The Register

If customers can slash bills by 'optimizing,' what does that mean for revenue? Opinion Snowflake should have been enjoying positive results at the end of last month. Revenue for the second for the quarter was $674.0 million, a 36 percent leap on the same period last year, albeit with an operating loss of $285.4 million, up from $207.7 million on Q2 2022....

All PaaS, including RedShift, gets a three-point bump. IaaS users outside the US get the nastiest numbers IBM has announced price rises for its cloud services, effective January 1, 2024....

Authorizes strike for voice and motion capture talent at major game studios The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has authorized its members employed in the interactive media industry at giant games studios - including Activision, Epic Games, and Electronic Arts - to strike....

The legacy lives on even though EC2-Classic and its flat network are no more Amazon Web Services has made good on its 2021 promise to retire EC2-Classic - the networking construct that underpinned its initial compute infrastructure-as-a-service offering....

You read that right: a speaker. Because merchants like music, electronic payments, and $8.50 hardware Indian payments outfit Paytm has launched a point-of-sale unit that incorporates, of all things, a speaker....

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk... not the bestest of buddies? An Amazon shareholder has filed a lawsuit on the company alleging it didn't do its due diligence when it awarded launch contracts for the company's Project Kuiper satellite constellation to Blue Origin and others....

One more reason to keep them short and sweet Microsoft has announced billing in public preview for Teams recording and transcription APIs, with pricing starting at 3 cents per minute for recordings....

Irony, not barbed wire, cuts the deepest The risk of running obsolete code and hardware was highlighted after attackers exfiltrated data from a UK supplier of high-security fencing for military bases. The initial entry point? A Windows 7 PC....

Hold onto your SQL Server, enterprise admins Microsoft has reminded users that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will soon be disabled by default in Windows....

When your '90s nostalgia craves a modern touch In the OS/2 world, ArcaOS 5.1 is a long-awaited release which enables this 32-bit OS from the late 20th century to run on modern PC hardware....

Came in wake of the force publishing their own people's data in botched FoI Nearly four weeks after the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) published data on 10,000 employees in a botched response to a Freedom of Information request, another two men, aged 21 and 22, have been released on bail after being arrested under the Terrorism Act....

Plus: AI luminary Douglas Lenat passed away, and US newspaper chain halts publishing of AI-generated articles AI In brief X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, updated its privacy policy this week stating that it may train its AI models on user posts....

Take up less CPU time and memory? What amazing tech is this?! Eggheads at Vrije Universiteit (VU) in the Netherlands recommend that people with Android devices use native apps rather than web apps when viewing popular sites like ESPN, Pinterest, Spotify, and YouTube because native apps are more energy efficient....

Open-book exams aren't nearly open enough Opinion Knowing when the universe is trying to tell you something is a core competency for many paths through life. You can't pass an exam in that, sadly, but perhaps we should consider what links these three stories: Microsoft moving to open-book exams for certification, ChatGPT passing law and other exams, and people are tearing their hair out trying to recruit an IT skilled workforce. Could it be that the way qualifications work doesn't pass muster?...

Could be among the first to come under new procurement rules next year The UK government has begun laying the groundwork for new technology buying arrangements which could become the vehicle for up to 12 billion ($15.12 billion) in spending....

All he did was follow the example of the boss. And fail to foresee obvious consequences Who, Me? Dear reader, is that you? Can it be? Why, that can only mean one thing: that yet again it is Monday, and therefore time for an instalment of Who, Me? - the column in which Reg readers confess the times they really didn't get things quite right....

Just three people were on duty in Australia when 'power sag' struck and software failures left them blind Microsoft's preliminary analysis of an incident that took out its Australia East cloud region last week - and which appears also to have caused trouble for Oracle - attributes the incident in part to insufficient staff numbers on site, slowing recovery efforts....

Solar roller on Australia-spanning race packs an Nvidia Jetson, radio link to an AWS edge box, and Starlink uplink Special Projects Bureau Revisited Long-time Reg readers may recall that in 2011 and 2013 The Register's Special Projects Bureau followed the World Solar Challenge - an event that sees solar-powered cars cross Australia from north to south over 3,000km of roads and some of the planet's least welcoming environments....

Microsoft ends development of free basic word processor bundled with Windows Microsoft has quietly deprecated WordPad, the bare bones word processor it's offered at no additional cost to users ever since including it with Windows 95....

ALSO: Brazilian stalkerware database ripped by the short hairs, a fast fashion breach, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief The latest round of Apple's Security Research Device (SRD) program is open, giving security researchers a chance to get their hands on an unlocked device - and Apple's blessing to attack it and test its security capabilities....

PLUS: China allows first wave of chatbots, India's sun-spotter soars; ASUS smacks down speculation it will quit smartphones Asia in Brief Samsung last Friday announced it has developed a 32-gigabit DDR5 DRAM die using its 12 nanometer-class process technology....

Turns out we can have nice things? The sudo command-line tool has been implemented in the Rust programming language to hopefully rid it of any exploitable memory-safety bugs....

Big blow to blighters' blow-by-the-boatload blueprint Video Efforts by cops to seize and shut down encrypted messaging apps favored by criminals, and then mine their conversations for evidence, appear to have led to more arrests - plus the seizure of about 2.7 tonnes of cocaine....

Memory-optimized beast prioritizes weapon-sim perf over flashy FLOPS figs After months of work unpacking, installing, and deploying the various subsystems and supporting infrastructure, Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) latest super, the Crossroads system, has been installed....

Japanese foundry startup also shipping engineers off to US to study IBM chip tech Japan's Rapidus broke ground on its IIM-1 plant in Hokkaido on Friday, kicking off a flurry of hiring as the foundry upstart races to bring its 2nm wafer fab online by 2025....

Can't have you finding the ghosts in those E-meter machines, now can we? Right to repair advocates have made significant gains across the US of late, but the latest challenge to the movement faces a challenge from a surprising place: the Church of Scientology....

Oktapus phishing campaign criminals are back in action Customers of cloudy identification vendor Okta are reporting social engineering attacks targeting their IT service desks in attempts to compromise user accounts with administrator permissions....

Analyst firm warns that users need to understand what it is they're buying One of SAP's preferred methods for migrating systems to the cloud risks IT departments losing control of operational running costs, Gartner has warned....

Stock prices shoot up thanks to tech flavor of the moment Dell and Samsung are the latest beneficiaries of the current frenzy of speculation surrounding anything AI related, with both vendors seeing a rise in share prices related to their future AI prospects....

UK emergency services organizations urged to consider alternatives What3Words, the website and app that translates physical coordinates into short memorable combinations of words, has been praised and criticized over the years....

Still, it's blisteringly fast and systemd-free too The latest release of antiX is Linux how it used to be, in the good way. It's not the friendliest, but it does everything - and, wow, it's fast....

'Pre-leasing' also on the up as customers try to grab space in bit barns as they're being built The global economy might be suffering from inflation and low growth, but that hasn't stopped the first half of 2023 from being the busiest on record for datacenter takeup in Europe, according to new research....

WebAssembly is getting a lot of hype, but is it the game-changer some think it is? Opinion Beginning in 1995 and for decades after, JavaScript was the only game worth playing when it came to web-based scripting. While incredibly versatile, JavaScript had its limitations, especially regarding performance-intensive tasks. As the web evolved, so did the demand for more power, speed, and flexibility in web applications. Enter WebAssembly (WASM)....

Engineer trumped angry user by pointing to the rulebook On Call With the weekend looming, The Register once again brings you an instalment of On Call, the weekly column in which sysadmins share stories of their eventual success....

The past seven years have seen improved mapping, AR and AI, and the developer's gotta catch 'em all ahead of Monster Hunter launch Niantic, the Google spin-out behind the smash success augmented reality game Pokemon Go, is set to release Monster Hunter Now - a game that even before launch is struggling in its predecessor's shadow....

Huawei's mystery smartphone excites, as top laptop-makers reportedly sign up to make in India India and China are both celebrating hardware-related wins that are being hailed as signs the respective nations' tech industries are in rude health....

As Nutanix celebrates Cisco hook-up and quirky cloud repatriations Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has dismissed concerns that China could derail the semiconductor giant's acquisition of VMware....

Regolith scraped from the surface of Bennu will reach Earth on 24 September NASA is preparing to nab its first-ever asteroid sample as the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft drops a capsule containing fragments of the potentially hazardous object Bennu onto Earth....

'Embarrassingly parallel' protoype baked for DARPA to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon at massive scale Hot Chips Intel has used this week's Hot Chips conference in California to show off a 528-thread processor with 1TB/s silicon photonics interconnects that's designed to chew the largest analytics workloads, while sipping power....

Hey, stop Zucking up my data! Netizens can ask Meta, the home of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, to not train its generative AI models on at least some of your personal data....

That's what we call a static shock Even ransomware operators make mistakes, and in the case of ransomware gang the Key Group, a cryptographic error allowed a team of security researchers to develop and release a decryption tool to restore scrambled files....

While ASML says it can keep selling DUV kit to China through 2023 You can add parts of the Middle East to the list of regions where you can't buy Nvidia's top-specced A100 and H100 accelerators, judging from a regulatory filing by the chip designer for investors this week....

Not so much X gon' give it to you, you gonna give it to X As August and summer in the northern hemisphere draw to a close, Elon Musk's Twitter is making several changes to its platform, including a privacy policy update noting that it plans to begin collecting biometric data and employment information from the people still using the site, if provided....

DoD is dead last for tech support, equipment, communication, and function, say staff When it comes to US government employee satisfaction with IT services, one agency finds itself continually at the bottom of the heap: The rather crucial Department of Defense....

Five Eyes nations warn of hit against Ukrainian military systems Russia's Sandworm crew is using an Android malware strain dubbed Infamous Chisel to remotely access Ukrainian soldiers' devices, monitor network traffic, access files, and steal sensitive information, according to a Five Eyes report published Thursday....

Everybody chill, we're still in the cart Data cloud vendor Snowflake has felt the need to publish a clarification following statements on payments from key customer Instacart, which are likely to add up to $100 million over four years....

CRM vendor might find itself pushed to the margins to keep investors happy Salesforce has posted upbeat results and raised its forecasts for revenue, operating margin, and operating cash flow for next year. But price rises announced earlier this year are yet to affect customers, the CRM giant said....

He praised Apple for its 'open source' tech - now he'll oversee AI use to defend Britain from its foes Comment British politician Grant Shapps, who once told The Register that an incoming* Tory government would be the "most tech-savvy in history," has been appointed as the UK's new defense chief....

Breaking up is hard to do: Redmond reluctantly lets EU play matchmaker for software suite flings Microsoft has blinked first in its dispute with the EU over bundling Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and will now allow European customers to buy the two software suites without it. It also pledged to make it easier for rival meeting tools to work with the two suites....

Maria Markstedter spent years writing about chip biz's ISA, is a tad miffed by heavy-handed takedown tactics If you fancy creating a blog or website to discuss the Arm architecture or the Softbank-owned outfit that develops it, keep the British CPU designer's name out of the domain name you choose - or draw the wrath of its lawyers....