The Register

Machine learning has its place, just not in ways that suits today's hypesters Systems Approach Full disclosure: I have a history with AI, having flirted with it in the 1980s (remember expert systems?) and then having safely avoided the AI winter of the late 1980s by veering off into formal verification before finally landing on networking as my specialty in 1988....

After two years of warnings, and outages, regulators ran out of patience with Kotak Mahindra Bank India's central bank has banned Kotak Mahindra Bank from signing up new customers for accounts or credit cards through its online presence and app....

Might help to set spluttering EV market on fire. Won't catch fire thanks to built-in vents Samsung SDI, the Korean giant's battery biz, on Tuesday promised EV batteries that can charge to 80 percent capacity in a mere nine minutes, plus models that can perform at that level for 20 years....

Investors want to know what Big Blue is smoking after growth disappoints IBM has announced it will acquire Hashi for $6.4 billion, and touted the deal as meaning its hybrid cloud platform will emerge with a comprehensive" set of products....

And warn that AI is already being used by extremists to plot attacks The director general of Australia's lead intelligence agency and the commissioner of its Federal Police yesterday both called for social networks to offer more assistance to help their investigators work on cases involving terrorism, child exploitation, and racist nationalism....

Don't get too comfortable: 'Line Dancer' malware may be targeting other vendors, too A previously unknown and "sophisticated" nation-state group compromised Cisco firewalls as early as November 2023 for espionage purposes - and possibly attacked network devices made by other vendors including Microsoft, according to warnings from the networking giant and three Western governments....

Now Jensen has a control plane to play with his army of NIMs Nvidia on Wednesday announced the acquisition of AI-centric Kubernetes orchestration provider Run:ai in an effort to help bolster the efficiency of computing clusters built on GPU....

It's not the fastest machine learning model, but you can't have everything Apple, not normally known for its openness, has released a generative AI model called OpenELM which apparently outperforms a set of other language models trained on public data sets....

It's the millions-of-robotaxis promise again - and all y'all buying it this time, too? Opinion Elon Musk has a strategy and you may have seen it before: When things aren't going well, he'll say something wild to take everyone's eyes off the trouble, and raise share prices with dreams....

Doctorow: 'The most amazing part is that this isn't already the way it's done' Collaboration software used by federal government agencies - this includes apps from Microsoft, Zoom, Slack, and Google - will be required to work together and be securely end-to-end encrypted, if legislation proposed by US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) passes....

And you thought the Bing begging was annoying Microsoft has made good on its promise, or threat, to put advertisements inside the Windows 11 Start menu with its latest update....

The SODIMM replacement finally arrives Lenovo's latest ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 laptop is set to be the first to use the new LPCAMM2 memory form factor, the successor to SODIMM sticks....

Secure-by-default... if your pockets are deep enough Microsoft has come under fire for charging for security add-ons despite the company's own patchy record when it comes to vulnerabilities and breaches....

Senior execs making $150K+ will still have to abide by them, but they fall away for everyone else The US Chamber of Commerce is saying it will sue the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for officially banning noncompete clauses in employment contracts across Amercia....

What's that? Q1 was better than expected? Pump those shares Another Boeing whistleblower has come forward to report problems at his former employer, but that doesn't seem to have upset shareholders, who sent shares skyward on news of a quarter bearing fewer losses than expected....

The firm 'fessed up to staff misconduct and avoided criminal liability A company contracted to manage an Amarillo, Texas nuclear weapons facility has to pay US government $18.4 million in a settlement over allegations that its atomic technicians fudged their timesheets to collect more money from Uncle Sam....

Privacy Sandbox slips into 2025 after challenges from UK authorities Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is being postponed to 2025 amid wrangling with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)....

Their holiday options are now far more restricted The US has charged and sanctioned four Iranian nationals for their alleged roles in various attacks on US companies and government departments, all of whom are claimed to have worked for fake companies linked to Iran's military....

Nashville 'ticked all the boxes' for Big Red's employees, says founder Ellison Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has confirmed that the tech giant plans to move its global headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee....

Who cares that net profit slid 55%? Not Wall Street In a dynamic first quarter, Elon Musk's Tesla contended with a terrorist organization, survived an arson attempt, and fiercely competed with hybrid car makers, all against a backdrop of falling prices as competition for electric vehicle customers intensified....

CISPE says concessions 'solve nothing' Updated Euro cloud trade body CISPE has hit back at concessions offered by Broadcom over VMware licensing, saying these do not address key issues that led it to lobby the European Commission into investigating....

Directive places requirements on gizmo vendors, but still needs formal approval The European Parliament has adopted the right-to-repair directive with 584 votes in favor and three against, making repairing goods more accessible and cost-effective....

Big tech backlash and animus against the machines will invite stifling red tape Video Generative AI is destined to drown in a tsunami of regulation, argues Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman....

International Energy Agency points out obvious: Infrastructure needs to meet demand The International Energy Agency (IEA) is reminding governments to match the continued rapid growth of electric car sales with infrastructure improvements....

Japanese foundry upstart aims to bolster domestic production while catering to growing demand for custom accelerators Interview The foundry space is arguably the most complex and competitive it has been in decades as foundry upstarts in the US and Japan look to challenge heavyweights Samsung and TSMC for a piece of the action....

Standards body adoption could help ease portability between vendors GQL, the query language for graph databases, has been recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), offering users more portability of queries and skills between graph database systems....

One wonders why are there adverts on public-sector portals at all Exclusive At least 18 public-sector websites in the UK and US send visitor data in some form to various web advertising brokers - including an ad-tech biz in China involved in past privacy controversies, a security firm claims....

You read that right - it's a bit like Pokemon Go, but for telephone poles Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) - which manages infrastructure including the Fukushima nuclear power plant - is reportedly involved in an IP dispute over an app that gamifies the crowdsourced identification of faulty power poles....

China Mobile alone wants almost 8,000 machines Giant Chinese telco China Mobile, which boasts over a billion customers, wants to purchase nearly 8,000 AI servers....

Somewhere in Beijing, someone's screaming: Mother, PFACAA! The US Senate has passed a bill that compels TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to offload the app to a US-approved buyer or face a ban. President Biden has indicated he will sign it into law....

Permissive licenses may be about to collide with geopolitics The United States Department of Commerce is reportedly considering lawmakers' calls to make it harder for China to use the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)....

In theory, this should make it harder for states to compel data-sharing to enforce anti-abortion laws A revision to America's healthcare privacy rules aims to better protect abortion providers and patients seeking the procedure - and other types of reproductive care, such as in vitro fertilization and contraception - as some US states ban procedures and attempt prosecutions....

Gelsinger and gang certified to court wider array of defense contractors Intel's Foundry division is one step closer to manufacturing chips for military applications using its forthcoming 18A process node....

Smaller dies, less wafer loss equals lower emissions, exec claims Comment AMD says its decision to ditch monolithic datacenter chips seven years ago in favor of a chiplet architecture has helped cut global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by tens of thousands of metric tons a year....

Strange tales from San Francisco A self-driving Waymo taxi in San Francisco was filmed passing unicyclists and scooters - which would have been mundane if it weren't for the fact that the autonomous vehicle drove down the wrong side of the street to do so....

Graphics giant and partners say they're clean - it's all technically legit More banned Nvidia GPUs are making their way into Chinese universities, local governments, and private companies....

ZBLAN fibers made in space hopefully don't crystallize and are far less brittle, opening the path to faster photonics Fiber optics of the future may be manufactured in space if the results of a recent ISS experiment prove its feasibility....

Expect ongoing supply shortages this year, say storage analysts Seagate has joined Western Digital in increasing the prices of hard drives, with rising demand due to the huge data requirements of AI taking the blame. AI is also behind a rapid growth in orders for Enterprise solid state drives (SSDs)....

Musk outfit's figures almost 10 times worse than industry averages Workplace safety data reported to the US government for 2023 indicates that SpaceX's injury rate continues to surpass the industry average....

What are Mir and Wayland all about anyway? Mir-based tiling window manager Miracle-WM version 0.2.0 is here, building on the basis of the initial release. Will Mir bring peace and harmony and convergence after all?...

Motorists file class action alleging breach of contract and more after their premiums went up Two New Jersey drivers claim they now pay more for their car insurance because General Motors (GM) and its OnStar app snooped on their driving behavior without their consent and sent metrics to "various insurance carriers."...

From first place to third as local brands grow iPhone sales in China - the world's largest smartphone market - slipped by 19.1 percent in Q1 year-over-year while many domestic brands rose, pushing Apple from first to third place....

Language model focused on reasoning fits on a smartphone and runs offline Microsoft claims the latest incarnation of its lightweight Phi-3 Mini AI model rivals competitors such as GPT-3.5 while being small enough to be deployed on a phone....

Electricity goes both ways as bit barns in Dublin aim to cut emissions and boost the bank Datacenter biz Digital Realty is to let facilities in Ireland feed energy back to the electricity grid when needed, helping to smooth out variability in supply, cut CO emissions and provide an additional revenue stream....

Even tighter requirements, so it's time to put old hardware out to pasture... or find an alternative OS Microsoft's war on old PCs appears to have intensified as the latest builds of Windows 11 will not boot if your CPU does not support the SSE4.2 instruction set....

Cloud migration good for margins, CEO says SAP booked revenue of 8.04 billion ($8.58 billion) in the first calendar quarter of 2024, up eight percent on the same period of 2023....

The 'big victory for the good guys' shouldn't be celebrated too much, though The average time taken by global organizations to detect cyberattacks has dropped to its lowest-ever level of ten days, Mandiant revealed today....

That said, good old US healthcare system so elaborately costly some are forced to avoid altogether UnitedHealth Group, the parent of ransomware-struck Change Healthcare, delivered some very unwelcome news for customers today as it continues to recover from the massively expensive side and disruptive digital break-in....

All from billions of miles away NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has begun returning usable engineering data after engineers devised a way to work around a damaged memory chip....

City council says it lost control after shutting down systems It's become somewhat cliche in cybersecurity reporting to speculate whether an organization will have the resources to "keep the lights on" after an attack. But the opposite turns out to be true with Leicester City Council following its March ransomware incident....