The Register

Blows hot and cold, and gets right up your nose Desktop Tourism Rightly or wrongly, Huawei has acquired a reputation for being a risky proposition, security-wise. It almost beggars belief, then, that the Chinese goliath's flagship Matebook X Pro laptop contains a literal hidden webcam secreted under a fake function key on the top row of its keyboard.…

Taking the Metal Mickey as customer complains that none of the equipment works On Call An important lesson in conductivity lies in wait for the unwary or downright incompetent. Welcome to another tale from the On Call archives.…

Crypto-coin theft isn't enough to keep these miscreants busy North Korea's Lazarus cybercrime gang is now breaking into chemical sector companies' networks to spy on them, according to Symantec's threat intel team.…

This is why the US Department of Commerce subpoenaed biz last year Updated Synopsys is being investigated by the US government over concerns the biz may have flouted restrictions placed on the flow of American chip-making technologies to certain Chinese companies.…

Specially crafted credentials grant remote high-privilege access? That's a 10 out of 10 in severity Cisco on Tuesday issued a critical security advisory for its Wireless LAN Controller (WLC), used in various Cisco products to manage wireless networks.…

Ukraine invasion, two Chinese lockdowns, Japanese earthquake cited by financial analysts in supply report We all know the global chip shortage has been bad, though here's a new data point: semiconductor lead times grew to an average of 26.6 weeks in March.…

Study finds turning sound off in a range of applications doesn't always cut the mic Boffins at two US universities have found that muting popular native video-conferencing apps fails to disable device microphones – and that these apps have the ability to access audio data when muted, or actually do so.…

That should keep the criminals offline for, well, weeks probably Microsoft has announced a months-long effort to take control of 65 domains that the ZLoader criminal botnet gang has been using to spread the remote-control malware and orchestrate infected machines.…

Web Services division plans to erect 2 bit barns an hour from San Fran Amazon is continuing to expand its global datacenter footprint, this time with a proposed facility in the Golden State, to meet the growing demand for its cloud compute services.…

Demand remains high for CPUs, GPUs and automotive chips, says TSMC CEO Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC can't make enough chips for its customers, but that isn't stopping the company from making bank on the silicon it can churn out.…

Europe's great cloud hope is growing but AWS, Microsoft and Google won't be losing sleep.... yet OVHcloud, Europe's closest approximation to a hyperscaler, says it has lifted revenue guidance for the year off the back of growing enterprise demand for a sovereign cloud – but Microsoft, AWS and Google likely won't be too troubled yet.…

South Korea the big winner in a year of supply struggles and continued shortages Despite (and perhaps because) of ongoing shortages, the semiconductor industry posted $595 billion in revenue in 2021, an increase of 26.3 percent over 2020.…

Ammonia as a viable, sustainable alternative to fossil fuels – and current fertilizer Fujitsu has signed an agreement with Atmonia to deliver HPC and AI technology for the development of catalysts to drive the clean production of ammonia, which is being touted as an alternative to fossil fuels.…

US security agencies say the tools can give hackers control of ICS and SCADA devices Hackers have created custom tools to control a range of industrial control system (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices, marking the latest threat to a range of critical infrastructure in the United States, according to several government agencies.…

Day 10 of ongoing disruption: Have some sympathy for admins, it's a difficult read Who, Us? Atlassian has published an account of what went wrong at the company to make the data of 400 customers vanish in a puff of cloudy vapor. And goodness, it makes for knuckle-chewing reading.…

$54.20 per share in cash so that Musk can help 'unlock' its 'potential' The Twitter, Elon Musk saga has taken another turn, with the tech billionaire tabling an offer of $54.20 per share to buy the service outright.…

IBM kit made 20 journeys into space, now selling for surprisingly down-to-Earth prices Boston-based auction house RR Auction currently has an out of this world item up for bid: IBM computers collectively used aboard twenty Space Shuttle missions.…

Vendors didn't 'diversify' adoption beyond education, CIOs flirted with form factor and nothing more Crashing Chromebook shipments caused the global PC market to shrink for the first time since the pandemic began.…

Payloads pulled as Europe eyes alternatives The European Space Agency (ESA) has pulled back from yet more "cooperative activities" with Russia as the agency continues to adjust to life without its former partner.…

Govt org that led controversial Palantir data store seeks overarching system and help to improve services NHS England is planning the procurement of a data platform with up to £240m million ($312 million) on the table to help in re-organization of the health service and recovering from the COVID-related backlog in care.…

Far from cheap but discounts could put HoloLens in closer reach for schools The HoloLens 2 has been around long enough some might see a reduction in the often-cited high pricetag. In this case, it's educational institutions eligible for a 10 percent price cut.…

All so that it can maintain backdoor access across reboots The China-linked Hafnium cyber-gang is using a strain of malware to maintain a persistent presence in compromised Windows systems by creating hidden tasks that maintain backdoor access even after reboots.…

Aims to reach a billion users with expanded cloud, and lots of cartoon content Korean web portal Naver – which enjoys 18 per cent share of the search market in its home nation – has unveiled plans to expand its business product portfolio and secure a billion global users.…

Founder's daughter is married to top UK politician, holds billion dollar stake that was maxed for tax efficiency Indian IT services giant Infosys has announced it will quit Russia, after finding itself at the center of a political storm in the UK.…

Big Blue contends it should not be forced to reveal more than law requires IBM has been accused of trying to avoid its legal discovery obligations in Kinney v. IBM, one of many age discrimination lawsuits that have been brought against the IT titan in the past few years.…

Yitian 710 chip boasts 128 Armv9 cores, available to test Alibaba Cloud has started accepting requests from customers to preview an instance type powered by the home-grown Arm CPUs it revealed last year.…

Miscreants Googled for post-intrusion tools before downloading them onto servers, PCs Lockbit ransomware operators spent nearly six months in a government agency's network, deleting logs and using Chrome to download hacking tools, before eventually deploying extortionware, according to Sophos threat researchers.…

But this time the patch should do the trick Apache has taken another shot at fixing a critical remote code execution vulnerability in its Struts 2 framework for Java applications – because the first patch, issued in 2020, didn't fully do the trick.…

Fees for sellers of virtual goods in Horizon Worlds will be almost half of sale price Meta intends to charge content creators as much as 47.5 percent of revenue from the sale of digital assets that touch its Meta Quest Store and virtual-reality service Horizon Worlds, more even than Apple's "30 percent App Store tax" that the firm's Facebook subsidiary has decried.…

Better support for top ML frameworks means stronger chip competition Good news for those who like their AI chips big: Cerebras Systems has expanded support for the popular open-source PyTorch and TensorFlow machine-learning frameworks on the Wafer-Scale Engine 2 processors that power its CS-2 system.…

Greenwashing or serious commitment? Intel has committed to being net zero for greenhouse gas emissions across its global operations by 2040, and has set itself interim milestones for 2030 including 100 percent renewable electricity use and to identify greener chemicals with lower global warming potential.…

Years of extended delays and changes for late 2022-planned system Intel is expected to provide next-gen CPUs and GPUs for what will become one of the world's fastest supercomputers later this year, but when the United States' long-delayed Aurora project is finally up and running, it will happen without a top Intel architect who was key to its delivery.…

Julia replaces Fortran as the basis for Earth's new digital twin When faced with climate models coded in Fortran in the 1960s and 70s, MIT decided there wasn't any more cobbling together left for the ancient code, so they decided to toss it out and start fresh. …

Addresses 'top reported issues'.. apart from that whole C++ thing Microsoft has made available an updated preview of Visual Studio 2022 for Mac, addressing what it described as the "top reported issues" in preview 9.…

Tightening of IP laws to prevent poaching seen by Beijing as 'provocative smear' Trouble is brewing over moves by Taiwan to prevent China from gaining access to its chip technology, as the island nation proposes tougher laws to deter the leaking of trade secrets outside the country.…

Tough news for those Googlers still holding out for permanent remote work Google is betting big on the future of the office with $9.5 billion in investments planned for such facilities in 2022. …

Keksec malware used for DDoS attacks, may spread to cryptomining, Fortinet says A prolific threat group known for deploying distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and cryptomining attacks is running a new botnet that is built using the Linux-based Gafgyt source code along with some code from the Mirai botnet malware.…

Aims to develop next generation cyberinfrastructure, amongst other things The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is building out a new high performance compute cluster for AI applications based on Dell hardware with AMD Epyc processors and Nvidia GPU accelerators.…

Running a multi-user Windows environment and Git? Time to patch After a hefty Patch Tuesday comes news of an update for Git to deal with a vulnerability for the source shack when run on Microsoft's Windows.…

Cryptocurrencies make up less than 1% of wiki donations, but as member points out, that $130k could pay a salary The wiki community held a vote as to whether the Wikimedia Foundation should continue to accept cryptocurrency donations, the result of which was a resounding "no".…

Data from embedded sensors, from in the sea to in space, could be used with ML to detect next-gen weapons The US Northern Command, the military command group designated to protect North America from attack, has lobbied Congress for $29.8m to expand its IT infrastructure to better support machine-learning technologies.…

SODIMM fans rejoice – the familiar form factor returns with a speedier CPU The Raspberry Pi gang will soon ship some new hardware in a form factor to delight builders still mourning the Compute Module 3. Behold the Compute Module 4S.…

Initial boom in data vizualization, but CEO Mike Capone says it needs to 'play nice' to win in new segment Interview It's never a zero-sum game, according to Mike Capone, CEO of data visualization software specialist Qlik. For the sake of the company, he'd better be right, as Qlik is betting its success on a foray into a market with way more competition than the one in which it earned its stripes.…

Anyone who tells you Linux is hard to use wasn't paying attention – and here's why Column I've used pretty much every desktop out there, and the Linux desktop is still the best of the best.…

Software was supposed to eat the world, but it's scarcely snacking on today's monstrous silicon Column When I first saw an image of the 'wafer-scale engine' from AI hardware startup Cerebras, my mind rejected it. The company's current product is about the size of an iPad and uses 2.6 trillion transistors that contribute to over 850,000 cores.…

Plus: Watchdog approves Fitbit's algorithm for detecting a dodgy ticker While Apple engineers continue adding health-related features to its smartwatch range, its blood-pressure monitoring system won't be ready until 2024 at the earliest, it is reported.…

Plans to take a bigger bite of the SME security market by swimming towards SASE Investment firm KKR has acquired Barracuda Networks from private equity firm Thoma Bravo.…

Chinese giant still hiring in Moscow – for some very interesting gigs Updated Chinese telecom giant Huawei has issued a mandatory month-long furlough to some of its Russia-based staff and suspended new orders, according to Russian media.…

Sixty percent of current facilities are near Tokyo – a risky concentration Japan's government has secured expressions of interest from over 100 regional centers willing to host new datacenters, as part of an effort to make the nation's computing infrastructure more resilient.…

April bundle addresses 100-plus vulnerabilities including 10 critical RCEs Microsoft's massive April Patch Tuesday includes one bug that has already been exploited in the wild and a second that has been publicly disclosed.…