The Register

Outsource all the things! To whom? The lowest bidder of course, says Gartner The world's governments are eager to let someone else handle their IT headaches, according to a recent Gartner report, which found a healthy appetite for "anything-as-a-service" (XaaS) platforms to cut the costs of bureaucracy.…

Now can we just buy them, please? Microsoft isn't wasting time trying to put Activision Blizzard's problems in the rearview mirror, announcing a labor neutrality agreement with the game maker's recently-formed union.…

Russian-based group doubles the extortion by exfiltrating the corporate data before encrypting it. Windows and Linux systems are coming under attack by new variants of the HelloXD ransomware that includes stronger encryption, improved obfuscation and an additional payload that enables threat groups to modify compromised systems, exfiltrate files and execute commands.…

LibreOffice, Collabora, KDE Gear all updated their Microsoft alternatives – whatever your OS Fresh versions of three of the bigger open-source application suites just landed for those seeking to break free from proprietary office apps.…

First of Europe's pre-exascale systems inaugurated, hits top 3 even without GPU partition fully installed HPE has scored another supercomputing win with the inauguration of the LUMI system at the IT Center for Science, Finland, which as of this month is ranked as Europe's most powerful supercomputer.…

Another assault in the battery market as automakers race to translate EV tech to the home Japanese automaker Toyota has become the latest car company to repurpose its electric vehicle batteries for home energy storage. …

Goal is to bring analytics to its transactional workloads but there are places where this might fall short Analysis At MongoDB's recent conference in New York, the company demonstrated its ambition in taking on workloads from other databases.…

Blake Lemoine began to believe that LaMDA, Language Model for Dialogue Applications, exhibited self-awareness Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies.…

Backlogs reportedly 10 to 15 times greater than they were pre-pandemic The Wireless LAN market was battered by a choppy supply chain in the first quarter of 2022 and lockdowns in China are compounding the problem, according to analysis by Dell'Oro Group.…

Orbital success counter stuck at 2 as upper stage of rocket shuts down early and CubeSats lost The first of NASA's TROPICS constellation launches came to an unscheduled end over the weekend as the Astra launch vehicle it was riding failed to deliver the cubesats to orbit.…

Delays said to favor Palantir as health service seeks suppliers to support its top-down data revolution The top-down approach to the procurement of a £360 million data platform for NHS England is said to favor incumbent supplier Palantir as fears grow the project could be making the same mistakes that led to the failure of the country's infamous £10 billion National Programme for IT.…

The weapon too deadly to use is just a handful of dirt. Let's change that Opinion Last year, the US Army War College published a paper suggesting that the Taiwanese government might give TSMC's chip fabs their own self-destruct systems in case China invaded. At the time, China said it had no interest in TSMC, thus defusing the Strangelove scenario. Now, the Middle Kingdom's talking about changing its mind. It might want TSMC very much indeed.…

If I delete all these duplicate files, everything will run much smoother! Who, Me? We've covered backups before in the annals of this column, but a bit of helpfulness that turned into a bonfire of the binaries? Start your Monday with a lesson in not taking the initiative.…

X86 giant says it’s on track to regaining manufacturing leadership after years of missteps By now, you likely know the story: Intel made major manufacturing missteps over the past several years, giving rivals like AMD a major advantage, and now the x86 giant is in the midst of an ambitious five-year plan to regain its chip-making mojo.…

Plus: Why safety data for self-driving technology is misleading, and more In brief Facebook and Instagram's parent biz, Meta, was hit with not one, not two, but eight different lawsuits accusing its social media algorithm of causing real harm to young users across the US. …

Investigation could help end WebKit monoculture on iOS devices The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday said it intends to launch an investigation of Apple's and Google's market power with respect to mobile browsers and cloud gaming, and to take enforcement action against Google for its app store payment practices.…

The Obegränsad is the company's first record player since 1973 Ikea is introducing a fresh take on a product it hasn't sold since 1973: The record player.…

All the news you may have missed from RSA this week RSA Conference in brief Researchers from Wiz, who previously found a series of four serious flaws in Azure's Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) agent dubbed "OMIGOD," presented some related news at RSA: Pretty much every cloud provider is installing similar software "without customer's awareness or explicit consent."…

Biz trying to clean up shop to close $68.7bn buyout by Microsoft Activision Blizzard is starting collective bargaining with quality-assurance workers at its game studio Raven Software, after they voted in favor of unionizing.…

Will cyber crimes shrug off Atlas Initiative? Objectively, yes RSA Conference An ambitious project spearheaded by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working to develop a map of the cybercrime ecosystem using open source information.…

French investigative report draws no conclusion but hints at inverter malfunction Late last month, France's BEA-RI, or Bureau of Investigation and Analysis on industrial risks, issued its technical report on the March 10th, 2021 fire at the OVH datacenter in Strasbourg.…

The chip’s GPU and neural engine could overshadow Apple’s concession on CPU performance Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.…

Visitors to insider.windows.com met with safety warning - how reassuring Microsoft has forgotten to renew the certificate for the web page of its Windows Insider software testing program.…

Well, we'll see in a week or so RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.…

Massive language models aren't for everyone, but neither is heavy-duty hardware, says AI systems maker Graphcore As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.…

The Reg FOSS desk takes the latest stable distro for a spin Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.…

Based in the Big Red cloud, the system will suck up records from hospitals and physicians, says CTO Larry Ellison Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.…

Automakers concerned as to whether there is enough infrastructure and battery capacity to go around Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.…

'Performing live forensics on an infected machine may not turn anything up' warn researchers Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.…

New Insider build adds a few toys, but leaves Pro X users reaching for the power button Microsoft has treated some of the courageous Dev Channel crew of Windows Insiders to the long-awaited tabbed File Explorer.…

The truth is out there, and the space agency intends to find it – scientifically Over recent years, Uncle Sam has loosened its tight-lipped if not dismissive stance on UFOs, or "unidentified aerial phenomena", lest anyone think we're talking about aliens. Now, NASA is the latest body to get in on the act.…

Strategy says 50 of the most frequently used digital services will be upgraded at the same time The UK government has committed to ending its reliance on legacy applications, or at least those it deems the highest priority, by 2025.…

Fresh out of jail on corruption charges, the company's leader goes shopping Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-yong is said to be courting Dutch chipmaker NXP on a visit to Europe to bolster the company's position in the automotive semiconductor market.…

MIT CSAIL boffins devise PACMAN attack to let existing exploits avoid pointer authentication Apple's M1 chip has been found to contain a hardware vulnerability that can be abused to disable one of its defense mechanisms against memory corruption exploits, giving such attacks a greater chance of success.…

Don’t cross the streams! Why? It would be bad. What do you mean 'bad'? Something for the Weekend Which do you prefer: sweat or green slime? Both are being touted as clean sources of energy to drive electronic devices.…

Pre-configured units can be delivered to customers in 12 weeks Schneider Electric has revamped its modular datacenters, and announced an update for the EcoStruxure IT management software to cover the hybrid infrastructure scenarios that now characterise the modern world of IT.…

Oh my word, do you remember MacWrite? It just works, right? On Call Sometimes it just works. Sometimes it just doesn't. And sometimes users do the most curious of things. Welcome to an Apple-tastic episode of On Call.…

Crimeware groups are re-inventing themselves The criminals behind the Emotet botnet – which rose to fame as a banking trojan before evolving into spamming and malware delivery – are now using it to target credit card information stored in the Chrome web browser.…

Wave of replacements needed as Samsung and Microsoft team to stream Xbox games to smart displays and tellies Microsoft and Samsung have teamed to stream Xbox games on the Korean giant's smart televisions and monitors.…

Researcher spots it targeting Asian government and telco targets, probably with Beijing's approval Threat researcher Joey Chen of Sentinel Labs says he's spotted a decade worth of cyber attacks he's happy to attribute to a single Chinese gang.…

While this poses a privacy and security threat, an attacker's ability to exploit it may come down to luck Researchers at the University of California San Diego have shown for the first time that Bluetooth signals each have an individual, trackable, fingerprint.…

Countries that accept US infosec help told they could pay a price too Russia and China have each warned the United States that the offensive cyber-ops it ran to support Ukraine were acts of aggression that invite reprisal.…

Epyc future ahead, along with Instinct, Ryzen, Radeon and custom chip push After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.…

The next wave of security maturity is measuring effectiveness, she told The Register RSA Conference When Sandra Joyce, EVP of Mandiant Intelligence, describes the current threat landscape, it sounds like the perfect storm. …

Buyer beware, say analysts, technical debt will catch up with you eventually AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services.…

Meanwhile, NFT Cloud pilot will allow companies to mint, manage, and sell the controversial web tokens Salesforce has previewed a bunch of updates to its Customer 360 platform promising close integration with external data sources including Google ads, ecommerce marketplaces and social media.…

Flying horses, gonna pwn me away... RSA Conference Living off the land is so 2021. These days, cybercriminals are living off the cloud, according to Katie Nickels, director of intelligence for Red Canary and a SANS Certified Instructor.…

Up for debate is whether Autopilot, or humans behaving badly, is the reason for Tesla's iffy safety record An investigation into the safety of Tesla's autopilot system has been upgraded from a preliminary peek to a formal engineering analysis, a step that could put the Musk-owned motor company on the path to a recall of nearly one million vehicles. …

Judge finds security is not a central feature of iDevices A California District Court judge has dismissed a proposed class action complaint against Apple for allegedly selling iPhones and iPads containing Arm-based chips with known flaws.…

Penguin fans will be able to use Rosetta 2 to run x86 binaries in forthcoming update Apple is extending support for its Rosetta 2 x86-64-to-Arm binary translator to Linux VMs running under the forthcoming macOS 13, codenamed Ventura.…