The Register

Oracle states it is agreeing to request while SAP and Microsoft decline to comment Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called on the world's largest software vendors to end support for Russian customers, companies and government organisations.…

Plus: Clearview slapped with €20m from Italy's data regulator for scraping selfies, and more In brief The name Rafaela Vasquez may not immediately be recogniseable, but the accident that ties her to the first-ever fatal self-driving car crash accident will be.…

Plus: Criminals use contact forms to spread BazarBackdoor, ServiceNow leaks, and more In brief A US bill that would require critical infrastructure operators to report cyberattacks within 72 hours is headed to President Joe Biden's desk to be signed into law.…

Fine-tuning cost using μTransfer was 7% of what it would be to pre-train GPT-3 Companies scaling up their neural network models could cut expensive training costs by employing a new technique developed by researchers at Microsoft and OpenAI.…

Martial law, no booze sales, big queues for trains westwards Pics British infosec pro Vic Harkness traveled to Ukraine to offer humanitarian help – and while taking a break in the western city of Lviv she described to The Register what it's like in the war-torn country.…

It might not be trendy anymore, but apparently it keeps on selling In a slightly curious blog post, Ubuntu recently dismissed the idea that OpenStack was no longer relevant and had been "abandoned" – making it the second outfit in the past six months to state how confident it remains in the IaaS platform.…

What if we've built the future, but nobody wants to come? Opinion On March 9th, Apple had its spring reveal. The stars of the show were a nice monitor, a new budget iPhone, and the Mac Studio, a Mac Mini stretched in Photoshop. Reaction was muted. There'd been some very accurate pre-launch leaks, sure, but nobody had cared about those either.…

Behind every successful company there is that one weird Visual Basic 3 app still running the show Who, Me? We all want the users of our software to be happy, but how far would you go to fulfill that requirement? For one Register reader, perhaps a bit too far. Welcome to Who, Me?…

Any port in a storm Analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has found that the global market for switches surged during 2021, despite shortages that have seen delivery of some products delayed for many months.…

Offers list of IP addresses that look like they're hosted at carriers and colos – hardly the stuff of super-spies China's Cyberspace Administration has claimed that "since late February" it has observed continuous attacks on the Chinese internet and local computers by actors who used the resources they co-opted to target Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.…

As Ukraine calls for big tech to end support for its products in Russia Russia's Investigative Committee, the nation's peak criminal and anti-corruption investigation body, has opened a probe into whether Meta is an extremist organization.…

The fight against economic espionage and skullduggery continues Taiwan's Ministry of Justice has tasked its Investigation Bureau to conduct a series of raids around the island and hauled in 60 Chinese nationals suspected of lifting trade secrets or poaching talent from China-owned firms.…

Spectre-like flaw has made an eighth release candidate necessary Linux kernel development boss Linus Torvalds's prediction that Linux 5.17 would be released this week "unless something surprising comes up" has come to pass. Not in the good way.…

iPhone plants closed and so have plenty more - brace for tech supply chain trouble The Chinese city of Shenzhen – the nation's tech hub – has gone into a week-long lockdown intended to slow an outbreak of COVID-19, and sent the world's tech-dependent industries into a whirlwind of worry about the impact on supply chains.…

Pay for pro, get a warm fuzzy feeling Zorin 16.1 has arrived, marking the first major update of the Linux distribution since August's release.…

Astrolab up against competition but has secret weapon: Cosmic crooner Chris Hadfield Space startup Astrolab, led by ex-SpaceX manager and NASA engineer Jaret Matthews, has successfully tested a lunar rover prototype that can operate telerobotically or ferry around a crew of two astronauts.…

Financial watchdog warns operators to shut down or else All cryptocurrency ATMs are operating illegally in the UK and must be shut down now, the nation's Financial Conduct Authority said in an alert on Friday.…

Back when debugging the Lyons Electronic Office led to interference from the building's elevator Obituary British programmer Mary Coombs, the first woman to program a computer designed for commercial applications, passed away on February 28 at the age of 93.…

It's not just a filesystem, it's an 'open-source storage platform' The OpenZFS Project has released version 2.1.3 of what the project calls its "open-source storage platform" for Linux and FreeBSD.…

Will someone give the buzzwords a buzz cut? The Cloud Security Alliance is trying to cut through the myriad zero-trust approaches and solutions out there and attempt to offer some practical info for corporate network admins.…

Details emerge of the now-patched flaws Singapore's Cyber Security Group, an agency charged with securing the nation's cyberspace, has uncovered four critical flaws in code from network software company Riverbed.…

Neon Genesis: Even Cryoin gone Analysts warned Russia's invasion of Ukraine could derail the supply chains of semiconductor fabs. Now those concerns are playing out with the apparent shuttering of two major neon gas suppliers in Ukraine.…

SaaS-y x86 goliath dreams of recurring revenue Analysis Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lately said he wants to grow his company's software business "rapidly" with new software-as-a-service products and software platforms that will help the chipmaker better compete against rivals.…

Measuring real-world AI training, decision-making abilities on todo list Benchmarking organization SPEC has formed a committee to oversee the development of vendor-agnostic benchmarks for machine-learning training and inference tasks.…

Abysmal server utilization and other problems uncovered US government auditors want to save taxpayers' money by bolstering the capability and efficiency of Uncle Sam's far-flung stable of datacenters. Each federal agency's sites have a host of problems, unsurprisingly.…

Cyberwarfare escalates for some as Russia continues to invade Ukraine Revenge and inflation are key drivers behind an 800 percent increase in cyberattacks seen by a managed services provider since the days before the onset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine last month, according to the company's top executive.…

Unexpected result of thousands of developers fleeing? More automation Thousands of developers are fleeing the war in Ukraine, while thousands more in Russia have been sanctioned out of being able to work in the West. There are two ways out, and one is to automate those jobs.…

Sustainability report blames carbon generated from data center builds, Xbox sales and usage Microsoft has published its annual sustainability report for 2021 [PDF], claiming to have reduced its own CO emissions by about 17 percent year-on-year, but with a bigger carbon footprint overall than it had last year, showing that "progress won't always be linear".…

Massive model gobbles 37 million homegrown 'Sunway' cores Back in October, reports surfaced that China had achieved exascale-level supercomputing capabilities on two separate machines, one of which is its Sunway "Oceanlite" system, which is built with entirely Chinese components, from CPU to network.…

Senior veep for software raps about containers and OpenShift to Wall Street IBM's senior veep of software reiterated for Wall Street this week that OpenShift is the linchpin of Big Blue's overall multi-cloud strategy.…

Doctor Ellison says big wins in the sector influenced decision to buy health records outfit Cerner The pandemic highlighted systemic weaknesses in healthcare systems around the globe and Oracle technology is going to fix those issues.…

Watchdog: We're 'concerned' they 'teamed up ... to put obstacles in the way of competitors' Google and Meta are facing scrutiny from UK and EU competition regulators over their infamous "Jedi Blue" ad-slinging deal.…

But potential bidders will have to move fast on this one The Home Office is looking to replace its ancient and creaky National Firearms Licensing Management System (NFLMS) in a £20m contract.…

My parents were not lying to me but… who's the Finn? Something for the Weekend? Later in life, my father used to make bizarre claims of Russian ancestry, which I put down to his Alzheimer's at the time.…

Practise makes... less than perfect On Call A Register reader finds the inevitable single point of failure after a call-out to the heart of darkness in this week's On Call.…

IT giants reportedly contemplating relocation of Eastern European ops Indian IT services giants Infosys and Wipro both operate offices in Russia - and neither is saying what will become of them.…

ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent team on improvement to WebRTC's startup times Chinese web giants Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance – the latter through its Volcano Engine hyperscale cloud service – have teamed up to create, in their terms, a new video streaming standard.…

With millions of euros, we'll do you a QSolid, say scientists Germany is getting more serious about quantum computing with the foundation of the QSolid project which aims to build a complete quantum computer based on cutting-edge native technology.…

They’re not bothering to be particularly polite about it either Toshiba's plan to split itself into two companies has been opposed by two significant groups of investors.…

Meanwhile, Anonymous claims it's popped Putin's comms regulator Moscow has set up its own certificate authority to issue TLS certs to Russians affected by sanctions or otherwise punished for president Putin's invasion of Ukraine.…

Sanctions work, who knew? The screw is tightening on Russian chip makers as America moves to further cut off semiconductor supplies to Vladimir Putin's regime.…

More than $28m in crypto-coins found in home, it is claimed US prosecutors on Thursday said they have extradited a Canadian man to America to face charges that he conspired to distribute ransomware.…

Not only is this payback sweet, it gives network defenders valuable intelligence It was a Ukrainian security specialist who apparently turned the tables on the notorious Russia-based Conti, and leaked the ransomware gang's source code, chat logs, and tons of other sensitive data about the gang's operations, tools, and costs. …

Xie claims his custom chips lower infosec computing costs by up to 10x As security and networking converge, Fortinet CEO Ken Xie believes the company he co-founded will win this particular $200bn market with its custom application-specific ICs, or ASIC chips.…

Code Verify tool confers with Cloudflare to warn of any shenanigans WhatsApp and Cloudflare have teamed up to provide desktop users of WhatsApp's web client with a browser extension called Code Verify that checks the integrity of the software running in their browser.…

Gee, could this be something Intel or IBM actually lead? Neuromorphic chips that mimic the way brains work may have broad applicability for high-performance computing applications and could be a better fit than CPUs and GPUs in some cases, according to Sandia National Laboratories in the US.…

We seem to give away stuff for free at just the right time, says CFO If Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert's take on his company's direction is accurate, expect future strategy to focus on how it can use its slew of newly announced tools to make the biggest dent in existing markets. Profit motivations come a distant second, as least for now.…

Focused on price point, energy-efficiency compute for midsized enterprise Lenovo is rolling out customized infrastructure bundles for midsize organizations that include new servers and a range of new services, mostly focused on bolstering security.…

Little doubt about US federal court outcome A Ukrainian national alleged to be a member of the REvil ransomware gang has been extradited to the US and charged with multiple criminal offences.…

Sets is still dead, but perhaps some more Tabs might help? Microsoft has sent a fresh build of Windows 11 into the Dev Channel, and eagle-eyed insiders have already spotted some hidden treats among the updates.…