The Register

Enterprises want a single data platform for data lakes and warehouse, but tech's not there yet, say analysts Analysis With confirmation of support for table formats Apache Iceberg and Hudi this week, Databricks is striving to broaden the appeal of its approach to data lakes, strengthening its dominance in machine learning to branch out to data warehouse-type workloads....

Bizarrely, there's been no suggestion that the bout won't happen How many CEOs in their 50s require their parents to step in when they're being a little shit?...

Company eyes return to memory growth, but warns life on the China ban-list could be hard US memory chipmaker Micron is still experiencing revenue way below last year's highs, but the company believes the industry has bottomed out, meaning prices for buyers are likely to rise again as demand picks up....

Desktop Ubuntu, but without the nonsense It's been a while coming, but the beta of Linux Mint 21.2, codenamed "Victoria", is here with a new version of the Cinnamon desktop among other updated features to enjoy....

Survey says most would prefer a gentle request A recent report covering 9,500 employers and 6,650 employees across 17 global markets found that those who forced workers to come back to office buildings are paying a price, with 42 percent saying they'd subsequently lost more employees than expected....

Decision to adapt software now subject of an independent management investigation Birmingham City Council is running parallel systems to compensate for the troubled implementation of an Oracle system which will suck in 46.5 million ($58.81 million) in additional spending in the current financial year....

Boffins plan 'digital twin' to help hit deadline, recruit heavy-hitting partners The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) has recruited Intel and the University of Cambridge for the compute resources it needs to develop Britain's prototype nuclear fusion reactor - including building a "digital twin" of the design to help with testing....

Not the iPhone maker's first think-of-the-children rodeo Apple has joined the rapidly growing chorus of tech organizations calling on British lawmakers to revise the nation's Online Safety Bill - which for now is in the hands of the House of Lords - so that it safeguards strong end-to-end encryption....

Ads and search giant also open sources offensive stereotype database, and gives Amazon a poke Google's Indian operation will test a feature that would offer navigation based on mentions of landmarks - kind of the way people do....

Forms a packaging posse to do the chiplet thing Samsung Electronics will commence mass production of a 2-nanometer silicon manufacturing process in 2025, the chaebol announced on Wednesday at its annual Foundry Forum....

Only for Ampere - but with a licencing twist that means Intel and AMD can't relax Oracle has certified its flagship Database 19c Enterprise Edition database for the Arm architecture, in the cloud or on-prem - provided it runs on an Ampere processor....

Group-IB spinout confirms Kislitsin is wanted by both Washington and Moscow A Russian network security specialist and former editor of Hacker magazine who is wanted by the US and Russia on cybercrime charges has been detained in Kazakhstan as the two governments seek his extradition....

Psst, some American user data still stored in China, too Five TikTok users who sued to overturn Montana's state-wide public ban on the video-sharing app have been getting secret support for their case from an unsurprising source: TikTok itself....

Where did they get the idea this bot was potentially spitting out personal info? Oh, from The Register Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies' AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent....

We'd sure like to see a bot unpick a failed update or handle users struggling to find the 'any' key Register Kettle We've seen a slew of claims lately once again predicting dire times ahead for IT system administrators: if they're not under threat from AI and outsourcing, they face an increasingly demanding work atmosphere....

A tale of emergency firewalling, a little bit of victim blaming, and workflow scripts gone berserk This month you may have noticed the servers used by the GMP project - an open source arithmetic library at the heart of GCC and other programs - slowed to a crawl. It was due to a deluge of network traffic, the source of which is quite surprising....

As we yearn for a return to a truly decentralized internet Systems Approach Next week I am heading to Edinburgh University, where I did my PhD back in the 1980s, to give a lecture as part of the events celebrating 60 years of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh....

Another win for Musk: Ford, GM, Rivian and Volvo have already announced plans to dump CCS The winds of EV charging standards change continue to favor Elon Musk, as the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has confirmed plans to standardize Tesla's in-house car charging hardware....

Fraudulent cash cow milked investors for almost $9M The Eastern District of California has serious beef with a bloke whose cow manure green energy scheme turned out to be udder bull....

To protect against weapons or economic interests - either way, it's bad news for some vendors Washington is understood to be considering further restrictions on the export to China of advanced chips used for AI processing, moves which could dent the sales of companies including Nvidia and AMD....

Ripples rebounding and reflecting from Red Hat's rebuff of RHEL rebuilds The backlash against Red Hat's decision to stop distributing the source code of RHEL for free to non-customers continues to widen....

Police reported backlog of 999 calls after unspecified technical error Britain's communications watchdog is investigating former state telco BT over a "UK-wide disruption" that prevented some calls connecting with emergency services on 25 June....

The labs will look at AI and robotics for manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and cities European officials - who reached political agreement on the EU's new Data Act last night -have launched four labs to test AI applications before they're released to the general public....

NASA space suits provide inspiration to Swiss and Brit boffins Drones built to withstand extreme temperatures have passed initial testing in an effort to reduce risks to rescuers in fire emergencies....

Clunky, costly, literally sickening data silos just aren't better than the real world Businesses are not rushing to adopt the metaverse, according to analyst firm Gartner - because it's just not very good or useful....

Proof-of-concept study shows it's possible to bypass high levels of security The rise of off-the-shelf AI tools that can clone human voices has forced developers of voice authentication software to build an extra layer of security to detect whether an audio sample appears to be human or machine-generated....

There's gold in them thar mobes. Also copper, silver and cobalt The GSM Association (GSMA) and a dozen carriers have announced a plan to make a modest dent in the number of mobile phones that languish, unused, unloved, and unrecycled....

The 'upgrade' is free, yet an amnesty is needed despite months of warning Microsoft's bid to have customers of Teams Rooms hardware acquire corporate licenses is going so well - not! - that the software giant has extended the deadline to sign up by 90 days, even though the move involves price reductions....

They're vetted, almost acculturated, and will be booted from the US if they lose their gig Canada has launched a bid to attract techies working in the USA on the notorious H-1B visa, by offering them the chance to move north....

Windows PCs in the cloud, spending Sony out of business, mobile woes, and more - and the files to read Microsoft's US legal battle to acquire gaming giant Activision Blizzard continued on Tuesday with courtroom testimony from Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, a company likely to be seriously affected if the deal goes through....

Packets you make at home or on mobile devices are in Switchzilla's sights, to make hybrid workers happy On the heels of Cisco's Accedian acquisition last week, the network giant has snapped up SamKnows to extend its ThousandEyes network performance monitoring (NPM) stack to remote and hybrid workers....

These expensive office buildings aren't for decoration - and that goes for the rest of ya, too Government employees of the US state of Ohio are in for a rude awakening - and commute - if the state's budget bill for the next year passes, as it includes an amendment that will limit those workers to one day a week of working from home....

Just as America's Supremes set a high bar for cyberstalking It's bad enough there's some Android stalkerware out there with the not-at-all-creepy moniker LetMeSpy. Now someone's got hold of the information the app collects - such as victims' text messages and call logs - as well as the email addresses of those who sought out the software, and leaked it all....

Or so the Europlod says Police breaking into and snooping on the EncroChat encrypted messaging network has led to 6,558 arrests worldwide and nearly 740 million seized in criminal funds, according to cops in France and the Netherlands....

Failure to match metadata with packaged files is perfect for supply chain attacks The npm Public Registry, a database of JavaScript packages, fails to compare npm package manifest data with the archive of files that data describes, creating an opportunity for the installation and execution of malicious files....

It's not the most accurate atomic clock in the world, but the NIST team behind it believes they can fix that There's a new atomic clock on the block over at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and while it's not as accurate as its predecessors it does have one big advantage: it's small enough to stick in your pocket....

Still the most profitable arm of Bezos's biz Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to spend $7.8 billion between now and 2030 expanding its datacenter operations in the US state of Ohio....

Submerge an Nvidia LLM 20,000 leagues under the data lake Snowflake Summit Nvidia and cloud data warehouse company Snowflake have teamed up to help organizations build and train their own custom AI models using data they have stored within Snowflake's platform....

Data sales 'can do real harm' Analysis The US Supreme Court's decision a year ago to overturn Roe v Wade has shone a light on the amount of personal, sensitive data that tech companies collect every day -and how that information can be used for nefarious purposes....

But can it run Crysis? The flexibility of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) makes them ideal for all kinds of applications ranging from smartNICs, telecom networks, and even for emulating retro game consoles....

Who are you calling a VLOP? asks German web fashionista Pick two massive platforms you'd think would be first to bring the fight to the EU lawmakers over the Digital Services Act... then forget both of them. Because it was German fashion retailer Zalando that filed a lawsuit today....

Conflicting feedback makes 2023 an especially difficult year to predict Changing priorities among enterprise and cloud providers are driving apparently conflicting trends, according to research outfit Omdia, with demand for compute resources remaining high, especially as ChatGPT has spurred interest in AI training, yet at the same time server shipments are declining....

Indian firm nabs 10-year contract, taking pensions wins to 1.73B On the back of a 1.5 billion contract win, Tata Consultancy Services is at it again, bagging a 234 million ($297 million) deal to administer the UK's Teachers' Pension Scheme (TPS)....

Next on the agenda: ClippyGPT, because why not? An anonymous developer has created a ChatGPT client for Windows 3.1, because some people like to keep one foot firmly in the past even as they explore the future....

James Webb scope finds CH - aka methyl cations - without which you probably wouldn't be reading this Astronomers wielding the James Webb Space Telescope have detected methyl cations - important precursor molecules needed to create proteins and DNA and therefore fundamental to carbon-based life forms....

Acquires Apptio and plans 'virtual command center' for multicloud IBM has announced it will acquire Apptio for $4.6 billion and use it to build a 'virtual command center' for spend management and optimization" of enterprise IT....

If the US or Europe dare criticize this deal, it would be rank hypocrisy The government of Japan's investment vehicle will acquire JSR Corporation, a key provider of chipmaking products and expertise....

Acquisition means for both parties get a shot at leading the roll-your-own AI market Analysis Databricks has announced it will acquire generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.3 billion, in a deal that will make it easier for private entities to train and run their own custom machine learning models....

Dr Evil would be proud Alphabet's plan to deliver high-speed internet service using helium-filled balloons may have been a bit too loony to work. Instead, the so-called Moonshot Factory has seemingly taken a page out of Dr Evil's playbook and started strapping lasers to buildings....

Tech tweaked ahead of rollout in July, Mozilla and Apple still not interested Google plans to ship its Topics API when Chrome 115 arrives on July 12. That's the API that's supposed to allow advertisers to target netizens with adverts tailored to their individual interests without impinging on people's privacy....