The Register

ALSO: Singapore's government LLM, China beats 5G base station target, and Malaysia telecom gives in to 5G bandwidth purchasing policy ASIA IN BRIEF Mastercard announced last week it will allow linking of its credit cards to AliPay's digital wallet without advancing the cash to a prepaid account, thus easing foreigner travel in China....

Web super-biz dreams of lobbing 3,000-plus internet-relay birds into orbit Amazon is building a $120 million facility at the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida's Cape Canaveral, where it'll prepare Project Kuiper internet-relaying satellites for launch....

How does more natural gas consumption contribute to Redmond's eco dream? Unable to secure a steady supply of power from Ireland's national power grid, Microsoft has elected to build its own power plant to keep its 900 million datacenter development outside Dublin up and running....

Still, judge finds 'reason to believe' Feds are getting better at not abusing snooping powers The FBI improperly spied on a US senator, a state senator, and a state-level judge, among others, according to a previously secret court opinion released Friday afternoon....

Ousted opposition seeks ways to circumvent military junta and access resources In the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, the exiled government is betting on cryptocurrency to help it overthrow a military junta as it backs the Saturday launch of the nation's first crypto-based bank....

Nice one, Joe, get those non-binding voluntary pledges in early Seven top AI development houses have promised to test their models, share research, and develop methods to watermark machine-generated content in a bid to make the technology safer, the White House announced on Friday....

How does the Azure giant come back from this? A stolen Microsoft security key may have allowed Beijing-backed spies to break into a lot more than just Outlook and Exchange Online email accounts....

File under PEBCAK VirusTotal today issued a mea culpa, saying a blunder earlier this week by one of its staff exposed information belonging to 5,600 customers, including the email addresses of US Cyber Command, FBI, and NSA employees....

Hardware from a decade ago? More like grumpy old mog The US Air Force is turning to an unlikely place to beef up its electronic warfare countermeasures: a decade-old aircraft-mounted pod known as the "Angry Kitten."...

Coming soon and looking very promising - if you like your models skinny, anyway You can now order the new 16-inch model of the Framework user-repairable - and user-upgradeable - laptop....

For Zuck, it's just another marketing phrase. For developers, it's the rules of the road Opinion Meta's newly released large language model Llama 2 is not open source....

Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture 'some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system' NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spied a swarm of 37 boulders that were ejected from the asteroid Dimorphos after the DART spacecraft crashed into its surface in the world's first planetary defense test mission....

Yet mission vital to ERP giant's financial future remains on track SAP has disappointed markets following a readjustment of cloud revenue forecasts despite robust sales in its calendar Q2 profit and loss accounts....

More data means better neural net training, but it also means more cores Tesla says it is spending upwards of $1 billion on its Dojo supercomputer between now and the end of 2024 to help develop autonomous vehicle software....

COPPA load of this Technology that estimates how old someone is based on their face geometry may soon be used to verify internet users' ages, if an approach submitted to the US government gets the green light....

95% pertain to pension schemes administered by outsourcing giant, says Barings Law The law firm that last month sent a Letter of Claim to Capita over a security breach in late March says it has signed up nearly 1,000 clients as it prepares a class action lawsuit aimed at the outsourcing giant....

Case is without merit, finance and HR SaaS vendor insists HR and financial management software vendor Workday has moved to dismiss a class action case which alleges it produced a screening system resulting in racial bias....

This one cleaned things up so well that signals couldn't get through On Call Welcome once again to On Call, in which The Register connects readers with your peers to share stories of shocking support SNAFUs....

Just the facts, ma'am. More facts, in fact A US federal judge almost threw out a lawsuit brought by artists accusing text-to-image AI developers of copyright infringement, but decided to give the creatives a chance to improve and resubmit their complaint....

Plus: Senator teases larger surveillance reform bill coming soon A draft law that would prevent data brokers from selling US citizens' personal information to law enforcement and federal agencies without a warrant has been advanced by lawmakers....

Output of 4nm parts stalled until at least 2025 TSMC on Thursday said its under-construction chip fab in Arizona won't be up and running until at least 2025 because of a shortage of skilled workers....

Multiple safety investigations, patches for unsafe behavior, and the fact it's still a beta haven't dissuaded other OEMs? Tesla CEO Elon Musk let an interesting tidbit slip during yesterday's Q2 earnings call: his car company has plans to license its as-yet Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers....

No more embrace-and-extinguish M&As, but budgetary changes may make enforcement harder The US Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have proposed rewritten guidelines on how mergers should be scrutinized by American watchdogs - the goal being to crack down harder on competition-crushing takeovers....

Astronomers puzzled over what is powering GPM J1839-10 Astronomers believe they may have discovered a new type of stellar object after spotting something that has been beaming radio pulses every 22 minutes for more than three decades....

'One of the most significant hacks of recent years,' we're told The number of victims and costs tied to the MOVEit file transfer hack continues to climb as the fallout from the massive supply chain attack enters week seven....

Qualcomm's venture arm among the firms under investigation A US congressional panel is investigating four venture capital firms, including the investment arm of semiconductor company Qualcomm, regarding financing of Chinese AI, semiconductor and quantum technologies....

Tributes paid to husband, father, son and rogue-turned-consultant Obit Kevin Mitnick, probably the world's most-famous computer hacker - and subsequently writer, public speaker, and security consultant - has succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He was 59....

Global economic conditions? Check. Sluggish end market demand? Check. Customer inventory adjustment? Bingo! TSMC has reported a double digit year-on-year plunge in sales, even though it seems the results aren't as bad as analysts anticipated. The chipmaker expects business to pick up again in the coming months....

Oracle joins the analytics anywhere bandwagon, promises future access to AWS S3 Oracle has launched MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, an extension to its proprietary analytics platform which now supports object storage outside the database....

Not changing the standard, but tweaking how applications work over top A group of tech companies has kicked off a project to adapt the Ethernet standard to make it better suited for the demanding network requirements of AI and high performance computing (HPC) applications....

Nine-site system built for UAE's G42, but there'll be plenty to spare AI biz Cerebras has unveiled its Condor Galaxy supercomputer, a distributed cluster that, when complete, will span nine sites capable of 36 exaFLOPS of combined FP16 performance....

In hindsight, it's probably good practice to give clients access to cloud logs Microsoft announced on Wednesday it would provide all customers free access to cloud security logs - a service usually reserved for premium clients - within weeks of a reveal that government officials' cloud-based emails were targets of an alleged China-based hack....

Do distros even matter in the era of cloud and microservices? Register Kettle Linux is everywhere. Servers, phones, laptops, and more, whether people know it or not. And it's all over our headlines lately - for good reason....

Who needs a graphical desktop manager anyway? This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development....

Rishi Sunak fails to secure place in 95.5B program before Parliament packs up for holiday After taking years to get to the point where it could rejoin the EU's 95.5 billion Horizon science program, the UK now seems to want more time to think about its options en route to becoming a global science superpower....

I know, because I let it all flood in. And it was damaging to my mental health Column In 2008, I formed a hypothesis that everyone has something to teach you, so the more connected you are, the more you should be able to learn....

Plus: Spanish cops arrest Ukrainian scareware dev after ten-year hunt Ukrainian cops have disrupted a massive bot farm with more than 100 operators allegedly spreading fake news about the Russian invasion, leaking personal information belonging to Ukrainian citizens, and instigating fraud schemes....

Behavior of OpenAI models about as consistent as Office 365's uptime GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 - the models at the heart of OpenAI's ChatGPT - appear to have got worse at generating some code and performing other tasks between March and June this year. That's according to experiments performed by computer scientists in the United States. The tests also showed the models improved in some areas....

16 qubit system capable of modeling simple molecules, Kremlin says Scientists at Russia's International Center for Quantum Optics and Quantum Technologies recently presented a new quantum computer to the nation's President Vladimir Putin, proclaiming it to be the "most powerful in Russia today."...

Too bad GPU slingers keep shrinking the memory bus Keeping graphics processors fed, whether for large language models or the latest AAA games, takes a lot of memory bandwidth. That's exactly what Samsung's GDDR7 memory module, unveiled Wednesday, claims to deliver....

Results were anticipated to be dim, so where does this put outsourcer now? IT outsourcer Infosys has signed a five-year $2 billion AI and automation deal with an unnamed existing client just three days before it releases its Q1 2024 earnings, a report that experts have predicted would be dismal....

Fewer than 2% of workstations will be cut off in 'experiment' In a bid to shrink the attack surface of its army of employees, and thus boost security, Google is taking an experimental approach: cutting some of their workstations off from the internet....

Outages are declining, but when one does hit, it's expensive While datacenter operators are under pressure to reduce energy consumption, reliability is gradually increasing and there have been fewer reported disruptive outages. Meanwhile, trust in AI as a tool for operational decision making has actually fallen....

The approach is the same, but never mind the crypto or gift cards Cybercriminals are taking their business offline in a new approach to familiar technical support scams recently identified by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation....

Temasek's head of ML is optimistic about 'overhyped' technology In order to make generative AI accurate, new layers must be inserted into its stack, according to the head of AI at state-owned Singapore investment company Temasek....

Appears to have given up the idea of catching the component midair with a helicopter Rocket Lab has successfully launched seven satellites into space and recovered the booster for its Electron rocket from the Pacific Ocean....

Only obstacle left is the FTC, which is still licking its wounds from other recent antitrust defeats Broadcom was today given a provisional OK from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to close its $61 billion bid to acquire VMware, leaving only one major regulatory hurdle in the way of the deal: the US Federal Trade Commission....

Regional trade group applies to partake in Germany's probe of Redmond's cloud software policies A trade association of mostly European cloud providers and Amazon Web Services has filed an application to "actively participate" in a probe by Germany's competition watchdog to examine the dominance of Microsoft....

Though chip giant is only referring to deal as a 'proposed agreement' for now Asus looks set to take on the NUC brand from Intel, saying it aims to form its own NUC business unit to manufacture, sell, and support the line of mini PCs....

Nifty new features mostly go to Cinnamon users, though The latest update to Linux Mint is here, with expanded video file format support and a tweaked Cinnamon desktop. It's as cool and refreshing as ever....