The Register

Counterfit automatically creates adversarial inputs to find weaknesses

Microsoft this week released a Python tool that probes AI models to see if they can be hoodwinked by malicious input data.…

Antisocial giant surprisingly vocal in dismissing chat app rival's 'stunt'

Encrypted messaging service Signal on Tuesday made a show of trolling Instagram and its parent company Facebook by creating ads that incorporated audience targeting categories into its ad copy.…

30% of employees reportedly walked out following sudden rule change

Jason Fried, CEO of project management tool Basecamp, has issued a public apology following a major bust-up over new policies that discouraged employees from discussing "societal politics" at work.…

Seriously, it's time to move on

Amazon is the latest to drive a knife into the twitching corpse of Python 2 with an announcement that AWS Chalice will follow Lambda in nudging customers to later versions.…

New Spark 3.0 connector will appeal to users too, analyst says

Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike is introducing set indexes and SQL operations within expressions in the pursuit of greater machine learning efficiency via its Apache Spark 3.0 connector.…

Nearly 4 million to be exact, say researchers

Researchers at security biz Qualys discovered 21 vulnerabilities in Exim, a popular mail server, which can be chained to obtain "a full remote unauthenticated code execution and gain root privileges on the Exim Server."…

Add yet another Chromium browser to your collection

Microsoft's Edge browser has taken another step to stability on Linux with the addition of the operating system to its Beta Channel.…

Looks like you can safely ignore that friend request... forever

The Facebook Oversight Board has upheld former President Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook and Instagram - but not before advising the platform to look at its own role in the Capitol-storming mess.…

'Was a Mailchimp sub too hard?!' asks Reg reader

A local authority in East London has committed a classic privacy blunder by emailing what appear to be thousands of residents – while forgetting to use the BCC field and exposing all of the email addresseses to each recipient.…

Crossing the chasm into mainstream computing

Shipments of Chromebooks reached 12 million globally in the first three months of 2021, according to analyst outfit Canalys, which pegged the year-on-year growth at a stratospheric 275 per cent.…

Used the GitHub Codecov Action? Credentials may have been pilfered

Cloud comms platform Twilio has confirmed its private GitHub repositories were cloned after it became the latest casualty of the compromised credential-stealing Codecov script.…

The bug: IF Tier = Free THEN PRINT "Can we offer you an upgrade?"

Microsoft has had its very own Who, Me? moment after being forced to apologise for a bug that spammed administrators of Teams Free organisations to suggest they should upgrade to avoid imminent deletion of data.…

Neural networks can be aimed to misbehave when squeezed

Boffins in China and the US have developed a technique to hide a backdoor in a machine-learning model so it only appears when the model is compressed for deployment on a mobile device.…

Planning a post-lockdown trip to the isle off England's south coast? Don't miss the interesting bits

Geek's Guide to Britain  Guglielmo Marconi is famous for sending the first transatlantic wireless signal from Cornwall to Newfoundland, with his two radio stations on the Lizard peninsula covered by a previous Geek's Guide. But he worked up to this achievement on the Isle of Wight, the England-in-miniature that lies just off the south coast of Hampshire.…

Which is a lot of money for this crap

In the long history of crowdfunding disasters, few stories spring quite as quickly to mind as Retro Computers Limited's ZX Spectrum Vega+. The premise was simple: bring the joy of 1980s 8-bit gaming to a pocketable form factor. Around 4,500 people collectively stumped up £513,000 to bring it to life.…

Redshift, Cloudera among preferred platforms, but after 7 years Big Red's system refuses to die

The UK's Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed it no longer runs a single data warehouse after moving analytics products off its Oracle system to a range of services for AWS, Oracle Cloud, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.…

Majority aren't GDPR compliant and Google Play categorises them badly, leading to lax practices

Hundreds of millions of women turn to fertility apps to conceive or prevent pregnancy, and according to a new study those apps may leak very personal information including miscarriages, abortions, sexual history, potential infertility and pregnancy.…

Tales from less-conventional bunkers at the height of the pandemic

Covid Logfile II  Darren Ellis spent eight weeks of 2020 quarantined in hotel rooms. James McParlane spent seven months of the year in a Croatian castle. Bruce Davie and Josh Odgers spent 111 days unable to travel more than five kilometres from home or spend more than an hour a day outside.…

India wanted five global players. And it got only five applications from qualifying companies

India has met its target to lure five global server, PC, and tablet computer manufacturers to its shores, but in a slightly unusual way.…

We speak to IT outsourcing giants as human malware grips nation

India's big tech companies have mobilized to protect their workforces as the nation experiences a terrifying second wave of COVID-19.…