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All it took to make an Google Edge TPU give up model hyperparameters was specific hardware, a novel attack technique ... and several days Computer scientists from North Carolina State University have devised a way to copy AI models running on Google Edge Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), as used in Google Pixel phones and third-party machine learning accelerators....

The Unixi-est of desktops gets a wide-ranging update Comment The new version of the longest-established Linux desktop is here, and at last, it's possible to use Wayland - although not everything works yet....

State-owned retail company was not subordinate to Japanese multinational in technical matters, legal rep says Fujitsu has said it continually told the Post Office about problems with Horizon, the computer system at the center of one of the UK's widest miscarriages of justice, as its client prosecuted branch managers for accounting discrepancies....

Chicago is my kind of driver model Pour a cup of cocoa and settle down for another episode of Microsoft Storytime. Why do codenames sometimes linger on in the implementation of products?...

Spirits of the NeXTcube, the web ad, and the cursed smartphone deliver a seasonal Technicarol Column On a Christmas Eve when nothing felt right, I lapsed into a deep yet disturbed sleep....

If you have trouble keeping track of your various streaming subscriptions, you're gonna love the irony Keeping track of the amount of cloudy resources an org uses, and the cost of doing so, is notoriously tricky - so tricky, indeed, that even Netflix isn't on top of it....

In case of submarine cable failure, call Jeff Bezos Taiwan has started talks with Amazon regarding access to its Kuiper satellite broadband service....

Not that you needed another reason to enable the 'known senders' setting Criminals are spoofing Google Calendar emails in a financially motivated phishing expedition that has already affected about 300 organizations with more than 4,000 emails sent over four weeks, according to Check Point researchers....

Victims' feelings might get hurt, global cops contend, and that could hinder reporting Interpol wants to put an end to the online scam known as "pig butchering" - through linguistic policing, rather than law enforcement....

You applied the patch that could stop possible RCE attacks last week, right? A critical security hole in Apache Struts 2 - patched last week - is currently being exploited using publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC) code....

'Super' edition promises 67 TOPS and 102GB/s of memory bandwidth for your GenAI projects Nvidia is bringing the AI hype home for the holidays with the launch of a tiny new dev board called the Jetson Orin Nano Super....

NASA to bid a final farewell to InSight Two years after NASA retired the InSight lander, scientists are continuing to use the vehicle to learn more about Mars....

Not as impenetrable as you might think, but still more than Intel or AMD would like Analysis Nvidia is facing its stiffest competition in years with new accelerators from Intel and AMD that challenge its best chips on memory capacity, performance, and price....

251 million? Zuck can find that in his couch cushions, but Meta still vows to appeal It's been six years since miscreants abused some sloppy Facebook code to steal access tokens belonging to 30 million users, and the slow-turning wheels of Irish justice have finally caught up with a 251 million ($264 million) fine for the social media biz....

Feds insist they still don't know what's happening - but note sightings cluster around airport flight paths Analysis Mystery drone fever continues to grip the US East Coast - and appears to be moving inland - as elected officials beg the federal government to do something. Meanwhile the feds reiterate what they've been saying all along: We don't know what's going on, but you all need to calm the hell down....

A cool mountain breeze blowing in after the new LTS kernel A fresh release of the minimalist and very lightweight Alpine Linux is here, with support for Chinese LoongArch64 CPUs....

Meanwhile, some iPhone users apathetic about introduction of AI features Things are not entirely going to plan for Apple's generative AI system, after the recently introduced service attracted the ire of the British Broadcasting Corporation....

Contract could be worth a cool 1 billion if associated organizations join The UK's largest police force is scoping the market for business outsourcing, an ERP upgrade and support in a tender that could be worth 1 billion ($1.27 billion) if other organizations join....

Heir to Superdome goes cloudy for those who run large in-memory databases and apps that need them Amazon Web Services usually stays schtum about the exact disposition of the servers it rents in its Elastic Compute Cloud, but made an exception on Tuesday with the announcement it is offering instances based on a single HPE server: the Compute Scale-up Server 3200....

Fresh attempt to mix the perfect cocktail of IoT and Infosec BlackBerry's ambition to mix infosec and the Internet of Things has been squeezed, after the Canadian firm announced it is offloading Cylance's endpoint security products....

The likes of SHA-256, RSA, ECDSA and ECDH won't be welcome in just five years Australia's chief cyber security agency has decided local orgs should stop using the tech that forms the current cryptographic foundation of the internet by the year 2030 - years before other nations plan to do so - over fears that advances in quantum computing could render it insecure....

Details? Who needs 'em! But AI seems a likely focus SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son revealed plans to invest $100 billion in the US and create a minimum of 100,000 jobs in the next four years....

But can you really take crims at their word? Supply chain integration vendor Cleo has urged its customers to upgrade three of its products after an October security update was circumvented, leading to widespread ransomware attacks that Russia-linked gang Cl0p has claimed are its evil work....

The Nuvia buyer's alleged violations of license terms expected to last through Friday The battle between British chip designer Arm Holdings and Qualcomm kicked off today in Delaware District Court....

The US has never attacked Chinese critical infrastructure before, right? President-elect Donald Trump's team wants to go on the offensive against America's cyber adversaries, though it isn't clear how the incoming administration plans to achieve this....

Personal and financial data probably stolen A cyberattack on a Deloitte-managed government system in Rhode Island carries a "high probability" of sensitive data theft, the state says....

Service promised by 2030 for bloc's take on Starlink A competitor for Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband constellation is on the way after Eurocrats signed the concession contract for the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS^2)....

Seek and ye shall find Opinion Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many....

Campaign groups, non-profit orgs urge action to prevent GPU maker tightening grip on AI industry A left-of-center think tank along with other non-profits are urging the European Commission to "fully investigate" Nvidia's purchase of workload management startup Run:ai amid worries its will help to tighten the GPU titan's grip on the AI industry....

Moxie maker Embodied is going under, teaching important lessons about cloud services Comment The maker of Moxie, an "AI"-powered educational robot for kids, is going out of business - and the $800 bots will die with it....

Best way to demystify modern computing? Brick it Opinion The Raspberry Pi is a moral hazard because it's been far too good to us. For the past 12 years, the Pi series has bombarded the world with extremely affordable, extremely useful computers designed purely to promote education, innovation and the democratization of digital skills....

Working for a startup is supposed to end with getting rich overnight, but not like this Who, Me? Welcome once again to Who, Me? The Register's Monday morning feature in which we share tales of technological messes your fellow readers made, and escaped, to give you hope in case you err during the coming week....

Giant distributor couldn't do a deal that delivered 'appropriate shareholder return' Exclusive Tech distribution behemoth Ingram Micro will stop doing business with Broadcom and its VMware range in many territories next year....

'Star Flash' is said to include 5G tech and leave rival wireless protocols struggling in the crack of a sofa China's Electronics Video Industry Association last week signed off on a standard for a universal remote control - a gadget Beijing thinks locals need because they're struggling with multiple remotes, but which is also a little more significant in other ways....

Plus: China wants to end AI mashups of classic vids; TSMC set to open Japan fab; and more Asia In Brief Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has once again argued for Indian workers to spend 70 hours a week in paid employment....

Plus: Netscaler brute force barrage; BeyondTrust API key stolen; and more Infosec in brief There's a problem of titanic proportions brewing for users of the Prometheus open source monitoring toolkit: hundreds of thousands of servers and exporters are exposed to the internet, creating significant security risks and leaving organizations vulnerable to attack....

Sometimes two models really are faster than one Hands on When it comes to AI inferencing, the faster you can generate a response, the better - and over the past few weeks, we've seen a number of announcements from chip upstarts claiming mind-bogglingly high numbers....

Take this job and automate it Red Rabbit Robotics made an appearance at the Humanoids Summit this week - a conference for builders making machines resembling people and selling autonomous labor as a service....

Gather around the fire for another retelling of computer networking history Systems Approach A few weeks ago I stumbled onto an article titled "Traceroute isn't real," which was reasonably entertaining while also not quite right in places....

Final curtain call for weird wingman The Microsoft axman just claimed another victim. Less than three years after it appeared in the Windows Insider Dev Channel, the Suggested Actions feature is being deprecated....

IOCONTROL targets IoT and OT devices from a ton of makers, apparently An Iranian government-linked cybercriminal crew used custom malware called IOCONTROL to attack and remotely control US and Israel-based water and fuel management systems, according to security researchers....

'Today's sentencing is more than just a punishment. It's a message' A Texan who ran a forum on the dark web where depraved netizens could swap child sex abuse material (CSAM), and chat freely about abusing kids, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison....

Won't someone think of Elon? Ah, who are we kidding - none of this will matter in a month Ever in the sights of the SEC, Elon Musk is engaged in another public spat with America's financial watchdog, this time in the form of a letter from the billionaire's lawyer published on X (better known as Twitter)....

Privacy measure leaves some mourning lost memories A year ago, Google announced plans to save people's Location History, which it now calls Timeline, locally on devices rather than on its servers....

And the kernel team's patience? AlmaLinux 10 is joining RHEL 10 in public beta testing, and the developers of CentOS Stream 10 have just hit the release button ahead of the festive break....

Workday policy expert suggests NIST framework will save you trouble later The US House and Senate are unlikely to pass federal legislation on the use of AI in business, so users should focus their attention on a new NIST framework in lieu of state-level law, according to Workday's veep for corporate affairs....

Landing hard at an angle not great for the old rotor blades It appears the bland Martian surface triggered a chain of events that left NASA's Ingenuity helicopter permanently grounded on the red planet....

Wider ecosystem still has work to do, though Google is rolling out two new features to help Android users evade stalkers who abuse Bluetooth tags to surreptitiously track them....

'Does it ever fully separate? I think that's an open question for another day,' interim co-CEO says Intel's interim co-CEOs, David Zinsner and Michelle Johnson Holthaus, discussed the possibility of fully spinning off its foundry business while speaking at the Barclays investment banking conference on Thursday....

Holidays come early for distro builders with two init systems to choose from Everyone's favorite Linux component has hit a milestone, while a fresh contender comes of age - with a touch of Lisp....