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All a simple misunderstanding, we're told A meeting intended to allay fears that Emirati AI firm G42's deal with Microsoft could result in China accessing advanced US technology was reportedly cancelled by the UAE ambassador to the US....

Everyone loves Copilot, execs claim - and hope they can say the same for Copilot Plus PCs Microsoft has tried to convince investors that AI is paying off, but they appear unimpressed by news of customer adoption and revenue revealed Tuesday in the software giant's Q4 and full-year results for 2024....

Minister accuses cab drivers of gaming algos to score more lucrative fares Taxi drivers are gaming ride-sharing algorithms in Japan to find more and more lucrative fares, according to digital transformation minister Taro Kono....

ICANN's local boss Jia Rong Low gets the gig - and a challenging to-do list The Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) has named its new director general: ICANN regional managing director and vice president Jia Rong Low....

Which is nice, but way behind Nvidia, while other segments are soft and supply-chain pain persists AMD has told investors that its Instinct MI300X GPUs - the chip designer's alternative to Nvidia AI accelerator hardware - landed over $1 billion of datacenter revenues in Q2 this year....

For the want of an underscore DigiCert has given some unlucky customers 24 hours to replace their SSL/TLS security certificates it previously issued them - due to a five-year-old blunder in its backend software....

E-super-souk isn't having any of it Amazon has been ordered by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to take full and proper responsibility for recalling faulty and dangerous products sold by merchants through its website and app....

Things are getting Tensor between Cupertino and Nv Apple has detailed in a research paper how it trained its latest generative AI models using Google's neural-network accelerators rather than, say, more fashionable Nvidia hardware....

Shut the Front Door! If you've had or are having problems using websites and apps today, it might well be due to the Microsoft Azure outage....

Everything's bigger in Texas -even the settlement deals Meta will pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit with Texas, which accused the Facebook giant of breaking privacy laws by performing facial recognition on people's photos without their consent....

Oh, Boies, here we go again Delta Air Lines lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to the CrowdStrike outage earlier this month - and it has hired a high-powered law firm to claw some of those lost funds back, potentially from the Falcon maker and Microsoft itself....

Latest silicon aims to bring Gigabit connectivity to sub-$100 handsets Qualcomm has been pushing high-end smartphone platforms recently, but its latest release targets the budget segment, aiming to deliver Gigabit 5G connectivity to sub-$100 handsets....

A model finetuned on your social media profile? What could possibly go wrong? SIGGRAPH Big public AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot have become near ubiquitous over the past few years - but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is banking that before long, everyone will have at least one, if not more, personalized AI assistants to call their own....

Partnership with NXP, Infineon, and Bosch finally gets under way TSMC and partners will break ground in Dresden, Germany, to start building the Taiwanese chip maker's first European fab....

Not to mention the skills gap, AI skepticism, and the unrelenting quest for power Datacenter operators face multiple challenges such as power and cooling requirements, while staffing issues persist and many are not tracking the right sustainability metrics. On the plus side, they can count on strong and growing demand for digital services....

Leaves a trail of ransomware infections, data theft, business email compromise in its wake Insight The developers of EvilProxy - a phishing kit dubbed the "LockBit of phishing" - have produced guides on using legitimate Cloudflare services to disguise malicious traffic. This adds to the ever-growing arsenal of tools offering criminals who lack actual technical expertise to get into the digital thievery biz....

Ready to talk it up to investors today, Redmond? Updated Microsoft's cloud services are having a bad day with users worldwide reporting difficulty connecting to Azure....

While some celebrate, the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group is not happy The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a blog criticizing Google's climbdown over the deprecation of third-party cookies, declaring that the move "undermines a lot of the work we've done together."...

Calculating ROI of neural networks turns out to be rather complicated Feature The tech industry's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence software - a conveniently amorphous term - has yet to generate much of an economic windfall....

Get those patches applied - all the big dogs are abusing it Do you have your VMware ESXi hypervisor joined to Active Directory? Well, the latest news from Microsoft serves as a reminder that you might not want to do that given the recently patched vulnerability that has security experts deeply concerned....

Yes, you've heard the term 'AI Factories' before but Europe has its own spin Europe's supercomputing body has officially added a new pillar to its strategy - to develop and operate AI Factories to drive "a more competitive and innovative" European AI ecosystem....

New release does something you might have thought it already did The new version of the high-speed compression algorithm LZ4 gets a big speed boost - nearly an order of magnitude....

Long overdue updates include expanded mandatory security incident reporting Analysis The introduction of fresh UK cybersecurity legislation, though delayed, is timely....

Just when you think you've ban-hammered one, it pops up with another name Analysis This month Anthropic's ClaudeBot - a web content crawler that scrapes data from pages for training AI models - visited tech advice site iFixit.com about a million times over a 24-hour period....

Founder forbidden to leave the country, promises to make things right for out-of-pocket vendors The South Korean government on Monday created a 560 billion ($445 million) rescue package to bail out merchants who used two major e-commerce marketplaces that have failed to pass on payments for several weeks....

They DKIM here, they DKIM there A huge phishing campaign exploited a security blind-spot in Proofpoint's email filtering systems to send an average of three million "perfectly spoofed" messages a day purporting to be from Disney, IBM, Nike, Best Buy, and Coca-Cola - all of which are Proofpoint customers....

Solaris support persists and support for Armed Macs improves Oracle last week debuted a beta for a major update to its VirtualBox desktop hypervisor....

Follows requirement for social media and messaging platforms to get a license Legislation for an internet "kill switch" will reach Malaysia's Parliament in October, according to the country's minister for Law and Institutional Reform....

At last, the world-changing innovation of ML emojis can be yours to enjoy Apple Intelligence, Cupertino's promised suite of generative AI services, has debuted in beta versions of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1....

Funny what threatening to walk off the job and shutter a retail store can do Apple is on the verge of entering its first-ever agreement with a stateside retail employee union, caving to demands from store workers who threatened to walk off the job in May....

Khaan! Khaaaaaan! Two US senators have urged the FTC to probe and potentially prosecute three automakers that allegedly unlawfully sold motorists' personal data for pennies....

'Ignore previous instructions' thwarts Prompt-Guard model if you just add some good ol' ASCII code 32 Meta's machine-learning model for detecting prompt injection attacks - special prompts to make neural networks behave inappropriately - is itself vulnerable to, you guessed it, prompt injection attacks....

Do we really want to bother SCOTUS with this, friends? Surely they're way too busy to take a look US border agents must obtain a warrant, in New York at least, to search anyone's phone and other electronic device when traveling in or out of the country, another federal judge has ruled....

Trick appears to speed powering up but could cause damage to cables Tesla has asked owners to stop wrapping wet towels around handles to speed up the recharging process, warning that this can damage its Supercharger stalls....

Aruba, Aruba! Some network pros worry it will lead to less choice The European Commission is set to deliver unconditional approval for HPE's proposed $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks, according to reports....

Ads in the Start Menu not annoying enough for you? Hold my beer Microsoft is always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to annoy Windows users. Its latest wheeze is a full-screen pop-up in Windows 11 to urge the non-initiated to back up their files....

1. Undock, bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner, 2. Launch Crew-9, 3. Do the handover, 4. Bring Crew-8 home NASA will be launching a crew atop a Falcon 9 in the coming weeks as the SpaceX workhorse returned to flight with three Starlink launches over the weekend....

Axe attack comes just days after arsonists target rail network Fiber optic internet cables across France have been cut in an apparent act of sabotage, resulting in outages across the country....

No mention of malware or ransomware - somewhat of a rarity these days HealthEquity, a US fintech firm for the healthcare sector, admits that a "data security event" it discovered at the end of June hit the data of a substantial 4.3 million individuals. Stolen details include addresses, telephone numbers and payment data....

Happy Sysadmin Day Google celebrated Sysadmin Day last week by apologizing for breaking its password manager for millions of Windows users - just as many Windows admins were still hard at work mitigating the impact of the faulty CrowdStrike update....

Fnding your code on the cutting room floor decades after the event Ever thought you'd committed an elegant bit of code, only to find that somebody else decided to drop it because "that's the way we've always done things"? If so, you aren't alone. It happens to Microsoft engineers too....

Former business minister Vince Cable testifies, highlighting misinformation and oversight failures Officials at the government department responsible for the Post Office sent out misleading information to MPs about court cases relating to the Horizon IT system, an inquiry into one of the UK's greatest miscarriage of justice has heard....

Outsmarting Ubuntu's midlife crisis and dodging Flintstone-sized bugs Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" debuted late last week and holds on to the crown as the most sensible choice if you're looking to move across from Windows....

A headset for workers who want to stride around the room bellowing Review Logitech has released a lightweight headset aimed squarely at business users. While there are Bluetooth and connectivity options aplenty, the quality of the materials matches the headset's low price....

Neil stepped on a rock. We're surfing an interstellar wave 9,000 light years long. Go us Opinion Fifty-five years after Neil Armstrong's one small step, and the future it promised has not come to pass. Nobody has gone back to the Moon since the end of the Apollo program, let alone out to Mars. As for Clarke and Kubrick's oh-so-plausible 2001 trip to Jupiter with a hallucinating AI, well, one out of two isn't bad. But while those futures didn't happen, what we have instead is unimaginably better....

When even tape can't save you, procrastination is a problem Who, Me? Greetings once again, gentle reader, and welcome to another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers like yourselves soften the start of the work week with reminders that we all sometimes make mistakes....

Promises to discourage use of kernel drivers - so they don't crash the world again Microsoft has admitted that its estimate of 8.5 million machines crashed by CrowdStrike's faulty software update was almost certainly too low, and vowed to reduce infosec vendors' reliance on the kernel drivers at the heart of the issue....

Because clearly it's better for Beijing to know who you are than for every ISP and social service to keep its own records Beijing may soon issue "cyberspace IDs" to its citizens, after floating a proposal for the scheme last Friday....

Not even Oracle could stop it, claims DoJ The US Department of Justice has alleged that TikTok shipped personal information to China and allowed profiling of the short video app's users based on their attitudes to some ticklish topics....

Promote free use of government data, privacy, canning spam, and more Five years of trade negotiations reached a milestone last Friday with 91 nations agreeing on new norms for e-commerce - among them extension of a moratorium on taxation of cross-border electronic transmissions....