The Register

Only in the Middle Kingdom as company reportedly eyes IPO Alibaba - China's equivalent to AWS - is bucking the global trend and cutting the cost of its cloud services instead of hiking them, but the bad news for potential takers is that only customers in China will benefit.…

Will need to sit at the front of the class where Commish can keep an eye on them Not to be outdone by the UK's copycat DMCC bill yesterday, European regulators have let the world know about the first few tech giants to make their super strictly monitored hitlist under its own antitrust regs, aimed at curtailing the power of Big Tech.…

Next year's revenue forecast to surpass the halcyon days of 2022 The outlook for the global semiconductor sector appears worse than feared, at least for the near future, with analyst Gartner now expecting to see revenue decline by 11.2 percent for 2023. Weakened demand is being compounded by an oversupply driving down chip prices, it said.…

NeMo Guardrails stops everything that made these chatbots so much fun ChatGPT's testing phases pretty quickly revealed that the OpenAI chatbot and others like it could go off the rails – or "hallucinate" – with enough poking and prodding.…

That's not very Unicorn Kingdom of you UK regulators have dealt a serious blow to Microsoft's hopes of acquiring gaming giant Activision Blizzard, with the Competition and Markets Authority blocking the massive deal because Microsoft's proposed remedies "had significant shortcomings." …

More public-private collab around this issue coming soon RSA Conference Defending space systems against cyberthreats remains "urgent and requires high-level attention," according to acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden. And to this end, the White House will host its first space industry cybersecurity workshop this week in southern California.…

In the rush to commercialize LLMs, security got left behind Feature Large language models that are all the rage all of a sudden have numerous security problems, and it's not clear how easily these can be fixed.…

How much better do mobile networks really have to be by 2030-ish? Another European project aims to kick start 6G telecoms technology and help define the scope of this future standard, even as 5G has yet to really deliver on its promise.…

It also required £20 million in extra funds – and Larry wants to brag about this? Birmingham City Council's ERP overhaul to replace SAP with Oracle has required £20 million ($24.9 million) additional spending and is three years late, a meeting heard last week.…

Addresses annoyances like 20-core VMs requiring 24 licenses Microsoft has made the terms on which it licenses Windows Server 2022 a little more generous.…

RSA's Adi Shamir thinks we're safe for a generation, but more gnarly keys are still a good idea RSA Conference Adi Shamir, the cryptographer whose surname is the "S" in "RSA", thinks folks need to stop worrying about quantum computing breaking encryption algorithms.…

Alphabet finds $1.6 billion of benefits by sweating its servers and networks for longer Google's cloud business has made a profit for the first time.…

Plus: Bias bounties are the new bug bounties RSA Conference Anyone with ChatGPT or AI or LLMs on their RSA Conference Bingo card is clearly winning at this year's event in San Francisco, as they all keep coming up over and over.…

Alleges large scale fraud, embezzling, and maybe even bribery, before crypto collapse The Seoul Southern District Prosecutor's Office has announced its intention to go after Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin, and others, for their role in the collapse of the Terra/Luna stablecoin.…

Adoption has been slow, maybe because there are few places to use it Civil servants and other public sector workers in the eastern Chinese city of Changshu will be paid solely in digital yuan starting in May, marking the biggest push of the e-currency to date.…

Also: ChatGPT Business tier will be available in the next few months OpenAI, the Microsoft-bankrolled outfit behind the chatbot star of the moment, ChatGPT, launched a feature on Tuesday that allows users to restrict the company from using text generated in their private conversations to train large language models.…

Qualifying for tax credits will only get tougher, so better plan that state-side manufacturing push now General Motors and Hyundai on Tuesday published dueling announcements of plans to build electric vehicle battery plants in the United States. …

Two out of three public-facing app instances open to hijacking Apache Superset until earlier this year shipped with an insecure default configuration that miscreants could exploit to login and take over the data visualization application, steal data, and execute malicious code.…

Comms lost to Hakuto-R after apparent crash landing A private company's first attempt to land a spacecraft on the Moon ended in apparent failure on Tuesday.…

OT firms construct handy early-warning info-sharing system RSA Conference A group of some of the largest operational technology companies are using this year's RSA Conference as an opportunity to launch an open source early-threat-warning system designed for OT and industrial control systems (ICS) environments. …

Botched BIOS firmware, EXPO memory profiles possible culprit Excessive processor voltages have been identified as the potential culprit of fried Ryzen 7000 and X3D CPUs and damaged motherboards.…

The lander might be dead, but its scientific legacy lives on NASA's Mars InSight lander may be dead, but the data it gathered is still filled with surprises – like the first direct observations of another planet's core, which scientists now believe is smaller and denser than previously thought.…

Russia unlikely to give up its crooks, but American CSOs can go to the clink RSA Conference US prosecutors are going to focus more on disrupting online attacks, even if it means losing out on a criminal conviction, according to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.…

Legendary R&D lab donated to SRI International where it will continue to innovate Xerox is donating the iconic Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California to SRI International, a non-profit scientific research institute, apparently so the company can focus on other stuff.…

Competition? We've heard of it Nearly two years after its creation, the UK's Digital Markets Unit (DMU) – meant to bring Big Tech to heel in much the same way as the EU's DMA – might finally get some teeth, with a draft law allowing it to fine anti-competitive behemoths up to 10 percent of their turnover for strangling rivals and eating all the pie.…

Dungeon master Sunak talks up 'funky' Silicon Valley sales pitch while schools left without maths teachers Opinion Political leaders are given to the odd flight of fancy, but yesterday UK prime minister Rishi Sunak created a whole new fantasy realm in which his dreams for the nation's future could flourish unhindered by encounters with reality.…

First came Slack then others joined the scrum to tackle the Beast of Redmond Microsoft is offering to stop bundling web conferencing and messaging app Teams with Office software to stave off the threat of a full-blown antitrust investigation by European Union regulators.…

What's NaaS? Whatever customers need it to be HPE's networking limb Aruba has taken the bold step of releasing some news about AI that doesn't involve a chatbot.…

Chang'e 8 missions will check whether regolith harbors appropriate materials China's space program has decided to no longer worry about hauling construction materials to the Moon and just 3D print buildings onsite instead, said state-sponsored media on Monday.…

YMMV. Hold onto your hats, we're diving into network technicals today Systems Approach As we’re working towards finishing our Private 5G book, we’ve been completing the Hands-On Experience Appendix. That necessitated a bit more, er, hands-on work than we normally would do, which provided the impetus for this column.…

Plus they are cliquey as all hell RSA Conference While some spend sleepless nights worrying about the big four nation-state cyber threats, you shouldn't underestimate the ones possibly living under your roof: teenagers.…

Understand the technology before you are taken by surprise, argues CTO Euro cloud biz OVH recently announced the purchase of its first quantum-powered system as part of long-term plans to build a quantum environment for developers and other users.…

Free trade agreement founders, and fears of government censorship rise India's forthcoming tech-related laws are not going down well with some of its key partners.…

Figure not a typo, tho it will be paired with £900M 'BritGPT' supercomputer, which is a bit more like it The UK government on Monday said it's putting up £100 million ($125 million) to launch a Foundation Model Taskforce, which is hoped will help spur the development of AI systems that can boost the nation's GDP.…

Helium is way cheaper than rocket fuel, and the pictures are just as good if you get high enough The world's first wide-field, balloon-borne telescope has begun returning images to Earth, with scientists keen to begin months of imagery to help investigate the existence of dark matter.…

Send in the LLMs RSA Conference Google Cloud used the RSA 2023 conference to talk about how it's injected artificial intelligence into various corners of its security-related services.…

As it preps to launch WhatsApp scam-shredder The government of Singapore issued its populace a recommendation for ad blockers this month, calling them “underrated scam protectors” that sieve out fraudulent online ads.…

Not for a long while at least, anyway Analysis Arm has designed its own example of a high-end processor, and is getting samples of the chip made for select customers.…

Game maker's success getting anti-steering rules nixed also survived An appeals court ruling today potentially clears the way for Epic Games and others to direct customers in their iOS apps to payment systems other than Apple's system.…

No surprise for a panel that appears to enjoy taking away rights rather than granting them The US Supreme Court has refused to hear a case arguing that AI algorithms should be recognized and protected by law as inventors on patent filings.…

'Let me tell you, I recuperated at home, and I followed the doctor's advice to recuperate at home' To China now, where a tech worker learned the hard way that a) you don't book a holiday before you have time off confirmed, and b) you definitely don't then take sick leave and go on holiday anyway.…

Customers shouldn't even notice, sniffs Linux distro CEO On Monday, Matt Hicks, CEO of IBM-owned Red Hat, said the Linux distro maker plans to lay off just under four percent of its roughly 20,000 person workforce, which amounts to less than 800 people.…

Despite Ellison's health world ambitions, Uncle Sam resets massive project over harm to patient health A $10 billion Oracle Cerner project has ground to an indefinite halt following repeated problems with the rollout of electronic health records, some of which have caused physical harm to patients.…

Look, anyone can build these things RSA Conference SentinelOne is the latest to add machine-learning features to its IT security software.…

Anyone else who wants to take on Musk, please take note Tesla has convinced a California jury to side with it in a court battle brought by a driver who sued the electric car maker over a 2019 accident she alleged was Autopilot's fault.…

Next on Netlist's hit list? Micron and Google Samsung Electronics has been stung for more than $303 million in a patent infringement case brought by US memory company Netlist.…

Security bods converge on the cool gray city of love RSA Conference You better watch out, you better not spam, you better not phish, I'm telling you why: RSA is coming to town.…

Silver Lake set to grab control of firm with legacy from Moon landing era Private equity investor Silver Lake has tabled a bid to take over Software AG, a longstanding stalwart of the European software industry, for an implied value of around €2.2 billion.…

Some customers unable to use the search function for online services like Teams and Outlook Updated Another week, another Microsoft 365 headache. Redmond this morning said in a tweet it is investigating yet one more issue that is making it impossible for some users to use the search functionality for a number of cloud-based services.…

Bumper payday for exec as relentless cost-cutting campaign continues Timing is everything, and confirmation via a regulatory filing that Alphabet and Google boss Sundar Pichai’s total compensation package swelled to $226 million in 2022, comes - awkwardly - during a period of company belt-tightening.…