The Register

A pit and 4,500 gallons of water were needed to put it out A totaled Tesla Model S burst into flames in a Sacramento junkyard earlier this month, causing a fire that took "a significant amount of time, water, and thinking outside the box to extinguish," firefighters said. …

Now we can squeeze required boxes into a smaller datacenter footprint, says Big Red Oracle has slimmed down its on-prem fully managed cloud offer to a smaller datacenter footprint for a sixth of the budget.…

Company was an early adopter of Google Cloud, which led to a search for a new security architecture Matt Ramberg is the vice president of information security at Sanmina, a sprawling electronics manufacturer with close to 60 facilities in 20 countries on six continents and some 35,000 employees spread across the world.…

Anonymous speech protections apply online too, and copyright can't diminish that It's been a good week for free speech advocates as a judge ruled that copyright law cannot be used to circumvent First Amendment anonymity protections.…

Paul Fellows describes how it beat the overambitious ARX to Acorn's Archimedes computer One of the longest-lived GUI operating systems in the world has its origins as an emergency project – specifically the means by which Acorn planned to rescue the original Archimedes operating system.…

Megacorp shows Alexa speaking like kid's deceased grandma In the latest episode of Black Mirror, a vast megacorp sells AI software that learns to mimic the voice of a deceased woman whose husband sits weeping over a smart speaker, listening to her dulcet tones.…

Japanese tech conglomerate has reportedly received 10 offers, each with a different idea about how to do things Toshiba has received 10 potential offers for the company, eight of which would take the company private, while two would allow it to remain publicly listed, according to reports.…

They're putting a crew together, and Beijing's tossed in $750m to get things started A Chinese state-backed startup has hired legendary Japanese chip exec Yukio Sakamoto as part of a strategy to launch a local DRAM industry.…

50% of public sector tech budgets in the cloud by 2015? Well that didn't happen! British readers who have only recently packed away the bunting commemorating the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II have been offered reason to get it out again by Crown Commercial Services, which is offering up the 10-year anniversary of G-Cloud as a cause for celebration.…

The Start Menu has been tweaked, but Smart App Control will appeal to the security conscious The second coming of Windows 11 is almost upon us. Is it worth chancing an upgrade? We took a look at the latest release preview of 2022's take on Microsoft's flagship operating system.…

Hyperscalers hog the good stuff Power and thermal management equipment essential to building datacenters is in short supply, with delays of months on shipments – a situation that's likely to persist well into 2023, Dell'Oro Group reports.…

I like driving in my car, hope my data's not gone far UK automobile service and parts seller Halfords has shared the details of its customers a little too freely, according to the findings of a security researcher.…

Use it sensibly instead – which means turning on the useful bits Microsoft doesn't enable by default Windows PowerShell is enormously useful, extremely prevalent, and often targeted by crooks because it offers an express route into the heart of Windows servers and networks.…

Move over silicon – digital circuits have a flexible new friend Scientists in Germany claim to have developed bipolar transistors from organic materials, opening a path for flexible and transparent electronics.…

Start by pondering if customers could store their own info and provide access Column Sixteen years ago, British mathematician Clive Humby came up with the aphorism "data is the new oil".…

Victims lured into handing over online banking logins, police say Europol cops have arrested nine suspected members of a cybercrime ring involved in phishing, internet scams, and money laundering.…

Promoted phones as ready for a dunking – forgot to mention known problems with subsequent recharges Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission has fined Samsung Electronics AU$14 million ($9.6 million) for making for misleading water resistance claims about 3.1 million smartphones.…

Freedom or echo chamber? Brave Software, maker of a privacy-oriented browser, on Wednesday said its surging search service has exited beta testing while its Goggles search personalization system has entered beta testing.…

And pay the tiniest of fines, too Facebook parent Meta has settled a complaint brought by the US government, which alleged the internet giant's machine-learning algorithms broke the law by blocking certain users from seeing online real-estate adverts based on their nationality, race, religion, sex, and marital status.…

Engineers, sales teams told to stick around, customers promised more 'choice' – to buy from Symantec or CA Broadcom has made its first public comment in weeks about its plans for VMware, should the surprise $61 billion acquisition proceed as planned, and has prioritized retaining VMware's engineers to preserve the virtualization giant's innovation capabilities.…

Focus emerges on workload security during its Zenith 2022 shindig Zscaler is growing the machine-learning capabilities of its zero-trust platform and expanding it into the public cloud and network edge, CEO Jay Chaudhry told devotees at a conference in Las Vegas today.…

Mega-corp insists it's all about 'people and technology working safely and harmoniously together' Amazon unveiled its first "fully autonomous mobile robot" and other machines designed to operate alongside human workers at its warehouses.…

Boffins devise five attacks to expose private files Mega, the New Zealand-based file-sharing biz co-founded a decade ago by Kim Dotcom, promotes its "privacy by design" and user-controlled encryption keys to claim that data stored on Mega's servers can only be accessed by customers, even if its main system is taken over by law enforcement or others.…

Bugs potentially useful for rogue insiders, admin account hijackers Cisco has alerted customers to another four vulnerabilities in its products, including a high-severity flaw in its email and web security appliances. …

First edicts of 2022 include firmware, hypervisor-level specifications Embedded World RISC-V International has grown its pile of royalty-free, open specifications, with additional documents covering firmware, hypervisors, and more.…

Devs who like a Linux flavor to their server code get a gift from Redmond Microsoft has made it official. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distributions are now supported on Windows Server 2022.…

Source remains unclear, plenty suspect Iran Air raid sirens sounded for over an hour in parts of Jerusalem and southern Israel on Sunday evening – but bombs never fell, leading some to blame Iran for compromising the alarms. …

Just us who see 'liquid engineering' and think three pints at lunch on a Thursday? OK, got it, just us Castrol, better known for its engine oil, has partnered with cooling specialist Submer to drive the adoption of immersion cooling for datacenter and edge applications.…

Nausea, eye strain, inability to take notes, migraines are just a few of Metaverse work 'perks' Sometimes it takes research to prove what was already suspected, like how utterly uncomfortable it would be to work in the metaverse.…

Although PCIe 5.0 is just coming to market, here's what we can expect in the years ahead Early details of the specifications for PCIe 7.0 are out, and it's expected to deliver data rates of up to 512 GBps bi-directionally for data-intensive applications such as 800G Ethernet.…

Stackoverflow survey: JavaScript still in lead. Plus, you may hate COBOL, but users saw a salary jump The annual Stackoverflow survey is here and while JavaScript continues to rule the roost, TypeScript has edged past Java to make it into the top five most commonly used programming languages.…

Space boffins: Nevermind ekeing out the battery, let it go out in a blaze of glory! Pondering what services to switch off to keep your laptop going just that bit longer? NASA engineers can relate, having decided the Mars InSight lander will go out on a high: they plan to burn through the remaining power to keep the science flowing until the bitter end.…

Internal research says the hiring pool has already dried up in a number of locations stateside Jeff Bezos once believed that Amazon's low-skill worker churn was a good thing as a long-term workforce would mean a "march to mediocrity." He may have to eat his words if an internal memo is accurate.…

Blockchain not as decentralised as many assume, finds Pentagon sponsored research US government sponsored research is casting new light on the security of blockchain technology, including the assertion that a subset of a distributed ledger's participants can gain control over the entire system.…

Reportedly dropping hints it may use legislation to push a London listing The UK government is upping the ante in attempts to have Arm listed on the London stock exchange, with reports suggesting it is considering the threat of national security laws to force the issue with owner SoftBank.…

Snowflake last week promised analytics and transactions in the same system. For some it was déjà vu all over again Analysis Under Nevada's baking summer sunshine, Snowflake last week promised it would bring together two ways of working with data that mix about as well as oil and water.…

So are Microsoft, Adobe, W3C, Huawei, and… IKEA? Not Apple, though A smattering of big and not so big tech companies have linked arms to shape the emerging industry known as the metaverse.…

Down but not yet on its Way(land) just yet The X window system turned 38 years old this week, and although it has more rivals than ever, it is still the go-to for a graphical desktop on Unix.…

Or some approximation of that Multi-cloud networking startup Alkira has decided it wants to be a network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider with the launch of its cloud area networking platform this week.…

British parcel delivery firm 'working around the clock' to get systems back and running Delivery company Yodel has found itself the latest victim of a cyber "incident" that has disrupted services.…

A simpler, easier remix sounds like a good thing, but glitches like these shouldn't be in a point release Version 21.3 of Manjaro - codenamed "Ruah" - is here, with kernel 5.15, but don't let its beginner-friendly billing fool you: you will need a clue with this one.…

Once former supplier Sitel coughed up its logs, it became apparent the attacker was hemmed in Okta has completed its analysis of the March 2022 incident that saw The Lapsus$ extortion crew get a glimpse at some customer information, and concluded that its implementation of zero trust techniques foiled the attack.…

Privacy group NOYB sues to get telcos to respect GDPR data access rights Some authorities in Europe insist that location data is not personal data as defined by the EU's General Data Protection Regulation.…

And over millions of miles, too. Piece of cake!? The software on ESA's Mars Express spacecraft is to be upgraded after nearly two decades, giving the orbiter capabilities to hunt for water beneath the planet and study its larger moon, Phobos.…

Satellite-deploying rocket finally launches – after a few setbacks South Korea's Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) yesterday succeeded in its endeavor to send the home-grown Nuri launcher into space, then place a working satellite in orbit.…

In unrelated news, China's rollout of a central bank digital currency continues China's ban on cryptocurrency mining – and general dislike of any form of blockchain-based assets – has seen web giant Tencent clamp down on discussion of the subjects on its massive WeChat and Weixin messaging platforms.…

As if users needed any more reminders they’re stuck on a dying platform HCL has given users of versions 9.x and 10.x of its Domino groupware platform two years warning that they'll have to upgrade or live without support.…

Fundamental problems of qubit physics aside, the cloud giant thinks it can help Nothing in the quantum hardware world is fully cooked yet, but quantum computing is quite a bit further along than quantum networking – an esoteric but potentially significant technology area, particularly for ultra-secure transactions. Amazon Web Services is among those working to bring quantum connectivity from the lab to the real world. …

Coining the term hardware-based 'AI hypervisor' has to be worth several million, dontcha think? The venture capital arm of Samsung has cut a check to help Israeli inference chip designer NeuReality bring its silicon dreams a step closer to reality.…

Deep-fake voices, face recognition, emotion, age and gender prediction ... A toolbox of theoretical tech tyranny Microsoft has pledged to clamp down on access to AI tools designed to predict emotions, gender, and age from images, and will restrict the usage of its facial recognition and generative audio models in Azure.…