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Updated 2026-03-20 03:45
Alibaba has made 470,000 AI chips, admits they’re inferior and may always be
Sees optimizing its entire cloud around homebrew silicon as the way to compete Chinese web giant Alibaba has revealed its T-Head chipmaking business has shipped 470,000 AI chips, and admitted they are currently inferior to rival products, but believes it can build a mutually optimized stack that makes performance gaps moot....
Decoding Nvidia's Groq-powered LPX and the rest of its new rack systems
From LPUs and GPUs to CPUs and switches, everything you need to know about Nvidia's latest kit GTC DEEP DIVE At Nvidia's GTC conference this week, CEO Jensen Huang finally addressed a $20 billion question he's dodged for months: Why spend so much to license AI chip startup Groq's tech and hire away its engineers rather than build it themselves?...
OpenAI tries to build its coding cred, acquires Python toolmaker Astral
Deal helps company build out its Codex team In a move clearly designed to strengthen its position among developers, OpenAI has acquired Python tool maker Astral. The house of Altman expects the deal to strengthen the ecosystem for its Codex programming agent....
Time to end the 'uncontrolled experiment' of social media on kids, scientists say
Pair say review of studies, other evidence, proves more countries need to do like Australia and keep kids offline There is enough evidence going back far enough that it's reasonable to conclude social media platforms are responsible for population-level mental health harms....
Unknown attackers exploit yet another critical SharePoint bug
Last time: Beijing-backed snoops and ransomware crims. Who's next? Unknown baddies are abusing yet another critical Microsoft SharePoint bug to compromise victims' SharePoint servers, the US government warned....
Google gives Android users a way to install unverified apps if they prove they really, really want to
Chocolate Factory describes concession as an attempt to balance openess with safety It turns out you won't be limited to Google-verified apps an developers on Android after all. In the face of sustained community dissatisfaction with its developer verification requirement, Google has given Android users an out....
'Death sentence': EU cloud lobby takes Broadcom to Brussels over VMware partner purge
CISPE files antitrust complaint, demands interim measures to stop what it calls chip giant's 'ongoing abuse' A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice....
Fiber on the surface of the moon could help detect moonquakes
Better than seismometers? Fiber-optic cables could be used to detect moonquakes, offering a simpler way to gather seismic data to support future missions....
GNOME 50 debuts with X11 axed, Wayland front and center
Most Ubuntu desktop users will be looking at this until at least 2028 GNOME 50 is here, codenamed Tokyo after the location of the GNOME Asia Summit 2025, and the biggest change is in fact more or less invisible, unless you look for an options button on the login screen....
FBI director leaves open the possibility that it's buying location data again
Kash Patel says the FBI uses all the tools it has to accomplish its mission - even if those tools are questionable It's been three years since an FBI director admitted to purchasing the location data of Americans, potentially in violation of the Constitution. Here we go again....
Lock down Microsoft Intune, feds warn after Stryker attack
Iran-linked attackers wiped employees' devices using Intune The US government has urged companies to better secure Microsoft Intune, an endpoint management tool that was abused in last week's cyberattack against med-tech firm Stryker....
PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI
Professional services giant did not read its own report on lackluster benefits You'll use AI and like it too - if you work for PwC. Paul Griggs, US chief executive of the global professional services giant, has made clear there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics....
UK blinks on AI copyright carve-out after star-studded revolt
Creative pressure forces rethink as officials step back from default data use The UK government has backed off plans to allow AI companies to access copyrighted material for free for training purposes by default....
Google says it will let UK publishers opt out of AI overviews
One search engine switch to rule them all in Google's response to UK competition watchdog The UK's competition watchdog has published responses to its consultation over Google's strategic market status (SMS) covering search and search advertising services - and the tech biz is offering some concessions....
Fixing Claude with Claude: Anthropic reports on AI site reliability engineering
It's still a job for humans, even though bots can search logs at the speed of I/O QCon London A member of Anthropic's AI reliability engineering team spoke at QCon London on why Claude excels at finding issues but still makes a poor substitute for a site reliability engineer (SRE), constantly mistaking correlation with causation....
Hide and sleek: Latest Vivaldi release can tuck its UI away until summoned
New toggle strips away browser chrome if you want Browser maker Vivaldi has opened up a new front in the browser wars by making itself disappear....
Competition watchdog cracks knuckles, probes legality of Adobe cancellation fee
Annual billed sub scrubbed after 14 days? Expect to pay 50% of yearly price Britain's competition watchdog is opening an investigation into Adobe's early cancellation fees on membership plans to ascertain if it breaks competition law....
Microsoft startup credits are the gift that keeps on billing unsuspecting users
Perks fall short as third-party AI models rack up costs with minimal notification Complaints about Microsoft's startup credits and Azure AI Foundry keep mounting, with users reporting surprise credit card charges and invoices they never saw coming....
SAP's grand cloud escape plan €2B short of the runway
Strategy launched after 2020 share price crash is 24% behind target Five years after launching its rescue plan to lift ERP users to the cloud and switch them to the latest software, SAP is off target by about 2 billion, The Register can reveal....
GOV.UK chatbot gets smarter but slower as LLMs improve
Accuracy jumps from 76% to 90% across public pilots, while users wait nearly 11 seconds for answers More powerful large language models (LLMs) are helping make the UK government's in-development chatbot more accurate but are also slowing it down, according to the Government Digital Service (GDS)....
Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary
From mild vegetarianism to full-blown haterdom, there's a label for everything Opinion Are you an AI hater, an AI vegan, or a slightly more moderate AI vegetarian? Or are you on the side of the clankers? A bot-licker, a prompt-fondler, a ChatNPC?...
Google offers ‘vibe design’ tool that you can shout at to create a UI
Stitch gets voice input and an infinite canvas The term vibe coding" has become associated with use of AI coding assistants to create code that expresses a developer's intent, even if the results are ropey and require plenty of extra work to put into production. Google's now proudly adapted the term to describe the workings of its Stitch design tool....
Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots
Micron plans to cash in, after already growing revenue $10 billion in a single quarter Autonomous cars will need 300 gigabytes of DRAM or more, and robots will need similar quantities, leading memory-maker Micron Technology to predict it has a long and happy future ahead of it....
Tencent says small clouds can’t get hardware, so big clouds can hike prices
Baidu joins the Chinese cloud price rise party Two more Chinese cloud giants have signalled price rises for their services, again due to the impact of AI on their supply chains....
Anthropic's Claude claws its way towards the top of the AI market
Who knew questioning authority and signaling virtue would lead to growth? Anthropic has been killing it in the business market, success that appears to be at least partially attributable to pushback against the Pentagon....
Okta made a nightmare micromanager for your AI agents
Where are you? What are you working on? Why are you doing that? Identity access and management platform Okta announced the general availability of its Okta for AI Agents, which will give customers the ability to do three things: locate agents, see what they're doing, and shut them down if need be....
State snoops and spyware vendors planting info-stealing malware on iPhones, Google warns
Darksword is the second iOS exploit chain in a month A new exploit kit targeting iPhone users and stealing their sensitive data is being abused by "multiple" spyware vendors and suspected nation-state goons, security researchers said on Wednesday....
Chatbot Romeos keep users talking longer, but harm their mental health
Flattery and delusional talk have negative outcomes Sometimes a compliment is no help at all. Chatbot flattery, a well-known and common problem, makes things worse for humans experiencing mental health issues....
ChatGPT advised exec on how to fire Subnautica founders to avoid payout, court ruling says
The law is the law, no matter who tells you to break it One of your studios is about to make a game that you think will be a huge hit, and you don't want to pay the contractually required bonuses. What to do? One Korean CEO turned to ChatGPT to cook up a plan to get his company out of paying up to $250 million. It went about as well as you'd expect....
Storage vendors orbit the Nvidia sun at GTC
Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Nutanix, and Seagate all had something to say GTC Hitachi Vantara and Nutanix announced support for Nvidia's new GPUs and software at GTC 2026, much like every other storage system vendor, while IBM integrated Watsonx and other offerings more tightly with GPUzilla's offerings. Seagate demonstrated a two-tier hybrid external KV Cache composed of SSDs and disk drives, as it did last year....
Microsoft promises all-in-one database wrangling hub on Fabric
PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server all handled via Database Hub, vendor says Microsoft has launched a database management tool it promises will help users manage multiple databases sharing a single SQL engine....
Amazon security boss says crims abused max-security Cisco firewall flaw weeks before disclosure
Interlock's post-exploit toolkit exposed Ransomware criminals exploited CVE-2026-20131, a maximum-severity bug in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center software, as a zero-day vulnerability more than a month before Cisco patched the hole, according to Amazon security boss CJ Moses....
Ohio citizens tell hyperscalers to take their supersized datacenters elsewhere
Residents looking to ban server farms with capacity over 25 MW Ohio residents are proposing a ban on datacenters with a capacity greater than 25 MW, the latest sign of growing opposition to massive server farms across the US....
Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes
Friends and family support techs: get ready for permission changing and batch file creating Microsoft has published a handy guide for regaining access to a C:\ drive borked by a Samsung application, but it isn't for the faint of heart....
Meatbags vs machines: DeepMind plans hackathon to draw line between human and AI brains
What exactly is AGI? Nobody knows, but Google's AI lab is asking for help trying to define it If a bot actually achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI), how would we even know? Google DeepMind boffins have come up with what they say is an empirical, scientifically grounded framework to measure progress toward AGI, and they're looking for a few good devs to actually flesh it out....
Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave
Good luck with that The latest release of the most widely used Linux init system is here, and between dropping init script support and AI-assisted coding, we feel sure that this release will win it yet more admirers....
Microsoft Copilot boss Mustafa Suleyman to chase superintelligence
Jacob Andreou takes reins in latest reshuffle Microsoft has rearranged the deckchairs on the RMS Copilot, sending Mustafa Suleyman to seek out superintelligence, and putting Jacob Andreou in charge of Copilot across consumer and commercial....
North Korea's 100,000-strong fake IT worker army rake in $500M a year for Kim Jong Un
Researchers map full org chart of the scam from dodgy recruiters to helpful Western collaborators Researchers at IBM XForce and Flare Research have uncovered data that sheds light on how North Korea's fake IT worker schemes operate and infiltrate companies in order to funnel money back to the regime and steal sensitive information....
AI for software developers is in a 'dangerous state'
Strong forces tempting humans out of the AI loop, and reducing the experience needed to supervise and review QCon London AI is in a dangerous state where it is too useful not to use, but where by using it, developers are giving up the experience they need to review what it does, said a speaker at QCon London, a vendor-neutral developer conference underway this week....
Microsoft 365 pauses Copilot creep after admins cry foul
Automatic deployment of Redmond's assistant halted for now Microsoft has paused plans to force the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on users, halting automatic installations for an unspecified period....
Britain's satellite-watching gap to be plugged with £17.5M eyeball in Cyprus
No 1 Space Operations Squadron will get a persistent stare capability The Ministry of Defence (MoD) plans to spend 17.5 million on a remotely-operated satellite monitoring facility in Cyprus, partly to protect the UK's secure communications system Skynet....
IBM CEO pay pack jumps 51% for 2025 in target smash and grab
Median employee increase? 2.1%. And shareholders urged to vote against a request for AI bias reporting Not all employees are created equally, just ask IBM boss Arvind Krishna, who received a financial package valued at $38 million in calendar 2025 - equivalent to the average collective pay of 765 Big Blue workers....
Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months
Analysts say three-screen smartphone successful as a proof of concept, memory crunch potentially made it unsustainable Samsung is killing the Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone after just three months on the market....
It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA
Three is the magic number as first off-the-shelf general-purpose ternary hardware since c 1965 lands The 5500FP is a ternary CPU implemented on an FPGA. It's not very fast, but it makes it easier to experiment with computers that don't use binary....
Europe's cloud minnows tell Brussels to stop big tech 'sovereignty-washing'
24 execs sign open letter demanding control-based definitions and reserved procurement Execs from 24 European cloud and digital service providers are urging the European Commission to legislate for real tech sovereignty - not the illusion of it - in the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA)....
Iran's cyberattack against med tech firm is 'just the beginning'
Even without a navy, or air power, 'They'll still have the ability to hack' Businesses should expect that Iran will conduct more aggressive cyber-ops as the war escalates, according to security analysts....
Alibaba Cloud hikes prices by up to 34%, blames hardware costs and AI demand
Compute, storage, and SaaS all slugged - even on Alibaba's own silicon Alibaba Cloud today informed users it will increase prices for many services by up to 34 percent....
Water company wasted $200k on bad answers from an AI model – so built its own slop filtering system
'Rozum' orchestrates multiple flaky models and drives them to reasonable conclusions Tech companies have in recent years developed a reputation for being rapacious rent-seekers, but can also be unwittingly generous because their penchant to prioritize popularity over quality leaves room for others to sell improvements or repairs....
Linux Foundation kicks off effort to shield FOSS maintainers from AI slop bug reports
Big Tech donates $12.5 million to get things rolling Half a dozen Big Tech players have together delivered $12.5 million in grants towards a project that aims to help maintainers of open source projects to cope with AI slop bug reports....
Japan to allow ‘proactive cyber-defense’ from October 1st
In less polite places, this is called hacking back' or offensive cyber-ops' Japan's government yesterday decided to allow its Self-Defense Force to conduct offensive cyber-operations, starting on October 1st....
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