The Register

'Complete digital sovereignty' ... sounds familiar Schleswig-Holstein, Germany's most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions....

Think before you pull the trigger, warn analysts If you're planning to save money by cutting out the unbundled Teams product from your Microsoft 365 subscription, the decision might not be as straightforward as you'd think....

Nerfed GPU included in revised list of cards deemed to be too powerful The US government has published an updated list of tech export controls that looks to be bad news for Nvidia as it now includes the company's "China special" RTX 4090D GPU in items that need an export license....

After slew of AWS deals signed under MoUs, CDDO says current approach might weaken its position Exclusive The UK government has admitted its negotiating power over billions of pounds of cloud infrastructure spending has been inhibited by vendor lock-in....

Watchdog concerns about price hikes and consolidation remain unresolved Britain's competition regulator is kicking off a deeper investigation into the potential impact caused by the merger of Vodafone and Three in the UK after neither resolved previously expressed concerns....

INC Ransom emerges as a growing threat as some ex-LockBit/ALPHV affiliates get new gigs Leicester City Council is finally admitting its "cyber incident" was carried out by a ransomware gang and that data was stolen, hours after the criminals forced its hand....

The Mercury 7: 'Not one of us knew what he was in for' Sixty-five years ago this week, NASA introduced its first astronauts, saying they'd be launched into space in the agency's new capsule. They were immediately dubbed The Mercury 7....

We're really just getting started, says OpenTofu community member Interview HashiCorp might be less than impressed with the rise of the Terraform fork, OpenTofu, but where Hashi sees challenges, the maintainers of the open source project see opportunities....

Rivals and regulators might disagree, so might users that are paying for software they don't need It's always interesting to see how technology executives crop their marketing messages to suit the audience....

3.2 glorious gigapixels to make 'the greatest movie of all time' Construction of the LSST Camera, destined for the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile has been completed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Silicon Valley....

Desire to build brainboxes will also see optical interconnects go mainstream Three imminent improvements to the Ethernet standard will make it a better alternative to host AI workloads, and that will see vendors back the tech as an alternative to Nvidia's InfiniBand kit, which is set to dominate for the next two years....

'Caracal' improves AI capabilities and is pitched as an alternative to VMware The OpenInfra Foundation has loosed an update of OpenStack on the waiting world and - like everyone else that can spell "virtualization" - has pitched it as fine alternative for those pondering a move away from VMware....

Nonetheless DRAM prices may yet feel slight aftershocks Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has shrugged off the impact of yesterday's earthquake....

Sounds so much cooler than 'come back to the office or else' In an effort to get its employees back into the office, Infosys has reportedly instituted mandatory in-person attendance for select roles - but dubbed the program "In-Person Collab" weeks. Because that's how the young people talk, right?...

Is there no cure for this cyber-plague? Nearly one million individuals' personal details, financial account information, and medical records may well have been stolen from City of Hope systems in the United States....

The downside? You probably won't see kit to use it until 2027 Analysis The PCIe 7.0 spec is on track for release next year and, for many AI chip peddlers trying to push the limits of network fabrics and accelerator meshes, it can't come soon enough....

As WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, other Meta bits plus Apple stuff fall offline today Updated Omni Hotels & Resorts' computer systems have been offline since Friday due to what the American luxury hospitality chain called a "disruption."...

'Necessary,' 'focusing our efforts,' 'deliver maximum impact' ... sounds just like all the other tech layoffs lately Hundreds of Amazon Web Services employees are being shown the door this week - a move the American technology behemoth said is necessary as it, like many others, moves to streamline operations....

First they came for the taxis and I did nothing because I was not a taxi driver Bad news if you're income-boosting, or God forbid trying to make a living, as an Uber Eats delivery driver because the robots are coming - to one part of the United States, at least....

Pendulum returns to the Obama era - don't be surprised if it swings right back The Federal Communications Commission has confirmed proposals to vote on rules to restore net neutrality in the United States later this month - whether it'll stick this time is anyone's guess, though....

Actions sent homeless victim to jail and a mental hospital for more than a year An Iowa system administrator has pleaded guilty to charges related to stealing and assuming a former coworker's identity over a 33-year period....

CTO shared code from his laptop with investigation after FTX collapsed Crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried's conviction was expedited by the cooperation of the chief software engineer at his FTX crypto exchange, prosecutors have revealed....

What's a few microseconds between friends? Quite a lot actually NASA, which isn't known for timeliness, has been tasked by the White House with implementing a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) zone for the Moon traceable to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)....

150 variants from about 50 families to choose from Opera has added experimental support for running large language models (LLMs) locally on the Opera One Developer browser as part of its AI Feature Drop Program....

Microsoft has a workaround but it's not a great look Emails from users with Outlook.com country domains may not be reaching Gmail addresses but fear not - Microsoft has a workaround....

Hint: It will keep going up every year Microsoft has laid out the ground rules for getting Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) as market share figures indicate users are still giving Windows 11 a wide berth....

Using copyrighted material to train models affects artists' livelihoods, says open letter The Artist Rights Alliance has launched a petition to end the use of AI that infringes upon or devalues the work of humans....

A man with a list of accolades long enough for several lifetimes, friends remember his brilliance Obituary Venerable computer scientist and information security expert Ross Anderson has died at the age of 67....

Device Bound Session Credentials said to render cookie theft useless Google reckons that cookie theft is a problem for users, and is seeking to address it with a mechanism to tie authentication data to a specific device, rendering any stolen cookies useless....

Follows the vendor's decision to overhaul licensing of the popular cache database Cloud giants AWS, Google, and Oracle have come out in support of a Linux Foundation open source fork of Redis, the popular in-memory database frequently used as a cache, following changes to its licensing....

Way to whip that LLaMA's ass A handy open source tool for packaging up LLMs into single universal chatbot executables that are easy to distribute and run has apparently had a 30 to 500 percent CPU performance boost on x86 and Arm systems....

CEO Gelsinger promises sunny days ahead as he confirms reorg Revenue at Intel's foundry business declined in 2023, leading to a $7 billion operating loss, and CEO Pat Gelsinger says this year could produce even nastier numbers as he revealed a reorg to help the chipmaker behave more like its rivals....

Mega framework set to replace earlier deals coming to an end next year The UK government has launched the procurement of a package of tech deals worth up to 8 billion ($6.36 billion), attempting to consolidate two earlier purchasing arrangements....

Next time you get in a Facebook argument, just let ChatGPT handle it If you're scratching your head wondering what's the use of all these chatbots, here's an idea: It turns out they're better at persuading people with arguments....

Web devs advised to do their part to limit UI redress attacks Web browsers still struggle to prevent clickjacking, an attack technique first noted in 2008 that repurposes web page interface elements to deceive visitors....

Chinese space startup claims it has the tech to make it happen. Yeah, right Alibaba's Taobao e-commerce platform is exploring one-hour delivery by - wait for it - rocket....

More entities will need a license On Tuesday, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) extended digital payment token (DPT) restrictions that seek to prevent money laundering and financing of terrorism....

Internet outages recorded as Japan issues tsunami warning Video A significant earthquake has struck Taiwan, shuttering some of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's chip fabrication plants....

CISA calls for 'fundamental, security-focused reforms' to happen ASAP, delaying work on other software A review of the June 2023 attack on Microsoft's Exchange Online hosted email service - which saw accounts used by senior US officials compromised by a China-linked group called "Storm-0558" - has found that the incident would have been preventable save for Microsoft's lax infosec culture and sub-par cloud security precautions....

Konnichiwa, Sato-San A simulation run by a Japanese professor and released on Monday revealed that by the year 2531, everyone in Japan will have the surname Sato....

Generative AI darling was on track to pay $99M on compute to generate just $11M in revenues The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall - because he couldn't find a way to pay for them....

And Diameter, too, for good measure The FCC appears to finally be stepping up efforts to secure decades-old flaws in American telephone networks that are allegedly being used by foreign governments and surveillance outfits to remotely spy on and monitor wireless devices....

Elon controversial? No way Grok, the edgy generative AI model developed by Elon Musk's X, has a bit of a problem: With the application of some quite common jail-breaking techniques it'll readily return instructions on how to commit crimes....

Come on in, drill into Anthropic and Mistral - that's not the sound of a door slamming shut behind you Amazon will furnish recent AI startups partnered with Y Combinator with $500k in credits each on Amazon Bedrock to use with third-party models like Anthropic and Mistral AI....

Advertiser antitrust lawsuit says claimed deal with Netflix is anticompetitive Meta allegedly starved its Facebook Watch video service to appease Netflix and sustain its ad monopoly, advertisers suing the biz have claimed....

Land of the Free has lost its way in quest for profits Comment Generally the head of US government agencies and comedy don't mix, but on Monday night the Lina Khan, boss of the Federal Trade Commission, was on the Daily Show recounting how the agency is going after Amazon, Facebook and others over monopolistic practices. She also got evidence of her persona non grata status with Cook & Co....

As 70% of boffinry nerve center's projects involve machine learning A DARPA leader has revealed that around 70 percent of the US government agency's programs involve AI in some shape or form, and those projects could have serious ramifications for the future of jobs in software development....

Irony alerts: Open Web Application Security Project Foundation suffers lapse A misconfigured MediaWiki web server allowed digital snoops to access members' resumes containing their personal details at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation....

Memorandum of Understanding penned to put models, systems, and agents through their paces The US and UK governments will collaborate on test suites to promote safety in the fast-paced world of AI development....

Power snafus take limelight in latest downtime diary from Uptime Institute The frequency and severity of datacenter outages is on the decline, yet when incidents do occur they can be very costly to the organization involved, with power issues leading to the most serious blackouts....