The Register

Competition heats up while profits cool down Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) is the latest to warn of a potential oversupply in the global market, saying there is an increasingly fierce price war for less advanced silicon in its domestic arena....

'This was a no sh*tter' RSAC A malware-laced USB stick, inserted into a military laptop at a base in Afghanistan in 2008, led to what has been called the worst military breach in US history, and to the creation of the US Cyber Command....

The deepfake dystopia we've been waiting for has already arrived TikTok intends to begin labelling AI-generated images and videos uploaded to its video-sharing service....

Sometimes your own invention just isn't enough anymore Interview The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS....

Someone in marketing may be getting fired for this Comment "This is who we are, this is what we stand for," said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs shortly before he relaunched the company in 1997 with its iconic Think Different marketing campaign. This week, the consumer tech giant showed the world its true colors and some were not impressed....

HashiCorp's programs are ideal fit for IBM/Red Hat's software lines, but why buy the company when the software's free and open? Opinion In some ways, IBM paying a cool $6.4 billion for HashiCorp makes perfect sense. HashiCorp's infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool Terraform is very popular and would work well with Red Hat Ansible. And, yes, I've heard the joke about how if you put them together, you'd get "Terrible."...

One, two, three, four is all you need to pass that door Rolling hot off the heels of World Password Day (groan), every May 2 we hacks generally receive hundreds of emails from PR companies repping their respective infosec pros, all espousing their expert opinions on how to create an "iron-clad" or "military-grade" password, or something equally cringey....

Five-star techies share stories of working from the lap of luxury On Call On Call is on vacation this week, so it seems appropriate to share a couple of the stories sent our way after our recent tale of a support contract that saw a techie required to spend a weekend in a $5,000/night hotel suite....

CPU-heavy big iron boasts Intel's HBM-packed Xeons and a tiny complement of Nvidia H100s Boffins in Italy are about to get their hands on a supercomputer that will more than double the resources available to study the effects of climate change....

That's a new twist on open, then OpenAI released model safety guidance on Wednesday while acknowledging that it's looking into how to support the creation of content that's NSFW, or "not safe for work."...

Give us an opt-out button or give us (temporary) account death! Stack Overflow users are revolting against the Q&A site's partnership with OpenAI, announcing they'd rather remove their posts and sacrifice their reputation scores than have their submissions used to train ChatGPT....

Spoiler alert: We're gonna talk about AI Interview Mick Baccio, global security advisor at Splunk, has watched the evolution of election security threats in real time....

Top Trump lieutenant Stephen Miller hopes to skewer Big Blue's Linux slinger on behalf of ex-director IBM-owned Red Hat has been sued for allegedly discriminating against a White male employee. The legal team behind the suit is led by Stephen Miller, a key anti-immigration advisor to Donald Trump during his presidency....

Sources claim ransomware is to blame Healthcare organization Ascension is the latest of its kind in the US to say its network has been affected by what it believes to be a "cybersecurity event."...

Any way you network slice it, you can't favor an app, says US watchdog The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released the final text of its net neutrality order, adding changes that appear to rule out so-called "fast lanes" for applications that some advocates feared would undermine it....

IT giant tries to downplay leak as just names, addresses, info about kit Dell has confirmed information about its customers and their orders has been stolen from one of its portals. Though the thief claimed to have swiped 49 million records, which are now up for sale on the dark web, the IT giant declined to say how many people may be affected....

Having China, Russia, and Iran routinely rummaging around is cause for concern, says ex-NSA man RSAC Digital intruders from China, Russia, and Iran breaking into US water systems this year should be a "wake-up call," according to former National Security Agency cyber boss Rob Joyce....

Oh well - next! The first human to get a Neuralink implant may be doing fine now, but that's after a good deal of work to address post-surgical trouble that saw its performance significantly degrade....

New-ish Kirin SoC performance doesn't impress, however A teardown of Huawei's Pura 70 Pro reveals that the China tech company's latest smartphone is mostly made in China, with one notable exception....

Praising 996 culture is so Jack Ma 2019 Updated The vice president and public relations head of Chinese search engine giant Baidu stirred up controversy this week by promoting workaholic behaviors on a personal social media account....

Research lands weeks after the Copilot company said it was still trying to convince customers of benefits Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index makes grand claims about the benefits of AI, but might make disturbing reading for administrators worrying about shadow IT....

Stick to data pipelines and ontology, says expert after share price dip Spy-tech biz Palantir has overstated its claim to be a generative AI company, according to one investment analyst who thinks this might explain its recent slowdown in growth from commercial markets....

Security's an uphill battle... does this latest move have teeth? RSAC Some of the biggest names in tech - including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and IBM - have signed up to a US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency-led effort and promised to take a series of actions within a year to make their products more secure....

Despite record revenues, Wall Street doesn't expect growth to last Chip designer Arm predicts that PCs based on its architecture will account for a significant share of the Windows market within three years as the company claims record revenues for the quarter just ended....

If it ain't broke, make it less accessible Much to the chagrin of security pros, VMware security advisories are now only viewable if users sign up for a Broadcom Support account first....

No it's not happened, but officials want readiness in the South China Sea The US Secretary of Commerce says it would be "absolutely devastating" if China seized Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and locked down the South China Sea....

Duplication across geographies no defense against the 'one-of-a-kind' accidental deletion Google's Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has weighed in on the UniSuper fiasco and confirmed that UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription was accidentally deleted....

Now this is our kind of click bait A study into whale language using machine learning has uncovered a complex phonetic system, implying the cetaceans may speak to each other much like humans do....

Ubuntu Unity 24.04 arrives along with new little sibling, Ubuntu Lomiri Ubuntu Unity Noble Numbat is out, and alongside it, a very much not long-term-supported new variant of the distro: Ubuntu Lomiri....

Customers can be pushed into renewing agreements for fear of the unknown, but there are cheaper options Oracle is threatening software audits as customers seek to exit Unlimited License Agreements (ULAs)....

Gosh, here's us thinking recursion was a solved problem AI model collapse - the degradation of quality expected from machine learning models that recursively train on their own output - is not inevitable, at least according to 14 academics....

Intel and pals automate manufacturing in Japan while AWS pledges billions to Singapore Tech giants including Intel and AWS joined Microsoft and others this week in announcing investments in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region to build out infrastructure - cloud services, datacenters, and chipmaking facilities - in anticipation of growing AI demand....

Power shortages are driving the industry to once-unthinkable places Southeast Asia's hyperscalers face plenty of challenges - from securing talent, property, and keeping construction costs down - but these hurdles pale in comparison to the task of banking enough power....

AI may help drug discovery, but not US drug affordability Google and DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs has developed an AI model called AlphaFold 3 that can, it's claimed, predict the structure of molecules more accurately than existing tools....

BogusBazaar ripped off shoppers and scraped card details, but not in China A crime ring dubbed BogusBazaar has scammed 850,000 people out of tens of millions of dollars via a network of dodgy shopping websites....

A Pleasant spot to Mount an AI push After Foxconn failed to turn Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, into an LCD manufacturing mecca as promised, the site is getting a new lease on life: Microsoft will build a $3.3 billion datacenter campus there....

Leccy car maker ships bunch of vehicles, losing around $39K on each one Cost-cutting layoffs have had little effect on Rivian's bottom line, as the troubled electric car maker has limped from another quarter with more than a billion dollars in losses....

It's 'essential to national security' ex-Navy intel officer tells us Interview As undersea cables carry increasing amounts of information, cyber and physical attacks against them will cause a greater impact on the wider internet....

Projecting much, US semiconductor industry? By 2032 America is projected to produce 28 percent of the world's most advanced processors while China will be making just two percent, or so the US Semiconductor Industry Association predicts....

Brain-inspired chip folks set to show off hardware at ISC next week SpiNNcloud Systems says it is making commercially available a hybrid AI high performance computer system based on an architecture pioneered by Steve Furber, one of the designers of the original Arm processor....

Interrogations, confiscating flyers, and prohibiting literature is no bueno, board says in final decision of 2022 case Apple tried to protest, but the complaints fell on deaf ears as the US National Labor Relations Board has finally decided the tech giant violated labor laws by interfering with union organizing activities at a New York City location....

It ain't all sunshine and windmills - and guess who's in the lead? China Thirty percent of the world's electricity in 2023 was generated by renewable energy sources, according to a think tank....

Crashes continue even with recall fixes in place The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has written to Tesla as the automaker's electric cars keep crashing despite a recall to fix problems with the Autopilot software....

And it would seriously inconvenience the Chinese and Russians, too RSAC There's a way to vastly reduce the scale and scope of ransomware attacks plaguing critical infrastructure, according to CISA director Jen Easterly: Make software secure by design....

No more stress for TESS NASA has confirmed that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has recovered from a reaction wheel problem and resumed making observations....

So long SODIMM? Only in new Thinkpad so far, but memory format may well spread across market LPCAMM2 memory is getting the thumbs up from the team at iFixit, which hailed it as a return to the upgradeable laptop and reckons the writing is on the wall for models with soldered-down, non-serviceable memory....

Nearly 95M people in total snagged by flaw in file transfer tool Just short of a year after the initial incident, the state of Georgia's higher education government agency has confirmed that it was the victim of an attack on its systems affecting the data of 800,000 people....

Administrators, start your engines Microsoft has finally broken its silence on the fate of on-premises Exchange, and administrators will need to move quickly to keep their servers supported....

Multiple Marketplace accounts sold fake bottles, cartridges for 2 years+, claim companies Amazon and printer manufacturer Seiko Epson have filed a joint action against firms in Turkey and the UK which they claim sold counterfeit printer bottles and cartridges on the global online retailer's platform....

Faith in frunk flunks We know that Tesla Cybertruck owners are very special, and their mothers love them very much, but perhaps the most special of all is the one who "broke" his finger attempting to demonstrate the safety of the "frunk" closing mechanism....