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Tiny, powerful, uncluttered: not easy, but a lot to like Alpine Linux 3.20.0 is out, with initial support for a whole new CPU architecture: RISC-V....

Royal Society warns black box models, a lack of documentation, and limited access to computing hamper efforts to understand results Using AI in science promises to add to problems in reproducing important results, the UK's highly prestigious Royal Society has warned....

Raking a talon through piles of plastic parts in search of holiday fun Hands-On Lego has added plastic brick representations of NASA's Space Launch System and the Milky Way Galaxy to its range. We had a go at building both to see if they merit a holiday investment....

It's easier to foresee growing inequality than surging growth Artificial intelligence (AI) may not do much to boost productivity - and could end up widening the income gap between owners of capital and workers....

Another endorsement for the theory that on-prem power generation trumps tapping the grid Mitsubishi Heavy Industries - Earth's largest source of electricity-generating gas turbines - has tied its future growth to surging demand for datacenters spurred by adoption of AI and new semiconductor plants....

Intel joins in with plans for better PC-Android integration Tencent and Microsoft have struck a deal that will see the Chinese gaming giant's Android wares available on the Microsoft Store, and playable on Windows PCs....

Training exercises test suitability for both reconnaissance and lethal kinetic action China has shown off a pair of robot dogs - one of them toting a machine gun and the other powered by AI....

GitHub trove details API features that 'contradict' Big G's public statements about how its engine works A trove of documents that appear to describe how Google ranks search results has appeared online, likely as the result of accidental publication by an in-house bot....

Theft happened in October, only now are details coming to light Sav-Rx has started notifying about 2.8 million people that their personal information was likely stolen during an IT intrusion that happened more than seven months ago....

New models will come with a year of Gemini Advanced, too Not to be outdone by the shiny new AI PCs Microsoft showed off last week at its Build conference, Google on Tuesday said various generative AI features will be rolling out to Chromebook Plus laptops over the next few weeks....

You are the product, after all PayPal will use data from billions of customer transactions to supercharge its nascent ad business....

How else are you going to feed all those 1,000-plus watt GPUs? Not long ago an entire rack of systems might consume 10kW or less of power. Today, that's barely enough to run a single GPU server, and those systems are only expected to get hotter and greedier for power amid the AI boom....

Website whack-a-mole getting worse BreachForums is back online just weeks after the notorious dark-web marketplace for stolen data was seized by law enforcement....

Russian info slinger could be on the hook for posting disinformation The European Union is reportedly looking into messaging app Telegram, and whether it has more users than the platform lets on....

You keep the towers, we'll bag the customer list, says T-Mo T-Mobile US says it will buy US Cellular's wireless business and 30 percent of its spectrum assets for $4.4 billion....

One tricky cluster is causing outrage among longstanding customers Over a month after an April datacenter upgrade coincided with problems with some of its customers' backups, secure storage biz SpiderOak still isn't fully operational, and some angry users say they're ready to cut ties....

AI biz forms Safety and Security Committee to succeed Superalignment team as it trains latest GPT model OpenAI has created a new safety group as it works on the successor to GPT-4 while grappling with the recent departure of high-profile members who criticized its commercial intent....

Will Boeing's Padstayer become Padleaver on June 1? NASA and Boeing have set another date - June 1 - for the first crewed launch of the Starliner CST-100, a capsule more noted for its reluctance to leave the ground than for its commercial crew capability....

Just because you could doesn't mean you should Windows Recall has been coaxed into life on a computer lacking the AI hardware shown off by Microsoft at its recent unveiling event....

Rivalry in Windows on Arm space would intensify once GPU giant enters the fray Competition could be heating up in the Windows on Arm space amid talk in the industry that Nvidia is readying a chip pairing next-gen Arm cores with its Blackwell GPU architecture....

Centuries-old institution dodges questions on how it happened as ransomware gang claims credit International auctioning giant Christie's has confirmed data was stolen during an online attack after a top-three ransomware group claimed credit....

As Lenovo says it'll cram hybrid AI into multiple devices, CIOs and analysts remain unconvinced Morgan Stanley is betting AI PCs will drive the next wave of commercial fleet refreshes after Microsoft made public its line-up at Build, and is forecasting the machines will comprise 65 percent of total sales by 2028....

Investors continue to buy into the AI hype Elon Musk's xAI has announced a series B funding round of $6 billion that takes the company to a valuation of $24 billion, according to the billionaire....

Digital age of consent at 13 not even enforced, committee finds A committee of MPs has urged the next government to consider a total ban on smartphones for under-16s in the UK....

The planet can wait, pal, we've got other problems Survey results While Big Tech wrings its hands about things like greenhouse gas emissions, IT teams out in the trenches aren't nearly as concerned about the eco-sustainability of their infrastructure....

And guess who has highest margins? Some interesting findings from fresh market watchdog report Microsoft is achieving the highest margins while at the same time achieving the strongest growth in the UK cloud market, according to a working paper from the competition watchdog....

In evolving smarter security, open source is the missing link Opinion Some ideas work better than others. Take DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Launched by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 response to Sputnik, its job is to create and test concepts that may be useful in thwarting enemies. Along the way, it's helped make happen GPS, weather satellites, PC technology, and something called the internet....

Prepare for the HyperAssistant of the future, maybe Half a decade hence, software development will be transformed by AI assistance, argue four academics from the University of Lugano in Switzerland....

Custom 2U boxen with Tofino inside are in production and mean Chinese cloud has more space for servers Alibaba Cloud has revealed the hardware design it uses to run networking at its edge locations, and those devices' reliance on Intel Tofino ASICs....

Nation of 17,000 islands operates 27,000 bits of software Indonesian president Joko Widodo on Monday ordered government officials to stop developing new applications....

Third 'Big Fund' is close to the level of US and EU subsidy programs China has allocated a big pool of money, hoping to spur domestic semiconductor development....

Meanwhile, North Korea's latest rocket fails South Korea launched its first unified space agency on Monday, when the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) took flight in the city of Sacheon....

Former Pentagon deputy CIO Rob Carey tells us guardrails should steer Feds away from bad ML Interview President Biden's October executive order encouraging the safe use of AI included a ton of requirements for federal government agencies that are developing and deploying machine learning technologies....

Suggested heir is Putin-approved and hard to download outside Russia Venerable instant messaging service ICQ has announced it will shut down for good in June....

No, nothing's broken. I'm just working under this desk for ... reasons Who, Me? As a fresh working week commences, The Register understands that many readers may feel like giving the kit they tend to a good thump. Which is why each week we offer a fresh and hopefully cathartic instalment of Who, Me? so you can take heart from fellow readers' tales of tech support agonies rather than letting irritation overwhelm you and create your own....

Invests $350 million in Flipkart Google has invested in Walmart's Indian e-commerce operation Flipkart, which holds almost half of the market for e-commerce on the subcontinent....

Blame AI. No, seriously Tape - as a digital storage medium - has been considered dead for your correspondent's entire 29-year career. But that didn't stop manufacturers behind the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standard shipping 152.9 exabytes worth of the stuff last year....

Plus: US water systems fail at cyber security Infosec in brief More than a dozen big pharmaceutical suppliers have begun notifying individuals that their data was stolen when US drug wholesaler Cencora was breached in February....

PLUS: Indian TV channel adopts 24x7 AI anchors; Google building first Africa-Australia sub cable; Singtel's strategy reset; and more Asia In Brief Samsung has disputed a report which claimed its high-bandwidth memory products are not performing to Nvidia's satisfaction....

Blast (processing) from the past Retro interview Just a few weeks ago, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was ported to the TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator....

Our vultures weigh in on the week that was more 'what we Built' than 'what you can Build' Kettle Microsoft held its annual Build developer conference this week with that bizarre Copilot+ PC launch tacked on the side....

FCC wants to hit this political genius with first-of-a-kind punishment The political consultant who admitted paying $150 to create a deepfake anti-Biden robocall has been indicted on charges of felony voter suppression and misdemeanor impersonation of a candidate....

But criminals posing as Microsoft workers scored the most ill-gotten gains The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shared data on the most impersonated companies in 2023, which include Best Buy, Amazon, and PayPal in the top three....

Which rival would be so bold as to snatch its business Huawei? Nvidia has cut the price of special GPUs it makes for the Chinese market in the face of local competition from Huawei....

An open and shut case, but the perps remain at large - whoever they are Justice is served... or should that be saved now that audio-visual software deployed in more than 10,000 courtrooms is once again secure after researchers uncovered evidence that it had been backdoored for weeks....

Mission Extension Vehicle to fuel up helpless but functional sats Northrop Grumman has signed a four-year contract renewal with Intelsat to continue providing on-orbit extension services for satellites....

Enjoy some Noble Numbat novelty now - but excluding GNOME 46.1 It comes a bit later than usual, but if you are running Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur, you should start seeing prompts to upgrade to the new release....

Tesla CEO would have preferred no tariffs, even though they're beneficial to his company Tesla supremo Elon Musk is criticizing the import tax that the Biden administration has levied against Chinese electric vehicles, saying Tesla doesn't need them....

ChatGPT? Write me a really horrid nondisparagement exit clause OpenAI has told former and current staff that it won't enforce nondisparagement agreements that could have cost employees dearly....

Case brought by Netlist involved DRAM modules in computer systems Chipmaker Micron is being ordered to cough up a total of $445 million after losing a patent litigation case involving memory module technology brought by rival Netlist....