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Replaces surveillance systems installed after 9/11 - and years before drones became a threat The Pentagon will upgrade the air surveillance technology it uses around Washington DC with a computer vision system that can identify and warn officials of suspicious objects flying around or near the capital....

Claims to have taken down two colossal networks, with 'Secondary Infektion' schooling 'Spamouflage' Russia appears to be "better" at running online trolling campaigns aimed at pushing its political narratives than China, according to Meta's latest Adversarial Threat Report....

Hopes cool-running Zen cores can socket to Intel's Xeon-D - maybe with a smaller socket Hot Chips At the Hot Chips conference this week AMD teased its upcoming edge-friendly Siena family of Epyc processors, revealing modest power consumption and designs that allow them to nestle into relatively small devices....

And adds rivals Claude 2, Falcon, Llama 2 to Vertex AI Cloud Next Google is rolling out a bunch of generative AI models and tools across its Workspace apps and Cloud, including an expansion of the promised Duet AI, its personal virtual assistant....

Halls of learning are stuck offline, but go Wolverines! The University of Michigan has isolated itself from the internet but, hey, everything's fine!...

'We will continue fighting this case' global chief's lawyer tells us An appeals court has reversed a 2021 decision to drop a bribery charge against Apple's head of global security, who is accused of donating iPads worth up to $80,000 to a sheriff's office in exchange for giving his Cupertino agents concealed carry weapon licenses....

Totally plucked: Agents remotely roast Windows botnet malware on victims' machines Uncle Sam today said an international law enforcement effort dismantled Qakbot, aka QBot, a notorious botnet and malware loader responsible for losses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, and seized more than $8.6 million in illicit cryptocurrency....

Llama 2 avoids errors by staying quiet, GPT-4 gives long, if useless, samples Computer scientists have evaluated how large language models (LLMs) answer Java coding questions from the Q&A site StackOverflow and, like others before them, have found the results wanting....

See hot singles in your area! Well, -453.8 F singles at least NASA's laser-based, gigabit-speed space internet is set to get its first orbital users just as soon as a new refrigerator-sized piece of hardware makes it to the International Space Station....

Demand may be 'tepid at best' but analyst sees return to pre-2019 levels next year The PC market is expected to return to growth in 2024, according to estimates from IDC analysts....

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....