The Register

Hopefully not another half century before the next... although launchpads are pricey Today marks the 50th anniversary of the UK joining an elite club of one: nations that gained the ability to launch satellites into orbit and then discarded the skill. The one – and only – successful orbital launch of the Black Arrow took place in 1971.…

Yuan 1.0 said to pass Turing test, and require many fewer GPUs than the GPT-3 Microsoft licensed from OpenAI Inspur has turned its hand to AI, and claims it has produced a text-and-code-generating machine-learning model superior to GPT-3 produced by OpenAI. And did so using significantly fewer GPUs.…

Pandemic work patterns work in component-maker's favour, but COVID isn't all upside Samsung Electronics sees ongoing high demand for data centre products, but the firm is also worried that supply chain constraints could see sales slip, execs revealed in an earnings call on Thursday.…

Accursed semiconductor shortages to blame but it's only 15 bucks A new Raspberry Pi Zero launches today that comes loaded with speedier silicon, however, the price is roughly a third higher than its predecessor and shipments are limited.…

Everyone else really is out to get you Those hoping for some respite from the world's ongoing woes are out of luck, apparently.…

Officials have until March 2022 to approve the deal or not The European Commission has launched an antitrust investigation into Nvidia’s $54bn bid to takeover Arm – and will decide whether to approve the merger deal or not by early 2022.…

Third parties get some data, use it to send mails as if they were your reseller, and – phew! – you don't get calls from sales people The next time your vendor or reseller sends a mail reminding you it's time to renew your software licence, subscription, or support contract, the mail could come from a third party you've never met and never will – but which has been trusted with enough info about you to make the sale.…

Sharding system coded in 40,000+ lines of Rust is changing the way cloud colossus ensures data durability Amazon Web Services has released a paper detailing the operations of its Simple Storage Service (S3), and in doing so revealed that the software powering the service is "being gradually deployed within our current service".…

Alas, we will have to wait 70 years to confirm the sighting Astronomers have for the first time discovered what looks like a planet outside the Milky Way, judging by a study published this week in Nature.…

From developers and Mount Evans ASICs to zettascale-by-2027 promises, the key things chip boss covered in speech this week Analysis Intel won't give up on Moore's Law, even though just about everyone has declared it dead or on its way out.…

We dubbed it the Antisocial Network – and it appears we were right Facebook on Wednesday was sued for allegedly violating federal securities laws in the first of what's likely to be many such claims arising from internal documents revealed by former employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen.…

Would you like AI with that? Big Blue has taken a bite out of McDonald's, acquiring the burger chain's automated order taking (AOT) tech – and the "McD Tech Labs" that built it, for an undisclosed consideration that may or may not include an upsold serve of fries.…

Subverted libraries likely intended as a prank but should be taken seriously, say security researchers Yet another NPM library has turned up infected with malware. Security firm Sonatype on Wednesday said it had spotted two related malicious NPM libraries that were named so they might be mistaken for a popular legitimate module that serves as a Roblox API wrapper.…

CEO plans to hop into bed with the Beast of Redmond MediaTek intends to work with Microsoft on putting Windows 11 on devices powered by its Arm-based processors, the chip house's CEO said during an earnings call this week.…

Vercel boss Guillermo Rauch speaks to The Reg about Rust, WebAssembly, Node TypeScript, and more Interview Next.js 12 is out with a range of new features including built-in middleware and support for ECMAScript (ES) modules.…

Venerable semi biz having to move faster to stop others eating its lunch Intel has had to significantly change its approach to chip design with Apple, Arm and AMD slowly undoing its decades-long dominance.…

Universe event reveals iterative improvements but no big bang Microsoft's GitHub social code motel begins its two-day Universe happening on Wednesday, bringing with it assorted enhancements to its developer-oriented products and services.…

Advertising engine still revving amid pandemic Google Cloud – a relative blip on parent Alphabet's balance sheet – booked in a 45 per cent year-on-year bounce in turnover for calendar Q3 but still missed the consensus estimate by Wall Street analysts.…

'If he was an adult he would be going inside' – judge A "sophisticated" teenager has had £2.1m ($2.88m) in cryptocurrency confiscated after he set up a phishing site and advertised it on Google, duping consumers into handing over gift voucher redemption codes.…

Water's wet, sky's blue, and Redmond's revenues grew in Q1 2022 Even a "stronger than expected" PC market with unprecedented demand from homebound workers couldn't lift Surface revenues in Microsoft's first quarter for fiscal 2022 - in an otherwise stellar quarter for the firm.…

Running Linux on a vintage box is one answer, but someone has to hold big tech's feet to fire Bringing an end to the relentless nature of annual product release cycles is something that should be top of the agenda for the soon-to-run 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26.…

Horizons Europe carrot dangled amid protocol wrangling A report from the UK House of Commons' European Scrutiny Committee has blamed delays in Brussels for choking off revenue streams to British institutions and businesses.…

PAX Technology devices allegedly infected with malware US feds were spotted raiding a warehouse belonging to Chinese payment terminal manufacturer PAX Technology in Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday, with speculation abounding that the machines contained preinstalled malware.…

In which a little unfairness can be quite beneficial Systems Approach It’s hard not to be amazed by the amount of active research on congestion control over the past 30-plus years. From theory to practice, and with more than its fair share of flame wars, the question of how to manage congestion in the network is a technical challenge that resists an optimal solution while offering countless options for incremental improvement.…

Working on Azure integration – but not there yet Cisco has deprecated support for some third-party management integrations for its UCS servers, and emerged unable to play nice with Microsoft's most recent offerings.…

Doesn't stop local courts' surveillance orders, though Encrypted email provider Protonmail has hailed a recent Swiss legal ruling as a "victory for privacy," after winning a lawsuit that sees it exempted from data retention laws in the mountainous realm.…

Local players passed over for Digital Agency’s first project Japan's Digital Agency has picked Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for its first big reform push.…

Fancies a real-time crowdsourced content rating scheme too A Minister in the Singapore government has suggested the creation of an internet kill switch that would prevent minors from reading questionable material online – perhaps using ratings of content created in real time by crowdsourced contributors.…

FCC urges more action against Huawei and DJI, too The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has terminated China Telecom's authority to provide communications services in the USA.…

A little more oomph coming for cheaper smartphones Budget smartphones these days do OK with 5G though lack performance in other areas, and so Qualcomm has promised some system-on-chips to give these modest devices some more oomph.…

You don't double operating income by giving silicon away AMD, which is raking in cash from its CPUs and GPUs, said higher price tags on its components helped bolster its financial results for the third quarter of this year.…

Connecting data and rewarding people with cryptocash, if they want it US carrier DISH Wireless has buddied up with Helium blockchain crew and FreedomFi to permit users to roam onto the Helium network, built with the latter's 5G CBRS hotspots.…

It's 2021 and of course code with classic buffer overflows is still shipping A mere two weeks after its most recent set of security patches, Adobe has issued another 14 security bulletins covering 92 CVE-listed bugs.…

China still in the toilet for internet freedom with 'draconian prison terms for online dissent' Google has published its semi-annual set of stats revealing how many content takedown requests it receives from courts and governments worldwide.…

Startup alleges IP wound up in Switchzilla's Quad product Cisco will face trial in a long-running case over claims that it stole trade secrets from an enterprise collaboration startup, a US judge has ruled.…

Hands up who wants to do that info migration The UK's intelligence services are to store their secret files in the AWS cloud in a deal inked earlier this year, according to reports.…

In-browser editing previewed for Photoshop and Illustrator Adobe has introduced a beta of Creative Cloud Web at its virtual Max event, which kicked off today.…

'Consent cannot be truly freely given' says privacy campaigner The use of facial recognition technology deployed in a number of school canteens across the UK has been put on hold for the time being after the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) intervened to ask some questions.…

*cough* Microsoft and Oracle *cough* Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) has published a report on how the licensing antics of legacy software firms could distort the cloud marketplace.…

Company recommends migration for those unhappy with current functionality Microsoft has further clarified its plans for the Universal Windows Platform, a desktop application framework which at the launch of Windows 10 was said to be the future but now looks headed for oblivion.…

New package aimed at consumers Element, which makes Matrix-based communications and collaboration tools, has launched a consumer-oriented version of its messaging platform, complete with bridges for WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.…

James Webb Space Telescope in line for a December flight The veteran Hubble Space Telescope (HST) tripped back into safe mode yesterday, leaving science operations suspended while the latest technical woe is investigated.…

Firm fingers 'overseas criminals' for sending internet phone business TITSUP* It never rains but it pours. Internet telephone service provider Voipfone, currently battling a "major outage" across all voice services, has admitted to being hit by an "extortion-based DDoS attack from overseas criminals" that knocked it offline last week.…

'Nice comparative boost' for AMP claimed to be achieved by actively slowing other formats More detail has emerged from a 173-page complaint filed last week in the lawsuit brought against Google by a number of US states, including allegations that Google deliberately throttled advertisements not served to its AMP (Accelerated Mobile) pages.…

Took Propofol, aka ‘the milk of amnesia’ or 'the drug that killed Michael Jackson' Samsung boss Lee Jae-Yong has been convicted of drug abuse and fined 70 million won (US$60K).…

Transparency, algorithmic accountability, and much more – tune in online next week for free Special Series After some years of investigation, more and more industries are warming to integrating machine-learning technologies into their digital offerings. Given the almost omnipresent reports on biased algorithms and security concerns, however, consumers often have an understandably hard time finding enthusiasm for AI popping up in sensitive areas, such as health and finances.…

Sir Jeremy Fleming paints picture of a cultural battle over the internet, AI and the soul of future technology The UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) boss Sir Jeremy Fleming has outlined a plan to pursue criminal actors who deploy ransomware as well as the state actors that are aware of their efforts.…

Zuck says criticism is unfair and – look over here at our huge revenue growth, billions for future holo-conferences, and pivot to young adults Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg believes the media has made "a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company".…

Good thing the government didn't crank up the national alert system or anything ... Oh no, it did South Korean telco KT, which has around 30 per cent of the nation’s mobile market, has admitted that a network outage was caused by its own blunder and not a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.…

Pretty ambitious – none of this Blue-Origin-led consortium can put humans in orbit yet Blue Origin is leading a consortium hoping to put the first commercial space station into orbit. The craft is set to combine research and tourism facilities, and provide an office address in space for businesses.…