The Register

Blame AI. No, seriously Tape - as a digital storage medium - has been considered dead for your correspondent's entire 29-year career. But that didn't stop manufacturers behind the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standard shipping 152.9 exabytes worth of the stuff last year....

Plus: US water systems fail at cyber security Infosec in brief More than a dozen big pharmaceutical suppliers have begun notifying individuals that their data was stolen when US drug wholesaler Cencora was breached in February....

PLUS: Indian TV channel adopts 24x7 AI anchors; Google building first Africa-Australia sub cable; Singtel's strategy reset; and more Asia In Brief Samsung has disputed a report which claimed its high-bandwidth memory products are not performing to Nvidia's satisfaction....

Blast (processing) from the past Retro interview Just a few weeks ago, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was ported to the TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator....

Our vultures weigh in on the week that was more 'what we Built' than 'what you can Build' Kettle Microsoft held its annual Build developer conference this week with that bizarre Copilot+ PC launch tacked on the side....

FCC wants to hit this political genius with first-of-a-kind punishment The political consultant who admitted paying $150 to create a deepfake anti-Biden robocall has been indicted on charges of felony voter suppression and misdemeanor impersonation of a candidate....

But criminals posing as Microsoft workers scored the most ill-gotten gains The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shared data on the most impersonated companies in 2023, which include Best Buy, Amazon, and PayPal in the top three....

Which rival would be so bold as to snatch its business Huawei? Nvidia has cut the price of special GPUs it makes for the Chinese market in the face of local competition from Huawei....

An open and shut case, but the perps remain at large - whoever they are Justice is served... or should that be saved now that audio-visual software deployed in more than 10,000 courtrooms is once again secure after researchers uncovered evidence that it had been backdoored for weeks....

Mission Extension Vehicle to fuel up helpless but functional sats Northrop Grumman has signed a four-year contract renewal with Intelsat to continue providing on-orbit extension services for satellites....

Enjoy some Noble Numbat novelty now - but excluding GNOME 46.1 It comes a bit later than usual, but if you are running Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur, you should start seeing prompts to upgrade to the new release....

Tesla CEO would have preferred no tariffs, even though they're beneficial to his company Tesla supremo Elon Musk is criticizing the import tax that the Biden administration has levied against Chinese electric vehicles, saying Tesla doesn't need them....

ChatGPT? Write me a really horrid nondisparagement exit clause OpenAI has told former and current staff that it won't enforce nondisparagement agreements that could have cost employees dearly....

Case brought by Netlist involved DRAM modules in computer systems Chipmaker Micron is being ordered to cough up a total of $445 million after losing a patent litigation case involving memory module technology brought by rival Netlist....

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....