The Register

Of the top 10 fabless chip designers, the Big M soared in Q1 thanks to switch ASICs In the world of fabless chip designers, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm usually soak up the most attention since their chips are fueling everything from top-end supercomputers to mobile devices.…

We're just astounded to see bipartisan efforts in Congress in this day and age A draft US law that would, for one thing, subsidize the US semiconductor industry, has gained an amendment that would turn the screws on American investments in foreign countries.…

It's back to the future for PostgreSQL as Michael Stonebraker lists priorities for the popular open-source system he helped create PostgreSQL co-creator and MIT computer science professor Michael Stonebraker has listed his top requests for features to add into the popular open-source database, including a time travel function he admits was implemented badly in the 1980s.…

Nexus portfolio undergoes cloudy Software-as-a-Service revamp Cisco's Nexus Cloud will eventually allow customers to manage their datacenter networks entirely from the cloud, says the networking giant.…

Silicon-anode power units could come to market soon, accelerating adoption of electric vehicles A new type of silicon-anode lithium-ion battery could be the solution the EV market is waiting for as it can allegedly charge from empty to full in less than 10 minutes.…

Would give its right, er, leg, to keep HQ – and jobs – in Britain The UK government is continuing efforts to have chip designer and licensor Arm listed on the London Stock Exchange after its public offering rather than New York, as is the current plan.…

Boffin agency seeks help to shoot 100kW through the air with lasers, but contributors don't have long to deliver US military researchers are trying to turn in-flight refueling tankers into laser-shooting "airborne energy wells" for charging drones, and they want the public's help to figure out how.…

It is sure a lot of money to be able to say confidently: 'It's going to rain' Exclusive A court case which would have seen Atos take on the UK government over a £854 million (c $1 billion) supercomputer contract for the Meteorological Office has ended before it began.…

Acquisition of health data specialist Cerner adds $15.8b to Big Red's debt Oracle has impressed the markets with strong revenue growth for cloud infrastructure and applications-as-a-service.…

Native code or nothing thanks to Safari's approach to web apps A week after confirming plans for Telegram Premium, the messaging platform's CEO, Pavel Durov, is again criticizing Apple's approach to its Safari browser for stifling the efforts of web developers.…

Redmond kicks off Patch Tuesday with a months-old flaw fix Two security vendors – Orca Security and Tenable – have accused Microsoft of unnecessarily putting customers' data and cloud environments at risk by taking far too long to fix critical vulnerabilities in Azure.…

Digital, Big Data, and Security units to be known as 'Evidian', less profitable parts as 'Tech Foundation Co' Atos's share price tumbled this morning on confirmation it is exploring a two-way split of operations, a decision that made the position of recently installed CEO Rodolphe Belmer untenable.…

Going from the semi-annual channel, but you'll never really wash it off the internals The end is nigh for support for Internet Explorer 11 on some editions of Windows 10. That is, unless users look a little too hard at Windows' internals.…

'Puck' hardware demoed with customers including Royal Dutch Shell to address big concern: cost Splunk has released a major update to its core data-crunching platform, emphasizing reductions in the quantity of data ingested and therefore the cost of operations.…

Users hopeful of waving bye to window overload as staggered rollout moves from Dev to Beta Channel Microsoft has added tabbed File Explorer functionality to the Window Insider beta channel, opening up the possibility of it making an appearance in the next major Windows Update.…

Over a year after discussions began, National Data Guardian continues to pursue transparency in health data use More than two years after England launched a COVID data store, keeping details of National Health Service (NHS) patients, the country's National Data Guardian (NDG) remains unsatisfied with who is accessing the data.…

Retro fun and games in Berlin's ComputerSpieleMuseum Curious about the history of home computing both west and east of the iron curtain? Berlin's ComputerSpieleMuseum in Germany's capital has you covered.…

Notes rise of 'pay to play' where companies try to buy way into governance – and says this is not that OpenInfra Berlin OpenInfra still has ideas to share, including an intriguing funding model for open source projects the Foundation discussed at its in-person event last week in Berlin.…

We mingle with the vendors so you don't have to RSA Conference Your humble vulture never liked conference expos – even before finding myself on the show floor during a global pandemic. Expo halls are a necessary evil that are predominatly visited to find gifts to bring home to the kids. …

Philippines says subsidies inflate profits, not local economy The government of the Philippines has welcomed the decision by giant business process outsourcer Concentrix Corporation to forgo tax incentives and instead allow its staff to continue working from home for the foreseeable future. The nation feels that subsidising outsourcers' bottom lines does nothing to boost the local economy.…

Broadens targets from telecoms to finance and government orgs The Gallium group, believed to be a Chinese state-sponsored team, is going on the warpath with an upgraded remote access trojan (RAT) that threat hunters say is difficult to detect.…

Paravirtualized guests on old x86s are the risk – just the sort of thing that gets forgotten The Xen Project has disclosed three bugs in its eponymous hypervisor – all of which would allow a malicious VM administrator to take control of a host system.…

Reports suggest SMBs will get more time, but core elements including six-hour reporting requirement remain Indian media is reporting that the government has consulted with industry about its controversial infosec reporting rules, possibly resulting in concessions that slightly ease requirements for some businesses.…

Be a good neighbor to folks and the environment, and we'll think that permit over SpaceX is one step closer to securing a permit to launch not just its first rocket from Boca Chica, Texas but its reusable super-heavy lifter at that.…

New meaning for accessory to murder A woman in the US has been charged with murder after she allegedly tracked down her boyfriend using an Apple AirTag and ran him over after seeing him with another lady.…

Factories hope to buy their way out of shortages – with Taiwan leading the pack If you've been ripping your hair out about the ongoing semiconductor shortage, you should know that chip manufacturers are at least trying to spend their way out of the problem at record levels.…

Don't even think about putting LaMDA on the compensation committee Google has promised to cough up $118 million to settle a years-long gender-discrimination class-action lawsuit that alleged the internet giant unfairly pays men more than women.…

Infamous 'Dinobabies' memo comes back to haunt Big Blue again Updated In one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against IBM, Big Blue has been ordered to produce internal emails in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former SVP of Human Resources Diane Gherson discuss efforts to get rid of older employees.…

Chip designer hopes to have broad inference and training coverage from the edge to the cloud Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.…

Not a good moment to look at that digi-coin portfolio, fam The cryptocurrency world is experiencing what can only be described as a meltdown, with prices plummeting today to lows not seen since the end of 2020.…

Outsource all the things! To whom? The lowest bidder of course, says Gartner The world's governments are eager to let someone else handle their IT headaches, according to a recent Gartner report, which found a healthy appetite for "anything-as-a-service" (XaaS) platforms to cut the costs of bureaucracy.…

Now can we just buy them, please? Microsoft isn't wasting time trying to put Activision Blizzard's problems in the rearview mirror, announcing a labor neutrality agreement with the game maker's recently-formed union.…

Russian-based group doubles the extortion by exfiltrating the corporate data before encrypting it. Windows and Linux systems are coming under attack by new variants of the HelloXD ransomware that includes stronger encryption, improved obfuscation and an additional payload that enables threat groups to modify compromised systems, exfiltrate files and execute commands.…

LibreOffice, Collabora, KDE Gear all updated their Microsoft alternatives – whatever your OS Fresh versions of three of the bigger open-source application suites just landed for those seeking to break free from proprietary office apps.…

First of Europe's pre-exascale systems inaugurated, hits top 3 even without GPU partition fully installed HPE has scored another supercomputing win with the inauguration of the LUMI system at the IT Center for Science, Finland, which as of this month is ranked as Europe's most powerful supercomputer.…

Another assault in the battery market as automakers race to translate EV tech to the home Japanese automaker Toyota has become the latest car company to repurpose its electric vehicle batteries for home energy storage. …

Goal is to bring analytics to its transactional workloads but there are places where this might fall short Analysis At MongoDB's recent conference in New York, the company demonstrated its ambition in taking on workloads from other databases.…

Blake Lemoine began to believe that LaMDA, Language Model for Dialogue Applications, exhibited self-awareness Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies.…

Backlogs reportedly 10 to 15 times greater than they were pre-pandemic The Wireless LAN market was battered by a choppy supply chain in the first quarter of 2022 and lockdowns in China are compounding the problem, according to analysis by Dell'Oro Group.…

Orbital success counter stuck at 2 as upper stage of rocket shuts down early and CubeSats lost The first of NASA's TROPICS constellation launches came to an unscheduled end over the weekend as the Astra launch vehicle it was riding failed to deliver the cubesats to orbit.…

Delays said to favor Palantir as health service seeks suppliers to support its top-down data revolution The top-down approach to the procurement of a £360 million data platform for NHS England is said to favor incumbent supplier Palantir as fears grow the project could be making the same mistakes that led to the failure of the country's infamous £10 billion National Programme for IT.…

The weapon too deadly to use is just a handful of dirt. Let's change that Opinion Last year, the US Army War College published a paper suggesting that the Taiwanese government might give TSMC's chip fabs their own self-destruct systems in case China invaded. At the time, China said it had no interest in TSMC, thus defusing the Strangelove scenario. Now, the Middle Kingdom's talking about changing its mind. It might want TSMC very much indeed.…

If I delete all these duplicate files, everything will run much smoother! Who, Me? We've covered backups before in the annals of this column, but a bit of helpfulness that turned into a bonfire of the binaries? Start your Monday with a lesson in not taking the initiative.…

X86 giant says it’s on track to regaining manufacturing leadership after years of missteps By now, you likely know the story: Intel made major manufacturing missteps over the past several years, giving rivals like AMD a major advantage, and now the x86 giant is in the midst of an ambitious five-year plan to regain its chip-making mojo.…

Plus: Why safety data for self-driving technology is misleading, and more In brief Facebook and Instagram's parent biz, Meta, was hit with not one, not two, but eight different lawsuits accusing its social media algorithm of causing real harm to young users across the US. …

Investigation could help end WebKit monoculture on iOS devices The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday said it intends to launch an investigation of Apple's and Google's market power with respect to mobile browsers and cloud gaming, and to take enforcement action against Google for its app store payment practices.…

The Obegränsad is the company's first record player since 1973 Ikea is introducing a fresh take on a product it hasn't sold since 1973: The record player.…

All the news you may have missed from RSA this week RSA Conference in brief Researchers from Wiz, who previously found a series of four serious flaws in Azure's Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) agent dubbed "OMIGOD," presented some related news at RSA: Pretty much every cloud provider is installing similar software "without customer's awareness or explicit consent."…

Biz trying to clean up shop to close $68.7bn buyout by Microsoft Activision Blizzard is starting collective bargaining with quality-assurance workers at its game studio Raven Software, after they voted in favor of unionizing.…

Will cyber crimes shrug off Atlas Initiative? Objectively, yes RSA Conference An ambitious project spearheaded by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working to develop a map of the cybercrime ecosystem using open source information.…