The Register

Web giant promises personal info and files won't be used to train this chatbot Google Bard can now retrieve and process information from your Gmail, Docs, and Drive as well as other applications, on top of searching the internet....

Or so says US Commerce Secretary Further escalating the rivalry between the US and China, America's Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo earlier today voiced open dismay over Huawei putting out a smartphone powered by a sophisticated 7nm homegrown processor during her visit to the Middle Kingdom....

People try to put us down, talkin' 'bout ML generation Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger used his keynote at the chip giant's Innovation conference in San Jose on Tuesday to repeatedly hammer home the idea of running large language models and other machine-learning workloads, like Llama 2 or Stable Diffusion, locally, privately, and securely on users' own PCs....

NetChoice 'likely to prevail' in First Amendment argument, court rules A federal judge in California has blocked the state's online kids' safety law from going into effect while a lawsuit brought by Meta, Google, and other tech giants moves through the courts....

And less than half the cost of a single F-35 - bargain! The Department of Defense has become the latest US government body to push for next-gen battery manufacturing in America, with a $30 million (24m) investment in an energy storage systems campus in the Lone Star State....

Allegations date back a decade to leaked Snowden docs Cavium, a maker of semiconductors acquired in 2018 by Marvell, was allegedly identified in documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden as a vendor of semiconductors backdoored for US intelligence. Marvell denies it or Cavium placed backdoors in products at the behest of the US government....

Feds claim sniper scope displays sold in sanctions-busting move A Russian national helped smuggle, via shell companies in Hong Kong, more than $1.6 million in microelectronics to Moscow potentially to support its war against Ukraine, it is claimed....

Download rates stabilize after influx of users dragged on service SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband service has become the provider to beat on speed, according to network intelligence outfit Ookla, although the company faces competition coming soon from a rash of rivals....

A look at America's next top (climate) model ... in fine resolution The Bell will toll for some of the more interesting climate research projects on one of the world's most powerful supercomputers starting this year....

Database company, which went through an IPO in December last year, was still in search of credit facility as of August Venture capital firm Runa Capital has made a bid for MariaDB, the database company which endured a disappointing IPO last year and is still in discussions for additional funding....

Electron rocket was lost when reusable first stage separated early this morning It's back to zero days without incident at Rocket Lab, whose 41st launch ended in failure this morning, breaking a streak that had been going since 2021....

Promise of neutral data layer between vendors' vested interests attracts $26M It is a year since a flurry of vendors including Snowflake, Google, and Cloudera backed the Apache Iceberg table format -promising to bring analytics to data wherever it sits....

Yes, because automated accounts are really the problem here Comment You couldn't make it up. The godlike genius Elon Musk, under the cosh from accusations of rising antisemitism on the website formerly known as Twitter, invites Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have a chat at Tesla's Fremont factory....

That sound? It's the screeching noise of a massive U-turn as games engine biz admits mistakes Unity is backtracking on commercial Ts&Cs for developers using its games engine, claiming that as part of a new tiering system under consideration fees will be capped and will apply only to top tier customers....

Fewer boxes shipped, but with 8 H100s apiece, revenue is up amid AI frenzy The server market for the near future is going to be about GPUs, GPUs, and more GPUs, according to Omdia. The market researcher estimates the volume of Nvidia H100 GPUs alone shipped during calendar Q2 added up to more than 900 tons in weight....

Back to 'manual' order processing for $7B household cleaning biz, financial impact will be 'material' The Clorox Company, makers of bleach and other household cleaning products, doesn't expect operations to return to normal until near month end as it combs over "widescale disruption to operations" caused by cyber baddies....

You're going to need liquid-cooled servers, 415V PDUs, two-ton racks, and plenty of software management The infrastructure behind popular AI workloads is so demanding that Schneider Electric has suggested it may be time to reevaluate the way we build datacenters....

AI dev assistants can be convinced to spill secrets learned during training Updated GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisper can be coaxed to emit hardcoded credentials that these AI models captured during training, though not all that often....

Legacy - sorry 'heritage' - support contract includes case managements systems The UK courts have awarded CGI a contract worth up to 60 million ($74.2 million) to keep its "heritage application" up and running after the much-delayed implementation of a new case management system....

As outline becomes visible, including the return of ZFS, kernel 6.4 glides across the Styx into eternity The next release of Ubuntu will appear in mid-October, and the latest daily builds reveal some of the features of the forthcoming interim release....

Time to retire that Nokia N97 at last? BT has updated the schedule to phase out 3G services from its networks a little later than planned, saying this will now start early next year....

Developer recounts rideshare giant's strange Middle Kingdom journey, and its fears interns were spies A developer named Matt Basta has posted an extraordinary account of working for Uber, where he was asked to develop a substitute for Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program under peculiar circumstances - only to see his work discarded....

Chip designer has extended support for modest desktop CPUs, citing Intel setting expectations for cheap and not-so-speedy silicon AI-on-the-desktop is not yet a thing, and its uses may not be apparent for some time, according to Justin Galton, director and worldwide segment leader for AMD's commercial client business....

Beijing reckons they could be handy for manufacturing, but for now they're just a mess China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced Monday it will form a working group to set metaverse standards - becuase without them, metaversal matters have meandered....

Local corporate regulator warns boards that cyber is totally a directorial duty Australia will build "six cyber shields around our nation" declared home affairs minister Clare O'Neill yesterday, as part of a national cyber security strategy....

CVs are starting to appear on social media because staff think it's a sensible time to be in the shop window VMware last week held a staff meeting at which it reportedly foreshadowed job cuts - perhaps before its acquisition by Broadcom closes in late October....

A different type of ARM - the Augmented Reality Microscope Google has contributed software to an AI-powered microscope the US Department of Defense hopes will help pathologists spot cancerous cells in tissue samples much more quickly....

US DoE particle will be a 'strobe light' in atomic disco The world's most powerful publicly known X-ray laser at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has fired its first pulses with an upgrade that could see it scan our world in strange new ways....

Unauthenticated and remote code execution possible without dropping a file on disk About 79 percent of public-facing Juniper SRX firewalls remain vulnerable to a single security flaw can allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code on the devices, according to threat intelligence platform provider VulnCheck....

Don't get too excited, tech won't be ready until the end of the decade Intel's latest gambit to keep Moores' Law on life support involves ditching organic substrates - the intermediary through which data and power flows on its way in and out of a compute die - for glass ones....

Board member sold off stock just before listing, Lyft forgot to mention it Ride sharing firm Lyft has agreed to pay the US Securities and Exchange Commission $10 million to settle charges that it failed to report a company director's role in a massive pre-IPO stock deal....

Now-NASA boffin not impressed Last October, Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) was sued by a former chief information officer for allegedly falsifying government security compliance reports....

Rumors point to Panay headed to Amazon to take over for outgoing Alexa and Echo chief David Limp Panos Panay, Microsoft chief product officer and VP for devices, abruptly announced his departure today after 19 years with the company....

ITC judge rules you can't sue over invalid patents, but the fight goes on The years-long legal drama resulting from a brief fling between Google and smart speaker maker Sonos has resulted in another loss for the Chocolate Factory, which had its claims of copyright infringement tossed out by a US International Trade Commission (ITC) judge Friday....

Included secrets, private keys, passwords, 30,000+ internal Teams messages A Microsoft employee accidentally exposed 38 terabytes of private data while publishing a bucket of open-source AI training data on GitHub, according to Wiz security researchers who spotted the leaky account and reported it to the Windows giant....

Yet another attempt at a permanent takedown - but will it stick? A group of large US science and education publishers are trying to get "notorious" online database Library Genesis -known by students as LibGen - kicked offline and claw back some of the cash they allege the owners made from copyright infringement....

US military enlists public to help track down missing jet Updated Anyone who has ever misplaced their car keys can sympathize with the US military, which has reportedly lost one of its F-35 stealth fighters after the pilot ejected but the aircraft continued flying, and is now seeking public help to find it....

At least it was the weekend Azure SQL Database caused some annoyance over the weekend with admins on the US east coast unable to connect to the service following a network infrastructure power failure....

Run 3 reboot provoked challenges for Europe's particle-smashing project Europe's particle accelerator at CERN spews out around a petabyte of data daily, which means monitoring the computing infrastructure that processes the data is crucial....

Auditors unable to sign off accounts partly due to lack of IT controls amid challenging ERP deployment Birmingham City Council turned off security features on its Oracle ERP system, meaning auditors have been unable to sign off the accounts for Europe's largest local government body, which effectively went bankrupt earlier this year....

Little chip promises big power savings AMD's latest CPU is a shrunken Epyc optimized for power-limited and thermally challenging telco and cloud edge deployments....

Also, LockBit gets a new second stringer, AirTag owners find yet another illicit use, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief Californians may be on their way to the nation's first "do not broker" list with the passage of a bill that would create a one-stop service for residents of the Golden State who want to opt out of being tracked by data brokers....

But the damage has already been done Hell hath no fury like a developer scorned, and Unity is finding out the hard way after poorly received adjustments to its runtime policy last week....

AMBERSQUID operation takes AWS's paths less travelled in search of compute As cloud native computing continues to gain popularity, so does the risk posed by criminals seeking to exploit the unwary. One newly spotted method targets services on the AWS platform, but not necessarily the ones you might think....

This week's story is brought to you by the letters C, E, O, as well as B and S Readers may have noticed there's a great deal of interest in AI at the moment but can the merest mention of those two letters drive up a company's share price? The answer seems to be yes....

Fuming customers steamed as they'd already paid luxury prices Opinion It's enough to warm the cockles of more than your heart. After an experimental rollout in a few test markets including Britain, posh motor maker BMW has abandoned its subscription plan to activate heated seats....

At least the economists seem to have a better grip on tech than Online Safety Bill pushers... "Nobody in this country wants there to be programmable digital currency like the Chinese system, where the government can basically determine what you look at, what you're spending, and determine what you can spend it on," said a member of the Treasury Committee grilling the incoming deputy governor of Financial Stability for the Bank of England....

Where there's smoke, there's ire Who, Me? The world is still turning, which sadly means another Monday has come around and many readers must resume the tedious business of exchanging their labor for currency - a tiresome necessity that The Register marks by each week offering up a new instalment of Who, Me? in which readers reveal errors they almost escaped....

Maybe better together? Duo announce AI and entertainment product partnership South Korean telecom SK Broadband and Netflix have called a truce in their dispute over who should pay for the trillions of bits of video content flowing over mobile networks....

PLUS: Coca-Cola's AI-designed drink to debut; chip startups struggle to compete with Nvidia as funding flees AI in brief A judge working at the UK's Court of Appeal has admitted he used ChatGPT to help him write a ruling....