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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....

Nothing says 'sorry' like 10 percent off shipping for a month Ecommerce platform Pandabuy has apologized after two cybercriminals were spotted hawking personal data belonging to 1.3 million customers....

Consumer-grade devices won't be hit as hard Samsung intended to raise prices on its enterprise SSDs by 15 percent in the second calendar quarter of 2024, but unrelentingly high demand boosted by AI might push that higher still....

Simple stuff like slapping on a logo fools more folks and travels further As hundreds of millions of voters around the globe prepare to elect their leaders this year, there's no question that trolls will try to sway the outcomes using AI, according to Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center....

Action gathers steam in the EU, US and UK as anti-trust teams collate market feedback The Cloud Infrastructure Providers In Europe (CISPE) lobby group has welcomed an agreement among French lawmakers that it claims "will enshrine fair software licensing for cloud customers in French law."...

Cloud cyber resilience model could raise $700M despite $278M losses Cloud security provider Rubrik has filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange following a flurry of similar flotations....

Refusal to play ball may result in satellite operator moving investment elsewhere Starlink is reportedly facing obstructions to its expansion in the Mediterranean from Telecom Italia, which it claims is refusing to share data that would help to avoid interference between the two operators....

Victims of the powerful surveillance tool will soon find out the truth Former Polish government officials may face criminal charges following an investigation into their use of the notorious spyware Pegasus to surveil political opponents and others....

This follows attack on NHS services in Scotland last week The cyber skids at INC Ransom are claiming responsbility for the ongoing cybersecurity incident at Leicester City Council, according to a post caught by eagle-eyed infosec watchers....

Licenses everywhere can omit collaboration app thanks to EU regulators For those not keen on Microsoft Teams, help is in hand - European Union requirements to unbundle the software from Office 365 will be implemented globally....

Senders of more than 5K messages a day are in the crosshairs It was 20 years ago on Monday that Google unleashed Gmail on the world, and the chocolate factory is celebrating with new rules that just might, hopefully, cut down on the amount of spam users receive....

Is Developer Cloud enough to steal Nvidia's thunder? Interview Intel is attempting to woo developers to its cloud with early access to unreleased hardware and a born-again attitude to open source in a bid to differentiate itself from competitors....

Ye cannae change the laws of physics, but you can change your mind Opinion Apple is good at security. It's good at processors. Thus GoFetch, a major security flaw in its processor architecture, is a double whammy....

But unhappy European buyers have called for regulators to step in Exclusive VMware by Broadcom will deliver a significant update to its flagship Cloud Foundation bundle in the middle of this year and follow it up with a major update early in 2025....

Big in China - and a presence elsewhere, but not at a scale to worry global hyperscalers On Friday, China's Huawei Technologies released its annual report in which it revealed its cloud computing business was its fastest growing established segment....

Brief awakening brought mixed news and familiar scenery Japan's Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) late last week revealed that its Moon lander had - somewhat unexpectedly - mostly survived a second lunar night and was briefly well enough to send home some snaps....

PLUS: Google Cloud ANZ boss departs; Japan revives airliner ambitions; China-linked attackers target Asian entities ASIA IN BRIEF Singapore's Monetary Authority on Monday launched an application, intuitively named "COllaborative Sharing of Money Laundering/TF Information & Cases" (COSMIC for short, obviously) to target money laundering and terrorism financing....

Declares victory in settlement of class action lawsuit, but individual claims remain possible In hopes of settling a lawsuit challenging its data collection practices, Google has agreed to destroy web browsing data it collected from users browsing in Chrome's private modes - which weren't as private as you might have thought....

At least not until Redmond's government edition is ready to roll Staff working at the US House Of Representatives have been barred from using Microsoft's Copilot chatbot and AI productivity tools, pending the launch of a version tailored to the needs of government users....

This time, we got lucky. It mostly affected bleeding-edge distros. But that's not a defense strategy Analysis The discovery last week of a backdoor in a widely used open source compression library called xz could have been a security disaster had it not been caught by luck and atypical curiosity about latency from a Microsoft engineer....

Play it again, Sam OpenAI is believed to be in talks with Microsoft to construct a massive supercomputer code-named Stargate containing millions of AI accelerators at a cost of up to $100 billion....

We're never going to give you up... An ASIC designed to display the infamous Rickroll meme is here, alongside 164 other assorted functions....

Super lab loves to big up things it says it couldn't possibly let loose on the world for now OpenAI's latest trick needs just 15 seconds of audio of someone speaking to clone that person's voice - but don't worry, no need to look behind the curtain, the biz wants everyone to know it's not going to release this Voice Engine until it can be sure the potential for mischief has been managed....

Timing predictions aside, multi-chip designs with 3D stacking will be the path forward 3D chiplets will be the key to building the world's first one-trillion transistor GPU, says TSMC chairman Mark Liu and chief scientist H.-S. Philip Wong....

Also, TheMoon botnet back for EoL SOHO routers, Sellafield to be prosecuted for 'infosec failures', plus critical vulns Infosec in brief Nearly a year on from the discovery of a massive data theft at healthcare biz Harvard Pilgrim, and the number of victims has now risen to nearly 2.9 million people in all US states....

Theresa Payton on why US needs a national privacy law Interview Congress is mulling legislation that will require TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance to cut ties with the video-sharing mega-app, or the social network will be banned in the USA....

Still claims the personal info wasn't stolen from its systems AT&T confirmed over the weekend that more than 73 million records of its current and former customers dumped on the dark web in mid-March do indeed describe its subscribers, though it still denies the data came direct from its systems....

Guess what? Some users should look out for expensive surprises Microsoft has consolidated its licensing terms for Power BI with its Fabric data platform, leaving some users facing steep price hikes according to one analyst....

Enthusiastic young tech decided to simplify the mainframe, with unexpected results Who, Me? Well hello again, dear reader, and welcome once more to Who, Me? - in which Register readers unburden themselves with confessions of tech mistakes long past. It's very cathartic, you know....

Code shines up nicely in production, says Chocolate Factory's Bergstrom Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++....

Redmond's strategy for blending cloud and client is finally taking shape Comment Microsoft's definition of what does and doesn't constitute an AI PC is taking shape. With the latest version of Windows, a dedicated Copilot key, and an NPU capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second, you'll soon be able to run Microsoft Copilot locally, ish, on your machine....

Karen Jacobsen had no idea what she was getting into when she applied for a very odd job in 2002 Interview In 2002 Australian singer-songwriter Karen Jacobsen was living in New York City when she was offered the chance to audition for a job that required a voiceover artist with a native Australian accent, resident in the north-east of the USA, to record a voice model that would be used for ... nobody quite knew what....

The 'most painful' part? Coding the Windows drivers If you've ever wondered whether a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA can be configured as a homegrown gaming 3D GPU capable of accelerating Quake and other faves from the 1990s, we have an answer - and it's yes....

Gaming industry clings to 'Survive 2024' Sega this week announced it was laying off 240 of its European workforce....

STOP USAGE OF FEDORA RAWHIDE, says Red Hat while Debian Unstable and others also affected Red Hat on Friday warned that a malicious backdoor found in the widely used data compression software library xz may be present in instances of Fedora Linux 40 and in the Fedora Rawhide developer distribution....

CVE-2024-1086 turns the page tables on system admins A Linux privilege-escalation proof-of-concept exploit has been published that, according to the bug hunter who developed it, typically works effortlessly on kernel versions between at least 5.14 and 6.6.14....

Cut-down chips get a big boost US sanctions on China that banned Nvidia's fastest gaming GPU might be irrelevant thanks to overclocking its slightly slower replacement back to original levels of performance....

Standard Term Support means only 18 months before retirement Support for Microsoft's .NET 7 software framework ends in May, a mere 18 months after its 2022 release - a reminder that the days of enterprise-pleasing long-term updates are receding into the past....

E-commerce titan to appeal sanction amounting to three hours of annual profit Poland's competition and consumer protection watchdog has fined Amazon's European subsidiary around $8 million (31.9 million Zlotys) for "dark patterns" that messed around internet shoppers....

PLUS: Dodging rats the size of cats while repairing chewed-through cabling On Call: Dirt File It's a holiday Friday in much of the Reg-reading world so On Call is departing from its usual format of a single story to instead bring you more tales from our Dirt File: your stories of mud, crud, dust, fust, and other foul substances that make fixing hardware so very fun....

Defenses against prompt injection, hallucination arrive as Feds eye ML risks Microsoft has introduced a set of tools allegedly to help make AI models safer to use in Azure....

2016 meddling was 'primitive' compared to what's ahead When it comes to AI possibly influencing elections, 2024 will be "ground zero," according to Hillary Clinton....

We know the average customer doesn't have a law degree, CEO tells us Updated Cloud server provider Vultr has rapidly revised its terms-of-service after some netizens were alarmed by clauses that broadly demanded the "perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free" rights to customer "content."...

But don't worry, the models are here to help summarize technical docs and answer your questions ... for now +Comment Two years ago, before ChatGPT turned the tech industry on its head, Juniper CEO Rami Rahim boasted that by 2027 artificial intelligence would completely automate the network....

Xi Jinping warns 'no force' can stop country's science and tech progress The US government has publicly confirmed it is applying pressure on chipmaking tool suppliers based in allied nations - think ASML and the like - to halt maintenance of kit already sold to China....

Vendor takes hardline approach to patch disclosure to new levels JetBrains TeamCity users are urged to apply the latest version upgrade this week after the vendor disclosed 26 new security issues in the CI/CD web application....

$340M finance upgrade still working out the kinks Hundreds of research grants are stuck in processing limbo as the University of Washington continues to grapple with its $340 million implementation of Workday software....

Could have been worse: Prosecutors wanted decades more Fallen crypto-king Sam Bankman-Fried has been jailed for 25 years after New York federal judge Lewis Kaplan expressed disbelief at almost every argument from his legal team....

Flaws enable privilege escalation and remote code execution Nvidia's AI-powered ChatRTX app launched just six week ago but already has received patches for two security vulnerabilities that enabled attack vectors, including privilege escalation and remote code execution....

Sustainability Summit pushes industry partners to reduce their environmental impact, including harmful chemicals Intel is seeking alternatives to harmful chemicals that the electronics industry has used for decades, amid growing concerns about the potentially negative impacts on the environment and human health....