The Register

We're on a highway to ML Cloud Next Google's cloud business last quarter achieved an annual run rate of $36 billion, more than five times what it was five years ago, announced Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai at the Google Cloud Next 2024 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday....

Critical vulns spell bad news for circa 92,000 NAS users D-Link is telling owners of expired NAS devices to pack them away and replace them with newer kit following the publication of security vulnerabilities that together are now being actively exploited....

Imitator seemingly swiftly sunk from search after plea to users for help Updated The developer of popular text editor Notepad++ is warning users to beware of a "parasite website" that he says has dubious intentions....

Robot overlords demand more energy Arm CEO Rene Haas cautions that if AI continues to get more powerful without boosts in power efficiency, datacenters could consume extreme amounts of electricity....

It's the gold ticket favored by foreign techies - and IT giants suspected of gaming the system In depth The US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) last October proposed new rules to reform the H-1B visa program following its acknowledgement of widespread fraud in April last year....

Four fatal flaws allow TV takeover A handful of bugs in LG smart TVs running WebOS could allow an attacker to bypass authorization and gain root access on the device....

Hint: If someone says they're an assassin on the dark web, they're probably not A former Microsoft software engineer has been sentenced to seven years in prison after paying $16,000 in Bitcoin to arrange the murder of the parents of his adopted children....

Amount sealed because it would result in 'serious injury,' say company lawyers Tesla has settled an outstanding Autopilot fatality lawsuit before the case could end up before a jury, but on the condition that the settlement amount never sees the light of day....

Neoverse V2 cores available in GCP later this year Cloud Next Google lifted the veil on its long-rumored Arm CPU, dubbed Axion, during its Cloud Next event in Las Vegas on Tuesday....

Goodbye dedicated AI hardware and hello to a GPU that fuses Xe graphics DNA with Habana chemistry On paper, Intel's Habana Gaudi3 AI accelerators don't look like they're ready to take on Nvidia's H100 thanks to older process tech and slower HBM memory delivering fewer FLOPS. But Gelsinger's gang insists its latest parts can not only go toe-to-toe with the H100 in inference, but best it in training....

Documents from leaders including former CEO Paula Vennells among those handed over at the last minute Updated The Post Office Horizon inquiry may be forced to recall witnesses after the company delayed disclosing evidence - some relating to communications to and from former chief executive Paula Vennells....

Plus: Qualy punts a 'micro-power' Wi-Fi system for the industrial kit Qualcomm and Qt Group are looking to make it easier to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for embedded systems using Qt's cross-platform development tools, while Qualcomm has also unveiled a micro-power Wi-Fi system for IoT connectivity....

CTO Tom Wilkie gives an optimistic take on AI without climbing on the bandwagon Grafana Labs showed off new releases of its eponymous visualization platform, an updated version of Loki, and introduced its distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector, Alloy, at its Amsterdam GrafanaCON this week. We spoke to the company's CTO, Tom Wilkie, about the updates and where the tech industry darling of the moment - AI - fits into everything....

Many decide to make no changes after detecting a breach UK businesses' response to security breaches has "astounded" experts following the release of the government's official cybercrime stats for 2024....

But do all Foundry workloads move to OCI? It's up to the customer, spy-tech firm says Last week Oracle and US spy-tech company Palantir struck a cloud partnership, seemingly delighting investors and the news media. But its success may depend very much on customers' attitudes to Big Red's infrastructure offer....

Vintage OS editions go the way of the dodo as VSI cranks up exclusivity Bad news for those who want to play with OpenVMS in non-production use. Older versions are disappearing, and the terms are getting much more restrictive....

Users report being pointed to other EU regions if they need more grunt Exclusive Datacenter power issues in Ireland may be coming to a head amid reports from customers that Amazon's facility is restricting resources that users can spin up, even directing them to other AWS regions across Europe instead....

Ethos-U85 microNPU boasts 4x performance boost over previous gen Arm is aiming to boost AI performance at the edge with its latest embedded neural processing unit (NPU) and a Reference Design Platform for it to slot into, and said it expects to see devices based on it running generative AI models next year....

Byteflow dropped by around half under some of the path of totality Cloudflare has measured the state of the internet during the solar eclipse that was visible on Monday across a swathe of North America, and found a measurable decrease in traffic....

Calls for ecosystem in which AIs keep other AIs in check, and lots more regulation Japanese telecom giant NTT issued an apocalyptic warning about the impending dangers of AI on Monday....

Seek ideas for thorny problems related to both HPC and real-world problems India has called for proposals under the Cooperation on High Performance Computing pact it signed with the European Union in 2022....

Ditching Intel for a system-on-chip out of Beijing SiFive has promised the world another HiFive RISC-V development system featuring a 64-bit out-of-order processor for engineers and other curious techies to try out....

But not the nuclear subs bit The AUKUS Alliance - a team-up between Australia, the US and the UK - has revealed it may invite Japan to join its efforts to develop artificial intelligence and quantum computing tech to be used for mutual defense....

After two decades of calls for national protections, something may actually happen Americans may soon live under a federal privacy law - a mere two decades after the US Federal Trade Commission urged Congress to regulate online data collection....

What is it with Fog City and ancient transport tech? Those taking public transport in the tech hub of San Francisco may be reassured to know that their rides will soon no longer be dependent on floppy disks....

Tool that lets spooks observe Americans appears to have been renewed for another year Everyone's favorite warrantless surveillance tool, FISA Section 702, returns to the US House of Representatives this week and is expected to go to a full House vote on Thursday....

Intel reckons the NPUs that power the 'AI PC' are needed on your lap, on the edge, but not on the desktop Intel has created versions of its Core Ultra processors - aka Meteor Lake - for use in socketed motherboards employed in embedded and edge applications, the x86 giant announced today at the Embedded World conference in Germany....

Of course, it helps if you don't live in a potential disaster zone US insurance companies are reportedly relying on aerial photos from drones to deny claims....

Chip designer legging it after Arm Brit chip designer Imagination Technologies today debuts its APXM-6200 RISC-V CPU cores, aimed at powering smart TVs, wearables, Internet of Things, embedded hardware, and similar gear....

Follows 2.5 billion pledge to 'upskill' British workers for the new world order Microsoft is opening an AI research and development hub in London led by former Google DeepMind researchers....

SaaS slip up leads to scumbags seeking sinecure Home Depot has confirmed that a third-party company accidentally exposed some of its employees' personal details after a criminal copy-pasted the data online....

Nevermind the fact that the first two plants are facing delays and costs are rising - build, build build! With a new Biden administration funding agreement in hand, chip giant TSMC plans to build a third chip fabrication plant in Arizona despite facing delays with the two it's still building....

And American CIOs keep a closer eye on the purse strings than European equivalents Reader Poll Results When it comes to rolling out AI systems, developers are still the most important in deciding which to run, but there are some major differences in strategy between The Register's US and European readers....

Civo's Mark Boost says price hikes appear designed to retain whales while tossing back small fry interview Broadcom has faced a lot of heat for the direction it's taken VMware after acquiring it - and much of what has happened has confirmed the fears Virtzilla customers expressed well before that deal closed....

Tycoon threatens to ignore court order banning far-right accounts on X In this weekend's episode of "Billionaires Behaving Boldly," X supremo Elon Musk locked horns with Brazil's legal luminaries over what constitutes free speech and what's far-right pablum....

Orange candidate has been known to use protectionist policy against allies AI, 6G, semiconductor supply chains and critical minerals were all discussed at the latest EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC), amid concerns that a victory for Republican candidate Donald Trump in this year's election would put an end to such cooperation....

'A huge amount of responsibility to ensure that there is ethical management' Interview You may have heard that Google is considering putting its latest AI search innovations behind a paywall, something that doesn't sit well with Rosanne Kincaid-Smith, COO at German HPC firm Northern Data Group....

IT systems pulled offline for chance to paws and reflect First, they came for hospitals, then it was charities and cancer centers. Now, cyber scumbags are coming for the puppies and kittens....

Shares up 25% on the news Shares in crisis-ridden French IT integrator Atos bounced by over 25 percent this morning as top shareholder Onepoint said it has a rescue plan involving investment firm Butler Industries....

Domestic customers saw their fees cut last January Alibaba Cloud is cutting prices for international users of its core compute, storage, and database services, using offers similar to those it dangled before Chinese customers earlier this year....

Theories abound over who's truly responsible Change Healthcare is allegedly being extorted by a second ransomware gang, mere weeks after recovering from an ALPHV attack....

FAA investigation set to examine failure after aircraft fire in Texas last week The engine cover on a Boeing 737-800 used by Southwest Airlines detached during takeoff from Denver on Sunday, prompting an investigation by aviation regulators....

Easter egg in test build could have scrambled Microsoft's reputation More than 30 years before the xz backdoor became the near disaster of the week, an intern tried to sneak some unexpected code into MS-DOS. Not a backdoor, but potentially a bit silly....

Orgs are missing a trick when it comes to the white fluffy stuff, survey says The migration of IT workloads to the cloud is benefiting tech departments rather than the wider business, according to a McKinsey survey....

Data sovereignty is eftersokt these days A Swedish telco has rolled a collaboration platform for public sector organizations worried about sensitive data leaving Sweden....

We've done it once, we can do it again Opinion The Sleepwalking Into Disaster klaxon is echoing through the corridors of power. Again. This time, the corridors are British and the klaxonner is the Cabinet Office's Central Digital & Data Office....

Every byte, and executable, counted when trying to fix Redmond's finest Who, Me? Greetings, gentle reader, and welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers like yourself try to make each Monday a little less manic by sharing tales of foible and fallibility....

PLUS: Another local government hobbled by ransomware; Huge rise in infostealing malware; and critical vulns In Brief Protecting your privacy online is hard. So hard, in fact, that even a top Israeli spy who managed to stay incognito for 20 years has found himself exposed after one basic error....

Work to make the digital rupee programmable has begun India's Reserve Bank deputy governor has revealed that transaction volumes using the nation's central bank digital currency (CBDC) have trended downwards since December 2023 - and may even have been inflated by one-off uses of the currency....

Consortium will spend $1.65 billion on Azure, 365 - and of course some AI Cloud Software Group (CSG) and Microsoft have renewed their alliance for another eight years, this time with a $1.65 billion commitment for the Group to use Redmond's cloud, productivity tools, and AI....