The Register

Microsoft is literally turning them off and on again, but things are getting worse and a root cause is proving elusive Updated Microsoft's flagship cloudy productivity services are down across the Asia-Pacific region.…

A watch that flips open to reveal tiny earbuds: what could possibly go wrong? Have you ever left the house with your smartwatch on, but forgotten your earbuds?…

Not a good look for Meta's content moderation team Just before the US midterm elections last month, researchers from non-profit Global Witness and New York University submitted ads containing death threats against election workers to Meta's Facebook, Google's YouTube, and TikTok.…

This is a Musk prediction, so don't get your hopes up After testing on monkeys and pigs, Neuralink may be able to plant its first chip into a human brain in six months, its founder and CEO Elon Musk claimed on Wednesday.…

Take a break from the gaming and fix these now Nvidia fixed more than two dozen security flaws in its GPU display driver, the most severe of which could allow an unprivileged user to modify files, and then escalate privileges, execute code, tamper with or steal data, or even take over your device.…

If at first you don't succeed try again. Then fail again. Video game maker Activision-Blizzard's attempts to stop a second group of quality assurance employees for unionizing has been slapped down by the National Labor Relations Board, clearing the way for an organizing vote at the company's Albany, New York offices.…

Your tax dollars at work US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "erroneously" posted names and other personal information belonging to more than 6,252 individuals seeking asylum in the US on its website earlier this week.…

Meanwhile NSO faces new lawsuit over Pegasus flying onto journalists' phones Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said on Wednesday that its researchers discovered commercial spyware called Heliconia that's designed to exploit vulnerabilities in Chrome and Firefox browsers as well as Microsoft Defender security software.…

Intel's 'Ice Lake' and AMD's 'Milan' chips bump up speeds and feeds Microsoft is bulking up its Azure SQL database services on the back of Intel's "Ice Lake" Xeon and AMD's "Milan" Epyc server chipsets.…

Biden to join Tim Cook as well as AMD and Nvidia chiefs for an announcement from the semiconductor giant next week TSMC reportedly plans to make 4nm chips at its Arizona manufacturing plant when it goes online in 2024, a significant upgrade from the Asian foundry giant's previous commitment to focus on less advanced 5nm silicon at its first leading-edge US fab.…

Since high-capacity drives are increasingly sealed off, that makes them candidates for dunking Liquid cooling company Iceotope has conducted a study with Meta into the feasibility of using its technology to meet the cooling requirements of the high-density storage drives that are increasingly being deployed by hyperscale datacenter operators.…

Amazon web arm investing in Microsoft's platform to help customers escape Windows RE:INVENT "We found that .NET open source is heavily under-funded," said Saikat Banerjee, an AWS software development manager, at a re:Invent session this week.…

Residents in westernmost municipality of Solund praise new mobile coverage, but others have been left behind Norway is a couple of years ahead of Britain in mothballing its century-old copper telephone network, which is due to shut down on January 1, 2023.…

Lovely visit to meet Tim Cook at Apple Park HQ forces big change in tone from world's richest man The one-sided battle of the billionaires is over before it really began, with Elon Musk saying his spat with Apple boss Tim Cook over perceived threats to remove Twitter from the App Store was a “misunderstanding”…

Password manager working to identify info affected but says credentials are safely encrypted Intruders broke into a third-party cloud storage service LastPass shares with affiliate company GoTo and gained access to "certain elements" of customers' information, the pair have confirmed.…

But why Elon Musk's satellite broadband biz and not govt-funded OneWeb? The UK government is the latest to test out the Starlink satellite broadband service amid efforts to connect homes and businesses in poorly served areas of the country.…

Flotation delayed but chip designer's board just keeps on growing Softbank-owned chip designer Arm says it is preparing for its initial public offering (IPO) by adding former Intel and Qualcomm executives to its board.…

Used by millions – and the first official finished version The ClamAV command-line virus scanner used on many Linux boxes has attained an important-looking milestone release: version 1.0.0.…

Why not recruit mature folk from outside industry? Why not keep experience in place for longer A little more than one in five techies in Britain is aged 50 or older, and enticing more of that demographic to enter the world of information technology could help alleviate a perennial skills gap.…

Parent biz Alphabet also accused of unfair monopoly in online ads Alphabet and its subsidiary Google are facing a £13.6 billion class action lawsuit claiming they abuse their dominant position in online advertising to make billions at the expense of smaller companies in the UK.…

Coders are safe, too, despite AI writing one line in ten Analyst firm Forrester predicts that despite recent mass layoffs across the tech sector, the jobs market will continue to favor IT professionals in 2023.…

Note to self: Lenders don’t need the contact list on your mobile device Almost 300 apps, downloaded by around 15 million users, have been pulled from the Google Play and Apple App stores over claims they promised quick loans at reasonable rates but then used extortion and other predatory schemes against borrowers.…

Cash flow is king, even in the cloud Cloudflare has announced what it claims are its first ever price rises.…

Is it too late to enter for Understatement of the Year? The former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman Fried (SBF), has defied the advice of his lawyers and given an interview in which he admitted "I made a lot of mistakes" that led to the collapse of his company and left investors with little prospect of recovering billions of dollars.…

Bret Taylor returns to entrepreneurial roots after losing his gig as chair of Twitter Salesforce has again unwound its CEO job share arrangement, with co-CEO Bret Taylor announcing he will leave the company in January 2023 – leaving Marc Benioff occupying the one remaining big chair.…

Hock Tan says hiring engineers is his strategy … but still won't explain plan for massive rapid profit increase Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan has again felt the need to state that his company's acquisition of VMware won't lead to price rises.…

Will also offer them as-a-service to other bit barn operators The Japanese operations of NTT Data will deploy datacenter-monitoring robots in 15 of its own facilities, then offer them as-a-service to customers.…

Don't worry, Redmond hasn't gotten its hands on the agency's coffers yet The future of meteorological simulation and forecasting may well be bound for the clouds — well, cloud datacenters anyway. …

PRC and chums see open-source chip architecture as safer alternative to Arm China is reportedly leaning on domestic tech giants Alibaba and Tencent to design RISC-V chips as part of the country's efforts to insulate itself from the effects of the United States' growing silicon sanctions.…

Telematics program doesn't just give you music, but a big security flaw Sirius XM's Connected Vehicle Services has fixed an authorization flaw that would have allowed an attacker to remotely unlock doors and start engines on connected cars knowing only the vehicle identification number (VIN).…

Lift-off postponed for 'additional pre-flight checkouts' SpaceX postponed the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a lunar lander and rover built by a private Japanese aerospace company and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency rover to the Moon, by one day.…

Rise of the explosive machines San Francisco police can deploy so-called "killer robots" following a Board of Supervisors' vote on Tuesday, clearing the cops to use robots equipped with explosives in extreme situations.…

No matter what, the cloud must grow Less than a month after Amazon froze hiring amid worsening economic conditions, execs are preparing to accept job applications within its public cloud business again to expand its datacenter footprint.…

MIT's hardware speeds up light manipulation by a factor of 10 A research team led by MIT has developed anovel piece of kit that can drastically increase the speed and capability of optical beam forming technology and that's easy to produce at scale.…

CPU roadmaps are fragmenting to serve a variety of needs. Time to do some homework Analysis Amazon Web Services has signaled that the future of cloud computing cannot rely alone on general-purpose chips with its new Graviton3E silicon, joining AMD and Intel in introducing specialized central processing units that are meant to perform certain applications faster and more efficiently.…

Protests in Zhangzhou may equate to 15-20 million fewer Pro models in Q4, says analyst Ming-Chi Kuo The Chinese city of Zhangzhou - home to Foxconn's largest iPhone factory - has lifted COVID-19 restrictions, but it could still be too late to help Apple bounce back from a serious holiday shortage of iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max devices.…

'Tis the season for plugging holes and bolstering security Microsoft is parcelling out new features and functions this week in updates to Windows and Defender.…

Orbiting sat suite includes machine learning models, cloud-managed edge runtime Amazon Web Services (AWS) claims to have delivered a first in operating a suite of machine learning software running on a satellite in orbit, as a testbed for others to collect and analyze data directly on orbiting satellites using its cloud.…

Redmond disputes report that 'it is not possible to use without transferring personal data to the USA' Germany's federal and state data protection authorities (DSK) have raised concerns about the compatibility of Microsoft 365 with data protection laws in Germany and the wider European Union.…

Being over budget, behind schedule, becoming obsolete, and impeding other projects isn't a way to get a green light NASA has cancelled its mission to launch a greenhouse gas-monitoring satellite called GeoCarb, but climate-conscious individuals shouldn't be worried it's giving up on tracking climate change, the space agency said.…

Tumbleweed rolling-release distro to need v2 of x86-64 – and drop x86-32 edition The future direction of openSUSE distros is firming up and has ramifications for its business-focused offspring SLE and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP).…

Company hopes future will be 'nearly impossible to navigate' without its wares HR and financial management platform provider Workday reckons that despite the uncertain economic climate, now more than ever businesses will need to overhaul legacy systems to manage changes ahead.…

Ex-moderation lead says he does not feel the platform is 'safe' under Musk Twitter under Elon Musk won't be taking down COVID-19 misinformation anymore, according to quietly updated policy pages.…

Project with shipping giant was once floated as ideal blockchain use case – but industry didn't buy in IBM and shipping giant Maersk have confirmed they are shutting down their blockchain-based trading platform, saying that its aim of full global industry collaboration had not been achieved.…

Governor bans platform and website from all state-owned devices that can connect to the internet The governor of South Dakota issued an executive order on Tuesday banning the use of Chinese social media platform TikTok for state government agencies, employees and contractors on state devices.…

Report concludes government needs to implement a chips strategy now – like the rest of the world The UK is missing out on investment in the semiconductor industry, according to a House of Commons Committee report, which said this is putting business in the country at risk as other nations seek to build greater resilience into their own supply chains.…

Move comes as National Grid decided not to go live on blackout prevention scheme last night The UK government today confirmed it would take a joint stake in the Sizewell C nuclear plant, allowing for "China General Nuclear's exit from the project," which it said was "set to generate reliable, clean electricity for 6 million UK homes."…

It's not clear whether the upstart had to abide by new US chip restrictions British AI chip designer Graphcore has wrapped its two-year-old, second-generation Intelligence Processing Unit in new packaging for China and Singapore amid recently reported financial woes.…

Urgent digital transformation in a war-torn country Re:Invent Ukraine's Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister and minister for digital transformation, spoke to press at Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, describing how emergency migration to the cloud is securing the country's digital infrastructure.…

Order books full and price cuts are coming as supply chains unkink Server buyers who shopped from Hewlett Packard Enterprise contributed to the storied vendor achieving its highest ever operating profit margin for its compute business: 14.7 percent for the fourth quarter of FY22, in contrast to historical rates of between 11 and 13 percent and 9.4 percent for the same quarter in 2021.…