The Register

Drawing flying pandas is useful. But Chinese web giant isn't saying how AI on wheels is practical China's AI-forward web giant Baidu has delivered on its promise to have its ERNIE large language model (LLM) used in cars, naming carmaker Great Wall Motors and "digital cockpit" creator ECARX as collaborators....

Set to join Intel, Nvidia in observing bus speed limits After the US slapped restrictions on the sale of AI accelerators into China, Nvidia - and later Intel - launched nerfed versions of their silicon that could be shipped to the Middle Kingdom without Uncle Sam blowing his stack. Now AMD is working on an export-compliant processor of its own to sell overseas....

AudioCraft is for musicians what ChatGPT is for content writers, maybe Meta on Wednesday released AudioCraft, a set of three AI models capable of automatically creating sound from text descriptions....

Ten ways you can blow a hole in your software by misusing AI tech The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) has released a top list of the most common security issues with large language model (LLM) applications to help developers implement their code safely....

UK mulls an 'appropriate response' Meta, after fighting European GDPR-related lawsuits for years, has said it will seek explicit consent from EU users before using their data to serve up highly targeted ads....

At the same time, company pipped to be preparing for IPO Servers powered by Arm chips are on the rise, especially in China, where new figures estimate that 40 percent of Arm-based servers are now deployed....

However boffins in academia need to match the progress made in Big Tech, and always challenge poor data quality The last decade has seen great strides in the application of artificial intelligence to scientific discovery, but practitioners need to know when and how to improve their use of AI and must challenge poor data quality....

First some steering wheels were falling off, now others allegedly won't steer The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened another investigation into steering issues in Tesla vehicles - the second such probe the agency has launched this year....

Interest from antitrust regulators spurred action? Still a pricey option, says analyst, and change doesn't help Google or Alibaba customers Microsoft is making a minor concession that allows customers with specific licenses to run Office wares in an AWS cloud - a week after Europe's competition regulators decided to officially probe its biz policies and practices....

Interesting move against backdrop of US sanctions Intel has opened an innovation hub in China to help local technology startups, despite the Biden administration's crackdown intended to prevent China from developing advanced technologies....

Where does Agent P work again? Version 254 of systemd marks the 115th release of this ever-growing init system for Linux. Expect to see it in the autumn releases of Ubuntu and Fedora, and in Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed sooner....

Hefty box said to be 'slightly larger than a carry-on' - but likely not for budget flyers Virgin Media O2's business arm has released a plug-and-play private 5G network product, meaning customers should be able to get a 5G service operating anywhere with power and an internet connection....

Here's looking at Euclid Astronomers are breathing a sigh of relief that the 600-megapixel Euclid wide-angle space telescope's instruments appear to be working well, despite discovering a gap in the orbiter's hull that allowed sunlight to leak through and contaminate some images....

CMA admits Sony deal might change the battlefield The UK's markets watchdog has reopened a consultation on the $69 billion tie-up between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft months after it blocked the proposed sale on the back of competition concerns....

Big Blue scores 54.7M project, taking business from Fujitsu as Home Office consolidates work The UK's Home Office has handed IBM a 54.7 million ($70 million) contract to work on the biometric matcher platform to support its police and immigration services in identifying suspects against a database of fingerprint and photo data....

Not all heroes wear capes - some are 50-year-old antennas A signal from Voyager 2 has been detected by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) over a week after communications with the distant probe were lost, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Tuesday....

Chips based on the tech could boost efficiency of electric vehicles Scientists at Japan's Chiba University claim they've developed a method that uses lasers to create diamond wafers that could one day power next-gen semiconductors....

WeChat accused of 'contempt for Parliament' as transparency rules floated for platforms An Australian Senate Committee has recommended banning Chinese social media apps in the land down under, on grounds the Communist Party of China uses them to spread propaganda and misinformation....

Current boss bails for unspecified non-tech gig Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it had hired Puneet Chandok as its new leader for India and Southeast Asia. Chandok's previous gig was president of AWS for India and South Asia....

Citrix's virtualization spin out goes a bit Musky by revealing its own X-centric logo XenServer, the Citrix spin-out that will offer a hypervisor and associated management tools for x86 systems, has teased a plan to lure VMware customers as well as a little more detail about its plans to operate as an independent entity....

Imagine your home's foundation was its own energy-storing supercapacitor Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black - a crystalline form of the element....

CEO, fresh with funds, lays out the dependency dilemma Interview Open source security biz Socket is extending its source code dependency checker, which previously addressed only JavaScript and Python, by adding support for checking Go code....

Don't worry, AI will fix everything, predicts CEO Lisa Su AMD crawled back to profitability in the second quarter of 2023, reporting net income of $27 million - a drop of 94 percent from this time last year, but a sight better than the $139 million loss the chipmaker sustained in Q1....

Does that include Zuck or? The chatbot craze isn't slowing any time soon. Google is understood to be injecting generative AI features into its digital assistant. Meanwhile Meta is said to be planning to launch virtual agents with various personas....

Are we out of touch? No, it's the charity that's wrong Twitter, lately known as X Corp, is suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for allegedly harming its advertising business by documenting vitriol on the social network....

Westinghouse's 2017 bankruptcy almost ended the Vogtle 3 reactor It's more than half a decade late coming online and has cost billions more than estimated, but Georgia Power's Vogtle Unit 3, the first US nuclear reactor built from scratch this century, has finally come online....

ESA is testing that pink stuff from your dirty bathtub as an antimicrobial Moon suit lining European space researchers are turning to an interesting place to find new antimicrobial coatings to keep the insides of future space suits from becoming stinky, bacteria-laden biohazards: the bacteria themselves....

Collide+Power vulnerability leaks secrets bit by bit - but could take months or years to learn a useful secret Boffins in Austria and Germany have devised a power-monitoring side-channel attack on modern computer chips that exposes sensitive data, but very slowly....

Crypto bad boy's appeal denied, despite recent Ripple Labs ruling A Manhattan judge ruled on Monday that a lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon will continue as planned....

Sleeping giant says no sign yet personal info was stolen Tempur Sealy, among the world's largest providers of bedding, has notified the Securities and Exchange Commission of a digital burglary by cyber crims that forced it to isolate parts of the tech infrastructure....

Scientists explain how the new HelioLinc3D software works to The Register Astronomers have spotted a potentially hazardous asteroid thanks to a new algorithm that will be deployed in the upcoming Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is currently under construction....

French IT supplier to complete split by selling non-Eviden bits to investment outfit Ailing French IT supplier Atos is looking to complete its 'transformation' by selling off the remaining half of itself to EP Equity Investment for an estimated 2 billion ($2.20 billion)....

Open source image-massage works ... up to a point Computer scientists claim they've come up with a way to thwart machine learning systems' attempts to digitally manipulate images and create deepfakes....

Bringing automatic window tiling to the mainstream could be big - but what is it and how do you use it? The GNOME desktop is considering adding support for automatic window tiling. This could be a significant productivity boost for the most common Linux desktop environment - as well as further afield....

Notably stretching the target requires 'a credible pathway towards its delivery,' says committee The British government is hoping to hit 24 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity by 2050 as well as roll out a new nuclear reactor every year. But these targets are more of a "wish list" rather than the type of strategic framework you'd need to actually build such capacity, according to a parliamentary committee....

Join Snowflake, Cloudera, Google as Apache format fans Cloud giant AWS has picked table format Apache Iceberg to extend the reach of its Redshift data warehouse to data lakes, in a move replicated by IBM's Netezza last week....

As if attacks from China weren't enough, one of the Air Force's own has reportedly gone rogue The US government is fighting a pair of cyber security incidents, one involving Chinese spies who potentially gained access to crucial American computer networks and the other related to an Air Force engineer allegedly compromised communications security by stealing sensitive equipment and taking it home....

If you need to trick a classifier into thinking a gun is a banana, just use these prompts Analysis A Google scientist has demonstrated that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM), despite its widely cited capacity to err, can help smash at least some safeguards put around other machine learning models - a capability that demonstrates the value of chatbots as research assistants....

Some say retaliation for sanctions, but Beijing says it just wants world peace China introduced restrictions on Monday that mean would-be exporters will require a license to ship certain drones and related equipment out of the Middle Kingdom....

Here's your metaphor for the state of the world: factory will be re-used to make EV batteries Panasonic has announced it has quit the Liquid Crystal Display business and will use the factory where it made the units to build batteries instead....

Not quite a controlled deorbit but not an uncontrolled one, either Video The European Space Agency's Aeolus weather satellite has reentered Earth's atmosphere after engineers sent their final commands to destroy the hardware. The machine, or whatever remains of it, was expected to crash into the Atlantic Ocean....

Looks like it's time for the territory to ramp up its SEO offensive again Hong Kong's High Court has rejected a government bid to ban online dissemination of a protest song that is often mistaken as the Special Administrative Region's national anthem....

Go ahead, spend up big. But be warned: many models 'will never make it to widespread use because they are quite frankly rubbish' Dell can't wait to tap into the frenzy of spending on ... er ... interest surrounding generative AI, so has cooked up hardware bundles and consulting chops to bring it on-prem....

Onsemi CEO says demand for silicon carbide surged - as investors pile in While chipmakers, memory vendors, and fabs collectively bemoan slow demand and excess inventories, one segment of the semiconductor biz appears to be weathering the storm better than most: silicon carbide (SiC) power circuits used in electric vehicles....

Some Ryzen Linux machines still stumble along despite efforts to fix it all Ongoing issues with Linux and AMD's fTPM - the chip designer's firmware-based TPM - appear to be wearing on kernel overseer Linus Torvalds' nerves, who has suggested switching off the module's random number generator altogether....

Waiting on that thumbs up from the FAA The US Air Force is dipping its toe into electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft by trialing a short-hop air taxi that has yet to get FAA certification to fly....

As expert panel suggests some tweaks to boost public's confidence in FISA The White House has weighed in on the Section 702 debate, urging lawmakers to reauthorize, "without new and operationally damaging restrictions," the controversial snooping powers before they expire at the end of the year....

Plus: Google DeepMind's latest visual-language model robot, and more AI in brief Four research papers this week concluded that users' political beliefs and behavior don't seem to be all that impacted by information amplified by Facebook's algorithms....

Neighbors say it's an eyesore, Musk's underlings won't let inspectors near it Updated A huge super-bright flashing X logo appeared atop the HQ of the company formerly known as Twitter on Friday, spurring complaints from neighbors and visits from San Francisco building inspectors that Elon Musk's underlings rebuffed twice over the weekend....

How they do it remains a mystery, say boffins in research paper Large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-3 can display the ability to solve complex reasoning tasks which humans crack using analogies....