The Register

All he did was follow the example of the boss. And fail to foresee obvious consequences Who, Me? Dear reader, is that you? Can it be? Why, that can only mean one thing: that yet again it is Monday, and therefore time for an instalment of Who, Me? - the column in which Reg readers confess the times they really didn't get things quite right....

Just three people were on duty in Australia when 'power sag' struck and software failures left them blind Microsoft's preliminary analysis of an incident that took out its Australia East cloud region last week - and which appears also to have caused trouble for Oracle - attributes the incident in part to insufficient staff numbers on site, slowing recovery efforts....

Solar roller on Australia-spanning race packs an Nvidia Jetson, radio link to an AWS edge box, and Starlink uplink Special Projects Bureau Revisited Long-time Reg readers may recall that in 2011 and 2013 The Register's Special Projects Bureau followed the World Solar Challenge - an event that sees solar-powered cars cross Australia from north to south over 3,000km of roads and some of the planet's least welcoming environments....

Microsoft ends development of free basic word processor bundled with Windows Microsoft has quietly deprecated WordPad, the bare bones word processor it's offered at no additional cost to users ever since including it with Windows 95....

ALSO: Brazilian stalkerware database ripped by the short hairs, a fast fashion breach, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief The latest round of Apple's Security Research Device (SRD) program is open, giving security researchers a chance to get their hands on an unlocked device - and Apple's blessing to attack it and test its security capabilities....

PLUS: China allows first wave of chatbots, India's sun-spotter soars; ASUS smacks down speculation it will quit smartphones Asia in Brief Samsung last Friday announced it has developed a 32-gigabit DDR5 DRAM die using its 12 nanometer-class process technology....

Turns out we can have nice things? The sudo command-line tool has been implemented in the Rust programming language to hopefully rid it of any exploitable memory-safety bugs....

Big blow to blighters' blow-by-the-boatload blueprint Video Efforts by cops to seize and shut down encrypted messaging apps favored by criminals, and then mine their conversations for evidence, appear to have led to more arrests - plus the seizure of about 2.7 tonnes of cocaine....

Memory-optimized beast prioritizes weapon-sim perf over flashy FLOPS figs After months of work unpacking, installing, and deploying the various subsystems and supporting infrastructure, Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) latest super, the Crossroads system, has been installed....

Japanese foundry startup also shipping engineers off to US to study IBM chip tech Japan's Rapidus broke ground on its IIM-1 plant in Hokkaido on Friday, kicking off a flurry of hiring as the foundry upstart races to bring its 2nm wafer fab online by 2025....

Can't have you finding the ghosts in those E-meter machines, now can we? Right to repair advocates have made significant gains across the US of late, but the latest challenge to the movement faces a challenge from a surprising place: the Church of Scientology....

Oktapus phishing campaign criminals are back in action Customers of cloudy identification vendor Okta are reporting social engineering attacks targeting their IT service desks in attempts to compromise user accounts with administrator permissions....

Analyst firm warns that users need to understand what it is they're buying One of SAP's preferred methods for migrating systems to the cloud risks IT departments losing control of operational running costs, Gartner has warned....

Stock prices shoot up thanks to tech flavor of the moment Dell and Samsung are the latest beneficiaries of the current frenzy of speculation surrounding anything AI related, with both vendors seeing a rise in share prices related to their future AI prospects....

UK emergency services organizations urged to consider alternatives What3Words, the website and app that translates physical coordinates into short memorable combinations of words, has been praised and criticized over the years....

Still, it's blisteringly fast and systemd-free too The latest release of antiX is Linux how it used to be, in the good way. It's not the friendliest, but it does everything - and, wow, it's fast....

'Pre-leasing' also on the up as customers try to grab space in bit barns as they're being built The global economy might be suffering from inflation and low growth, but that hasn't stopped the first half of 2023 from being the busiest on record for datacenter takeup in Europe, according to new research....

WebAssembly is getting a lot of hype, but is it the game-changer some think it is? Opinion Beginning in 1995 and for decades after, JavaScript was the only game worth playing when it came to web-based scripting. While incredibly versatile, JavaScript had its limitations, especially regarding performance-intensive tasks. As the web evolved, so did the demand for more power, speed, and flexibility in web applications. Enter WebAssembly (WASM)....

Engineer trumped angry user by pointing to the rulebook On Call With the weekend looming, The Register once again brings you an instalment of On Call, the weekly column in which sysadmins share stories of their eventual success....

The past seven years have seen improved mapping, AR and AI, and the developer's gotta catch 'em all ahead of Monster Hunter launch Niantic, the Google spin-out behind the smash success augmented reality game Pokemon Go, is set to release Monster Hunter Now - a game that even before launch is struggling in its predecessor's shadow....

Huawei's mystery smartphone excites, as top laptop-makers reportedly sign up to make in India India and China are both celebrating hardware-related wins that are being hailed as signs the respective nations' tech industries are in rude health....

As Nutanix celebrates Cisco hook-up and quirky cloud repatriations Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has dismissed concerns that China could derail the semiconductor giant's acquisition of VMware....

Regolith scraped from the surface of Bennu will reach Earth on 24 September NASA is preparing to nab its first-ever asteroid sample as the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft drops a capsule containing fragments of the potentially hazardous object Bennu onto Earth....

'Embarrassingly parallel' protoype baked for DARPA to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon at massive scale Hot Chips Intel has used this week's Hot Chips conference in California to show off a 528-thread processor with 1TB/s silicon photonics interconnects that's designed to chew the largest analytics workloads, while sipping power....

Hey, stop Zucking up my data! Netizens can ask Meta, the home of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, to not train its generative AI models on at least some of your personal data....

That's what we call a static shock Even ransomware operators make mistakes, and in the case of ransomware gang the Key Group, a cryptographic error allowed a team of security researchers to develop and release a decryption tool to restore scrambled files....

While ASML says it can keep selling DUV kit to China through 2023 You can add parts of the Middle East to the list of regions where you can't buy Nvidia's top-specced A100 and H100 accelerators, judging from a regulatory filing by the chip designer for investors this week....

Not so much X gon' give it to you, you gonna give it to X As August and summer in the northern hemisphere draw to a close, Elon Musk's Twitter is making several changes to its platform, including a privacy policy update noting that it plans to begin collecting biometric data and employment information from the people still using the site, if provided....

DoD is dead last for tech support, equipment, communication, and function, say staff When it comes to US government employee satisfaction with IT services, one agency finds itself continually at the bottom of the heap: The rather crucial Department of Defense....

Five Eyes nations warn of hit against Ukrainian military systems Russia's Sandworm crew is using an Android malware strain dubbed Infamous Chisel to remotely access Ukrainian soldiers' devices, monitor network traffic, access files, and steal sensitive information, according to a Five Eyes report published Thursday....

Everybody chill, we're still in the cart Data cloud vendor Snowflake has felt the need to publish a clarification following statements on payments from key customer Instacart, which are likely to add up to $100 million over four years....

CRM vendor might find itself pushed to the margins to keep investors happy Salesforce has posted upbeat results and raised its forecasts for revenue, operating margin, and operating cash flow for next year. But price rises announced earlier this year are yet to affect customers, the CRM giant said....

He praised Apple for its 'open source' tech - now he'll oversee AI use to defend Britain from its foes Comment British politician Grant Shapps, who once told The Register that an incoming* Tory government would be the "most tech-savvy in history," has been appointed as the UK's new defense chief....

Breaking up is hard to do: Redmond reluctantly lets EU play matchmaker for software suite flings Microsoft has blinked first in its dispute with the EU over bundling Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and will now allow European customers to buy the two software suites without it. It also pledged to make it easier for rival meeting tools to work with the two suites....

Maria Markstedter spent years writing about chip biz's ISA, is a tad miffed by heavy-handed takedown tactics If you fancy creating a blog or website to discuss the Arm architecture or the Softbank-owned outfit that develops it, keep the British CPU designer's name out of the domain name you choose - or draw the wrath of its lawyers....

It also beats its main rival in some speed tests now The latest version of the flagship FOSS browser is out, and it's picked up one of the main features for which we keep Chrome around....

May as well give up already A fully autonomous flight AI has steered a drone through a racetrack faster than human pilots in the fledgling sport of first-person view (FPV) drone racing....

iFixit takes aim at the John-Deere-for-frozen-milk situation Having won victories for iPhone and tractor owners alike, the right-to-repair crusaders at iFixit are turning to the really important stuff as summer enters its last death throes - ice cream....

Scientists one step closer to cracking the case of these atomic swine You may be surprised to know that Germany's wild boars are too radioactive to eat - and Chernobyl may not be solely to blame. Fallout from nuclear weapons testing decades ago during the Cold War is a significant contributor to that radiation, it turns out....

Exec chuffed regulators accepted perhaps-overstated lame duck argument "You write what you need to win."...

CEC-IDE is re-skinned Visual Studio Code with added censorware to spot terms like Taiwan Independence' Chinese consultancy Digital Guandong has apologized after publishing a product based on open source code from Microsoft without properly disclosing that fact....

This sort of group usually sees members share IP and vow not to sue each other, to accelerate innovation Nine of China's most prominent explorers and purveyors of processors built on the permissively licensed RISC-V architecture have formed a patent alliance....

ChatGPT's prose harvesting protected by fair use, super-lab argues OpenAI is trying to dismiss various claims in two legal actions launched by authors and comedians, who sued the machine-learning super-lab for scraping their books to train ChatGPT without explicit permission....

Storm that passed through Sydney saw clouds sleep early and struggle to wake up Updated Oracle, Netsuite, and Microsoft's clouds have gone down, hard, in the Sydney, Australia, region likely due to an issue at a datacenter provider in which both are tenants....

Backdoors detailed, plus CISA releases more IOCs for IT depts to check Nearly a third of organizations compromised by Chinese cyberspies via a critical bug in some Barracuda Email Security Gateways were government units, according to Mandiant....

Could a Surface mobe with one of these displays eliminate all that bad press from the Duo? Microsoft's first attempt at a folding phone didn't go so well, though a fresh patent from the Windows giant suggests it might be holding out hope that a 360-degree foldable screen could make the difference....

Clicking a URL from a system service will actually open in your chosen browser. For some. How fancy Microsoft has released a Windows 11 preview build that will open links generated by Windows system components in the user's default browser - but only for those in the European Union and a few other countries....

Could be used to put ethical hackers, and citizens, behind bars A controversial United Nations proposal has a new foe, Microsoft, which has joined the growing number of organizations warning delegates that the draft version of the UN cybercrime treaty only succeeds in justifying state surveillance - not stopping criminals, as originally intended....

NHTSA is already worried Autopilot and FSD make drivers irresponsible - this surely won't help matters The discovery of a secret Tesla Autopilot configuration that allows the self-driving system to operate without driver attention isn't sitting well with US regulators who have cut a special order to get more information for their ongoing investigation....

At least the cost-cutting scissors are still sharp HP is putting a brave face on its third quarter 2023 results, claiming it's making progress to long-term growth priorities while enacting structural cost savings, despite revenue being down nearly 10 percent year-on-year....