The Register

Unexpected expenses in semiconductor division overshadow revenue gains Samsung Electronics is blaming a quarter-on-quarter plunge in operating profits in its chips division on costs incurred, and says it intends to focus on "high value-added products" for the rest of 2024....

This will both ease and exacerbate price concerns and competitive sniping VMware by Broadcom has upped the storage capacity allowed under licenses for its vSphere Foundation bundle - a move that addresses competitors' attacks, but may also give them new impetus....

Mr X ordered to show at Halloween hearing over election lottery as his lawyers file docs to dodge it Updated Elon Musk has been ordered to attend a Halloween hearing on the legality of his election petition lottery, but a last-minute removal request may have given the billionaire a reprieve to spend the day enjoying quality holiday time with his family or more relentless campaigning to help elect Donald Trump....

A scary few Halloween hours for team behind hugely popular web plugin LottieFiles is overcoming something of a Halloween fright after battling to regain control of a compromised developer account that was used to exploit users' crypto wallets....

Vendors not keen on 'lengthy bureaucracy,' and cost when they try to hire skilled foreigners UK government is to recommend streamlining the visa process for those with AI skills and the creation of special zones where it will be easier to build datacenters and any infrastructure they depend on....

Motherboard missing, leaving space for a million hits of meth Australian police have arrested a man after finding he imported what appear to be tower PC cases that were full of illicit drugs....

Azure's acceleration continues, but so do costs Microsoft has explained that its method of funding the tens of billions it's spending on new datacenters and AI infrastructure is to shun customers who want to rent GPUs to train new AI models....

Busy week for Cupertino sees shrunken Mac minis, updated lappies, and new SoCs With the arrival of its M4 silicon on the Mac this week, Apple wants the world to know that the silicon powering AI PCs is no match for its chips....

India makes it onto list of likely threats for the first time A report by Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) revealed that state-backed actors have collected valuable information from government networks for five years....

It's not like Zuck needs the coin despite increased infrastructure spend, headcount, losses on VR Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has told investors that open sourcing its Llama AI models is not entirely altruistic - he thinks it will also save his social media conglomerate money....

Another Asian country declares ambition to be a tech hub Thailand has won a pair of high profile investments that boost its ambition to become a hub for datacenters and semiconductor manufacturing....

And what do you know, Google's former CEO just so happens to have a commercial solution Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead....

Plus a free micropatch until Redmond fixes the flaw There's a Windows Themes spoofing zero-day bug on the loose that allows attackers to steal people's NTLM credentials....

After 19 years of losses, all it took was a machine translation of its posts to get out of the red After months of uncertainty, it looks like going public was a good thing for Reddit's bottom line, as the online forum just posted a profit for the first time in its 19-year history....

If SMCI is the AI Enron, Ernst & Young wants nothing to do with them Supermicro shares took a nose dive on Wednesday, sliding more than 30 percent after the accounting firm hired to review its reporting practices resigned after determining they were just a bit too sketchy to warrant the risk....

Just like his once famous temper, Linux kernel creator also ditched classic engines ... in favor of EVs Mark Zuckerberg sits behind the wheel of a Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing, Open AI's Sam Altman gets from A to B in a Koenigsegg Regera, and for many of us, Elon Musk drives us mad. But what about Linux kingpin Linus Torvalds?...

It's not a mass exodus, say analysts, but biz bods are bringing things down to earth The reality of the cloud market is that many organizations find it doesn't live up to their expectations, leading to a growing trend of workloads being repatriated back on-premises or to private cloud environments....

If you're gonna come at the mouse, you need to be better at hiding your tracks A disgruntled ex-Disney employee has been arrested and charged with hacking his former employer's systems to alter restaurant menus with potentially deadly consequences....

The prolific Midnight Blizzard crew cast a much wider net in search of scrummy intel Microsoft says a mass phishing campaign by Russia's foreign intelligence services (SVR) is now in its second week, and the spies are using a novel info-gathering technique....

Between jets, yachts and investments in destructive companies, billionaires are speed running the apocalypse Despite their self-professed environmental bona fides, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the their ilk are responsible for so much carbon emissions that the average person would need a lifetime to match the amount one of them spews in 90 minutes....

Big personnel changes happening as semiconductor materials seller looks set to list Taiwan biz in 2025 In an unexpected personnel shake-up, IQE chief Americo Lemos has left the listed British semiconductor materials supplier effective immediately after less than three years at the helm....

Release the Kraken! China has accused unnamed foreign entities of using devices hidden in the seabed and bobbing on the waves to learn its maritime secrets....

Fabbed by TSMC, needed for ... it's a secret OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Broadcom to build a custom inferencing chip....

Ultra Accelerator Link consortium promises 200 gigabits per second per lane spec will debut in Q1 2025 The Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium - an alliance of enterprise tech vendors that pointedly excludes Nvidia because it wants a shared standard for accelerator-to-accelerator links - has opened its doors and promised to deliver a spec in the first quarter of 2025....

Incoming trio includes first female engineer, a returning taikonaut, and one newbie Three taikonauts have successfully launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center and are on their way to the Tiangong space station....

Q3 profits jump 191 percent from last quarter on revenues of $6.2 billion, helped by accelerated interest in Instinct AMD continued to ride a wave of demand for its Instinct MI300X AI accelerators - its answer to Nvidia's venerable H100 - in its third quarter, revealing that the part is expected to drive $5 billion in revenues during the chip designer's 2024 fiscal year....

Google Cloud grows fast thanks to AI, which now writes a quarter of all G-code Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has warned that the Department of Justice's proposed remedies for Google's monopolistic behaviour could impact US leadership of the global tech market - after announcing enormous growth in the megalithic firm's ad business....

Or: why using the same iCloud account for malware development and gaming is a bad idea The US government has named and charged a Russian national, Maxim Rudometov, with allegedly developing and administering the notorious Redline infostealer....

'It was like watching a robot going rogue' says researcher OpenAI's language model GPT-4o can be tricked into writing exploit code by encoding the malicious instructions in hexadecimal, which allows an attacker to jump the model's built-in security guardrails and abuse the AI for evil purposes, according to 0Din researcher Marco Figueroa....

Don't hold your breath Putin A Russian court has ruled that Google owes Russian media stations around $20 decillion in fines for blocking their content, and the fines could get bigger....

Oh, and it'll need the total current US power output Video Masayoshi Son, the Japanese billionaire behind Softbank, has predicted that an artificial superintelligence 10,000 times smarter than a human brain will be created within about a decade - but at quite a cost....

Work already underway to expand system to 200,000 Nvidia Hopper chips Unlike most AI training clusters, xAI's Colossus with its 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs doesn't use InfiniBand. Instead, the massive system, which Nvidia bills as the "world's largest AI supercomputer," was built using the GPU giant's Spectrum-X Ethernet fabric....

Linux kernel creator says let's see which workloads use GenAI in five years Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, thinks the majority of marketing circulated by the industry on Generative AI is simply fluff with no real substance - and it may take many years before the tech is proven....

Ominously-named bot can spot trouble from a mile away, distinguish threats from false alarms, says DoD The US Army is testing a new AI product that it says can identify threats from a mile away, and all without the need for any new hardware....

US also charges an alleged Redline dev, no mention of an arrest International law enforcement officials have arrested two individuals and charged another in connection with the use and distribution of the Redline and Meta infostealer malware strains....

At the end of the day, it all boils down to tokens per dollar Analysis Today, most GenAI models are trained and run on GPUs or some other specialized accelerator, but that doesn't mean they have to be. In fact, several chipmakers have suggested that CPUs are more than adequate for many enterprise AI use cases....

Patch up: The Spring framework dominates the Java ecosystem If you're running an application built using the Spring development framework, now is a good time to check it's fully updated - a new, critical-severity vulnerability has just been disclosed....

Wouldn't want to inadvertently fund the PLA The US treasury department finalized a rule on Monday that limits domestic entities' investment in Chinese semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and AI....

'The single biggest constraint is access,' says exec looking to invest 'hundreds of millions' One of the UK's major commercial property developers says it would be pumping investment into new datacenters if it could just secure the energy supply needed for those facilities, reflecting a growing problem worldwide....

Jessica Rosenworcel looks at policy challenges for the next decade The chair of America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) foresees a single network future where space-based comms will be integrated with terrestrial networks to ensure connectivity anywhere....

It's not just the French president, Biden and Putin also reportedly trackable The French equivalent of the US Secret Service may have been letting their guard down, as an investigation showed they are easily trackable via the fitness app Strava....

After years of delay, new systems with 'diverse tech stacks' need a hand in 195M deal The UK's Home Office has launched a procurement for tech support and services to oversee border control and immigration via a contract estimated to be worth up to 195 million ($253 million)....

Only took 'em a year to dish up some scary travel advice, and a Secure Innovation ... Placemat? Cyber security agencies from the Five Eyes nations have delivered on a promise to offer tech startups more guidance on how to stay secure....

Seemingly dissatisfied with CISPE settlement, new UK-centric cloudy industry group calls for end to 'restrictive licensing' Microsoft has alleged that a new group of cloud providers and users is a front for Google - a notion the ads and search giant rejects....

GCHQ job ads seek top talent with bottom-end pay packets While the wages paid by governments seldom match those available in the private sector, it appears that the UK's intelligence, security and cyber agency is a long way short of being competitive in its quest for talent....

The Mons Mouton Plateau looks nice this time of year. Or maybe you prefer Slater Plain? NASA has released an updated list of nine potential landing spots near the lunar south pole for Artemis III - the mission that will hopefully see the first humans set foot on the Moon in over 50 years....

The GPIO turns out to be a handy tool if you want to measure the conductivity of concrete Chinese scientists have found a novel use for the Raspberry Pi: detecting voids in the linings of railway tunnels that could lead to structural damage, or even collapse....

Microscopic 'water bears' can survive blasts that would kill humans Drugs that prevent or reverse the effects of ionizing radiation have long been a sci-fi pipedream, but the gene sequencing of a newly discovered species of tardigrade could change all that....

Burger me! Partial success in chipping away at insane DMCA rules The US Copyright Office has published a new list of exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), including one for retail food machines that was requested to deal with the perennial problem of broken ice cream makers at McDonald's....

The decentralized social network hints at sustainability with talk of subscriptions Bluesky says it has hauled in more than 13 million users, up from about three million when it opened to the public in February 2024....