The Register

Tokamak Energy off to Albuquerque desert to douse kit in radiation UK fusion company Tokamak Energy claims to have made a breakthrough in fusion magnets – and is prepared to test its technology at a US gamma ray facility in the desert.…

That's right – we're going to hold the world ransom for... ONE BILLION POUNDS! UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is said to be preparing a £1 billion ($1.24 billion) investment for the country’s semiconductor industry, as chip companies threaten to relocate elsewhere if sufficient government support is not forthcoming.…

Apple only vendor to report shipment rise in tricky Q1 for smartphone industry The visit from the Pope might have paid off for Tim Cook as Apple is the only top five smartphone brand that retailers are calling up to order more stock.…

With inventory surplus still an issue, revenues are 'bottoming out' Sluggish global demand has left Samsung and SK Hynix - the world's top two memory makers - reporting similar hefty losses for Q1, with promises that more profitable days are coming thanks to production cuts.…

Has harsh words for Python fan Musk after losing the blue tick RSA Conference The Wednesday keynote at RSA is often not time for something completely serious, and so it was that Monty Python's Eric Idle got the assembled throng singing along to some of the troupe's most popular songs.…

First British biz joins Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers A cloud group pressing the European Commission to address Microsoft's software licensing practices has snagged its first British member.…

Snapdragon giant and others insist alleged data gathering is overblown Analysis Cellphones using Qualcomm chipsets may transmit data sometimes classified as personal information, specifically IP addresses, back to Qualcomm. But where such transmission is occurring, it's not secret and it has been going on for years.…

Gusts associated with M87 accretion flow surprises scientists peering into massive ring-like structure Scientists have observed larger ring-like structures around the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87 than when it famously became the subject of a photoshoot in 2019.…

Of course the German conglomerate expects Yankee cash for its trouble German manufacturing titan Bosch announced it will add California-based TSI Semiconductors to its arsenal, in a bid to bolster production of the silicon carbide (SiC) chips used in electric vehicles.…

Promises more cross-product links, better security, and easier admin – for you and Redmond’s own crew Microsoft has admitted its panoply of 365-branded products have sprawled across an uncomfortably large quantity of inconsistently named URLs, so the software giant has started to consolidate them all at cloud.microsoft.…

Hopes it might wake during the Martian solstice, but not with much confidence China has finally confirmed that its Zhurong Mars rover is inoperable, and may never again roll across the red planet.…

Claims it's verified viability of city-scale network that would free vast resources, in Japan or elsewhere Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points – and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they’re reserved for private use, according to NTT. The Japanese tech giant proposes sharing the fleet to cope with increased demand for wireless comms without adding more hardware.…

Inspection drones and telemedicine enabled by island-hopping hybrid network For years The Reg has heard how 5G's many features will profoundly change every industry under the sun. Yesterday we saw an example of that claim that holds water: a plan bringing comprehensive 5G coverage to Singapore's maritime industry.…

And a pin to pop this hype bubble would be nice, too The US National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee has urged President Joe Biden to fill key positions and create new organizations to address rising societal concerns with AI models, in its upcoming first report. …

Imagine fighting swarms – swarms – of autonomous planes RSA Conference The future of warfare is autonomous systems, enabled by AI, and these wars will be won and lost in space and cyberspace, according to retired US Army general Richard Clarke.…

Musk loyalists said launch wasn't a failure. Tell that to folks, wildlife covered in dust, ash, debris America's Federal Aviation Administration has grounded SpaceX's Starship to conduct a safety investigation after the heavy-lift launch vehicle rocket destroyed a chunk of the launch pad and exploded during a test last week.…

Remember next time Redmond begs you not to install another browser You might want to think twice before typing anything into Microsoft's Edge browser, as an apparent bug in a recent release of Redmond's Chromium clone appears to be funneling URLs you visit back to the Bing API.…

Yes, launch another appeal, that'll do the trick Elizabeth Holmes, the now-former CEO of the imploded blood-testing startup Theranos who was convicted of conspiracy and wire fraud over her role in defrauding investors, has managed to delay the start of her 11-year prison sentence, which was due to begin tomorrow. …

That's two in three years, in case anyone's counting The Weather Channel is settling a lawsuit alleging it violated privacy laws by selling geolocation data collected from its mobile app users, its second such lawsuit - and settlement - in three years.…

Paris-based europe-west9-a zone still MIA Google Cloud stopped operating in Paris early on Wednesday morning local time due to "water intrusion," said the off-prem biz, which a day earlier reported profitability for the first time.…

If the DPRK is named, you know it somehow involves Lazarus Group The US government is aggressively pursuing three men accused of wide-ranging and complex conspiracies of laundering stolen and illicit cryptocurrency that the North Korean regime used to finance its massive weapons programs.…

Agency hopes program will keep US ahead of curve on semiconductor manufacturing The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) revealed this week that, under the US CHIPS and Science Act, it will establish a network of public-private technical centers to accelerate the research and development of semiconductors.…

Only in the Middle Kingdom as company reportedly eyes IPO Alibaba - China's equivalent to AWS - is bucking the global trend and cutting the cost of its cloud services instead of hiking them, but the bad news for potential takers is that only customers in China will benefit.…

Will need to sit at the front of the class where Commish can keep an eye on them Not to be outdone by the UK's copycat DMCC bill yesterday, European regulators have let the world know about the first few tech giants to make their super strictly monitored hitlist under its own antitrust regs, aimed at curtailing the power of Big Tech.…

Next year's revenue forecast to surpass the halcyon days of 2022 The outlook for the global semiconductor sector appears worse than feared, at least for the near future, with analyst Gartner now expecting to see revenue decline by 11.2 percent for 2023. Weakened demand is being compounded by an oversupply driving down chip prices, it said.…

NeMo Guardrails stops everything that made these chatbots so much fun ChatGPT's testing phases pretty quickly revealed that the OpenAI chatbot and others like it could go off the rails – or "hallucinate" – with enough poking and prodding.…

That's not very Unicorn Kingdom of you UK regulators have dealt a serious blow to Microsoft's hopes of acquiring gaming giant Activision Blizzard, with the Competition and Markets Authority blocking the massive deal because Microsoft's proposed remedies "had significant shortcomings." …

More public-private collab around this issue coming soon RSA Conference Defending space systems against cyberthreats remains "urgent and requires high-level attention," according to acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden. And to this end, the White House will host its first space industry cybersecurity workshop this week in southern California.…

In the rush to commercialize LLMs, security got left behind Feature Large language models that are all the rage all of a sudden have numerous security problems, and it's not clear how easily these can be fixed.…

How much better do mobile networks really have to be by 2030-ish? Another European project aims to kick start 6G telecoms technology and help define the scope of this future standard, even as 5G has yet to really deliver on its promise.…

It also required £20 million in extra funds – and Larry wants to brag about this? Birmingham City Council's ERP overhaul to replace SAP with Oracle has required £20 million ($24.9 million) additional spending and is three years late, a meeting heard last week.…

Addresses annoyances like 20-core VMs requiring 24 licenses Microsoft has made the terms on which it licenses Windows Server 2022 a little more generous.…

RSA's Adi Shamir thinks we're safe for a generation, but more gnarly keys are still a good idea RSA Conference Adi Shamir, the cryptographer whose surname is the "S" in "RSA", thinks folks need to stop worrying about quantum computing breaking encryption algorithms.…

Alphabet finds $1.6 billion of benefits by sweating its servers and networks for longer Google's cloud business has made a profit for the first time.…

Plus: Bias bounties are the new bug bounties RSA Conference Anyone with ChatGPT or AI or LLMs on their RSA Conference Bingo card is clearly winning at this year's event in San Francisco, as they all keep coming up over and over.…

Alleges large scale fraud, embezzling, and maybe even bribery, before crypto collapse The Seoul Southern District Prosecutor's Office has announced its intention to go after Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin, and others, for their role in the collapse of the Terra/Luna stablecoin.…

Adoption has been slow, maybe because there are few places to use it Civil servants and other public sector workers in the eastern Chinese city of Changshu will be paid solely in digital yuan starting in May, marking the biggest push of the e-currency to date.…

Also: ChatGPT Business tier will be available in the next few months OpenAI, the Microsoft-bankrolled outfit behind the chatbot star of the moment, ChatGPT, launched a feature on Tuesday that allows users to restrict the company from using text generated in their private conversations to train large language models.…

Qualifying for tax credits will only get tougher, so better plan that state-side manufacturing push now General Motors and Hyundai on Tuesday published dueling announcements of plans to build electric vehicle battery plants in the United States. …

Two out of three public-facing app instances open to hijacking Apache Superset until earlier this year shipped with an insecure default configuration that miscreants could exploit to login and take over the data visualization application, steal data, and execute malicious code.…

Comms lost to Hakuto-R after apparent crash landing A private company's first attempt to land a spacecraft on the Moon ended in apparent failure on Tuesday.…

OT firms construct handy early-warning info-sharing system RSA Conference A group of some of the largest operational technology companies are using this year's RSA Conference as an opportunity to launch an open source early-threat-warning system designed for OT and industrial control systems (ICS) environments. …

Botched BIOS firmware, EXPO memory profiles possible culprit Excessive processor voltages have been identified as the potential culprit of fried Ryzen 7000 and X3D CPUs and damaged motherboards.…

The lander might be dead, but its scientific legacy lives on NASA's Mars InSight lander may be dead, but the data it gathered is still filled with surprises – like the first direct observations of another planet's core, which scientists now believe is smaller and denser than previously thought.…

Russia unlikely to give up its crooks, but American CSOs can go to the clink RSA Conference US prosecutors are going to focus more on disrupting online attacks, even if it means losing out on a criminal conviction, according to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.…

Legendary R&D lab donated to SRI International where it will continue to innovate Xerox is donating the iconic Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California to SRI International, a non-profit scientific research institute, apparently so the company can focus on other stuff.…

Competition? We've heard of it Nearly two years after its creation, the UK's Digital Markets Unit (DMU) – meant to bring Big Tech to heel in much the same way as the EU's DMA – might finally get some teeth, with a draft law allowing it to fine anti-competitive behemoths up to 10 percent of their turnover for strangling rivals and eating all the pie.…

Dungeon master Sunak talks up 'funky' Silicon Valley sales pitch while schools left without maths teachers Opinion Political leaders are given to the odd flight of fancy, but yesterday UK prime minister Rishi Sunak created a whole new fantasy realm in which his dreams for the nation's future could flourish unhindered by encounters with reality.…

First came Slack then others joined the scrum to tackle the Beast of Redmond Microsoft is offering to stop bundling web conferencing and messaging app Teams with Office software to stave off the threat of a full-blown antitrust investigation by European Union regulators.…

What's NaaS? Whatever customers need it to be HPE's networking limb Aruba has taken the bold step of releasing some news about AI that doesn't involve a chatbot.…