The whole incident could have been avoided by spending some spare change on a fastener

Who, Me?  What? Monday? Again? Didn't we do Monday last week? OK, fine. Welcome once again to your soft landing pad into the working week – the oasis we call Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with tales of tech tribulations.…

Headcount down 18 percent as content creation time shrinks from 99 hours to 90 minutes

Singapore-based superapp Grab logged its first ever positive net profit late last week, and revealed it was helped by cutting cloud costs and adopting generative AI.…

Plus: US Department of Justice has hired its first chief AI officer

AI in brief  Microsoft is investigating fictional press statements about the death of political prisoner Alexei Navalny, written by its AI Copilot and falsely attributed to Russian president Vladimir Putin.…

As users report Broadcom massively hikes license costs, consultant advises negotiation tactics used for Oracle or Microsoft will apply

VMware's end-user compute business unit is set to be acquired by private equity firm KKR, according to a Reuters report that claims the deal will see $3.8 billion change hands.…

Plus: Huawei’s tablets beat iPad sales; Japanese supermarket’s long ransomware fight; Do Kwon extradited

Asia In Brief  India's home-grown DIR-V VEGA RISC-V processors have debuted in development boards.…

It takes only one bottleneck or single point of failure to ruin your week

Systems Approach  One refrain you often hear is that security must be built in from the ground floor; that retrofitting security to an existing system is the source of design complications, or worse, outright flawed designs.…

Use of AI to calculate legal bill 'utterly and unusually unpersuasive'

You'd think lawyers – ostensibly a clever group of people – would have figured out by now that relying on ChatGPT to do anything related to their jobs could be a bad idea, but here we are, yet again, with a judge rebuking a law firm for doing just that. …

In with the new, but old Insider bugs remain

More than a month after the Wi-Fi alliance introduced certification for Wi-Fi 7 devices, Microsoft has added support for the technology to Windows 11.…

Oodles of problems with data decompression and suchlike, depending on system settings

Some recent Intel microprocessors are crashing systems – and the problem appears related to the chips' firmware and clock rates settings.…

Investigating LockBit’s finances has blown previous estimates of the operation’s wealth out of the water

Authorities digging into LockBit's finances believe the group may have generated more than $1 billion in ransom fees over its four-year lifespan.…

$800M expansion canceled after a mere glimpse at the power of Sora

If you ask American film mogul Tyler Perry, AI isn't coming for jobs – it's already taken them. Case in point, Perry's Atlanta film studio, where the movie maker just scrapped an expansion in the works for four years after getting a glimpse of OpenAI's Sora. …

The coasters are making a comeback ... but tech won't be commercially available for some time

Optical discs that can store up to 200 TB of data could be possible with a new technology developed in China. If commercialized, it could revive optical media as an alternative to hard disk or tape for cost-effective long-term storage.…

Space factory startup celebrates successful re-entry

Almost drowned out by last night's lunar landing, Varda Space Industries celebrated the re-entry and landing of the capsule from its W-1 mission in the Utah desert.…

Thieves broke into IT system using stolen login

U-Haul is alerting tens of thousands of folks that miscreants used stolen credentials to break into one of its systems and access customer records that contained some personal data.…

Pair had to dodge croc on trek back to civilization

Two German tourists got more than they bargained for when they put their lives in the hands of Google Maps and blindly followed the service into the depths of the Australian jungle.…

NCA still left enough for onlookers to wonder if there's anything more to come

The grand finale of the week of LockBit leaks was slated to expose the real identity of LockBitSupp – the alias of the gang's public spokesperson – but the reveal has fallen short of expectations.…

Publicity around offer breaches loan agreement, or so SEC filing alleges

MariaDB has been warned by a bank lender that it may "sweep" its accounts in retaliation for the publication of a private equity bid for the troubled database company.…

Lawsuit accuses contractor and co-defendants of 'pacify and delay' tactics

Sergey Brin and two of his businesses – Google and Bayshore Global Management – are named in a lawsuit seeking damages over the death of a pilot who attempted to ferry one of Brin's airplanes from California to his private island in Fiji.…

Windows 10 users would probably prefer longer support instead of prettier pics

Windows Insiders cannot get enough of AI if Microsoft is to be believed, with the company rolling out AI-infused Photo updates for Windows 10 and 11.…

Air Canada discovered the hard way that when your ML model makes a commitment, your biz will be on the hook for it

Opinion  I keep hearing about businesses that want to fire their call center employees and front-line staffers as fast as possible and replace them with AI. They're upfront about it.…