- our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season's trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint -- or even better, have an ecologically positive one."

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.SBS gTLD once owned by Australian broadcaster is another source of strife

Scammers are buying up cheap domain names to host sites that sell dodgy health products using fake articles, according to cybercrime disruption outfit Netcraft.…

After settling privacy lawsuit now admits you're observable even when trying for anonymity

Google has altered the text describing data collection when users employ Incognito Mode in its Chrome browser.…

No consultants were mauled or eaten but some were quite scared

Indian forestry authorities have laid traps for a leopard that was spotted prowling near campuses used by tech services giants Infosys and TCS.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Apple-versus-Beeper saga is not over yet it seems, even though the iMessage-on-Android Beeper Mini was removed from the Play Store last week. Now, Apple customers who used Beeper's apps are reporting that they've been banned from using iMessage on their Macs -- a move Apple may have taken to disable Beeper's apps from working properly, but ultimately penalizes its own customers for daring to try a non-Apple solution for accessing iMessage. The latest follows a contentious game of cat-and-mouse between Apple and Beeper, which Apple ultimately won. [...] According to users' recounting of their tech support experiences with Apple, the support reps are telling them their computer has been flagged for spam, or for sending too many messages — even though that's not the case, some argued. This has led many Beeper users to believe this is how Apple is flagging them for removal from the iMessage network. One Beeper customer advised others facing this problem to ask Apple if their Mac was in a "throttled status" or if their Apple ID was blocked for spam to get to the root of the issue. Admitting up front that third-party software was to blame would sometimes result in the support rep being able to lift the ban, some noted. The news of the Mac bans was earlier reported by Apple news site AppleInsider and Times of India, and is being debated on Y Combinator forum site Hacker News. On the latter, some express their belief that the retaliation against Apple's own users is justified as they had violated Apple's terms, while others said that iMessage interoperability should be managed through regulation, not rogue apps. Far fewer argued that Apple is exerting its power in an anticompetitive fashion here.

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It pays not to be Huawei, and the US military can be lucrative, too

Comment A vendor establishing a business unit dedicated to government sales is not new or unusual. But Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia’s decision to do so in the USA this week tells a bigger story about Washington’s paranoia regarding the security of critical communications infrastructure security.…

Apple has announced several new experiences launching with their upcoming Vision Pro spatial computing headset, including 3D content from Disney Plus. "Other apps announced with Vision Pro support include ESPN, MLB, PGA Tour, Max, Discovery Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus, Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi, Fubo, Crunchyroll, Red Bull TV, IMAX, TikTok, and MUBI," reports The Verge, noting that Netflix's existing app "will work unmodified on Apple's new headset." From the report: The announcement lists some of the movies that will be in 3D, and naturally, Avatar: The Way of Water is among them. But Vision Pro owners will also get 3D versions of movies like Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Encanto. The movies will be available to rent through the Apple TV app, and the company says that anyone who has already bought the movies will now get 3D versions without paying extra. Otherwise, "more titles, including those available exclusively to Disney Plus subscribers, will be announced at a later date." Among the four screening environments for Disney Plus subscribers, one is called the Disney Plus Theater, which the company says takes inspiration from Hollywood's El Capitan Theatre, as well as others based on Pixar's Monsters, Inc., the fictional Avengers Tower from Marvel Avengers films, and one set in the cockpit of a landspeeder sitting in Star Wars' Tatooine desert. Besides Disney content, Apple mentioned the Apple TV app will have some free "immersive entertainment" that includes Alicia Keys: Rehearsal Room and a film from Planet Earth producers called Prehistoric Planet Immersive. The $3,499 Vision Pro headset will start shipping on February 2nd. Pre-orders begin January 19th at 8AM ET.

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Infecting networks via years-old CVEs that should have been patched by now

Crooks are exploiting years-old vulnerabilities to deploy Androxgh0st malware and build a cloud-credential stealing botnet, according to the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).…

Uber is shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly three years after the company acquired it for $1.1 billion. Axios reports: Drizly was always a bit of an odd match for Uber, in that it didn't hire or contract its own delivery workers. Instead, Drizly provided backend tech that let local liquor stores provide their own deliveries. The bigger issue, however, might have been cybersecurity. Drizly in 2020 confirmed a hack that exposed information on around 2.5 million customers. What it didn't say, however, was that the company had been aware of the security flaw for two years without fixing it. That information was discovered by the Federal Trade Commission, after Uber's acquisition of Drizly, and led to an FTC order that restricted the types of customer information that Drizly could collect and retain. "After three years of Drizly operating independently within the Uber family, we've decided to close the business and focus on our core Uber Eats strategy of helping consumers get almost anything -- from food to groceries to alcohol -- all on a single app," said Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber's SVP of delivery. "We're grateful to the Drizly team for their many contributions to the growth of the BevAlc delivery category as the original industry pioneer."

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