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But not the nuclear subs bit The AUKUS Alliance - a team-up between Australia, the US and the UK - has revealed it may invite Japan to join its efforts to develop artificial intelligence and quantum computing tech to be used for mutual defense....

After two decades of calls for national protections, something may actually happen Americans may soon live under a federal privacy law - a mere two decades after the US Federal Trade Commission urged Congress to regulate online data collection....

What is it with Fog City and ancient transport tech? Those taking public transport in the tech hub of San Francisco may be reassured to know that their rides will soon no longer be dependent on floppy disks....

Tool that lets spooks observe Americans appears to have been renewed for another year Everyone's favorite warrantless surveillance tool, FISA Section 702, returns to the US House of Representatives this week and is expected to go to a full House vote on Thursday....

Intel reckons the NPUs that power the 'AI PC' are needed on your lap, on the edge, but not on the desktop Intel has created versions of its Core Ultra processors - aka Meteor Lake - for use in socketed motherboards employed in embedded and edge applications, the x86 giant announced today at the Embedded World conference in Germany....

Of course, it helps if you don't live in a potential disaster zone US insurance companies are reportedly relying on aerial photos from drones to deny claims....

Chip designer legging it after Arm Brit chip designer Imagination Technologies today debuts its APXM-6200 RISC-V CPU cores, aimed at powering smart TVs, wearables, Internet of Things, embedded hardware, and similar gear....

Follows 2.5 billion pledge to 'upskill' British workers for the new world order Microsoft is opening an AI research and development hub in London led by former Google DeepMind researchers....

SaaS slip up leads to scumbags seeking sinecure Home Depot has confirmed that a third-party company accidentally exposed some of its employees' personal details after a criminal copy-pasted the data online....

Nevermind the fact that the first two plants are facing delays and costs are rising - build, build build! With a new Biden administration funding agreement in hand, chip giant TSMC plans to build a third chip fabrication plant in Arizona despite facing delays with the two it's still building....

And American CIOs keep a closer eye on the purse strings than European equivalents Reader Poll Results When it comes to rolling out AI systems, developers are still the most important in deciding which to run, but there are some major differences in strategy between The Register's US and European readers....

Civo's Mark Boost says price hikes appear designed to retain whales while tossing back small fry interview Broadcom has faced a lot of heat for the direction it's taken VMware after acquiring it - and much of what has happened has confirmed the fears Virtzilla customers expressed well before that deal closed....

Tycoon threatens to ignore court order banning far-right accounts on X In this weekend's episode of "Billionaires Behaving Boldly," X supremo Elon Musk locked horns with Brazil's legal luminaries over what constitutes free speech and what's far-right pablum....

Orange candidate has been known to use protectionist policy against allies AI, 6G, semiconductor supply chains and critical minerals were all discussed at the latest EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC), amid concerns that a victory for Republican candidate Donald Trump in this year's election would put an end to such cooperation....

'A huge amount of responsibility to ensure that there is ethical management' Interview You may have heard that Google is considering putting its latest AI search innovations behind a paywall, something that doesn't sit well with Rosanne Kincaid-Smith, COO at German HPC firm Northern Data Group....

IT systems pulled offline for chance to paws and reflect First, they came for hospitals, then it was charities and cancer centers. Now, cyber scumbags are coming for the puppies and kittens....

Shares up 25% on the news Shares in crisis-ridden French IT integrator Atos bounced by over 25 percent this morning as top shareholder Onepoint said it has a rescue plan involving investment firm Butler Industries....

Domestic customers saw their fees cut last January Alibaba Cloud is cutting prices for international users of its core compute, storage, and database services, using offers similar to those it dangled before Chinese customers earlier this year....

Theories abound over who's truly responsible Change Healthcare is allegedly being extorted by a second ransomware gang, mere weeks after recovering from an ALPHV attack....

FAA investigation set to examine failure after aircraft fire in Texas last week The engine cover on a Boeing 737-800 used by Southwest Airlines detached during takeoff from Denver on Sunday, prompting an investigation by aviation regulators....

Easter egg in test build could have scrambled Microsoft's reputation More than 30 years before the xz backdoor became the near disaster of the week, an intern tried to sneak some unexpected code into MS-DOS. Not a backdoor, but potentially a bit silly....

Orgs are missing a trick when it comes to the white fluffy stuff, survey says The migration of IT workloads to the cloud is benefiting tech departments rather than the wider business, according to a McKinsey survey....

Data sovereignty is eftersokt these days A Swedish telco has rolled a collaboration platform for public sector organizations worried about sensitive data leaving Sweden....

We've done it once, we can do it again Opinion The Sleepwalking Into Disaster klaxon is echoing through the corridors of power. Again. This time, the corridors are British and the klaxonner is the Cabinet Office's Central Digital & Data Office....

Every byte, and executable, counted when trying to fix Redmond's finest Who, Me? Greetings, gentle reader, and welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers like yourself try to make each Monday a little less manic by sharing tales of foible and fallibility....

PLUS: Another local government hobbled by ransomware; Huge rise in infostealing malware; and critical vulns In Brief Protecting your privacy online is hard. So hard, in fact, that even a top Israeli spy who managed to stay incognito for 20 years has found himself exposed after one basic error....

Work to make the digital rupee programmable has begun India's Reserve Bank deputy governor has revealed that transaction volumes using the nation's central bank digital currency (CBDC) have trended downwards since December 2023 - and may even have been inflated by one-off uses of the currency....

Consortium will spend $1.65 billion on Azure, 365 - and of course some AI Cloud Software Group (CSG) and Microsoft have renewed their alliance for another eight years, this time with a $1.65 billion commitment for the Group to use Redmond's cloud, productivity tools, and AI....

Because English isn't the only language Korean web giant Naver last week debuted a family of large language models named HyperCLOVA X, which it claimed perform better at cross-lingual reasoning in Asian languages than other models - and may therefore help the region to develop sovereign large language models....

Plus: YouTube's fake India election ad policy; Singtel not selling Optus; Do Chinese tech stalk former workers? ASIA IN BRIEF Wipro on Friday named Srini Pallia as its leader, effective immediately, after previous boss Thierry Delaporte stepped down "to pursue passions outside the workplace."...

Study finds workers' sense of meaningfulness and autonomy declines with automation Robots may make companies more productive, as some studies have suggested, but they make people feel that their jobs have less meaning....

What happened, how it was found, and what your vultures have made of it all Kettle It's been about a week since the shock discovery of a hidden and truly sophisticated backdoor in the xz software library that ordinarily is used by countless systems....

Biz leaders optimistic it can reduce living, breathing cost centers... er, valued workers A survey of senior biz executives reveals that 41 percent expect to have a smaller workforce in five years due to the implementation of AI technologies....

Meng Wanzhou is home, but the case is far from over Huawei looks set to face trial in 2026 over charges that it misled banks and Washington about historic business dealings in Iran in breach of US sanctions....

The pair allegedly made 87 apps since 2019 and defrauded folks of tens of thousands of dollars Google is suing two Chinese app developers claiming they allegedly spent years creating fraudulent cryptocurrency investment apps that were downloaded from its Play Store....

Beware random inflammatory questions on social media - they may come from a threat actor With the US presidential election looming, China is stepping up its disinformation game with increased use of AI, Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) reports....

Iceotope will need the help as it navigates the frosty waters of global expansion Liquid cooling specialist Iceotope has hired an ex-Microsoft datacenter exec on an advistory capacity as the company eyes global expansion amid insatiable demand for high-powered bit barns to feed the AI craze....

And it was all thanks to peer pressure AMD plans to document and open source its Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware for GPUs, giving users more control over Radeon graphics cards....

Self-driving to the nearest job center Apple is to chop more than 600 workers in a move likely related to the cancellation of several projects at the firm, including the company's self-driving car....

In what other sphere does a bad supplier not feel pain for its foulups? Analysis You might think that when a government supplier fails in one of its key duties it would find itself shunned or at least feel financial pain....

Enterprise tech slingers want to see what Hock Tan can get away with - and replicate it Opinion Cancel your Netflix account. Delete Season 2 of House of the Dragon from your diary....

Attacks could be completed in seconds, compromising customer safety A self-service check-in terminal used in a German Ibis budget hotel was found leaking hotel room keycodes, and the researcher behind the discovery claims the issue could potentially affect hotels around Europe....

Ed Dwight, almost America's first Black astronaut, will ride New Shepard rocket Blue Origin has announced the crew flying on its NS-25. Former US Air Force Captain Ed Dwight is among the six aiming to travel aboard the reusable rocket past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space....

Nothing is forever, not even a web page Forget chocolate eggs, the only event that really mattered this week was 404 Day....

Even when tech crew gets the tweaks approved, vendor lead times are bonkers, says report UK councils might spend 8 billion ($10.1 billion) on tech each year, yet some find that suppliers don't have the wares they need and customizations can "incur significant costs."...

All sorts of levers being pulled to lure AI developers from here, there, everywhere Amid the scramble to hire developer talent in the field of AI, regulators in the European Union are expressing interest in recent events that saw Microsoft lift and shift most of the team at Inflection....

You can prove them wrong, but they'll still get you on a non-technicality On Call On Call is back from an Easter adventure with another reader-contributed - and perhaps tear-inducing - tale of tech support....

Algorithms as PHBs - who wouldn't want that? Nearly half of US office workers expressed concern that AI might take their jobs in a February survey by investment banking biz Jefferies....

Just disabling Siri requires visits to five submenus A study has concluded that Apple's privacy practices aren't particularly effective, because default apps on the iPhone and Mac have limited privacy settings and confusing configuration options....

Today's lesson covers the potential for Loongson's made-in-China architecture to hurt Microsoft and Intel China's long march towards creation and adoption of its own information technology stack has taken a long stride forward after a school district commenced a trial of 10,000 PCs powered by domestically designed processors....