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TPU v5e, A3 VMs, and GKE Enterprise headline first in-person shindig since pandemic Cloud Next Google is razor-focused on AI at this year's Cloud Next, with a slew of hardware projects, including TPU updates, GPU options, and a bevy of software tools to make it all work....

On AWS Firecracker - but there are other new micro-VM engines around, too Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more... and although it's aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone....

All 47,000 Met Police officers and staff reportedly accessed in break-in London's Metropolitan Police has said a third-party data breach exposed staff and officers' names, ranks, photos, vetting levels, and salary information....

Quango must show Palantir does not have unfair advantage in procurement England's health data watchdog has warned the government quango in charge of the country's health service that it must show how it will avoid vendor lock-in in the forthcoming 480 million ($604 million) deal for a Federated Data Platform (FDP)....

Wide-ranging procurements hint at prospect of SAP ERP system replacement Southern Water - the 792 million ($996 million) UK utility business - is on the hunt for technology suppliers to take part in a 358 million ($450 million) framework deal which includes help selecting and implementing a replacement for its current SAP ERP system....

Here's what you actually get for this VIP level. And how is Microsoft happy with this? OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise on Monday, a tier of the text-generating chatbot focused on alleviating concerns about privacy and other fears business customers may have. What does enterprise-level access actually get you?...

Asks Beijing to stop the phone calls harassing civilians, as tests show impact of nuke plant water Japan last week commenced the release of water from the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant, and the neighbors aren't pleased....

It doesn't matter if your GPU is better at training if no one can get hold of them Comment Nvidia's latest quarter marked a defining moment for AI adoption....

Intel and Micron made the agenda, but action to ease their woes did not The US Commerce Department said on Monday that it's reached an agreement with Chinese authorities to facilitate the exchange of export control enforcement information - a pact that means the two nations will talk about tech export bans, without seeking to alter them....

Mega-corp has mastered the complexity of numerous technologies but it took several scandals to impart this obvious lesson Samsung's compliance committee chair has told local media the massive conglomerate is now on the straight and narrow, after years spent dealing with the legal fallout of past ethical lapses....

Pilots' Goose cooked as uncrewed vehicles prove cheaper and perhaps more versatile The US Air Force wants to spend around $5.8 billion on up to 2,000 pilotless AI-powered drones, to serve alongside human pilots....

Dissenting opinion asserts position is wrong and that many headaches linger In its first enforcement action concerning the issuance of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, if you can remember that sad fad, the SEC has declared they should be considered and thus regulated as conventional securities under some circumstances....

Just bring your own accelerator Hot Chips Arm has unveiled a set of blueprints called Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) that - inadvertently or not - takes the biz an inch closer to straight-up designing processors for its customers, rather than customers designing processors from Arm's technologies....

Meal delivery biz leaves bitter taste Purfoods has notified more than 1.2 million people that their personal and medical data -including payment card and bank account numbers, security codes, and some protected health information - may have been stolen from its servers during what sounds like a ransomware infection earlier this year....

Plus more insights on x86 titan's all E-core datacenter chips Hot Chips Intel today for the Hot Chips 2023 conference shed light on the architecture changes, including improvements to memory subsystems and IO connectivity, coming to next-gen Xeon processors....

Dude, stop hitting yourself Two weeks after HashiCorp changed the terms under which its Terraform software is licensed, users of the infrastructure automation project - corporate rivals among them - have created a fork of the Terraform code....

Not just a company town - it's the new feudal age A gaggle of tech billionaires want to start their own metropolis in California, and they've spent the past five years buying up thousands of acres of land north of the San Francisco Bay Area to do it....

Top of the list to trip sensors Three malware loaders - QBot, SocGholish, and Raspberry Robin - are responsible for 80 percent of observed attacks on computers and networks so far this year....

British Bank Holiday blues as flight plans have to be filed by hand The UK's National Air Traffic Service (NATS) is spending a bank holiday Monday dealing with an unspecified "technical issue" that has disrupted flights across the country....

This assumes MySQL, PHP, the web - and humanity - will be around that long Content management and hosting outfit Wordpress wants to sell you some legacy technology: a domain name and website it will keep alive for 100 years, for $38,000....

ALSO: News publishers block OpenAI's text-crawling bot; YouTube does a deal for AI tunes AI in brief Researchers have helped a woman paralyzed by a brain stem stroke to speak through a digital avatar, thanks to AI algorithms that analyze her brain waves and translates them into speech and simulated movements....

'Sky spaghetti' remains on the menu for Asian carriers, and tourists Unruly telecom cables may seem an unlikely tourist attraction, but in the Vietnamese town of Hoi An you can buy t-shirts that celebrate the thick snarls and loops of wire dangling from many of the nation's telegraph poles....

Billionaire claims being a political outsider means he can fix border, avert wars, make Taiwan great again ... which sounds rather familiar Terry Gou, who founded contract manufacturer to the stars Foxconn, has delivered on his previous promise to stand for election as president of Taiwan....

Tech's pride in his work fed a hungry mechanical monster Who, Me? Welcome once again, dear reader, to Who, Me? - the Reg's Monday morning pick-me-up that aims to cushion your entry to the working week by sharing stories of fellow readers' narrow escapes from their own errors....

ALSO: Euro chip maker breached, crims plan to undermine cyber insurance, and this week's critical vulnerabilities Infosec in Brief No one likes malware, but malicious code that tracks your location is particularly unlovable....

PLUS: India calls for global action on AI and crypto; Vietnam seeks cybersecurity independence; China bans AI prescribing drugs Asia In Brief Taiwan-based infosec consultancy Team T5 has disputed Microsoft's alleged timeline of just when a Beijing-linked attack group named Flax Typhoon commenced its campaigns....

Summer push proved less disruptive than feared Linus Torvalds has decided the time is right to give the world a new version of the Linux kernel, announcing its delivery in a brief Sunday afternoon post....

No miners were involved in this story Tor, which stands for The Onion Router, weathered a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) storm from June last year through to May....

New exec works on 'strategic, operational and financial reviews' as existing loan maturity nears MariaDB has yet to conclude its discussion with a "large commercial bank" as it nears the maturity of an existing loan....

Enterprise Linux users question web giant's commitment to hybrid cloud When Amazon Linux 2023 was released on March 15, it was supposed to be offered as a virtual machine image that organizations could run on their own servers....

From Un-carrier to Un-employed T-Mobile US will lay off roughly 5,000 employees, or about seven percent of its workforce, over the next five weeks, the wireless carrier revealed in a recent regulatory filing....

Discrimination lawsuit claims company's 'ITAR' excuse was badly wrong Fresh from blowing up a small portion of Texas with Starship, SpaceX is once again being forced to focus on more earthly matters, like discriminatory hiring practices, in a lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice....

Argument that Mountain View is politically biased against RNC 'pure speculation,' says judge The Republican National Committee's attempt to hold Google accountable for sending its emails to Gmail's spam folder have failed, with a federal judge in California dismissing the conservative political group's lawsuit yesterday....

With a choice of kernel versions, and even a 32-bit edition Bodhi Linux 7.0 is the latest release of one of the oldest Ubuntu-based distros, with one of the more unusual desktops....

Detection algorithms also fail to distinguish between answers from real people and large language models OpenAI's ChatGPT outperforms the average university student in computer science, according to researchers, but interestingly, not in math....

Analysts reckon extension of 2016 deal will be good for industry - as long there are no gotchas Huawei and Ericsson have signed a long-term cross-licensing agreement that includes patents relating to a broad range of technology areas, including those covering 3G, 4G, and 5G cellular networks....

Almost a month after AWS concession, Redmond keeping mum on reason for locking rivals out Customers and sellers of virtual desktop infrastructure remain frustrated that Microsoft continues to lock out Google and Alibaba from running Office 365 Windows Apps on their cloud platforms, weeks after Redmond made concessions for AWS....

Was this source-generating model used to bang out Threads in a week or something? Meta has released yet another sort-of-open machine learning model, this time tuned for generating software source code....

It'll replace the old one, also built by BAE, on a very tight schedule: The old junk's due to be ripped out in 2026 The UK military is set to get a new tactical wide-area network from BAE Systems just in time for the decommissioning of the old one from BAE Systems, for which BAE Systems will bank 89 million ($113 million) for its efforts....

A Love Boat story that almost didn't have a happy ending On Call Welcome once again to On-Call, The Register's Friday morning forum for sharing readers' tales of tech support mishaps and near misses....

Google says it is. Amazon's swerves the rules, for now. And tests suggest consumer protections aren't yet strong The European Union's Digital Services Act comes into effect today, August 25, and it's unclear if the hoped-for consumer protections are going to have their desired impact....

Semiconductor Industry Association downplays the intel Huawei is building a network of secret semiconductor fabs in China, according to recent media reports. Or maybe it isn't....

JAXA's SLIM scheduled to arrive after Chandrayaan-3 says goodnight India's Chandrayaan-3 Moon mission continues to achieve its goals, but Japan will have to wait a little longer for its attempts to land on Luna to succeed....

Realistically you're going to look stuff up anyway, so you might as well learn how to do it right Microsoft has made some of its certification exams open book affairs, allowing access to its learning portal while candidates sit tests....

Joins in the chorus of advice to bin the gear instead of trying for a fix The FBI has warned owners of Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances the devices are likely undergoing attack by snoops linked to China, and removing the machines from service remains the safest course of action....

Upstart now valued at $4B after Salesforce, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, and pals dish out dosh Hugging Face, which maintains a huge repository of open and non-open source AI models and training data, just closed a $235 million funding round backed by top tech players and a Hollywood heavyweight....

Diplomats debate Russia-backed rules on what can be said online An international treaty on countering cybercrime is in danger of becoming an "expansive global surveillance pact" that will trample data privacy and human rights, activists warned UN delegates as they meet in New York City this week to hammer out an updated proposal....

One percent of customers store more than 35TB. And before you ask: Yes, you can blame crypto creeps for this Dropbox has decided it's time to limit its unlimited Advanced plan. Rather than giving people as much space as needed," as it did previously, now users are capped, starting at 15TB....

'It feels like the Berlin Wall of tech repair monopolies is starting to crumble, brick by brick' Apple has endorsed, with caveats, California's proposed Right to Repair law after spending years opposing DIY fixes....

Pay particular attention if you're MSI and Intel powered Microsoft is probing reports of dreaded blue screens of death from users who installed a recent Windows 11 update. Some folks suggest it's a particular problem for machines equipped with Intel chips and MSI motherboards....