The Register

Tributes paid to husband, father, son and rogue-turned-consultant Obit Kevin Mitnick, probably the world's most-famous computer hacker - and subsequently writer, public speaker, and security consultant - has succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He was 59....

Global economic conditions? Check. Sluggish end market demand? Check. Customer inventory adjustment? Bingo! TSMC has reported a double digit year-on-year plunge in sales, even though it seems the results aren't as bad as analysts anticipated. The chipmaker expects business to pick up again in the coming months....

Oracle joins the analytics anywhere bandwagon, promises future access to AWS S3 Oracle has launched MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, an extension to its proprietary analytics platform which now supports object storage outside the database....

Not changing the standard, but tweaking how applications work over top A group of tech companies has kicked off a project to adapt the Ethernet standard to make it better suited for the demanding network requirements of AI and high performance computing (HPC) applications....

Nine-site system built for UAE's G42, but there'll be plenty to spare AI biz Cerebras has unveiled its Condor Galaxy supercomputer, a distributed cluster that, when complete, will span nine sites capable of 36 exaFLOPS of combined FP16 performance....

In hindsight, it's probably good practice to give clients access to cloud logs Microsoft announced on Wednesday it would provide all customers free access to cloud security logs - a service usually reserved for premium clients - within weeks of a reveal that government officials' cloud-based emails were targets of an alleged China-based hack....

Do distros even matter in the era of cloud and microservices? Register Kettle Linux is everywhere. Servers, phones, laptops, and more, whether people know it or not. And it's all over our headlines lately - for good reason....

Who needs a graphical desktop manager anyway? This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development....

Rishi Sunak fails to secure place in 95.5B program before Parliament packs up for holiday After taking years to get to the point where it could rejoin the EU's 95.5 billion Horizon science program, the UK now seems to want more time to think about its options en route to becoming a global science superpower....

I know, because I let it all flood in. And it was damaging to my mental health Column In 2008, I formed a hypothesis that everyone has something to teach you, so the more connected you are, the more you should be able to learn....

Plus: Spanish cops arrest Ukrainian scareware dev after ten-year hunt Ukrainian cops have disrupted a massive bot farm with more than 100 operators allegedly spreading fake news about the Russian invasion, leaking personal information belonging to Ukrainian citizens, and instigating fraud schemes....

Behavior of OpenAI models about as consistent as Office 365's uptime GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 - the models at the heart of OpenAI's ChatGPT - appear to have got worse at generating some code and performing other tasks between March and June this year. That's according to experiments performed by computer scientists in the United States. The tests also showed the models improved in some areas....

16 qubit system capable of modeling simple molecules, Kremlin says Scientists at Russia's International Center for Quantum Optics and Quantum Technologies recently presented a new quantum computer to the nation's President Vladimir Putin, proclaiming it to be the "most powerful in Russia today."...

Too bad GPU slingers keep shrinking the memory bus Keeping graphics processors fed, whether for large language models or the latest AAA games, takes a lot of memory bandwidth. That's exactly what Samsung's GDDR7 memory module, unveiled Wednesday, claims to deliver....

Results were anticipated to be dim, so where does this put outsourcer now? IT outsourcer Infosys has signed a five-year $2 billion AI and automation deal with an unnamed existing client just three days before it releases its Q1 2024 earnings, a report that experts have predicted would be dismal....

Fewer than 2% of workstations will be cut off in 'experiment' In a bid to shrink the attack surface of its army of employees, and thus boost security, Google is taking an experimental approach: cutting some of their workstations off from the internet....

Outages are declining, but when one does hit, it's expensive While datacenter operators are under pressure to reduce energy consumption, reliability is gradually increasing and there have been fewer reported disruptive outages. Meanwhile, trust in AI as a tool for operational decision making has actually fallen....

The approach is the same, but never mind the crypto or gift cards Cybercriminals are taking their business offline in a new approach to familiar technical support scams recently identified by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation....

Temasek's head of ML is optimistic about 'overhyped' technology In order to make generative AI accurate, new layers must be inserted into its stack, according to the head of AI at state-owned Singapore investment company Temasek....

Appears to have given up the idea of catching the component midair with a helicopter Rocket Lab has successfully launched seven satellites into space and recovered the booster for its Electron rocket from the Pacific Ocean....

Only obstacle left is the FTC, which is still licking its wounds from other recent antitrust defeats Broadcom was today given a provisional OK from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to close its $61 billion bid to acquire VMware, leaving only one major regulatory hurdle in the way of the deal: the US Federal Trade Commission....

Regional trade group applies to partake in Germany's probe of Redmond's cloud software policies A trade association of mostly European cloud providers and Amazon Web Services has filed an application to "actively participate" in a probe by Germany's competition watchdog to examine the dominance of Microsoft....

Though chip giant is only referring to deal as a 'proposed agreement' for now Asus looks set to take on the NUC brand from Intel, saying it aims to form its own NUC business unit to manufacture, sell, and support the line of mini PCs....

Nifty new features mostly go to Cinnamon users, though The latest update to Linux Mint is here, with expanded video file format support and a tweaked Cinnamon desktop. It's as cool and refreshing as ever....

Software expected to top $1 trillion next year, according to analysts In the face of continuing economic uncertainty and geopolitical conflict, spending on computer software continues at a staggering pace, forecast to grow 13.5 percent in 2023....

Will people really hop on a plane to gaze at their phone? Singapore attracts millions of tourists every year, but lags well behind competing Asian destinations like Malaysia, Indonesia or Japan. Part of the problem is limited space available to build tourist attractions - the whole country is on an island. So the Singapore Tourism Board has turned to creating digital experiences to lure in guests and their wallets....

John Kelly is building approach around Microsoft, but there's room for flexibility Interview The UK government is to spend 1.2 trillion in the current financial year overseen mainly by HM Treasury, the department also responsible for keeping the economy on track and overseeing financial markets. To do its job, the Treasury aims to create a "production model" of a new data platform by the end of the 2024-2025 financial year....

Won't someone think of Zuck's pocket change? Norwegian data protection authorities have temporarily banned Meta from tracking users for the purposes of serving ads, and threatened the US company with fines of one million Kroner per day if it doesn't comply....

As Microsoft warns it'll charge $30 per user per month for Copilot for Business Llama 2, Meta's latest collection of large language models, can now be downloaded for free and commercial use is supported....

Predator dev joins Pegasus slinger The US government on Tuesday added commercial spyware makers Intellexa and Cytrox to its Entity List, saying the duo are a possible threat to national security....

Enough to make you hopping mad JumpCloud says a "sophisticated nation-state" attacker broke into its IT systems and targeted some of its customers....

Look who is learning to share: Deal includes no admission of fault, naturally Tesla's board of directors has settled a case with shareholders who accused its members of awarding themselves oversized compensation packages....

Industry body warns against political rhetoric or US subsidy efforts will be diminished The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has stepped into the fray to lower tensions between Washington and Beijing over chip exports, as well as calling for further restrictions to be put on ice....

China's Alibaba comes in third followed by Google and Huawei The global market for cloud infrastructure services grew by 30 percent last year, exceeding $100 billion in value for the first time and two lions account for nearly two-thirds of that entire spend....

Also: OpenAI enters deals with the Associated Press and Shutterstock to license content, and more AI in brief More than 8,000 writers have signed an open letter penned by the US Authors Guild urging leaders from six top AI companies to obtain consent and compensate them for training models on their copyrighted work....

Data from 2021 Mercury flyby shows same mechanisms cause phenomena throughout our star system Scientists have found that the fundamental mechanism behind the spectacular light shows of auroras on Earth are universal throughout the solar system....

Probably not aliens, maybe The Australian Space Agency said on Monday it was making enquiries related to a mysterious cylindrical object that washed ashore on Western Australia's Jurien Bay....

Says baddies launched attack at weekend, isolates parts of tech infrastructure to contain spread Norwegian mining and recycling giant TOMRA says it has isolated tech systems as it deals with an "extensive cyberattack."...

Could've sworn that came out yesterday OK, going by previous auctions of retro Apple hardware, it's clear that there are fanbois out there benefiting from an infinite money glitch or something - but this is getting ridiculous....

It would be twice as much if people could stop arguing about who counts and who doesn't Opinion Linux is now a little more than three 3 per cent of the desktop OS market, excluding the just over four per cent that is ChromeOS. Which is also Linux, but the wrong kind of Linux....

Misconfiguration led to hours of pain for engineers as bootstrap service caught in a loop A code deployment for Azure Container Apps that contained a misconfiguration triggered prolonged log data access issues, according to a technical incident report from Microsoft....

The race to 2nm is getting crowded as Intel, Japan's Rapidus enter the fray Samsung Electronics has reportedly caught up with rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in advanced processor design, achieving comparable yields for both 4nm and 3nm nodes....

Good thing Mali isn't best pals with Russia right no- oh, shoot For the past decade, millions of emails destined for .mil US military addresses were actually directed at .ml addresses, that being the top-level domain for the African nation of Mali, it's claimed....

Redmond one step closer to $69B Activision Blizzard merger Microsoft and Sony have signed a pact to keep Call of Duty games available for PlayStation consoles for the next ten years, clearing a major roadblock to Microsoft closing its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard....

Smells like Russian cyber spies (again) A vulnerability in Zimbra's software is being exploited right now by miscreants to compromise systems and attack selected government organizations, experts reckon....

Three years after Slack flagged up 'illegal' bundling of chat app European Union antitrust regulators are expected to next week launch their first formal probe into Microsoft's integration of collaboration app Teams with its dominant Office 365 productivity software suite....

There's never been a fruit winder like this before An Apple patent application indicates that Cook and Company are possibly entertaining the idea of adding roll-up screens to everything from the all-in-one iMac to the iPhone - and even wearables....

Also more fiery, with vague but firm orders to create a 'security barrier' Over the weekend Chinese president Xi Jinping gave a directive to officials to build a Beijing-supervised "security barrier" around its internet....

Why are you hitting yourselves? semiconductor CEOs ask The chip wars between the US and China continue apace amid warnings that both sides may be harming their own economy as much as the other, and tech companies are increasingly concerned about doing business within constantly shifting restrictions....

Trust and safety push promises ability to delete app-associated accounts Google, citing trust and safety concerns, has issued updated policies for those distributing Android apps through the Play Store....