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And American CIOs keep a closer eye on the purse strings than European equivalents Reader Poll Results When it comes to rolling out AI systems, developers are still the most important in deciding which to run, but there are some major differences in strategy between The Register's US and European readers....

Civo's Mark Boost says price hikes appear designed to retain whales while tossing back small fry interview Broadcom has faced a lot of heat for the direction it's taken VMware after acquiring it - and much of what has happened has confirmed the fears Virtzilla customers expressed well before that deal closed....

Tycoon threatens to ignore court order banning far-right accounts on X In this weekend's episode of "Billionaires Behaving Boldly," X supremo Elon Musk locked horns with Brazil's legal luminaries over what constitutes free speech and what's far-right pablum....

Orange candidate has been known to use protectionist policy against allies AI, 6G, semiconductor supply chains and critical minerals were all discussed at the latest EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC), amid concerns that a victory for Republican candidate Donald Trump in this year's election would put an end to such cooperation....

'A huge amount of responsibility to ensure that there is ethical management' Interview You may have heard that Google is considering putting its latest AI search innovations behind a paywall, something that doesn't sit well with Rosanne Kincaid-Smith, COO at German HPC firm Northern Data Group....

IT systems pulled offline for chance to paws and reflect First, they came for hospitals, then it was charities and cancer centers. Now, cyber scumbags are coming for the puppies and kittens....

Shares up 25% on the news Shares in crisis-ridden French IT integrator Atos bounced by over 25 percent this morning as top shareholder Onepoint said it has a rescue plan involving investment firm Butler Industries....

Domestic customers saw their fees cut last January Alibaba Cloud is cutting prices for international users of its core compute, storage, and database services, using offers similar to those it dangled before Chinese customers earlier this year....

Theories abound over who's truly responsible Change Healthcare is allegedly being extorted by a second ransomware gang, mere weeks after recovering from an ALPHV attack....

FAA investigation set to examine failure after aircraft fire in Texas last week The engine cover on a Boeing 737-800 used by Southwest Airlines detached during takeoff from Denver on Sunday, prompting an investigation by aviation regulators....

Easter egg in test build could have scrambled Microsoft's reputation More than 30 years before the xz backdoor became the near disaster of the week, an intern tried to sneak some unexpected code into MS-DOS. Not a backdoor, but potentially a bit silly....

Orgs are missing a trick when it comes to the white fluffy stuff, survey says The migration of IT workloads to the cloud is benefiting tech departments rather than the wider business, according to a McKinsey survey....

Data sovereignty is eftersokt these days A Swedish telco has rolled a collaboration platform for public sector organizations worried about sensitive data leaving Sweden....

We've done it once, we can do it again Opinion The Sleepwalking Into Disaster klaxon is echoing through the corridors of power. Again. This time, the corridors are British and the klaxonner is the Cabinet Office's Central Digital & Data Office....

Every byte, and executable, counted when trying to fix Redmond's finest Who, Me? Greetings, gentle reader, and welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers like yourself try to make each Monday a little less manic by sharing tales of foible and fallibility....

PLUS: Another local government hobbled by ransomware; Huge rise in infostealing malware; and critical vulns In Brief Protecting your privacy online is hard. So hard, in fact, that even a top Israeli spy who managed to stay incognito for 20 years has found himself exposed after one basic error....

Work to make the digital rupee programmable has begun India's Reserve Bank deputy governor has revealed that transaction volumes using the nation's central bank digital currency (CBDC) have trended downwards since December 2023 - and may even have been inflated by one-off uses of the currency....

Consortium will spend $1.65 billion on Azure, 365 - and of course some AI Cloud Software Group (CSG) and Microsoft have renewed their alliance for another eight years, this time with a $1.65 billion commitment for the Group to use Redmond's cloud, productivity tools, and AI....

Because English isn't the only language Korean web giant Naver last week debuted a family of large language models named HyperCLOVA X, which it claimed perform better at cross-lingual reasoning in Asian languages than other models - and may therefore help the region to develop sovereign large language models....

Plus: YouTube's fake India election ad policy; Singtel not selling Optus; Do Chinese tech stalk former workers? ASIA IN BRIEF Wipro on Friday named Srini Pallia as its leader, effective immediately, after previous boss Thierry Delaporte stepped down "to pursue passions outside the workplace."...

Study finds workers' sense of meaningfulness and autonomy declines with automation Robots may make companies more productive, as some studies have suggested, but they make people feel that their jobs have less meaning....

What happened, how it was found, and what your vultures have made of it all Kettle It's been about a week since the shock discovery of a hidden and truly sophisticated backdoor in the xz software library that ordinarily is used by countless systems....

Biz leaders optimistic it can reduce living, breathing cost centers... er, valued workers A survey of senior biz executives reveals that 41 percent expect to have a smaller workforce in five years due to the implementation of AI technologies....

Meng Wanzhou is home, but the case is far from over Huawei looks set to face trial in 2026 over charges that it misled banks and Washington about historic business dealings in Iran in breach of US sanctions....

The pair allegedly made 87 apps since 2019 and defrauded folks of tens of thousands of dollars Google is suing two Chinese app developers claiming they allegedly spent years creating fraudulent cryptocurrency investment apps that were downloaded from its Play Store....

Beware random inflammatory questions on social media - they may come from a threat actor With the US presidential election looming, China is stepping up its disinformation game with increased use of AI, Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) reports....

Iceotope will need the help as it navigates the frosty waters of global expansion Liquid cooling specialist Iceotope has hired an ex-Microsoft datacenter exec on an advistory capacity as the company eyes global expansion amid insatiable demand for high-powered bit barns to feed the AI craze....

And it was all thanks to peer pressure AMD plans to document and open source its Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware for GPUs, giving users more control over Radeon graphics cards....

Self-driving to the nearest job center Apple is to chop more than 600 workers in a move likely related to the cancellation of several projects at the firm, including the company's self-driving car....

In what other sphere does a bad supplier not feel pain for its foulups? Analysis You might think that when a government supplier fails in one of its key duties it would find itself shunned or at least feel financial pain....

Enterprise tech slingers want to see what Hock Tan can get away with - and replicate it Opinion Cancel your Netflix account. Delete Season 2 of House of the Dragon from your diary....

Attacks could be completed in seconds, compromising customer safety A self-service check-in terminal used in a German Ibis budget hotel was found leaking hotel room keycodes, and the researcher behind the discovery claims the issue could potentially affect hotels around Europe....

Ed Dwight, almost America's first Black astronaut, will ride New Shepard rocket Blue Origin has announced the crew flying on its NS-25. Former US Air Force Captain Ed Dwight is among the six aiming to travel aboard the reusable rocket past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space....

Nothing is forever, not even a web page Forget chocolate eggs, the only event that really mattered this week was 404 Day....

Even when tech crew gets the tweaks approved, vendor lead times are bonkers, says report UK councils might spend 8 billion ($10.1 billion) on tech each year, yet some find that suppliers don't have the wares they need and customizations can "incur significant costs."...

All sorts of levers being pulled to lure AI developers from here, there, everywhere Amid the scramble to hire developer talent in the field of AI, regulators in the European Union are expressing interest in recent events that saw Microsoft lift and shift most of the team at Inflection....

You can prove them wrong, but they'll still get you on a non-technicality On Call On Call is back from an Easter adventure with another reader-contributed - and perhaps tear-inducing - tale of tech support....

Algorithms as PHBs - who wouldn't want that? Nearly half of US office workers expressed concern that AI might take their jobs in a February survey by investment banking biz Jefferies....

Just disabling Siri requires visits to five submenus A study has concluded that Apple's privacy practices aren't particularly effective, because default apps on the iPhone and Mac have limited privacy settings and confusing configuration options....

Today's lesson covers the potential for Loongson's made-in-China architecture to hurt Microsoft and Intel China's long march towards creation and adoption of its own information technology stack has taken a long stride forward after a school district commenced a trial of 10,000 PCs powered by domestically designed processors....

Some equipment suffered minor damage, but the silicon show must go on Wednesday's earthquake in Taiwan will hit at least one chipmaker in the wallet, but won't weaken the overall silicon supply chain, according to analyst outfit TrendForce....

Japan's Hoya also makes components for chips, displays, and hard disks, and has spent four days groping for a fix If ever there was an incident that brings the need for good infosec into sharp focus, this is the one: Japan's Hoya - a maker of eyeglass and contact lenses, plus kit used to make semiconductor manufacturing, flat panel displays, and hard disk drives - has halted some production and sales activity after experiencing an attack on its IT systems....

Will buy tens of thousands of Nvidia's prized accelerators, which will be collateral for the loan Lambda Labs, operator of a GPU-infused cloud, on Thursday revealed it has secured a $500 million loan to fund the expansion of its accelerators-as-a-service offering....

But don't worry, if tech takes your job, we'll retrain you Of all the tech CEOs touting AI's potential to empower workers, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been among the most vocal about its ability to replace them....

State Dept keeps schtum 'for security reasons' Updated Uncle Sam is investigating claims that some miscreant stole and leaked classified information from the Pentagon and other national security agencies....

Fifty-one years of community contributions, software, and clever cryptanalysis contributed Three men received recognition in December 2020 for cracking the Zodiac Killer's 340-character cipher (Z340) - but they want to share credit with the community of sleuths who helped with the 51-year code breaking effort....

At $4.6 billion, this Moon malarkey is getting expensive NASA has selected three companies to develop designs for a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) to transport astronauts around the Moon....

If you're popular enough at Elon's party, that is What Elon taketh away, Elon also giveth. Fee-free blue checks on Twitter are back, but only for users with a certain number of followers who pay for X Premium....

Ad-free search experience might not be on the cards Google is reportedly considering tweaks to its search engine, including making some AI features subscription-only - an ad-free search experience is seemingly not on the cards....

CEO addresses whirlwind start to 2024 and how it plans to prevent a repeat Ivanti has committed to adopting a secure-by-design approach to security as it gears up for an organizational overhaul in response to the multiple vulnerabilities in Connect Secure exploited earlier this year....