The Register

Asset management outfit Macquarie will buy existing bit barns. But first, check out the shiny new 15.2MW bit barn in Indonesia Japanese giant NTT has found a friend to help it fund the planned expansion of its datacenter fleet.…

Shame it's not finished – Microsoft has promised more hybrid cloud capabilities are coming real soon now Microsoft has quietly slipped System Center 2022 out the door, more than six months after the debut of Windows Server 2022 – but also flagged the product is not in its final state.…

Plus: Improving Google Search and open-source software library for more natural computer speech In brief AI algorithms crushed eight world champions playing the card game Bridge, marking another milestone in machine learning systems becoming better than humans at specific games.…

Plus: Hive hits health-care org, law enforcement ransomware response is lacking, and orgs can't meet new disclosure rules In Brief Cybercriminals have used fake emergency data requests (EDRs) to steal sensitive customer data from service providers and social media firms. At least one report suggests Apple, and Facebook's parent company Meta, were victims of this fraud.…

When does this thing get to unionize? Robotics company Boston Dynamics is making one of its latest robots more generally commercially available: a mobile, autonomous arm called Stretch.…

If it can cut energy requirements for both, this idea might not stink after all Tomorrow Water, a subsidiary of Korean firm BKT, is aiming to make datacenters more environmentally friendly by colocating them with sewage treatment plants, an arrangement it claims can save both energy and water.…

It's a bug's life Video After some careful study, it turns out the brain of an insect is pretty good at separating signal from noise.…

If decision is upheld, this 'could seriously harm FOSS and copyleft' A US federal district court decision in California favoring database biz Neoj4 is incorrect and imperils free open-source software, according to the Software Freedom Conservancy.…

White House chimes in: Folks 'in every state must have a free and fair choice' to unionize Amazon warehouse workers in New York City voted in favor of joining a trade union on Friday, marking the first-ever successful union campaign against the tech giant in its history.…

Fixed passphrases for OmniAuth users not such a great idea GitLab on Thursday issued security updates for three versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) software that address, among other flaws, a critical hard-coded password bug.…

Ferroelectric devices key for this qubit-slinging startup A Swiss quantum computing company claiming a world-first discovery has just marked what it believes is one of the largest funding rounds in the history of the quantum tech space.…

Open-source HPC suite now includes 100 full-release products The Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) project has released version 22.02 of its collection of software packages for developing, deploying and running scientific applications on high-performance compute (HPC) platforms.…

Pretty 'community' version of one of the best-known Linuxes in Middle Kingdom Deepin version 20.5 is the latest "Community" version of one of the best-known Chinese Linux distros, and shows an interesting blend of technological influences.…

In the meantime, Windows giant eliminates 'challenged restriction' Microsoft's attempts to have a 2021 lawsuit's claims regarding anti-competitive practices struck out were this week contested in UK courts.…

Two teenagers arrested as part of police probe into extortion group British police have charged two teenagers as part of an international investigation into the Lapsus$ cyber extortion gang.…

So long as the economy stays healthy, and supply can catch up to demand IDC forecasts that spending on compute and storage systems for cloud infrastructure will grow 21.7 percent this year compared to 2021. Spending on public clouds is also expected to pass that of non-cloud infrastructure in 2022.…

Tech’s posterchild of German industrial success must face its failures as it succumbs to midlife angst Feature Like so many stories in the history of computing, it involves Xerox. Scientific Data Systems was sold by Xerox to IBM as part of a hardware deal. When Big Blue canned a related software project, a group of five German engineers saw an opportunity.…

Steering body calls for help to 'identify ISA gaps, build plans for future extensions' The momentum behind RISC-V is growing with the backing of tech heavyweights, but it comes with a challenge: encouraging CPU designers to stay on the same page, and to avoid the sort of fragmentation that happened in MIPS and Android.…

We can't have that contractor making us look bad Something for the Weekend? I nearly choked when I read the email. "Your eBay auction has ended. Your NFT has sold for $1 million." That's about $0.999999 million more than I thought it was worth, hence the surprise. Oh, and becoming comfortably well off was a bit of a jolt, I suppose.…

Also: Belarusian miscreants pivot to browser-in-the-browser attacks A Russian cybercrime gang has lately sent credential-phishing emails to the military of Eastern European countries and a NATO Center of Excellence, according to a Google threat report this week. …

Forrester Research is DeFi-ing current hype Analyst firm Forrester Research has had a look at Web3 – the buzzword describing blockchain-powered decentralized metaverse-y stuff – and decided there's not a lot to like.…

Company changed address to avoid probe after sending 378,553 messages Britain's data watchdog has issued an £80,000 penalty to a financial advisor that dispatched hundreds of thousands of unsolicited text messages during lockdown.…

Behold the rarest of IT skills: Tact and diplomacy On Call Being On Call requires certain skills. Technical ability? Sure. A desire to help? Naturally. However, there are some calls where one has to dip into one's reservoirs of diplomacy. Two bytes: good. Loss of face: bad.…

And software nasty may have a VPNFilter link, too Tens of thousands of Viasat satellite broadband modems that were disabled in a cyber-attack some weeks ago were wiped by malware with possible links to Russia's destructive VPNFilter, according to SentinelOne.…

The deal is a long way from done and players can already foresee rival bids Singapore-based Effissimo Capital Management, the largest shareholder in troubled Japanese tech giant Toshiba, has signed a deal to sell its stake to American private investment firm Bain Capital – if Bain decides to launch a takeover bid.…

Managed to send material from his private email address, it is claimed The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has accused an NSA employee of sharing top-secret national security information with an unnamed person who worked in the private sector.…

Fittings open on Saturday, to make it easier to take motorized pals with you wherever you go Japanese startup Groove X will on Saturday stage fittings for a wearable sling - somewhat akin to baby carriers - designed to let owners of "Love Robots" more easily carry the machines wherever they go.…

Public agencies told to stop using overseas apps from 2025 as parallel imports approved, too Russian President Vladimir Putin has banned the purchase of foreign software – be it standalone applications or code shipping in equipment – for significant critical infrastructure projects, with limited exceptions.…

Vid-streamer iQIYI also earns a place Chinese search giant and AI cloud company Baidu has landed on the US Securities and Exchange Commission's provisional list of companies it might de-list because of opaque disclosures.…

Alphabet AI lab under fire after bosses 'dragged out' probe into abuse A former DeepMind employee has blasted the AI lab for being, in her view, "grossly inadequate" in dealing with internal sexual harassment. She also urged the organization to end its policy of NDAs that prevent victims from speaking out.…

Nothing like a little kernel-level memory snooping, code execution Apple has released updates for its mobile and desktop operating systems to patch security holes that may well have been exploited in the wild.…

Uni trio probe efforts by miners to max out rewards at expense of others UC Berkeley boffins have found that strategies for squeezing extra profit out of Ethereum transactions come at the cost of other cryptocurrency investors and threaten the security and stability of the entire Ethereum ecosystem.…

Troubled container company may escape confines of its doldrums Docker hasn't just got back in the fight thanks to its latest round of funding: it's earned double-unicorn status, too. …

Lead dev of modest ground-up Unix-like OS quit job to work on it SerenityOS, which started out as a one-man project in 2018, has now got to the point where its creator proudly announced that its web browser passes the Acid3 browser test.…

Backers include SK Lubricants as dielectric fluid research partner An enterprise immersion cooling company has received a $28 million investment it plans to use to sink itself into additional customer datacenters.…

Will provide tips on spotting bad info, frontload highly cited sources Further embracing its unspoken role as arbiter of truth, Google has unrolled some new search result features to help users "sort out what information is credible and what isn't."…

You didn't have any plans for the weekend anyway, did you? Another Java Remote Code Execution vulnerability has reared its head, this time in the popular Spring Framework and, goodness, it's a nasty one.…

Tech will be touted as a SaaS add-on in Xeon sales pitches, live on as standalone product Updated Intel hopes to gain an extra edge in the cloud and datacenter markets with the acquisition of Granulate, a developer of software that optimizes complex and older workloads for modern CPUs.…

RPA vendor's recurring revenue for 2023 will be down by $15m after pausing Russia operations UiPath's CEO has said the war in Ukraine is "having a profound impact" on business confidence in Europe and the UK.…

Reverse engineering yields sticky microarchitectural vulnerabilities Nvidia's ultra-dense GPU-driven AI training and inference systems are prone to covert and side channel attacks, according to research just published from a team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). This might be less concerning for those with on-prem DGX systems, but for cloud vendors selling time on the AI training boxes, the vulnerabilities are worth noting.…

Confused? Don’t be – Intel flagged this when it married Evo and vPro a while back Dell has refreshed its business laptops, predictably enough adding 12th-gen Intel silicon while also trying to make its offerings in a very well established product category stand out.…

Uses 64-node cluster of classical HPC boxen to prove it Fujitsu says it has developed the world's fastest quantum simulator capable of handling 36 qubit quantum circuits. The firm will use this to speed development of quantum applications, and said it is already planning a further simulator capable of handling more qubits.…

Windows 10 still rules the roost among Microsoft fans, according to AdDuplex The growth of Microsoft's flagship operating system, Windows 11, appears to be slowing if figures from AdDuplex are to be believed.…

GNOME 42 and some other small changes for both... though we still miss Unity Late April should see the release of the 36th versions of two of the biggest Linux distros: Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04.…

'We have this small moment in time where we can make improvements in our defensive posture' The US and its NATO allies should expect a "long tail of retaliation," in the form of cyberattacks, for the sanctions imposed on Russia, says cloud security shop ExtraHop's CEO Patrick Dennis.…

Questions linger over Technology Sourcing Programme as 2nd supplier in a week gets significant extension for historic contract UK tax authority HMRC has awarded Fujitsu a £250m contract for managed desktop services (MDS), extending a deal that dates back to 2017.…

Hosting platforms required to report content creators' names and income to stymie tax dodges China's massive live-streaming industry is the next target of China's tech regulation blitz, with three governmental agencies announcing a requirement for operators to register in an attempt to eliminate tax evasion.…

Architecture may make it possible to train one machine-learning model that performs all sorts of tasks Google says it is developing an AI architecture that can be used to train one giant system capable of performing multiple different tasks more efficiently than today's models.…

Your cloudy server will not self-destruct – even if the hardware it runs on does Amazon Web Services has added a small but important resilience feature: instances in its Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) now include automatic recovery by default.…

Oh look, someone else who thinks on-prem is old hat Cryptocurrency mining groups that typically have targeted on-premises servers are now competing fiercely for servers in the cloud.…