TheRegister
LegalPwn: Tricking LLMs by burying badness in lawyerly fine print
Researchers at security firm Pangea have discovered yet another way to trivially trick large language models (LLMs) into ignoring their guardrails. Stick your adversarial instructions somewhere in a legal document to give them an air of unearned legitimacy – a trick familiar to lawyers the world over.…
ESA's Solar Orbiter will help space boffins predict desctructive coronal ejections
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter probe has pinpointed the source of electrons expelled by the Sun, with implications for forecasting space weather.…
I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA
Who, Me? No two mistakes are the same, but The Register thinks they're all worth celebrating each Monday when we serve up a fresh edition of Who, Me? – the reader-contributed column in which we share your most magnificent messes, and your means of making it out alive.…
Traffic to government domains often crosses national borders, or flows through risky bottlenecks
Internet traffic to government domains often flows across borders, relies on a worryingly small number of network connections, or does not require encryption, according to new research.…
China launches new ‘AI+’ policy to ‘deepen information technology revolution’
Asia In Brief China’s State Council last week announced a new IT policy called “AI +”, the successor to 2015’s “Internet +”.…
WhatsApp warns of 'attack against specific targeted users'
Infosec In brief A flaw in Meta's WhatsApp app “may have been exploited in a sophisticated attack against specific targeted users.”…
AI spies questionable science journals, with some human help
About 1,000 of a set of 15,000 open access scientific journals appear to exist mainly to extract fees from naive academics.…
Bring your own brain? Why local LLMs are taking off
Feature After a decade or two of the cloud, we're used to paying for our computing capability by the megabyte. As AI takes off, the whole cycle promises to repeat itself again, and while AI might seem relatively cheap now, it might not always be so.…
Programmers: you have to watch your weight, too
opinion To fight the enshittification of software, the first step is to pinpoint why and how it happens. Some observers are trying to do that.…
Kilopixel creator kills livestream switch before woodblock display hits Crysis point
All good things must come to an end, and so too must the blocky glory of the Kilopixel. As the wood and robotic marvel crested the 200,000-pixel mark, its creator pulled the metaphorical plug.…