The Register

It’s the mutant offspring of an intranet and a metaverse and even if it flops, you'll get some kudos Hybrid work isn't working, according to analyst house Gartner, and one way to fix it is an "intraverse" – an interactive space that melds an intranet and a metaverse.…

VMware ran tests on kernel 5.19 and saw some nasty numbers. Meanwhile progress on version 6.0 is steady VMware engineers have tested the Linux kernel's fix for the Retbleed speculative execution bug, and report it can impact compute performance by a whopping 70 percent.…

PLUS: APAC IT spend grows at over 5 percent; China's pop-up clampdown; Pakistan VPN exemptions; and more! Asia In Brief India's software-related services industry won over $150 billion for the first time in 2021–2022, according to the nation's Reserve Bank (RBI).…

Virtzilla has built itself an island. Important players aren't welcome to visit and might go elsewhere Analysis About a decade ago hyperscale clouds realized that they couldn't rent all the cores in their servers because some of them were doing boring work needed to make secure multitenancy possible. So they offloaded that work into network interface controllers imbued with some modest computing capacity – devices known as SmartNICs or Data Processing Units (DPUs).…

Plus: New MLPerf inference results, and artists finds terrifying AI-generated face haunting images In-brief New rules drafted by the European Union aimed at regulating AI could prevent developers from releasing open-source models, according to American think tank Brookings.…

Iranians won't be terrified, but US vendors need to check their customers The US Treasury Department has issued sactions against Iran's intelligence agency in response to that country's cyberattack against Albania and other "cyber-enabled activities against the United States and its allies."…

Also, Authorities seize WT1SHOP selling 5.8m sets of PII, The North Face users face tough security hike In brief AT&T cybersecurity researchers have discovered a sneaky piece of malware targeting Linux endpoints and IoT devices in the hopes of gaining persistent access and turning victims into crypto-mining drones.…

'We're making China's job easier' The massive amounts of digital data being bought and sold — or sometimes freely shared — poses a grave national security risk, according to a former US policymaker and diplomat.…

But the North Korean criminals are still over half a billion digicash dollars up Federal investigators and private companies seized $30 million in cryptocurrency stolen in March by North Korean-linked APT gang Lazarus Group from a video game developer, the latest example of the growing skills of government and cybersecurity experts to track and recover such ill-gotten gains.…

White House proposes fill-in-the-blanks tech policy reform The White House has said tech platforms should be more competitive and more accountable without specifying how that will be accomplished.…

Datacenters or digicash - what's the bigger boon to society? A White House report on the energy costs of cryptocurrency mining in the US is recommending swift policy actions to avoid disrupting the country's efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. …

And on new accounts as Microsoft tries to drive big adoption A Windows update issued last month is blocking some users with new Microsoft accounts from being able to log into their systems, a glitch Microsoft says can be remedied either through a workaround or a feature introduced to the operating system last year.…

Still unclear: Were members just screaming into a void for the past few years? Facebook parent Meta has disbanded its Responsible Innovation Team (RIT) that it claimed last year was a central part of efforts to "proactively surface and address potential harms to society in all that we build." …

H100 Tensor Core GPU leaves A100 in the dust, but company says previous gen has improved too Nvidia's Hopper GPU has turned in its first scores in the newly released MLPerf Inference v2.1 benchmark results, with the company claiming new records for its performance.…

Apple went with Globalstar for Emergency SOS feature, but such comments suggest a direction of travel Following the debut of the iPhone 14 this week, Elon Musk has claimed that Apple had been locked in talks with SpaceX about the new handset's satellite capabilities.…

Over at HP, CEO says a client price war is now looming The supply chain for personal computers is back to normal after 30 months of plague-induced disruption – there is nothing more to worry heads of procurement teams at big corporate buyers.…

Picture of longer sales cycles, more deliberation, enterprise upgrade challenges emerging across industry Enterprise software deals will take longer to close for the rest of the year as inflation and geopolitical uncertainty hit IT departments, according to ServiceNow CFO Gina Mastantuono.…

Gets some pushback from those wanting permission to keep it hanging around for decades The US Federal Communications Commission wants to shrink a current requirement for space operators to pull their equipment from low Earth orbit from within 25 years to just five years, according to new rules published yesterday.…

Analyst believes industry is in for 'deepest downcycle and inventory correction in over a decade' Chip delivery times shrank in August but while some are painting this as a sign that semiconductor shortages are easing, it is most likely an indicator that demand is slowing as economic conditions worsen.…

System look well suited to fill gaps in traditional OLAP market DuckDB – the in-process analytical database management system used by Google, Facebook, and Airbnb – has released its 0.5.0 iteration.…

In the military facility, vermin sniffed out a destructive secret On Call Welcome yet again to On Call, The Register's Friday folly in which readers share reminiscences of their most redolent rescue jobs.…

Clouds are buying plenty, but there's lots of product left for the rest of us – outside Russia Major networking vendors continue to report supply chain challenges, but the market for their switches and routers is growing at quite a clip according to analyst outfit IDC.…

Top tip: Skip the memos with cancer advice Comment At CodeCon 2022 on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, and billionaire business executive Laurene Powell Jobs launched the Steve Jobs Archive, an online repository to honor the legacy of Apple's co-founder and CEO for many years.…

Local regulators think such apps should be banned because of incidents including suicides Google has expanded its test of apps that allow users to gamble – and lose – real money, but won't allow that money to be handled using the billing systems it has fought to impose on developers of other apps.…

Beijing thinks standards should include central network controls. Washington does not The US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has relaxed restrictions that barred export of some encryption technologies to Huawei, in the name of ensuring the United States is in a better position to negotiate global standards.…

Will it be third time lucky? NASA will attempt, for the third time now, to blast off its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the Moon in late September.…

These super-corps are otherwise enjoying 'a consequence-free zone' Mozilla's Chief Security Officer Marshall Erwin urged federal regulators to crack down on internet giants and web browser makers that don't protect their users' privacy — and to make them pay penalties for bad behavior.…

For those who reckon we'll make it out of 2022 alive and into 2024 Intel and Broadcom have demonstrated cross-vendor interoperability of Wi-Fi 7 kit, claiming over-the-air speeds of more than 5Gbps between an Intel-based laptop and a Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 access point.…

Nothing like an authentication bypass for your private IPSec network Cisco patched three security vulnerabilities in its products this week, and said it will leave unpatched a VPN-hijacking flaw that affects four small business routers.…

It is with a heavy heart that we must announce that the hackers are at it again Mandiant is "highly confident" that foreign cyberspies will target US election infrastructure, organizations, and individuals in the run-up to the November midterm elections.…

We'll even get our checkbook out, web giant says Google's open source security team says OSS-Fuzz, its community fuzzing service, has helped fix more than 8,000 security vulnerabilities and 26,000 other bugs in open source projects since its 2016 debut.…

Redmond loves open source so much, it keeps most of its stuff closed Just weeks after rolling out SQL Server 2022 Release Candidate 0 for Windows, Microsoft is following with a release candidate for Linux systems.…

HME2 signs off Obit Queen Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor has died, ending the reign of Britain's longest-serving monarch. She was 96.…

Plasma at over 100 million kelvin for 20 seconds adds to list of noteworthy fusion breakthroughs in 2022 Scientists in Korea have succeeded in sustaining a plasma gas at 100 million kelvin for up to 20 seconds without significant instabilities, a feat thought to be a significant step forward in the quest for a sustainable nuclear fusion reaction.…

Anyone fancy renting some office space? Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the parent firm of the world's largest cloud service provider will likely slow the rate at which it's hiring staff, while noting he has no plans to force current workers to return to the office.…

Welcome to Datacenter Alley, where you'll find the backbones of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, ByteDance... The state of Virginia has over a third of America's hyperscale datacenter capacity, and this amounts to more than the entire capacity of China or the whole of Europe, highlighting just how much infrastructure is concentrated along the so-called Datacenter Alley.…

After the events of the weekend, there's no need to rush Ever the optimist, NASA has handed Axiom Space a $228.5 million deal to develop a moonwalking system in the first award under a competitive spacesuits contract.…

Will somebody think of the poor shareholders? They have kids too Google is joining the legions of other tech companies that are tightening up on company expenses in preparation for a potentially bumpier ride ahead in the global economy.…

Handsets with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 platform should be able to take full advantage Japanese telco NTT Docomo claims to have the world's first commercial 5G Standalone (SA) network that enables smartphones to simultaneously use both mid-band (sub-6 GHz) and mmWave frequencies, known as 5G NR Dual Connectivity.…

'Enterprise immune system' sees share price slump US private equity investor Thoma Bravo has pulled out of its planned takeover of Darktrace, causing shares in the UK cybersecurity company to plummet.…

Cisco finds custom malware in North Korea's latest cyberespionage effort The North Korean state-sponsored crime ring Lazarus Group is behind a new cyberespionage campaign with the goal to steal data and trade secrets from energy providers across the US, Canada and Japan, according to Cisco Talos.…

As deadline for mandatory code rewrite approaches, Manifest v3 still looks like a step backward Analysis Next year, Chrome browser extensions – such as ad blockers and other privacy tools – will stop working if they are reliant on an API called Manifest v2 (MV2).…

Bike and car accessory slinger fined £30,000 for hitting send on more than 499k unsolicited emails Bike and car accessory retailer Halfords has found itself in the wrong lane with Britain’s data watchdog for sending hundreds of thousands of unsolicited marketing emails to members of the public.…

Lightbend's Akka shifts from Apache 2.0 license to BSL 1.1 – but critics not pleased about pricing Lightbend is fed up with commercial entities using its open source wares in production environments and giving nothing back to the FOSS community, so is making an alteration to the licensing of a popular product.…

Protein prediction it can do, the next steps not so much – not that it was trained for this Analysis DeepMind's AlphaFold model has predicted nearly all known protein structures discovered yet, though its ability to help scientists discover new drugs remains unproven.…

So are ITSM tools that can’t spread, data tools, and private 5G. But outsourcing is cool again Analyst firm Forrester Research has published its 2023 planning guide for Technology Architecture and Delivery and warned that IT departments will face increased spending scrutiny as economic conditions tighten.…

Or if you're looking for something lower power, it can be had with a pentacore Celeron If you’ve ever thought to yourself these single board computers (SBC) could use a few more cores, Asus’ Aaeon latest system might be right up your alley.…

Yes, that’s a lot to digest: Marshall Islands legislators allegedly bribed to make it possible About halfway between The Philippines and Hawaii is a place called Rongelap Atoll that’s infamous for having been unintentionally irradiated by nuclear weapons tests conducted by America at nearby Bikini Atoll in 1954.…

Odd couple will tie the knot in late September – but there's still no sign what's in store Citrix has announced that its planned de-listing and merger with Tibco has cleared regulatory hurdles and the two companies will therefore become one during the last week of September 2022.…

We guess new chips are only for Pros At this week’s big iPhone launch, Apple's custom Arm-compatible chips – known as Apple Silicon – received little fanfare compared to what the processors have enjoyed at previous events.…