Authors continue to lose out on owed payments as rebuild of digital services drags on

The British Library is denying reports suggesting the recovery costs for its 2023 ransomware attack may reach highs of nearly $9 million as work to restore services remains ongoing.…

Renewed focus follows TV drama

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised to speed up the process of exonerating Post Office employees wrongfully convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud decades after after faulty software led to one of the greatest miscarriage of justice in British history.…

Plus: A virtual Elvis Presley animated using AI to perform in shows, and the most popular chatbot on Character.ai

AI in brief  Adding visible or invisible watermarks to images to identify whether they're made by AI won't prevent content from being manipulated to spread misinformation online, experts warn.…

FOSS's license to exist depends on helping users. It has to learn to think that way

Opinion  Bruce Perens is unhappy. He sees the spirit and potency of FOSS decaying into obsolescence as the big guns learn to game the system and users don't see the point.…

How the hyperscalers derailed Europe's cloud infrastructure train

Interview  Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek is blunt about the future of Europe's Gaia-X project: it doesn't have one. At least, not in the way many of its founders hoped.…

Old BT green boxes to be repurposed

The BT Group has made good on its promise to repurpose street cabinets into EV charge points by kicking off a pilot to demonstrate the concept actually works.…

How badly do you want your name in the About box?

Who, me?  Welcome, gentle reader, and rejoice, for with the new year comes a new instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers recount tales of tech trouble for your edification.…

When record labels go bananas over brief samples, good luck generating tracks built from today's culture

Comment  Generative AI models are most known for knocking out text and pictures, though they're also getting some way with audio. Music is particularly tricky, arguably: as humans, we can be relatively forgiving with machine-imagined imagery and some forms of writing, but perhaps not so much with audio. People can be very picky about the sounds they like listening to.…

Also: Twitter hijackings, BEC arrest, and critical vulnerabilities

Infosec in brief  We gather everyone's still easing themselves into the New Year. Deleting screens of unread emails, putting on a brave face in meetings, and slowly getting up to speed. While you're recovering from the Christmas break, Meta has been busy introducing fresh ways to monetize your web surfing habits while dressing it up as a user experience improvement.…

It'll also cost billions, but perhaps a price worth paying?

Let's say that you and your political leaders are committed to reducing the effects of the "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) that are indisputably toasting our Earth.…

Won't stop the chaos, may lead to attacks with more dire consequences

Opinion  A general ban on ransomware payments, as was floated by some this week, sounds like a good idea. Eliminate extortion as a source of criminal income, and the attacks are undoubtedly going to drop. …

An electric airplane on Mars, micrograv hibernation, and plenty others

NASA is funding 13 ambitious projects that could potentially lead to space missions one day, ranging from scanning for signs of life on Mars to exploring a nearby exoplanet with thousands of swarming spacecraft.…

Remember the good old days when ransomware crooks vowed not to infect medical centers?

Extortionists are now threatening to swat hospital patients — calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims' homes — if the medical centers don't pay the crooks' ransom demands.…