The Register

Who needs aircon when you have NASA to punch holes through your home? NASA has confirmed that a piece of space junk that crashed through a Florida home in March was a fragment of a discarded ISS battery pallet....

Social engineering patterns spotted across range of popular projects Open source groups are warning the community about a wave of ongoing attacks targeting project maintainers similar to those that led to the recent attempted backdooring of a core Linux library....

Can regulators keep up? Microsoft has confirmed a $1.5 billion investment in G42, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) AI biz....

Enhanced data density and speed upgrades, though challenges in endurance remain Micron is now mass producing 232-layer QLC NAND, claiming it's the first memory manufacturer to break the 200-layer mark in QLC chips....

First glimpse at attack financials reveals huge pain UnitedHealth, parent company of ransomware-besieged Change Healthcare, says the total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million....

Plans to plant $12B bitbarn where homegrown renewables hope once lived US private equity investor Blackstone has plans for a 10 billion ($12.45 billion) hyperscale datacenter in northern England on a site formerly owned by battery startup Britishvolt....

$62 million settlement plan challenged over payments to progressive nonprofits Google's plan to pay $62 million to settle allegations that it tracked people even when their Location History setting was switched off may have to be renegotiated based on several objections....

Consultancy tasked with helping local services get on board The UK's health department has awarded global consultancy KPMG an 8.5 million ($10.5 million) contract to help implement the controversial Federated Data Platform (FDP) at a local level....

Starts racking MI300X systems - because you can actually buy them and they beat the H100 on many specs Specialist cloud operators skilled at running hot and power-hungry GPUs and other AI infrastructure are emerging, and while some of these players like CoreWeave, Lambda, or Voltage Park - have built their clusters using tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, others are turning to AMD instead....

If you wanna make money you've gotta spend money. And against Samsung it's gonna cost a lot Analysis Three years after CEO Pat Gelsinger announced Intel would create a foundry business that took on contract manufacturing gigs, Chipzilla has committed to more than $185 billion in spending across new and existing fab, packaging, and test sites....

Current plans are too expensive and slow, meaning China could win race to score red rocks NASA still wants to proceed with its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission but needs its cost to drop - so it's seeking help from the commercial space sector....

Meanwhile, Gartner predicts massive market share loss and European regulators start asking questions Broadcom has blinked, and made a couple of changes to support VMware customers who don't want to move to its new software bundle subscriptions....

Zoonet employs 'elegant generalization of ping and traceroute' among other tricks Exclusive Alibaba Cloud has detailed the telemetry tool it uses to look out for glitches in customers' virtual networks, and revealed it's reduced the number of personnel dedicated to troubleshooting by 86 percent since developing the system....

Local customers get early access to Japanese-language GPT-4 On Sunday, OpenAI announced the launch of its operations in Asia, beginning with a office in Tokyo, Japan. It's OpenAI's third outpost beyond the United States, following offices in London and Dublin....

Japanese giants have big brands, but tiny shares of a shrinking market Japanese imaging manufacturers Konica Minolta and Fujifilm have revealed talks aimed at creating a joint venture to handle printer manufacturing and R&D for both brands....

Promises up to ten AI exaFLOPs of grunt - if you turn down the resolution a bit Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has flipped the switch on its Venado supercomputer - a machine capable of bringing ten exaFLOPS of performance to bear on AI workloads for the Department of Energy....

Hard-coded credentials last thing you want in home security app Some smart locks controlled by Chirp Systems' software can be remotely unlocked by strangers thanks to a critical security vulnerability....

'Obtaining genuine consent for training data collection is especially challenging' industry sages say The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has issued its seventh annual AI Index Report, which reports a thriving industry facing growing costs, regulations, and public concern....

Says the IRS can do this stuff for free As Americans go through their annual ceremony of tax day, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has reminded the FTC that tax software biz Intuit is making bank on "junk fees."...

Work in Austin, Taylor will include new 2nm facility, packaging plant, and Pentagon partnership Samsung is the latest chipmaker to benefit from CHIPS and Science Act funds, with the US Commerce Department today announcing the Korean megacorporation is getting $6.4 billion in funding to expand its Texas operations....

Special export license granted to Intel by President Trump unlikely to be renewed Huawei's launch of its newest MateBook Pro X, which uses Intel's latest Meteor Lake CPU has invoked the ire of Republican members of Congress in the US....

Antitrust proposals could stretch to 30% of annual revenues for law-breaking app store monopolies Apple, Google, and other Big Tech players could be fined 20 or even 30 percent of their sales in Japan if they break newly proposed regulations on abusive app store monopolies....

Shares of the worst performing member of the S&P 500 slide some more as news unlikely to please investors Tesla is starting the week on a low note by laying off "more than" 10 percent of its employees just days after Cybertruck production was reportedly halted to address an issue with the accelerator pedal....

If you want open system to automate workflows over platform of your choosing, join the queue Cloud storage provider Backblaze is adding Event Notifications to its portfolio, sending out an alert whenever data in its Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage changes....

Streamer says access came via credential stuffing Streaming giant Roku is making 2FA mandatory after attackers accessed around 591,000 customer accounts earlier this year....

Since you can't get a soldering iron out there, the fix will be in software Engineers at NASA have pinpointed some corrupted memory as the cause of Voyager 1's troubles and are working on a remote fix to deal with the hardware problem....

It probably wasn't only sound driver problems that kept users away Microsoft has lifted a 29-month compatibility hold that prevented some Windows 10 systems from upgrading to Windows 11 due to an issue with an Intel Smart Sound Technology driver....

Attackers could nab an org's most sensitive keys if left unaddressed Updated Customers of Delinea's Secret Server are being urged to upgrade their installations "immediately" after a researcher claimed a critical vulnerability could allow attackers to gain admin-level access....

Someone forgot to tell Apple and Samsung as Chinese brands rebound The world is collectively buying more factory-fresh smartphones again, with Chinese homegrown brands propelling shipments. Meanwhile, Apple reported a near double-digit slump, and Samsung also saw declines, albeit at a slower rate....

Fears of low-cost invasion and data spies spark call for ban Electric vehicles may become a new front in America's tech war with China after a US senator called for Washington DC to block Chinese-made EVs to protect domestic industries and national security....

Skills access still an issue for organizations hoping to beat the 2027 ECC support deadline Nearly two-thirds of SAP users in North America are set to migrate to its latest S/4HANA ERP platform, or have already started the process, according to a recent survey....

This wasn't what most had in mind when Redmond promised to make the feature 'great again' Microsoft is to try out "recommendations" - ads for apps in the Microsoft Store - in the Windows 11 Start Menu, but only for a small set of US Beta Channel Windows Insiders at first....

System alerts were pinging but cat had no way of knowing what was happening A developer named Danny Guo has shared a story of the time his cat alerted him to a DDoS attack....

Neither side can afford to lose, but one surely must Opinion Twice it was tried, twice it failed. In Germany, Munich and Lower Saxony both decided to switch to open source for official IT. Both projects, to some extent or another*, returned to Microsoft. Now the state of Schleswig-Holstein is hoping for third time lucky. It's been planning the same thing for three years, and now it's pressing the button....

Kernel 6.8, GNOME 46, and more apps in Snap packages The beta version of this year's Ubuntu LTS release is out, complete with a new, and automatable, installation program....

Thanks to sensors and math, machines can 'learn' to adapt to new mediums Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new method for 3D printing, which they claim greatly reduces the time taken to adapt machines to using different materials....

If you're too exhausted to think, maybe you shouldn't be doing tech support who, me? Welcome once again, gentle reader folk, to the comfy corner of The Register safe space we call Who, Me? wherein readers share their stories of times when they were not perhaps at the very peak of their technical brilliance....

First rise in five years varies between 9.26 and 16.67 percent for different products - for no apparent reason Microsoft has foreshadowed significant price rises for its Dynamics 365 cloudy business applications....

Reconaissance vessels first, then set a course for armed drones South Korean industrial giant HD Hyundai's maritime arm announced on Sunday it will collaborate with controversial software developer Palantir Technologies to develop an unmanned surface vessel (USV) that can conduct reconnaissance for the world's navies....

Investors get excited about using AI to make AI easier Supercolossal SaaS seller Salesforce is reportedly poised to acquire cloud data management outfit Informatica....

PLUS: Chinese chipmaker Nexperia attacked; A Microsoft-signed backdoor; CISA starts scanning your malware; and more Infosec in brief US Congress nearly killed a reauthorization of FISA Section 702 last week over concerns that it would continue to allow warrantless surveillance of Americans, but an amendment to require a warrant failed to pass....

PLUS: AWS expands India payment options; Alibaba co-founders unite in criticism; Korea invests in AI; and more Asia In Brief The Australian operations of Estonian cloud and web hosting outfit BlueVPS have been struck by a multi-day outage that commenced on or about April 9 and is ongoing at the time of writing....

Industrial revolution didn't give us human mimics, so why should AI think like us, this computer scientist wonders Interview While the likes of OpenAI and Google DeepMind chase after some fabled artificial general intelligence, not everyone thinks that's the best use of our time and energy in developing AI....

'Something is stopping it, even though it clearly can do it' AI models become better at foretelling the future when asked to frame the prediction as a story about the past, boffins at Baylor University in Texas have found....

'Not all AI content is spam, but I think right now all spam is AI content' interview We know Google search results are being hammered by the proliferation of AI garbage, and the web giant's attempts to curb the growth of machine-generated drivel haven't helped all that much....

There's no Huawei we saw that coming Years after Uncle Sam ordered US telecommunications providers to rip and replace Huawei kit from their networks, Beijing is telling telcos in China to strip out American-made chips....

Dev teams must beware inflated expectations of tech leadership, Gartner warns Global tech research company Gartner estimates that by 2028, 75 percent of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants, up from less than 10 percent in early 2023....

Slow but bona fide made in China Loongson's current-generation 3A6000 processor, one of the fastest designed and made in China for consumers, is now available in a line of mini PCs....

Beijing will be thrilled by this nerfed silicon Intel is set to launch two China-exclusive models of its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, and they'll be substantially crippled to fit in with US sanctions....

Out of the PAN-OS and into the firewall, a Python backdoor this way comes Palo Alto Networks on Friday issued a critical alert for an under-attack vulnerability in the PAN-OS software used in its firewall-slash-VPN products....