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Watt's the problem? Not enough energy to win the arms race? US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that aims to ensure American AI leadership doesn't lag because of shoddy energy infrastructure....

Attorney Jennifer Scullion on allegations of algorithmic suppression of competition Interview Price fixing - an agreement between competitors to set price levels - has been illegal under the US Sherman Antitrust Act since 1890....

Fewer giant contracts, but many more smaller ones, in bit barn feeding frenzy Datacenter merger activity soared to new heights in 2024, with $57 billion in deals closed over the 12 months. If you're looking for a reason, you guessed it: anticipated gains around generative AI....

38-year veteran Edward Screven led technology and architecture decisions since Sun merger One of Oracle's longest-serving senior team members, chief corporate architect Edward Screven, has announced plans to retire on a comfortable sum....

Double-digit reduction only served to 'stimulate some interest' Microsoft and its close circle of PC maufacturers slashed the price of Copilot+ PCs being sold into Europe in Q4, an analyst confirmed to The Register, yet it still didn't make the impact hoped....

Third front opened amid continued scrutiny from US, Euro regulators The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the latest regulator investigating Google's position in the search and search advertising business....

'Let's not do this again please'... days before release date Intel and AMD engineers have stepped in at the eleventh hour to deal with a code contribution from a Microsoft developer that could have broken Linux 6.13 on some systems....

Packages removed, vendor said to have apologized to AI code editor as onlookers say it could have been a test Updated Developer security company Snyk is at the center of allegations concerning the possible targeting or testing of Cursor, an AI code editor company, using "malicious" packages uploaded to NPM....

He could buy 49,766 and a half MacBook Pros with that Apple supremo Tim Cook bagged an 18 percent pay rise in 2024, taking his total compensation to $74.6 million, according to a regulatory filing....

That niche forum running for 20 years - get ready, there's work to do Analysis A little more than two months out from its first legal deadline, the UK's Online Safety Act is causing concern among smaller online forums caught within its reach. The legislation, which came into law in the autumn of 2023, applies to search services and services that allow users to post content online or to interact with each other....

Linux distros that don't exist, but we wish did Analysis In an overcrowded field full of distributions, there are still many empty gaps. The Register would like to point in the direction of a few....

Stronger proposals may also see private sector applying for a payment 'license' A total ban on ransomware payments across the public sector might actually happen after the UK government opened a consultation on how to combat the trend of criminals locking up whole systems and taxpayers footing the bill....

Knee-deep in the markup There is a race to see who can bend the PDF file format to do the most impressive thing. Considering the more-than-30-year-old shooter, Doom, has been ported to many unexpected places, it was inevitable it would turn up in a PDF file....

Export controls would limit shipments of GPUs to large swaths of EU The European Commission is displeased with the Biden administration's plans to extend export controls on AI chips and models to most of the world....

Free Our Feeds solicits funds to foster AT Protocol that powers decentralized social media In a challenge to billionaire-controlled social media platforms, a group of nine less affluent technology leaders have formed a group that aims to raise $30 million to support the development of decentralized social media platforms....

Sailesh Kottapalli sees a once-in-a-career opportunity' at the house of Snapdragon - maybe server CPUs or AI silicon? Intel fellow Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year Chipzilla veteran who worked as lead engineer on many of Xeon server processors, has left the company and joined Qualcomm....

Board appoints interim leader to stay in tune with its turnaround song, both execs hear sweet sound of cash landing in the bank Smart speaker outfit Sonos has parted ways with CEO Patrick Spence, who oversaw the release of an app that was billed as an upgrade but instead made the company's products worse and riled customers....

WordPress.org accounts cancelled, dissidents told to fork off WordPress co-founder Matthew Mullenweg on Saturday deactivated the WordPress.org accounts of five members of the WordPress community, and justified his actions by saying it will encourage them to fork the open source content management system....

Ransomware 'not off the table,' Arctic Wolf threat hunter tells El Reg Miscreants running a "mass exploitation campaign" against Fortinet firewalls, which peaked in December, may be using an unpatched zero-day vulnerability to compromise the equipment, according to security researchers who say they've observed the intrusions....

That's Cray cray Hewlett Packard Enterprise has reportedly secured a contract to supply Elon Musk's X, the site better known as Twitter, with more than $1 billion in AI-accelerating servers....

Nad lad says 30 years of change happening in 3 years ... we're certainly feeling the compression of time Microsoft has revealed it's created an engineering team that CEO Satya Nadella feels is needed to cope with a potential huge change to software development processes and applications unleashed by AI....

This is what happens when you publish PoCs immediately, hm? "Several cloud deployments" are already compromised following the disclosure of the maximum-severity vulnerability in Aviatrix Controller, researchers say....

Rent-a-GPU outfit's latest datacenters are packed to the brim with H200s As the UK government reaffirms its aspirations to become an AI superpower, CoreWeave says two new GPU bit barns packed to the brim with Nvidia accelerators are ready for business....

Scumbags stole API keys, then started a hacking-as-a-service biz, it is claimed Microsoft has sued a group of unnamed cybercriminals who developed tools to bypass safety guardrails in its generative AI tools. The tools were used to create harmful content, and access to the tools were sold as a service to other miscreants....

It's fixed, mostly, after Europeans had a manic Monday Microsoft's multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Azure and Microsoft 365 (M365) was offline for four hours during Monday's busy start for European subscribers....

'Sweden has changed,' PM warns as trio of warships join defense efforts Sweden has committed to sending naval forces into the Baltic Sea following yet another suspected Russian attack on underwater cables in the region....

Plus: Man who tossed Bitcoin drive worth millions barred from digging in dump A man of God is in the sin bin with Uncle Sam's prosecutors over a cryptocurrency investment business that he claims came to him in a dream....

'New rule threatens to squander America's hard-won technological advantage' says GPU supremo Nvidia has hit back at the outgoing Biden administration's AI chip tech export restrictions designed to tighten America's stranglehold on supply chains and maintain market dominance....

'Codefinger' crims on the hunt for compromised keys A new ransomware crew dubbed Codefinger targets AWS S3 buckets and uses the cloud giant's own server-side encryption with customer provided keys (SSE-C) to lock up victims' data before demanding a ransom payment for the symmetric AES-256 keys required to decrypt it....

Software snafu can fry computer components for owners of Musk's electric buggies Days after the US's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) began an investigation into the company's Actually Smart Summon technology, Tesla is is now recalling almost a quarter of a million vehicles over a separate issue - glitches with rearview cameras on some models....

Government adopts all 50 venture capitalist recommendations but leaves datacenter energy puzzle unsolved Britain's government is adopting all 50 recommendations made by a venture capitalist to use AI to drive economic recovery, without even acknowledging the resulting energy challenge this strategy likely poses....

Vehicle subsystem concerns blamed for scrub Blue Origin has given up on today's lift-off attempt for its New Glenn rocket, confirming that it was standing down a little more than two hours into the vehicle's launch window....

Think you're good at spotting trends? Try these on for size Opinion This column may be out of date two days after publication. That's when the US Supreme Court decides whether the Constitutional right to free speech overrides the laws against online porn adopted by many southern states....

Unauthorized activity detected, but no backdoors found UK domain registry Nominet is investigating a potential intrusion into its network related to the latest Ivanti zero-day exploits....

Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project designation could tear down more restrictions Britain's planning system is still seen as a significant barrier to the development of datacenters....

Or ignore documentation that warns you are about to do something dangerous Who, Me? Rise and shine, dear readers, it's Monday and therefore time to sink your teeth into a new week of work, a fact The Register celebrates with a new edition of Who, Me? This is the column in which you share stories of when you bit off more than you can chew, but fumbled through....

Faced with huge license cost increase, provider and customers were both happy to make migration a mission Exclusive Broadcom has lost another large customer for its VMware platform: Austrian cloud provider Anexia has moved 12,000 VMs, some of them rented by major European businesses, to an open-source system based on the KVM hypervisor....

PLUS: Data broker leak reveals extent of info trading; Hot new ransomware gang might be all AI, no bark; and more Infosec in brief Gravy Analytics, a vendor of location intelligence info for marketers which reached a settlement with US authorities last year over its alleged unlawful sale of location, has reportedly been hacked - potentially exposing millions of smartphone users....

I'm a software person with a soldering iron', he warns alongside release of Linux 6.13-rc7 Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has offered to hand-build a guitar effects pedal for one lucky kernel contributor....

Won't say if other nations will be hit, but will listen, learn, and improve' as buyers react - so far with anger Microsoft has advised users of its M365 suite in six Asian nations that they face big price rises when they renew subscriptions, and says the hikes are needed to ensure Microsoft customers are among the first to access powerful AI features in our apps"....

PLUS: China plans unified APIs; Singapore lets Police run scam victims' bank accounts; Fujitsu now too cool for aircon Asia In Brief Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has reported strong annual revenue growth....

El Reg vultures circle the Consumer Electronics Show Kettle The annual Consumer Electronics Show was held this week in Las Vegas - and for us the extravaganza felt a bit subdued for a change....

Meanwhile, tech titans are falling over themselves to help Trump Opinion We all know the US's incoming president, Donald Trump, has gone off-script in a way that is almost comical. Gulf of America? Make Greenland great again? Taking over the Panama Canal?...

Even better use for the Technic range than the Mars Rover - with one big caveat The original Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle had the look of something that had been strung together from an oversized Meccano set. It should, therefore, not come as a surprise to find a LEGO variant built from the company's Technic pieces....

Right as Uncle Sam pushes for Chrome sell-off, eh? While Google awaits a decision about whether it will be required to sell its Chrome browser as an antitrust remedy, the search giant has joined with the Linux Foundation to announce an initiative to support the open source Chromium project upon which the Chrome browser depends....

Gee, wonder why Beijing is so keen on the - checks notes - Committee on Foreign Investment in the US Chinese cyber-spies who broke into the US Treasury Department also stole documents from officials investigating real-estate sales near American military bases, it's reported....

All the consumer electronics weirdness you didn't want to see in person anyway CES As the gadget-filled spectacle that CES draws to a close, there's much to anticipate and just as much that leaves us completely baffled....

Struggling to connect to the cloud? You're not alone Microsoft on Friday warned Azure cloud service users may continue to experience "intermittent errors," blaming the problem on a US East regional networking service configuration change....

Now set for the day before SpaceX's next Starship test Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin has postponed the inaugural launch of its New Glenn rocket to January 12, the day before SpaceX hopes to launch another Starship test flight....

Details of afflictions and care plastered online BayMark Health Services, one of the biggest drug addiction treatment facilities in the US, says it is notifying some patients this week that their sensitive personal information was stolen....