The Register

Researchers reckon results could improve recipe development for food and beverages Joining the list of things that probably don't need improving by machine learning but people are going to try anyway is Belgian beer....

The days of cybercriminals having something of a moral compass are over The parent company of The Big Issue, a street newspaper and social enterprise for homeless people, is wrestling with a cybersecurity incident claimed by the Qilin ransomware gang....

'Temporary' isn't always Windows has a built-in reminder of the perils of temporary solutions thanks to the 30-year-old porting efforts of former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer....

Depending on planning permission being given for facility The Airlander hybrid airship looks set to go into production within a few years, if its maker can get planning approval for a factory....

Liquid cooled, 44.7 Petaflops and with unspecified GPUs The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has picked Lenovo to build and install a 44.7-Petaflops liquid cooled supercomputer....

Predicts 500 percent increase in consumption over a decade and suggests 800 kilovolt fix John Pettigrew, the CEO of British utility National Grid, warned on Tuesday that datacenter power consumption is on track to grow 500 percent over the next decade....

Finally, a power greater than AI hype: angry fandom Pics The BBC has decided to exterminate its experiments using generative AI to promote venerable SciFi show Doctor Who....

Per-socket licensing regime may explain years of ups and downs XenServer, the Cloud-Software-Group-owned server virtualization spinout from Citrix, has debuted its new/old product, XenServer 8....

Already backed away from cloud spinout, now gradually breaking up with its own breakup plan Chinese tech giant Alibaba has decided not to spin out its logistics limb, Cainiao, and will instead buy back shares in the outfit and integrate it more deeply with its e-commerce operations....

Sigh, AI to the rescue, sigh Dell this week disclosed it has 120,000 workers, which is about 13,000 fewer than it had at the start of 2023. That means it has laid off almost double the number of people it previously indicated....

Chipzilla wants more apps coded for NPUs, not Nvidia Intel has expanded its efforts to encourage programmers to code for so-called "AI PCs" by targeting smaller software houses with a development kit based on Asus's NUC 14 Pro PC....

At last, no more crappy emulation or experimental builds The first official release of Chrome for Windows-on-Arm laptops is landing this week, in time for this summer's Snapdragon X Elite-powered notebooks running Microsoft's operating system....

100 minutes of heating to melt a frozen heart... 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth Boffins at the European Space Agency (ESA) are very pleased with themselves following confirmation that the de-icing process they devised for Euclid's optics has "performed significantly better than hoped."...

But not, we repeat, not on the desktop Intel's Meteor Lake processors will apparently make it to socketed motherboards after all, but not those of traditional desktops....

Financial firms that help evade existing restrictions in crosshairs It's sanctions central at the US Treasury this week as a further 15 are slapped on organizations and individuals in Russia....

Yet another reason to reconsider that overpriced Creative Cloud subscription Canva is stepping up its competition with Adobe for creative software dominance with the acquisition of popular creative software suite Affinity....

Software slackers urged to up their game The US has clearly had enough of software vendors shipping products with "unforgivable" vulnerabilities, and is now urging them to launch formal code reviews to stamp out SQL injection flaws....

A RAGs to riches story Interview Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference concluded last week, bringing word of the company's Blackwell chips and the much-ballyhooed wonders of AI, with all the dearly purchased GPU hardware that implies....

Up and running in 2028, making crucial HBM, among other tech, reportedly High-bandwidth memory (HBM) leader SK hynix is set to build an advanced packaging facility in Indiana, which is estimated to cost $4 billion and come online in 2028 to potentially package high-end HBM....

SA Special Investigating Unit orders payment within 7 days following alleged breach of public finance laws A Special Tribunal in South Africa has ordered the German software giant SAP to pay a R500 million ($26.4 million, 20.9 million) settlement within a week following a long-running investigation into compliance with public finance laws....

More MS moves just a week after new AI unit and other changes announced Microsoft just put Pavan Davuluri in charge of the company's Windows and Surface teams, while Windows exec Mikhail Parakhin is "to explore new roles."...

An open standard challenger appears The UXL Foundation is readying its open standard accelerator programming model, touted by some as an alternative to Nvidia's CUDA platform, for "a spec release in Q4."...

Andreas Bechtolsheim is paying out less than $1M to SEC amid allegations he illegally bought options A Silicon Valley heavyweight has been charged with insider trading by the US Securities and Exchange Commission....

ARPA-H joins the challenge, adds $20M to cash rewards Interview As ransomware gangs target critical infrastructure - especially hospitals and other healthcare organizations - DARPA has added another government agency partner to its Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC)....

Looking for feedback before pressing the production button European cloud provider Scaleway showed off its new RISC-V servers at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF's) Kubecon Europe 2024 event....

Python 2 has been dead for four years Did you know that His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) offers free Linux tools? Sadly, though, they recently stopped working....

Selection comes despite Japanese supplier's role in Post Office scandal A UK government-endorsed ID card scheme is set to appoint Fujitsu as a business outsourcing supplier despite the Japanese company's earlier promise to refrain from participating in UK public procurement....

Multiple CHERI-related projects win money for important research that prizes safety over speed The inaugural Beacon Awards has handed three prizes to projects working on safer software for CHERI-enabled hardware running on the CheriBSD operating system....

Sanctions galore for APT31, which has been blamed for two major attacks on democracy The UK's deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, says China has been unsuccessful in its attempts to undermine UK elections....

Some of us would be happy being rated 7.5 out of 10, just sayin' Two DNSSEC vulnerabilities were disclosed last month with similar descriptions and the same severity score, but they are not the same issue....

'Error budget' and other server maintenance/site reliability secrets revealed Cloudflare has revealed a little about how it maintains the millions of boxes it operates around the world - including the concept of an "error budget" that enacts "empathy embedded in automation."...

Promises it can handle digi-bucks and tokenized assets without new infrastructure, maybe next year One of the many sanctions imposed on Russia after its illegal invasion of Ukraine was exclusion from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) - the messaging network that most of the world's banks use to move money across borders....

Speed-reading flash drives no longer just an Arm wrestle A demo of Yingren Technology's YRS820 PCIe 5.0 SSD controller - built entirely on the RISC-V architecture - showed it reading at 14GB/sec and writing at 12GB/sec, without any active cooling required....

Reveals 2021 incident that saw parliamentary agencies briefly probed The government of South Pacific island nation New Zealand has revealed that it, too, has been attacked by China....

Points out scofflaw crypto outfit needs a license The Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ordered the nation's National Telecommunications Commission to block access to cryptocurrency exchange Binance, for the simple reason that platform doesn't have a licence....

Could end-to-end lasers keep long training jobs on track? Networking biz Coherent unveiled an optical circuit switch designed to support high-density AI clusters at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference on Monday....

Plus: Alleged front sanctioned, UK blames PRC for Electoral Commission theft, and does America need a Cyber Force? The United States on Monday accused seven Chinese men of breaking into computer networks, email accounts, and cloud storage belonging to numerous critical infrastructure organizations, companies, and individuals, including US businesses, politicians, and their political parties....

How's that free comment thing working out, Elon? Elon Musk's attempt to use the courts to silence a nonprofit documenting hate speech on X has been dismissed by a California judge, who said it was clear the billionaire's legal action was all about putting a lid on criticism....

Cheap low-carbon energy? What's not to love... The land surrounding a nuclear power plant might not sound like prime real estate, but as more bit barns seek to trim costs, it's poised to become a rather hot commodity....

Improved workqueues mean the end of tasklets is looming at long last Linus Torvalds just announced the first RC of 6.9 on the Linux Kernel mailing list, saying it "looks to be fairly normal", although it's a recordbreaker in size....

Startup slams AMD for buggy firmware After a weeks-long struggle to get its AMD RX 7900XTX-based TinyBox working on open source firmware, Tiny Corp says it will be launching an Nvidia RTX 4090 version for users who want something that "just works."...

Supply chain attack targeted GitHub community of Top.gg Discord server More than 170,000 users are said to have been affected by an attack using fake Python infrastructure with "successful exploitation of multiple victims."...

Be careful where you click Google's new AI-generated search results feature is suffering from the same problem that its regular results have had of late: Spammy, if not outright malicious links are rising to the top of the SERP stack....

LLMs powering generative AI may be moving GPUs, but Huang and co already looking at next big opportunity Comment For many, apps like ChatGPT, Copilot, Midjourney, or Gemini are generative AI....

Go look at Facebook and Google, says Mac man Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has criticized the US government's targeting of TikTok, saying it is hypocritical to single out one social media platform for tracking users and not apply the same rule to all....

Boffins demonstrate Rowhammer memory meddling on AMD DDR4 hardware Updated ZenHammer would be the perfect name for a heavy metal band, but alas, it's an AMD-focused variant of the decade-old Rowhammer attack that compromises computers by flipping bits of memory....

Systems have been pulled offline as a precaution Exclusive The Communications Workers Union (CWU), which represents hundreds of thousands of employees in sectors across the UK economy including tech and telecoms, is currently working to mitigate a cyberattack....

Users may have to upgrade twice to protect their browsers Mozilla has swiftly patched a pair of critical Firefox zero-days after a researcher debuted them at a Vancouver cybersec competition....

For now, cryptographic work should be run on slower Icestorm cores The GoFetch vulnerability found on Apple M-series and Intel Raptor Lake CPUs has been further unpacked by the researchers who first disclosed it....

They were all planning on leaving anyway, company claims The door plug on Boeing's C-suite has flown off, taking the CEO, board chair, and head of its commercial airplane division with it....