The Register

Project includes hundreds of millions of loonies for a national supercomputing facility Canada is one of the latest nations to catch the sovereign AI bug and plans to invest $2 billion CAD ($1.42 billion USD) to bolster the nation's domestic compute capacity by funding the development of new datacenters and computing infrastructure north of the 49th parallel....

Compatibility holds persist as gamers face black screens Windows 11 24H2 is set to hit more users as the Microsoft operating system enters a "new stage of availability."...

Another buzzword box ticked: OCI-compliant containers FreeBSD 14.2, the latest point release of the most widely used of the BSDs, brings some new features to tempt Docker fans....

Euro rocket stuck on the ground for another day The return to flight of Arianespace's Vega C has been delayed due to a "mechanical issue" with the mobile gantry....

Very much a 1.0 - but it's a solid start MLCommons, an industry-led AI consortium, on Wednesday introduced AILuminate - a benchmark for assessing the safety of large language models in products....

Merger will create third large operator in UK mobile market Vodafone and Three's proposed merger has been cleared by the UK's competition watchdog, as long as the pair commit to certain conditions. The move will create a third large-scale mobile operator, with the expectation this will offer greater competition for BT/EE and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2)....

Children's hospital and cardiac unit say criminals broke in via shared 'digital gateway service' Both National Health Service trusts that oversee the various hospitals hit by separate cyberattacks last week have confirmed they're still in the process of restoring systems....

Sensitive data allegedly stolen from US subsidiary following Black Basta post BT Group confirmed it is dealing with an attempted attack on one of its legacy business units after the Black Basta ransomware group claimed they broke in....

A third-party Kubuntu remix with a severe identity crisis Wubuntu is a stripped-down Kubuntu, with custom themes and additional tools to make it look (a lot) and work (superficially) like Windows 11....

Stoli Group on the rocks in the US Two US subsidiaries of alcohol giant Stoli Group filed for bankruptcy protection this week over financial difficulties exacerbated by an August ransomware attack....

Bases predictions on historical data, instead of solving physics equations Google DeepMind researchers claim they've used machine learning to devise a model that can deliver better 15-day weather forecasts and requires only modest quantities of compute resources to produce its predictions....

Boffins' big brainwave of using custom skullcaps to capture, er, more brainwaves Eggheads in the US are said to have created an easier, faster, and just-as-reliable but much cooler way to measure brain activity than the bulky, wire-ridden caps used today: Printable, temporary "e-tattoos."...

Which could be in short supply as Beijing bans rare earth exports Four of China's top industry bodies have published advice suggesting members source fewer semiconductors from US silicon slingers, because supply chain issues caused by sanctions mean they are "no longer secure and reliable."...

Smaller buyers see deep discounts and suddenly worry less about regulatory issues Canalys Forums APAC Chinese cloud vendors are undercutting their US counterparts on price and making inroads into the Asian small and medium business market, according to analyst firm Canalys....

Now wants to work with 500 and lean more on partners to defend against migrations - which Dell says are on the cards Canalys Forums APAC Broadcom has revised its strategy to work directly with the top 2,000 "strategic" VMware users, and will instead focus on just 500 - a move that Canalys chief analyst Alastair Edwards described as "a U-turn."...

Floating the idea of a robot navy NATO is testing hardware for a potential force that would operate unmanned surface vessels (USV) to patrol the coastal waters of member states and also help protect undersea cables from attack....

Security chief talks to El Reg as Feds urge everyone to use encrypted chat interview While Chinese-government-backed spies maintained access to US telecommunications providers' networks for months - and in some cases still haven't been booted out - T-Mobile US thwarted successful attacks on its systems "within a single-digit number of days," according to the carrier's security boss Jeff Simon....

Facebook titan targets early 2030s for reactor deployment Meta believes it will need one to four gigawatts of nuclear power, in additional to the energy it already consumes, to fuel its AI ambitions. As such, it will put out a request for proposals (RFP) to find developers capable of supplying that level of electricity in the United States by early 2030....

Billionaire space tourist and mate of Elon pledges Americans will get to Mars President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman, a notable SpaceX customer, as head of NASA....

Lawsuit says e-commerce giant cut two zip codes from its own fleet without telling residents Amazon has trouble in the US capital, where the city's attorney general alleged in a lawsuit filed today that the company excluded two postal zip codes from its fastest Prime delivery service without informing customers....

TPM 2.0 'non-negotiable' for latest OS, says software giant Microsoft is not backing down on the hardware requirements for Windows 11, stating that the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is essential for the operating system, even if it is not part of the minimum requirements for Windows Server 2025....

Nozzle woes in the past for continent's new launcher Arianespace's Vega C is set to make a return to flight this evening, almost two years to the day after a second-stage failure doomed its previous launch....

Never mind our alleged cheating of customers - you guys are a bunch of leakers, Redmond tells watchdog Microsoft isn't happy about an antitrust investigation reportedly kicked off by the FTC recently, but not for the reason you might think: Redmond's mad that it found out about the probe by reading the news....

Drugs, botnets, forged docs, and more generated fortune for platform sellers German authorities say they have again shut down the perhaps unwisely named Crimenetwork platform and arrested a suspected admin....

Installed the final non-security preview update of 2024? Best not hop onto the Dev Channel Microsoft has pinned down why some eager Windows Insiders could not persuade the Recall preview to save any snapshots. It's all down to a pesky non-security preview....

Based on Ubuntu 24.04, more accessibility, still looks great Elementary OS 8 "Circe" is here, based on Ubuntu 24.04, with Wayland support in the Pantheon desktop....

Multi-stage journey preferred in high-risk switch, says user group chair According to the chair of the SAP UK and Ireland user group, users of its legacy on-prem ERP systems are set to upgrade their software before they move to the cloud, eschewing the vendor's preferred method as a first step....

Cinnamon 6.4 is already out and Xfce 4.20 is very nearly ready Fancy spending time refreshing your setup over the holidays? Two of the more popular Windows-style FOSS desktops are about to drop new point releases, one for higher-end machines and one for lower-end kit....

They took the red pill Updated French and Dutch police have taken down the Matrix chat app, which was designed by criminals for criminals to be a secure encrypted messaging tool....

Differing China tech policy agendas will send bromance into 'it's complicated' status Canalys Forums APAC The CEO and founder of channel-centric analyst house Canalys has predicted that the alliance between president-elect Donald Trump and aspiring oligarch Elon Musk will unravel in 2025, putting Tesla's ability to execute on full self-driving vehicles at risk....

Yes, we've been over this before - several times, in fact Microsoft has been sued in the UK to the tune of more than 1 billion over claims Redmond has been overcharging businesses for Windows Server licenses used on competing cloud platforms....

Minister reveals 17 crypto players owe $100 million - with Binance the baddest of the bad India's Finance Ministry has alleged crypto exchange Binance evaded almost $85 million in tax - the vast majority of around $96 million it claims digi-dollar outfits haven't paid....

Architecture may be good for more than cut-rate SoCs and high-volume microcontrollers after all RISC-V chip designer Tenstorrent has won $693 million of investment - an endorsement of its plans to use the permissively licensed instruction set architecture for workloads like AI....

'Where we go is who we are' totally isn't a creepy ad slogan at all The FTC has reached a settlement with two data brokerages over allegations they harvested precise location data that shows when people entered hospitals, places of worship, and even attended protests supporting the late George Floyd....

Cloud colossus reckons it can clarify hallucinations, get your apps off Microsoft's OS at pleasing speed re:Invent Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman opened the cloud computing service's 13th annual re:Invent conference by observing: "Generative AI has the potential to disrupt every single industry out there."...

20-year-old info disclosure class bug still pervades security software It's time to rev up those patch engines after SailPoint disclosed a perfect 10/10 severity vulnerability in its identity and access management (IAM) platform IdentityIQ....

We're sure you'll learn to love the new Outlook for Windows app Microsoft is preparing to kill off the old Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps by the end of this month and shift users to the Outlook for Windows app....

Probe may not make it to 30 as funding runs out and replacement is launched ESA and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is approaching what could be its final year of operations as it hits the 29th anniversary of its launch....

ENGlobal customers include the Pentagon as well as major oil and gas producers American energy contractor ENGlobal disclosed that access to its IT systems remains limited following a ransomware infection in late November....

Tens of thousands of AWS' Trn2 instances to fuel Anthropic's next-gen models Re:Invent Amazon Web Services teased its next gen AI accelerator dubbed Trainium3 at re:Invent on Tuesday, which it says will deliver 4x higher performance than its predecessor when it arrives late next year....

Most significant API changes since S3 was launched, AWS VP tells us Re:Invent There are two significant changes to AWS's ubiquitous S3 storage service arriving soon: first, a new Table bucket type aimed at data analytics; and second, a previewed metadata feature that uses S3 tables to enable fast query of S3 data....

'Even if a stockholder vote could have a ratifying effect, it could not do so here,' says Delaware Chancellor Elon Musk's controversial $56 billion Tesla compensation package, voided by a Delaware court in January and reinstated by shareholder vote in June, has failed to move Judge Kathaleen McCormick to reverse her original decision, rendering Musk's pay package void yet again....

Microsoft marketing skewered by X platform users... and its own chatbot Opinion Microsoft's recent post on X that Copilot+ PCs are "the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever" is being rebuffed by the platform's context panel and the software vendor's own chatbot....

CEO's severance pales in comparison to Musk's billion-dollar Tesla battle Outgoing Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger is set to receive severance pay of around $9.7 million following his departure from the chip giant....

What to buy the techie who has everything? If you thought $373 million was a little bit beyond your budget to get your hands on the latest chipmaking machines, ASML will let you have one for just $228 - provided you don't mind it being made of Lego....

National cyber emergencies increased threefold this year The number of security threats in the UK that hit the country's National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) maximum severity threshold has tripled compared to the previous 12 months....

New framework set to help public sector orgs move on amid lock-in fears The UK government has awarded a contract worth up to 1 billion ($1.3 billion) to get tech services companies to help various bodies and departments make the leap to the cloud....

Stability essential ahead of Christmas trading amid ongoing Walmart divorce The UK's third-largest retailer has accelerated plans for a system freeze during the busy Christmas period as it grapples with a long-running tech divorce from its previous owner....

We're shocked - shocked - that Microsoft's study of its own tools might not be super-rigorous GitHub's claim that the quality of programming code written with its Copilot AI model is "significantly more functional, readable, reliable, maintainable, and concise," has been challenged by software developer Dan Cimpianu....

No exaggeration - literally a ton. Plus, 15 co-conspirators also put behind bars A Russian court has handed a life sentence to the head of the infamous online drugs souk Hydra, and 15 of his co-conspirators will also spend many years behind bars....