Feed the-register The Register

The Register

Link https://www.theregister.com/
Feed http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom
Copyright Copyright © 2024, Situation Publishing
Updated 2024-05-02 18:31
IBM quantum system elbows into Arm-powered Fugaku supercomputer
Slotting in the module for ambitious next-generation compute goals Japan's Arm-based Fugaku supercomputer is to be paired with a newly developed quantum system from IBM as part of a project to research and develop future computing systems....
NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer
Tried to sell top secret docs for the low, low price of $85K A former NSA employee has been sentenced to 262 months in prison for attempting to freelance as a Russian spy....
ChatGPT Plus remembers everything you forgot you told it to remember
Unless you live in Europe or Korea OpenAI's Memory feature is now broadly available for ChatGPT Plus users, meaning many more can feel vaguely uncomfortable about how much the chatbot is "remembering" about their preferences....
Enterprise browser maker Island says it's now worth $3B
Big rise in valuation... for browser that won't let you Control-V any data copied inside it Insta-unicorn Island, with its browser built for the enterprise, has some interesting funding news: it just hit a $3 billion valuation in an era where it's AI or bust in the VC world....
Razer made to pay $1.2M over 'N95' face mask that wasn't
Customers to get their light-up cyberpunk respirators refunded Remember when Razer, better known for overpriced peripheral hardware with RGB blinkenlights aimed at gamers, released an overpriced "N95-grade" face mask?...
EU duties might not be enough to hold off flood of Chinese EVs
15 to 30% won't touch the sides... 50%? Now you're talking Import duties of 40 to 50 percent will be needed to shield the European auto industry from China-based producers, according to a new report....
Satellite of love: SES and Intelsat finally tie the knot in $3.1B acquisition
Second time lucky as competition from Starlink and pals increases Satellite operator SES is to acquire Intelsat for $3.1 billion, creating an entity with more than 100 Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and 26 Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites....
Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License
Software doyen hopes to achieve a third impossible thing Interview Bruce Perens believes he can do three impossible things, having already accomplished two of them....
Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels
There are many reasons why this is likely more trouble than it's worth EV carmaker Tesla is considering a wonderful money-making wheeze - use all of that compute power in its vehicles to process workloads for cash, like a kind of AWS on wheels....
European Commission starts formal probe of Meta over election misinformation
Europe takes action after Facebook parent withdraws monitoring tool The European Commission has launched formal proceedings against Meta, alleging failure to properly monitor distribution by "foreign actors" of political misinformation before June's European elections....
Xubuntu 24.04: A minimal install that does what it says on the tin
This nearly Snap-free Ubuntu remix may be about about to win friends and influence people Xubuntu 24.04 is out, and offers a minimal installation option that is considerably more minimal than the other official flavors....
Novel vitrimer plastics promise greener PCBs
Even the least recyclable part of the process could be recovered 91 percent of the time A recent study proposes that vitrimer could potentially be used for making printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are much more repairable and recyclable than the ones we use today....
Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace
No it's not Birmingham this time. West Sussex County Council ERP replacement price to hit 40M A local authority on the southern coast of England expects the cost of swapping its ERP system from SAP to Oracle to go from 2.6 million ($3.26 million) to nearly 40 million ($50 million), as the council seeks a new implementation partner for a project that began nearly five years ago....
Vantage enters crowded Irish datacenter market with new Dublin site
On-site generation plant aims to 'alleviate pressure on energy demand from the grid' Vantage Data Centers is joining the crowded Irish datacenter market with its first site in the Emerald Isle due to come online in 2024. In view of ongoing power constraints in the country, the project is to include on-site power generation....
Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe
Infosec eggheads find iGiant left EU iOS 17 users open to being tracked around the web Apple's grudging accommodation of European antitrust rules by allowing third-party app stores on iPhones has left users of its Safari browser exposed to potential web activity tracking....
China to launch sample return mission to the far side of the Moon – maybe next week
And hatches 2030 plan to beat US for Mars rock retrieval China's space program will next week launch mission that aims to land on the Moon, take samples, and bring them back to Earth....
Politicians call for ban on 'killer robots' and the curbing of AI weapons
'This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation' Video Austria's foreign minister on Monday likened the rise of military artificial intelligence to the existential crisis faced by the creators of the first atomic bomb, and called for a ban on "killer robots"....
Here’s another thing AI can do: Return Samsung’s memory biz to profit
HBM will help too. Foundry biz? On track for 2nm but bruised Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions unit reported on Tuesday a 68 percent year-on-year increase in sales for Q1 2024, largely thanks to its memory sales - a result that confirms what many had predicted: an AI and server boom has brought the chip shop out of the lows experienced in 2023....
Australia to fund $620M quantum computer claimed to be first at 'utility-scale'
PsiQuantum's coming home Australian researchers pioneered the development of solar panels, but the nation now imports them in huge quantities - a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain....
The hiring frenzy is over at India's services giants
Headcounts are down for the first time in ages, margins are up, and CEOs are happy When India's top four outsourcers - Wipro, HCL Tech, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) - announce their results, they often mention plans to hire thousands of new workers to both grow headcount and replace departed workers. But across 2023 and into 2024, that changed....
AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile US fined $200M for selling off people's location info
Carriers claim real culprits are getting away with it - the data brokers The FCC on Monday fined four major US telcos almost $200 million for "illegally" selling subscribers' location information to data brokers....
Google blocked 2.3M apps from Play Store last year for breaking the G law
Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules....
Ford's BlueCruise driving assistant probed by US watchdog after deaths
Electric Mustang tech active right up to moment of crashes The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating an electric car maker whose self-driving-ish software was involved in a pair of fatal collisions. It's not Tesla this time, instead it's Ford's turn in the hot seat....
Open source Z80 clone seeks to help bring classic chip back from the dead
Whether the project will bear fruit is perhaps questionable Zilog's classic Z80 chip is soon to be dead, though it might not be gone forever if one open source project succeeds in its goal to clone the legendary processor....
Musk schmoozes Chinese Premier as Tesla Full Self-Driving remains parked
Automaker could really do with the training data Tesla boss Elon Musk met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing to discuss electric vehicles and self-driving cars....
London Drugs closes all of its pharmacies following 'cybersecurity incident'
Canadian stores shuttered 'until further notice' Updated Canadian pharmacy chain London Drugs closed all of its stores over the weekend until further notice following a "cybersecurity incident."...
Cloudflare CEO sues over free-roaming fidos at his ski resort paradise
Who let the dogs out? When regular people have disputes with neighbors, the more reasonable party will grit their teeth, bite their tongue, and try to avoid conflict as much as possible. When billionaires have disputes with millionaire neighbors, they'll see you in court....
Intel tells mobo makers to go easy on the BIOS settings amid CPU instability reports
Do not disable safeguards by default, says chipmaker Intel is reportedly telling motherboard manufacturers to use its recommended BIOS settings by default to stop CPU instability issues with 13th and 14th Generation chips....
Apple's pleas ineffective: iPadOS on EU's gatekeeper list
iFought the law, but the law wasn't particularly interested in my line of reasoning The European Commission just brought months of legal wrangling to an end with a decision to add Apple's iPadOS to the Digital Markets Act's list of gatekeepers....
Python, Flutter teams latest on the Google chopping block
Never mind the record revenues, costs must be cut Updated Google's latest round of layoffs have hit engineers working on its Flutter and Python teams....
Twilio cofounder buys The Onion
Satirical news site asks everyone for a buck The former CEO of web comms tools provider Twilio has bought The Onion, the US satirical magazine that saw its popularity boom in the early days of the web....
OpenAI slapped with GDPR complaint: How do you correct your work?
Irresistible magical tech runs headlong into immovable personal data regulations Privacy activist group noyb (None of Your Business) has filed a complaint against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT service violates GDPR rules since its information cannot be corrected if found inaccurate....
France willing to buy key Atos assets to keep them French
Finance minister says government has interests in IT giant's 'sovereign activities' The French government has tabled an offer to buy key assets of ailing IT giant Atos after the company late last week almost doubled its estimate of the cash it will need to stay afloat in the near future....
Hubble Space Telescope has gyro problems again
At 34, things don't seem to work how they used to The Hubble Space Telescope has celebrated the 34th anniversary of its launch in the traditional way: by entering safe mode due to an ongoing gyroscope issue....
UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords
New laws mean vendors need to make clear how long you'll get updates too Smart device manufacturers will have to play by new rules in the UK as of today, with laws coming into force to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to break into hardware such as phones and tablets....
Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 40, EndeavourOS, and TrueNAS 24.04 all arrive at once
Sometimes Linux releases are like buses... frequently clustered together, and rarely as reliable as you might ideally want FOSS round-up Last week was a busy one for the open source community: EndeavourOS and TrueNAS Scale arrived on Tuesday, Fedora landed on Wednesday, and Ubuntu on Thursday....
Watchdog reveals lingering Google Privacy Sandbox worries
Ad tech rewrite to replace web cookies still not to regulatory taste The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google's Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025....
UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation
Cabinet Office letter also reveals department lost money on unfinished database project The UK Cabinet Office has confirmed it is 17.5 million out of pocket after underwriting the official receiver of UKCloud, which went into liquidation in 2022....
The chip that changed my world – and yours
Zed 80 is dead baby, Zed 80 is dead.... vulture claws over the astounding tech Opinion It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it. Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU. Readers may have owned one in an 8-bit microcomputer or showered coins on one in an early arcade video game....
Software support chap survived breaking his customer
Sometimes there's more than enough blame to go around Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we like to call Who, Me? wherein Reg readers may unburden themselves with tales of times their tech prowess might have let them down....
Alibaba Yitian 710 rated fastest Arm server CPU in the cloud (for now)
Researcher finds it beats Intel's Xeons for speed on one database-related tests, joins AWS Gravitons in cost-efficiency win The homebrew Yitian 710 CPU developed in 2021 and deployed by Alibaba Cloud is the fastest Arm server processor for rent in hyperscale clouds when handling database-related tasks, according to research published this week in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal Transactions on Cloud Computing....
Teardown confirms Huawei's Pura 70 contains SMIC 7nm process node
'Remarkably similar' to the Kirin 9000 processor that shocked many last year A teardown of Huawei's Pura 70 smartphone by an IC research firm revealed the Chinese tech giant is relying on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp's (SMIC) HiSilicon Kirin 9010 processor, likely because US sanctions mean the Chinese company can't buy from other sources....
First Ariane 6 rocket ready to assemble as Europe begins final countdown
Core and boosters are on the pad ahead of (maybe) June launch The European Space Agency is ready to put together the first Ariane 6 rocket, and has declared the campaign to get it into orbit is under way....
Discord dismantles Spy.pet site that snooped on millions of users
ALSO: Infostealer spotted hiding in CDN cache, antivirus update hijacked to deliver virus, and some critical vulns Infosec in brief They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that appears to have been true in the case of Discord data harvesting site Spy.pet - as it was recently and swiftly dismantled after its existence and purpose became known....
Japan's space junk cleaner prototype closes in on its target
PLUS: Huawei returns to top Chinese smartphone market; China's new IPv6 goals; Malaysia's golden VC Visa Asia In Brief Japan's effort to start a business disposing of space junk is off to a promising start, after the ADRAS-J satellite spotted its first target and sent back images....
State-by-state is the best approach for right to repair, says advocacy leader
Gay Gordon-Byrne of the Repair Association says US at least is nearing a tipping point Interview There's a lot of momentum behind the right-to-repair movement, and if anyone should know, it'd be Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association and longtime repairability advocate....
Raspberry Pi adds more memory to the Compute Module 4S
Compute Module 5 still on track for later this year New memory variants were this week launched for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module family. Customers can now specify a 4S with 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB, as well as the original 1GB version....
The hyper-clouds are open source's friends
No, really. Look at the evidence Opinion One of the knee-jerk arguments made by companies abandoning their open source roots is that they can't make money because the bad hyper-cloud companies "steal" their open source services. True, at one time, the hyper-clouds took more than they gave. That's often no longer the case....
Workday abandons new-build Dublin office project
Continues to expand EMEA HQ in existing buildings instead SaaS biz application vendor Workday has pulled out of a new-build development in Dublin as it rethinks plans to expand EMEA HQ....
NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix
Laser beam comms are fast, so long as the weather cooperates NASA's optical communications demonstration has hit 25 Mbps in a test transmitting engineering data back to Earth from 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away....
12345678910...