The Register

'Lonsdaleite' is even harder than normal diamonds and its genesis shows how we might make more A rare type of diamond that's even stronger than the usual form of the crystal was created when a large asteroid smashed into an ancient dwarf planet 4.5 billion years ago, researchers assert.…

USA told to sort itself out in 5G, AI, and microelectronics by 2025 – or things could get mighty grim US think tank the Special Competitive Studies Project, a private spinout from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, has warned that the period between 2025 and 2030 will be the time when global technological leadership will be decided – and the USA and like minded nations may not be able to maintain their lead over China.…

vCenter Converter will make a comeback VMware has quietly announced a beta of vCenter Converter – a tool it withdrew earlier this year over security concerns.…

At 130nm, we'll take it NIST has decided, with participating colleges, to design open source chips to help lower the barrier for those hoping to get into the world of semiconductors.…

Criminals continue to target some of the most vulnerable Two recent ransomware attacks against healthcare systems indicate cybercriminals continue to put medical clinics and hospitals firmly in their crosshairs.…

Mudge tells senators his former bosses are 'terrified' of the French, US regulators are toothless Twitter's former head of security Peiter "Mudge" Zatko on Tuesday told the US Senate Judiciary Committee that the social media company's lax data handling and inability to present problems to its board of directors threaten the privacy, security, and democracy for Americans.…

Plus: Nasty no-auth RCE in TCP/IP stack, Adobe flaws, and many more updates Patch Tuesday September's Patch Tuesday is here and it brings, among other things, fixes from Microsoft for one security bug that miscreants have used to fully take over Windows systems along with details of a second vulnerability that, while not yet under attack, has already been publicly disclosed.…

Speech can be impacted by cancer, Parkinson's, depression, and more The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has earmarked as much as $14 million in funding to support the training of AI software that can analyze patients' voices to diagnose and study illness.…

Bitbarn suffered 'total shutdown' after 113F heatwave Earlier this month extreme heat downed a Twitter datacenter in California over the Labor Day weekend, leaving the website and app working on bare-bones infrastructure.…

Criminals do love that unpatched VoIP and IoT kit The Lorenz ransomware gang is exploiting a vulnerability in Mitel VoIP appliances to break corporate networks.…

Everythings bigger in Texas, including the tax breaks Taiwanese chip biz GlobalWafers is rounding up a posse of press in time for the Thanksgiving groundbreaking ceremony at the site of its forthcoming $5 billion Texas wafer fab.…

Not just for the web anymore: Microsoft Office Scripts coming for the macro-managers among us Users running Excel on either Windows or Mac PCs will soon be able to automate many of the now-manual tasks in their spreadsheet software, something that currently is only available to those using the web application.…

Euroconsumers hail success, payments capped and only folks in 4 countries eligible so far HP has settled a dispute brought of behalf of European consumers upset that a covert firmware update introducing the Dynamic Security Feature prevented them from using supplies made by third parties with a range of HP printers.…

Withdrawal of SpaceX's $885.5m award a 'drastic action' – but Musk wouldn't want subsidy anyway, right? A member of the Federal Communications Commission's leadership team has come out swinging on behalf of SpaceX after the company's bid for rural broadband subsidies via its Starlink satellite business was rejected.…

The ones used as boot drives in its datacenters seem to be, but perhaps not over time Cloudy backup and storage provider Backblaze has found that flash SSDs are more reliable than hard drives, at least as far as the boot drives deployed in its datacenters go, but cautions this could change in future as the SSDs age.…

Avoiding data movement saves $$$ but rivals have own approaches to doing analytics, transactions on same data Oracle has made its Heatwave combined analytics and transactional data system available on cloud platform AWS for the first time, and a product on Microsoft's Azure is expected to follow shortly.…

Virtualization giant pays $8m to settle claims it pushed revenue into later quarter... without admitting liability VMware misled investors about its order backlog management processes that allowed it to roll revenue into future quarters by postponing product delivery dates to customers to conceal slowing sales relative to forecasts.…

One in six ditching job offer from employers low-balling on pay Despite a flatlining UK economy, and recessionary clouds gathering, in the tech sector the competition for skilled staff remains intense, even as software job openings reportedly dip on a global scale.…

Forget self-driving cars, the Middle Kingdom has floating cars now Chinese researchers levitated a 2.8-ton car 35 millimeters off the ground on a highway in east China’s Jiangsu province, state-sponsored media said over the weekend.…

What could go wrong with leaving firmware open after world's biggest hacker convention talk? Multiple high-severity firmware bugs in HP enterprise computers remain unpatched, some more than a year after Binarly security researchers disclosed the vulnerabilities to HP and then discussed them at the Black Hat security conference last month.…

Everything's fine! The Yanluowang ransomware group behind the May attack on Cisco Systems has publicly leaked the stolen files on the dark web over the weekend, but the networking giant says there's nothing to worry about.…

This time it has sprinklers and the batteries are outside the building – where they flaming well belong OVHCloud has opened a datacenter in Strasbourg, on the site of a 2021 fire that destroyed two such facilities.…

It needs to, because the likes of Alipay are already ubiquitous – and used overseas China appears to have begun to address one of the big unanswered questions about its central bank digital currency: how to get people using it, given rival electronic payment schemes are already ubiquitous.…

Authorities also bust a shell company scam operation with links to the Middle Kingdom Chinese scammers have reportedly stolen a whopping $529 million dollars from Indian residents using instant lending apps, lures of part-time jobs, and bogus cryptocurrency trading schemes, according to the cyber crime unit in the state of Uttar Pradesh.…

There may not be any, which is the point of the lawsuit India’s Supreme Court has ordered the nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to disclose whether it has a standard protocol for ordering or allowing internet shutdowns.…

Wait? Is the plan to ban them from buying parts they can already make? The Biden Administration is reportedly prepping another round of sanctions in a bid to further hamper Chinese chipmakers.…

If at first you don't succeed... Elon Musk has come up with a new reason to get out of his acquisition of Twitter - a severance payment.…

High-value targets tend to get hit Apple has pushed out five security fixes including including two vulnerabilities in its iPhones, iPads and Mac operating systems that are already being exploited.…

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines Intel says its 13th-Gen Raptor Lake CPUs will do 6GHz at stock settings and top 8GHz when overclocked, according to slides shared during the company’s Tech Tour in Israel this week.…

No one hurt as crew-free mission goes awry An uncrewed flight test of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket failed about one minute after launch on Monday when the rocket booster erupted in flames.…

The code's on GitHub for admins to play with Enterprises using Microsoft's service for enforcing business rules within their expansive Azure cloud environments now have a less complex option for implementing policies and ensuring compliance.…

Independent management aims to ensure openness and transparency Meta is shifting the management of PyTorch, a deep learning framework developed by Meta subsidiary Facebook, to the newly formed PyTorch Foundation, which in turn will be under the oversight of The Linux Foundation.…

Now it's really got all eyes on you Google closed its $5.4 billion Mandiant acquisition today in a move that brings the threat intel and incident response giant under the Google Cloud umbrella. …

No, the devil's lettuce isn't on the menu A former Digital Realty datacenter in Virginia is getting a new lease on life as an urban farmstead. And no, this isn’t a crypto farm or some seedy weed growing operation.…

Maintenance and software installation prices heading north for range of agreements SAP is upping the price of support fees for a raft of agreements to offset the rising cost of doing business, it confirmed to The Register.…

*Tappity tappity* Yes the NSA's on the phone. Well maybe the automated log check didn't pick it up yet, Chad! In an IT world that is increasingly automated, there are still occasions when manual operations are necessary. According to Microsoft, one of these times is when security events are reported to enterprise security operation centers (SOCs).…

1.5 million machines and half a billion acres of land connected to the John Deere Operations Center within a matter of years US farm machinery giant John Deere has estimated software fees will make up 10 percent of the company's revenues by the end of the decade.…

A high level of image duplication in a single paper is a sign of cheating Shady scientists trying to publish bad research may want to think twice as academic publishers are increasingly using AI software to automatically spot signs of data tampering.…

Calm down - it's potentially only meant for units sold in China Republican lawmakers have said Apple is "playing with fire" if reports of its plans to source 3D NAND flash from China's YMTC (among others) for the upcoming iPhone 14 prove true.…

The chipmaker not only needs to find nearly 10,000 workers, it has to deliver a competitive product Interview As Intel breaks ground on its Columbus, Ohio mega fab, the company’s Foundry Services (IFS) President Randhir Thakur’s biggest concerns have less to do with finding workers to build and run the fabs and more to do with keeping the chipmaker’s technology roadmap on track and the cost of manufacturing chips in check.…

Sycamore Asset Management: Outsourcer 'badly run' with 'profit margin,' growth 'below industry averages' Beleaguered outsourcing tech giant Atos is coming under fire from a section of its investor community over the ambitious turnaround plan that will see the business carved up in two later this year.…

It's not because our AI overlords aren't keen on the idea Interview Every time a chipmaker or researcher announces an advancement in neuromorphics, it's inevitably the same story: a brain-like AI chip capable of stupendous performance-per-watt compared to traditional accelerators.…

If you make it here, you can make it anywhere Opinion In IT, there is sexy tech, there is fashionable tech, and there are databases. Your average database has very little charisma, however. Nobody's ever made a movie about one. …

TickTock mic lock won't work on Apple Scientists from the National University of Singapore and Yonsei University in the Republic of Korea have developed a device for verifying whether your laptop microphone is secretly recording your conversations.…

Who doesn't like a cup of coffee? Anything electrical, that's who Who, Me? A lot of folks in technology and affiliated industries use caffeine as stimulant of choice. A hot cup of Joe is just the thing at the start of a long day shift after an all-nighter, because sleep is for the weak. Importantly, though, it must not be shared with the computers.…

Helium-3 also draws excitement as future fusion energy source China announced last Friday it discovered a hitherto unknown mineral in samples returned from the Moon.…

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).…