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Zen 2 flaw more simple than Spectre, exploit code already out there - get patching when you can AMD has started issuing some patches for its processors affected by a serious silicon-level bug dubbed Zenbleed that can be exploited by rogue users and malware to steal passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets from software running on a vulnerable system....

The pain and joy of using an old OS on hardware newer than it is Warning: the stunts in this article were performed by professionals, so for your safety and the protection of those around you, do not attempt any of the stunts you're about to read unless qualified....

Meanwhile, Einstein dismantles the creation myth in $125,000 letter A pair of Apple-branded sneakers have gone on sale for $50,000 through art broker Sotheby's....

One in five users can expect an audit in the next three years Most organizations adapting to Oracle's new licensing terms for Java expect the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model, according to Gartner estimates....

TSMC has too much capacity when China has made no secret of its desire for Taiwan AMD is considering broadening chip production suppliers as it believes it is too reliant on semiconductor giant TSMC and this places the supply chain at risk of disruption....

X marks the rot: It's Elon's fave letter and way forward for the 'everything app' Mercurial billionaire Elon Musk has ditched the Twitter brand name in favor of a white "X" on a black background, and is kicking the blue bird logo out of the nest to signal a world-bending shake-up at the biz....

Plus: Apple is building its own large language models internally, and AI South Park is terrible AI in brief Judges have tentatively rejected Google's request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a former engineer who accused the company of firing him for challenging an internal AI chip design research project....

More puffins than people on Lundy, and no one wants to say how much it cost BT and satellite operator OneWeb are now providing internet access to the island of Lundy as part of the UK government's program to connect up hard-to-reach areas of the country, but the pair are strangely reluctant to discuss costs....

What do you call an air-gapped Googler? Anything you like, they can't hear you Opinion It seems intuitively obvious. Disconnect your PC from the internet, and it's safe from attack. Google thinks enough of the idea to try cutting off a couple of thousand workstations from the pestilential swamp. The air gap is an experiment in increasing the cost of mounting an attack, says the company....

Penguins are OK with glaciers. Academics not so much Who, Me? Ah, gentle reader, we find ourselves once again at that juncture of the week we call Who, Me? in which your fellow Regizens' tales of technical not-quite-competence brighten an otherwise dull Monday....

Sign of confidence or ... something bigger? Alibaba will not participate in a planned share buyback of its fintech arm, Ant Group, according to a regulatory filing lodged with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sunday....

ALSO: Amazon's child-sized COPPA fine, smart tech security labels coming to the US, and this week's critical vulns Infosec in brief A security weakness in Google Cloud Build could have allowed attackers to tamper with organizations' code repositories and application images, according to Orca Security researchers....

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....