The Register

This time it has sprinklers and the batteries are outside the building – where they flaming well belong OVHCloud has opened a datacenter in Strasbourg, on the site of a 2021 fire that destroyed two such facilities.…

It needs to, because the likes of Alipay are already ubiquitous – and used overseas China appears to have begun to address one of the big unanswered questions about its central bank digital currency: how to get people using it, given rival electronic payment schemes are already ubiquitous.…

Authorities also bust a shell company scam operation with links to the Middle Kingdom Chinese scammers have reportedly stolen a whopping $529 million dollars from Indian residents using instant lending apps, lures of part-time jobs, and bogus cryptocurrency trading schemes, according to the cyber crime unit in the state of Uttar Pradesh.…

There may not be any, which is the point of the lawsuit India’s Supreme Court has ordered the nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to disclose whether it has a standard protocol for ordering or allowing internet shutdowns.…

Wait? Is the plan to ban them from buying parts they can already make? The Biden Administration is reportedly prepping another round of sanctions in a bid to further hamper Chinese chipmakers.…

If at first you don't succeed... Elon Musk has come up with a new reason to get out of his acquisition of Twitter - a severance payment.…

High-value targets tend to get hit Apple has pushed out five security fixes including including two vulnerabilities in its iPhones, iPads and Mac operating systems that are already being exploited.…

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines Intel says its 13th-Gen Raptor Lake CPUs will do 6GHz at stock settings and top 8GHz when overclocked, according to slides shared during the company’s Tech Tour in Israel this week.…

No one hurt as crew-free mission goes awry An uncrewed flight test of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket failed about one minute after launch on Monday when the rocket booster erupted in flames.…

The code's on GitHub for admins to play with Enterprises using Microsoft's service for enforcing business rules within their expansive Azure cloud environments now have a less complex option for implementing policies and ensuring compliance.…

Independent management aims to ensure openness and transparency Meta is shifting the management of PyTorch, a deep learning framework developed by Meta subsidiary Facebook, to the newly formed PyTorch Foundation, which in turn will be under the oversight of The Linux Foundation.…

Now it's really got all eyes on you Google closed its $5.4 billion Mandiant acquisition today in a move that brings the threat intel and incident response giant under the Google Cloud umbrella. …

No, the devil's lettuce isn't on the menu A former Digital Realty datacenter in Virginia is getting a new lease on life as an urban farmstead. And no, this isn’t a crypto farm or some seedy weed growing operation.…

Maintenance and software installation prices heading north for range of agreements SAP is upping the price of support fees for a raft of agreements to offset the rising cost of doing business, it confirmed to The Register.…

*Tappity tappity* Yes the NSA's on the phone. Well maybe the automated log check didn't pick it up yet, Chad! In an IT world that is increasingly automated, there are still occasions when manual operations are necessary. According to Microsoft, one of these times is when security events are reported to enterprise security operation centers (SOCs).…

1.5 million machines and half a billion acres of land connected to the John Deere Operations Center within a matter of years US farm machinery giant John Deere has estimated software fees will make up 10 percent of the company's revenues by the end of the decade.…

A high level of image duplication in a single paper is a sign of cheating Shady scientists trying to publish bad research may want to think twice as academic publishers are increasingly using AI software to automatically spot signs of data tampering.…

Calm down - it's potentially only meant for units sold in China Republican lawmakers have said Apple is "playing with fire" if reports of its plans to source 3D NAND flash from China's YMTC (among others) for the upcoming iPhone 14 prove true.…

The chipmaker not only needs to find nearly 10,000 workers, it has to deliver a competitive product Interview As Intel breaks ground on its Columbus, Ohio mega fab, the company’s Foundry Services (IFS) President Randhir Thakur’s biggest concerns have less to do with finding workers to build and run the fabs and more to do with keeping the chipmaker’s technology roadmap on track and the cost of manufacturing chips in check.…

Sycamore Asset Management: Outsourcer 'badly run' with 'profit margin,' growth 'below industry averages' Beleaguered outsourcing tech giant Atos is coming under fire from a section of its investor community over the ambitious turnaround plan that will see the business carved up in two later this year.…

It's not because our AI overlords aren't keen on the idea Interview Every time a chipmaker or researcher announces an advancement in neuromorphics, it's inevitably the same story: a brain-like AI chip capable of stupendous performance-per-watt compared to traditional accelerators.…

If you make it here, you can make it anywhere Opinion In IT, there is sexy tech, there is fashionable tech, and there are databases. Your average database has very little charisma, however. Nobody's ever made a movie about one. …

TickTock mic lock won't work on Apple Scientists from the National University of Singapore and Yonsei University in the Republic of Korea have developed a device for verifying whether your laptop microphone is secretly recording your conversations.…

Who doesn't like a cup of coffee? Anything electrical, that's who Who, Me? A lot of folks in technology and affiliated industries use caffeine as stimulant of choice. A hot cup of Joe is just the thing at the start of a long day shift after an all-nighter, because sleep is for the weak. Importantly, though, it must not be shared with the computers.…

Helium-3 also draws excitement as future fusion energy source China announced last Friday it discovered a hitherto unknown mineral in samples returned from the Moon.…

It’s the mutant offspring of an intranet and a metaverse and even if it flops, you'll get some kudos Hybrid work isn't working, according to analyst house Gartner, and one way to fix it is an "intraverse" – an interactive space that melds an intranet and a metaverse.…

VMware ran tests on kernel 5.19 and saw some nasty numbers. Meanwhile progress on version 6.0 is steady VMware engineers have tested the Linux kernel's fix for the Retbleed speculative execution bug, and report it can impact compute performance by a whopping 70 percent.…

PLUS: APAC IT spend grows at over 5 percent; China's pop-up clampdown; Pakistan VPN exemptions; and more! Asia In Brief India's software-related services industry won over $150 billion for the first time in 2021–2022, according to the nation's Reserve Bank (RBI).…

Virtzilla has built itself an island. Important players aren't welcome to visit and might go elsewhere Analysis About a decade ago hyperscale clouds realized that they couldn't rent all the cores in their servers because some of them were doing boring work needed to make secure multitenancy possible. So they offloaded that work into network interface controllers imbued with some modest computing capacity – devices known as SmartNICs or Data Processing Units (DPUs).…

Plus: New MLPerf inference results, and artists finds terrifying AI-generated face haunting images In-brief New rules drafted by the European Union aimed at regulating AI could prevent developers from releasing open-source models, according to American think tank Brookings.…

Iranians won't be terrified, but US vendors need to check their customers The US Treasury Department has issued sactions against Iran's intelligence agency in response to that country's cyberattack against Albania and other "cyber-enabled activities against the United States and its allies."…

Also, Authorities seize WT1SHOP selling 5.8m sets of PII, The North Face users face tough security hike In brief AT&T cybersecurity researchers have discovered a sneaky piece of malware targeting Linux endpoints and IoT devices in the hopes of gaining persistent access and turning victims into crypto-mining drones.…

'We're making China's job easier' The massive amounts of digital data being bought and sold — or sometimes freely shared — poses a grave national security risk, according to a former US policymaker and diplomat.…

But the North Korean criminals are still over half a billion digicash dollars up Federal investigators and private companies seized $30 million in cryptocurrency stolen in March by North Korean-linked APT gang Lazarus Group from a video game developer, the latest example of the growing skills of government and cybersecurity experts to track and recover such ill-gotten gains.…

White House proposes fill-in-the-blanks tech policy reform The White House has said tech platforms should be more competitive and more accountable without specifying how that will be accomplished.…

Datacenters or digicash - what's the bigger boon to society? A White House report on the energy costs of cryptocurrency mining in the US is recommending swift policy actions to avoid disrupting the country's efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. …

And on new accounts as Microsoft tries to drive big adoption A Windows update issued last month is blocking some users with new Microsoft accounts from being able to log into their systems, a glitch Microsoft says can be remedied either through a workaround or a feature introduced to the operating system last year.…

Still unclear: Were members just screaming into a void for the past few years? Facebook parent Meta has disbanded its Responsible Innovation Team (RIT) that it claimed last year was a central part of efforts to "proactively surface and address potential harms to society in all that we build." …

H100 Tensor Core GPU leaves A100 in the dust, but company says previous gen has improved too Nvidia's Hopper GPU has turned in its first scores in the newly released MLPerf Inference v2.1 benchmark results, with the company claiming new records for its performance.…

Apple went with Globalstar for Emergency SOS feature, but such comments suggest a direction of travel Following the debut of the iPhone 14 this week, Elon Musk has claimed that Apple had been locked in talks with SpaceX about the new handset's satellite capabilities.…

Over at HP, CEO says a client price war is now looming The supply chain for personal computers is back to normal after 30 months of plague-induced disruption – there is nothing more to worry heads of procurement teams at big corporate buyers.…

Picture of longer sales cycles, more deliberation, enterprise upgrade challenges emerging across industry Enterprise software deals will take longer to close for the rest of the year as inflation and geopolitical uncertainty hit IT departments, according to ServiceNow CFO Gina Mastantuono.…

Gets some pushback from those wanting permission to keep it hanging around for decades The US Federal Communications Commission wants to shrink a current requirement for space operators to pull their equipment from low Earth orbit from within 25 years to just five years, according to new rules published yesterday.…

Analyst believes industry is in for 'deepest downcycle and inventory correction in over a decade' Chip delivery times shrank in August but while some are painting this as a sign that semiconductor shortages are easing, it is most likely an indicator that demand is slowing as economic conditions worsen.…

System look well suited to fill gaps in traditional OLAP market DuckDB – the in-process analytical database management system used by Google, Facebook, and Airbnb – has released its 0.5.0 iteration.…

In the military facility, vermin sniffed out a destructive secret On Call Welcome yet again to On Call, The Register's Friday folly in which readers share reminiscences of their most redolent rescue jobs.…

Clouds are buying plenty, but there's lots of product left for the rest of us – outside Russia Major networking vendors continue to report supply chain challenges, but the market for their switches and routers is growing at quite a clip according to analyst outfit IDC.…

Top tip: Skip the memos with cancer advice Comment At CodeCon 2022 on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, and billionaire business executive Laurene Powell Jobs launched the Steve Jobs Archive, an online repository to honor the legacy of Apple's co-founder and CEO for many years.…

Local regulators think such apps should be banned because of incidents including suicides Google has expanded its test of apps that allow users to gamble – and lose – real money, but won't allow that money to be handled using the billing systems it has fought to impose on developers of other apps.…