TheRegister
Deloitte refunds Aussie gov after AI fabrications slip into $440K welfare report
Deloitte has agreed to refund part of an Australian government contract after admitting it used generative AI to produce a report riddled with fake citations, phantom footnotes, and even a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgment.…
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters offering $10 in Bitcoin to 'endlessly harass' execs
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters has launched an unusual crowdsourced extortion scheme, offering $10 in Bitcoin to anyone willing to help pressure their alleged victims into paying ransoms.…
OpenAI and AMD link arms for AI buildout: It's a power-for-equity swap
AMD and OpenAI have forged a 6 gigawatt agreement to power OpenAI’s AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs.…
EchoStar secures rights to spectrum it plans to sell to SpaceX
EchoStar says it has met the regulatory conditions to maintain the spectrum it is selling to Musk's rocketeers.…
Radiant Group won't touch kids' data now, but apparently hospitals are fair game
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.…
Kicked from RubyGems, maintainers forge new home at Gem Cooperative
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.…
An idea that won't sink: China planning underwater datacenter deployment
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.…
Thieves steal IDs and payment info after data leaks from Discord support vendor
Discord has confirmed customers' data was stolen – but says the culprit wasn't its own servers, just a compromised support vendor.…
Jaguar Land Rover engines ready to roar again after weeks-long cyber stall
Jaguar Land Rover is readying staff to resume manufacturing in the coming days, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Reg.…
Clop crew hits Oracle E-Business Suite users with fresh zero-day
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.…
Leak suggests US government is fibbing over FEMA security failings
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.…
AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true
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.…
Qualcomm in the dock over 'patent tax' on smartphones
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.…
Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it
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.…
AI chatbots that butter you up make you worse at conflict, study finds
State-of-the-art AI models tend to flatter users, and that praise makes people more convinced that they're right and less willing to resolve conflicts, recent research suggests.…
Hacking contest kerfuffle over copied rules pits Wiz against ZDI
A new hacking contest has caused a social media kerfuffle over allegations of rule copying and plagiarism.…
Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face
Conference-room screens at Ford's Dearborn HQ were briefly hijacked on Thursday to display a protest image in an apparent swipe at the carmaker's return-to-office policy.…
India's tech talent pipeline is sputtering
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.…
ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking contractors to trawl social media and other open-source data for potential immigration enforcement leads, assuming public posts can yield actionable intelligence.…
Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally
Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos says that, within two decades, gigawatt-scale datacenters powered by a continuous stream of photons from the sun will fill Earth's orbit.…