The Register

If hiring more people to work fewer hours isn't appealing, you could always make a robot do it Datacenter outages remain a perennial problem, with human error among the top contributors. Analyst outfit the Uptime Institute suggests the key to curbing these disruptions could be as simple as shortening shifts....

Pesky 'macro' stuff forces SaaS biz to yank revenue forecast, share price plunges double digits SaaS application biz Workday is lowering revenue forecasts for the year after saying it is feeling the squeeze of larger customers taking longer to sign off on deals amid a wavering economy....

Installation problems with non-English language systems resolved Microsoft has released a fix to fix the fix for NTLM traffic spikes on Windows Server 2019 after the original fix failed to install on some devices where Windows was not set to English language....

Surging demand, the AI plan, and spinning FPGAs into gold AMD claims it is touching 33 percent in server CPU market share as it looks towards the launch of its next-gen "Turin" processors, and is promising a GPU roadmap for what comes after the MI300 product line....

Because not everyone has time to be a tech guru Manjaro Linux is the DIY-spirited Arch Linux distro, but made easier - so that those still on their way to guru status will be able to say: "I run Arch, BTW."...

Here's the tea, for all open sourcers inclined to drink it Opinion Oracle is dropping Terraform for OpenTofu, and IBM's CEO is talking up open source. What does all this mean for both programs? Here's what I see happening....

Tory comms leaked thanks to a barefooted Johnny Mercer's wayward situational awareness In setting the date for the UK's next general election, prime minister Rishi Sunak this week essentially announced the start of open season for political reporters all hunting for the top scoop of the day by any means necessary. He may need, however, to brief his ministers on basic opsec if he's going to stop any more internal memos from reaching the front pages....

That's half a billion from generous taxpayers in 2.5 years The UK's tax collector has awarded tech consultancy and service provider Capgemini a contract worth up to 245.5 million to keep legacy systems up and running....

Slow and steady wins the race, but sometimes flooring it saves the day On Call In case the working week has given you bad vibrations, The Register devotes Friday mornings to a fresh instalment of On Call - our (hopefully) cathartic reader-contributed tales of tech support chores that left your peers shaken and stirred....

Much of the money will go to mountainous Aragon - not mainly in the plain Amazon announced it will invest 15.7 billion ($16.9 billion) in the Spanish branch of Amazon Web Services (AWS)....

More AZs in its Asian backyard also planned Alibaba Cloud announced on Wednesday it will open its first region in Mexico and expand with building new datacenters across Southeast Asia....

Shinkansen maintenance tricks boost reliability on the ground, so why not? Japan's space agency JAXA has teamed up with West Japan Railway Company to apply the latter's AI-powered failure-prediction technology to operating spacecraft....

President warns of 'all-out national warfare' around silicon as he announces $19B development package South Korea's president has described the global semiconductor industry as "a field where all-out national warfare is underway" as he announced a $19 billion to diversify the nation's silicon sector....

Might share tech and data with the world sometime ... maybe China says it has created its own radar technology to help it forecast space weather, and claimed it made breakthroughs along the way....

We know IT admins have busy schedules but c'mon An improper access control bug in Apache Flink that was fixed in January 2021 has been added to the US government's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, meaning criminals are right now abusing the flaw in the wild to compromise targets....

CEO tells El Reg the phone titan's 'refusal to be completely candid with us was a major factor' iFixit and Samsung are breaking up, ending efforts to provide better tools, parts, and resources for DIY repairs that began almost two years ago....

Set up as a gamble, the Absolics subsidiary has just paid off The CEO of South Korean chemical firm SKC made a big bet on the US CHIPS Act when he decided to grow his manufacturing site in the American South. That gamble has now paid off with some CHIPS change coming SKC's way to help bankroll its factory expansion....

ShrinkLocker throws steel and vaccine makers into the hurt locker Yet more ransomware is using Microsoft BitLocker to encrypt corporate files, steal the decryption key, and then extort a payment from victim organizations, according to Kaspersky....

US politicos worry that all roads lead to renminbi Microsoft may end up exporting advanced computer processors, AI model weights, and other key technologies to the Middle East and beyond via the Windows giant's cozy relationship with United Arab Emirates giant G42....

Mandiant CTO chats to The Reg about the looming fate of this ransomware crew Interview The cyberattacks against Las Vegas casinos over the summer put a big target on the backs of prime suspects Scattered Spider, according to Mandiant CTO Charles Carmakal....

Music to everyone's ears The US Department of Justice, in the company of 30 state and district attorneys general, filed a civil antitrust complaint against Live Nation Entertainment and its Ticketmaster subsidiary today, claiming the entertainment giant has suppressed competition by monopolizing the concert market....

Current approaches aren't working and demonize security teams A Google security bigwig has had enough of federally mandated phishing tests, saying they make colleagues hate IT teams for no added benefit....

But still just once a year because this stuff is expensive. Hopefully that's enough In the military world, preparation is everything. That's why the US Space Force is planning to up its tactical response launch practice cadence ... to once a year....

Updates now optional, but Azure security is not Microsoft has given administrators additional flexibility in managing Windows updates and clarified what it meant by stating: "Microsoft will require MFA for all Azure users."...

CTO waiting for major OEMs to get on board, but when/if that happens it'll be game on ... perhaps for AI Next Nutanix is contemplating the day when it ports some of its wares to the Arm CPU family, but hasn't yet put the job on its to-do list and doesn't think its hypervisor needs to make the jump....

Thales Alenia Space and The Exploration Company tapped for retrieval ops The European Space Agency has signed contracts with two European companies in a bid to get cargo back from the International Space Station (ISS) - hopefully before what is left of it is deorbited into the ocean....

Apple and Samsung still on top, though, and pre-pandemic numbers but a faraway dream The first quarter of 2024 saw the European smartphone market register its first year-over-year increase in shipments since 2021, and Chinese brands are growing the most....

Phenomenon underpinning aurora has eluded explanation as we approach 11-year flip Skywatchers this month feasted their eyes on ramping up of the aurora borealis, a light show caused by the interaction between the solar wind of charged particles and Earth's magnetic field....

It's still a rough one, so patch up Veeam says the recent critical vulnerability in its Backup Enterprise Manager (VBEM) can't be used by cybercriminals to delete an organization's backups....

The writing's on the wall for veteran scripting language Microsoft has sent Windows 11 24H2 into the Release Preview channel and confirmed that VBScript will be starting its journey to full deprecation by becoming an on-by-default Feature On Demand (FOD)....

Wait, why do you want this job again? Chief information security officers around the globe "are nervously looking over the horizon," according to a survey of 1,600 CISOs that found more than two thirds (70 percent) worry their organization is at risk of a material cyber attack over the next 12 months....

262% topline increases won't last forever, amid market worries that mega AI investments won't pay off... Nvidia has turned in another set of sizzling results on the back of AI-driven demand for its products, yet industry watchers are increasingly wondering how long this substantial growth can continue, or whether the bubble is going to burst....

We have not changed our minds, the industry has evolved, data warehouse stalwart claims With its vision of a unified enterprise data warehouse, Teradata attracted globally dominant customers including HSBC, Unilever and Walmart. But earlier this month, it confirmed backing of the lakehouse concept, which combines both messy data lakes and structured data warehouses, together with the idea of analytics anywhere, supported by object storage and open table formats....

Man who promised the Unicorn Kingdom must now face judgement from the real thing Drenched in British spring rain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called an election yesterday, surprising colleagues and commentators. And if opinion polls are anything to go by he will lose and leave behind a tech legacy which is patchy at best....

Alternatively, true AGI has been reached, and the machines decided to delete themselves Updated Parts of Microsoft's Bing are still offline in Europe after it fell over earlier this morning, taking down Copilot and anything else that depends on the search service's API....

Remember Intel's 'Larrabee' many-core Pentium-based GPU? GCC doesn't After dropping Itanium support, GCC 15 is set to kill off more ancient platforms, with the Xeon Phi facing the firing squad alongside the penultimate version of Solaris....

More than four years after procurement began, authority has no go-live date East Sussex County Council is conducting "a further health check of the system and programme" after it failed to go live with Oracle Fusion, its replacement for SAP R/3....

In less than 13 minutes, we'll get you up to speed on USP Interview Technical report 69, or TR-069, which defines how people's broadband routers and other customer-premises equipment can be remotely provisioned and managed by ISPs automatically, is turning 20 years old....

Massive discount applied to save cop shop's helicopter budget Following a data leak that brought "tangible fear of threat to life", the UK's data protection watchdog says it intends to fine the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) 750,000 ($955,798)....

Models with flaws can be harmless ... yet dangerous. So why are reports of problems being roundly ignored? Feature Imagine a brand new and nearly completely untested technology, capable of crashing at any moment under the slightest provocation without explanation - or even the ability to diagnose the problem. No self-respecting IT department would have anything to do with it, keeping it isolated from any core systems....

SpaceX is smart on this, Cupertino and GL.iNet not so much In-depth Academics have suggested that Apple's Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) can be abused to create a global privacy nightmare....

You shouldn't - Indian infosec researchers warn you'll get random junk instead Indian infosec firm CloudSEK warned on Wednesday that scammers are selling counterfeit code advertised as the NSO Group's notorious Pegasus spyware....

Pact made with WSJ, New York Post, Sunday Times, Australian publisher as lawsuit bullets ping around the industry OpenAI and News Corp on Wednesday announced a partnership that will bring the publisher's output to the super-lab's models, marking yet another in a series of data content deals for the industry....

What next? Kim-Jong-AI? Don't laugh - Nvidia has pondered rebuilding a digital Napoleon China's Cyberspace Research Institute has revealed it's created a large language model and conversational AI based on the philosophies of President Xi Jinping....

Unfading Sea Haze adept at staying under the radar Bitdefender says it has tracked down and exposed an online gang that has been operating since 2018 nearly without a trace - and likely working for Chinese interests....

Vague ML definitions subject to change - yeah, great The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted Wednesday to advance a law bill expanding the White House's authority to police exports of AI systems - including models said to pose a national security threat to the United States....

Subscribers in US, Europe, SEA can take silicon out for a spin for free Microsoft is bringing its custom-designed Arm-based Cobalt 100 processors closer to the public as it is now demoing the chips in an Azure virtual machine (VM) preview....

How about just flag up the adverts not using machine learning The Federal Communications Commission is considering a proposal that would require US political ads to disclose their usage of AI technology....

Why should we get its paperwork? More than 100 medical industry groups have asked the Feds to make UnitedHealth Group, not them, go through the rigmarole of notifying everyone about the Change Healthcare ransomware infection....

Computershare CTO says he got a bill 15 times his previous quote Next Global stock-market share registry operator Computershare looks like it has just decided to bail from VMware rather than suffer Broadcom's latest licensing regime and price hikes....