The Register

Maybe time to play the cloud hokey pokey? You put your workload in. You take your workload out... Updated Microsoft Azure went down for customers in New Zealand earlier today, taking with it parts of Microsoft 365 and bite-sized chunks of the working day for employees still dealing with the effects of previous outages....

Deploying and folding wings without power might be useful in a tight spot The rhinoceros beetle turns out to be an unlikely source of engineering inspiration for tiny flying robots that can fold their wings when resting or after a collision....

Snapshots, failover, recovery, and uninstallation on a plate The big names mostly can't yet, but some lesser-known Linux distributions offer the ability to undo updates and recover from damage, even automatically....

Legal woes are still ongoing in Italy, France, and Germany The High Court of England and Wales has sided with Intel in a multinational patent dispute brought by R2 Semiconductor alleging the x86 giant infringed on its voltage regulation tech....

Execs blame gap in licensing revenues for lost momentum, while hawking AI Brit chip design champ Arm posted its fourth consecutive quarter of growth on Wednesday with Q1 revenues up 39 percent year-over-year to $939 million and profits of $233 million....

Meanwhile, US apparently considers further AI hardware sanctions Germany's government has named China-controlled actors as the perpetrators of a 2021 cyber attack on the Federal Office of Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) - the official mapping agency....

Pesky test infrastructure woes seem to be solved, too The Xen Project has delivered a new cut of its open source hypervisor....

Taxman disagrees with the outfit that built the tax portal IT services giant Infosys is facing a demand for almost $4 billion in tax demand from Indian state of Karnataka, relating to expenses incurred by its overseas branches....

Sweet sweet GenAI money not yet flowing, Zuck reckons other ML efforts are paying off Meta has told investors generative AI won't bring it revenue this year, but that the massive investments it's planning will pay off over time - and be configured so they're not tied to training workloads....

Adds L40 bare metal option to the O-Cloud, plus A100 and H100 VMs. And teases a GH200 beast Oracle has created a pair of for-rent AI infrastructure options aimed at medium-scale AI training and inference workloads - and teased the arrival of Nvidia's GH200 superchip in its cloud...

Scumbags go for the jugular A ransomware attack against blood-donation nonprofit OneBlood, which services more than 250 American hospitals, has "significantly reduced" the org's ability to take, test, and distribute blood....

28-year-old mowed down in US state where cars ordinarily aren't allowed to operate autonomously Washington State Patrol investigators have found that the Tesla involved in the death of a motorcyclist on Friday, April 19, 2024 was operating in Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode....

Small stay of execution in 'exceptional circumstances' promised as lawsuits start to fly As the DigiCert drama continues, we now have a better idea of the size and scope of the problem - with the organization's infosec boss admitting the SSL/TLS certificate revocation sweep will affect tens of thousands of its customers, some of which have warned that the short notice may have real-world safety implications and disrupt critical services....

Eight-year-old domain hijacking technique still claiming victims Dozens of Russia-affiliated criminals are right now trying to wrest control of web domains by exploiting weak DNS services....

Employees hate this one simple trick to fix failing business empires Intel is said to be considering laying off thousands of its employees to alleviate the x86 giant's unsteady financial situation....

Finnish firm started the networking and cloud fight, Amazon could finish it Amazon has filed a complaint against Nokia accusing the Finnish tech firm of violating a dozen of its patents....

37 nations on good terms with Uncle Sam spared incoming restrictions, report claims The US is said to be tightening its export rules on chipmaking equipment, but will provide exceptions for allied and friendly nations....

It lost billions and missed expectations, but fresh blood at the top has pleased shareholders Boeing missed the mark on pretty much every analyst expectation in Q2 as it continues to struggle to recover from a series of devastating engineering failures....

Windows users now get macOS-grade secret security Google says it's enhancing the security of sensitive data managed by Chrome for Windows users to fight the scourge of infostealer malware targeting cookies....

German vendor maintains departures follow increase in job cuts On the back of an expanded workforce restructuring, two execs responsible for revenue and marketing depart have departed SAP's board....

Strikes? What strikes? Samsung Electronics is riding the AI wave with an increase in sales and a huge jump in operating profit thanks to a recovery in the memory market, and the firm expects demand from server AI to stay strong for the rest of the year....

An unprecedented period for an unparalleled force in cybercrime Feature For roughly two years, LockBit's ransomware operation was by far the most prolific of its kind, until the fateful events of February. After claiming thousands of victims, extorting hundreds of millions of dollars, and building a robust army of sophisticated cybercriminals, the life's work of its mastermind, LockbitSupp - whom cops claim is Russian national Dmitry Khoroshev - is now hanging by a thread....

Feedback prioritized, unless it's about a feature customers really miss Microsoft has announced an ad-free update for Skype, now headed to testers in the company's Insider program. However, this update is unlikely to appease users who are still missing features previously dropped from the once-premier chat app....

A playbook full of strategies and someone fumbles the implementation Do you have problems configuring Microsoft's Defender? You might not be alone: Microsoft admitted that whatever it's using for its defensive implementation exacerbated yesterday's Azure instability....

Users and developers warned to prepare for what's coming with human resources a focus in 'high-risk' category As the world's first legislation specifically targeting AI comes into law on Thursday, developers of the technology, those integrating it into their software products, and those deploying it are trying to figure out what it means and how they need to respond....

Ranger 7 finally gets its shot. Five years later, humans would follow It has been 60 years since a spacecraft snapped the USA's first close-up images of the lunar surface, a mere five years before astronauts set foot on the Moon. Ranger 7 finally achieved the feat in July 1964....

Open source TerraForm rival introduces a new file extension so users can 'keep older code around for compatibility' Terraform alternative OpenTofu has reached version 1.8 amid further signs of fragmentation....

In front, unmodified GNOME; underneath, it's all a bit strange, but purposefully so Vanilla OS is an experimental distro testing out new implementations of immutability, cross-distro packaging, A/B failover, and more....

It took 13 months to notice 40 million voters' data was compromised The UK's Electoral Commission has received a formal slap on the wrist for a litany of security failings that led to the theft of personal data belonging to around 40 million voters....

Redmond disputes some claims made in Cracked Labs report Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides "field service management" that allows customers to monitor mobile service workers through smartphone apps - allegedly to the detriment of their autonomy and dignity....

The workaround is going to be inevitable in the future anyway, say Chinese boffins Leading Chinese computer scientists have suggested the nation can build large language models without imported GPUs - by using supercomputers instead....

All a simple misunderstanding, we're told A meeting intended to allay fears that Emirati AI firm G42's deal with Microsoft could result in China accessing advanced US technology was reportedly cancelled by the UAE ambassador to the US....

Everyone loves Copilot, execs claim - and hope they can say the same for Copilot Plus PCs Microsoft has tried to convince investors that AI is paying off, but they appear unimpressed by news of customer adoption and revenue revealed Tuesday in the software giant's Q4 and full-year results for 2024....

Minister accuses cab drivers of gaming algos to score more lucrative fares Taxi drivers are gaming ride-sharing algorithms in Japan to find more and more lucrative fares, according to digital transformation minister Taro Kono....

ICANN's local boss Jia Rong Low gets the gig - and a challenging to-do list The Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) has named its new director general: ICANN regional managing director and vice president Jia Rong Low....

Which is nice, but way behind Nvidia, while other segments are soft and supply-chain pain persists AMD has told investors that its Instinct MI300X GPUs - the chip designer's alternative to Nvidia AI accelerator hardware - landed over $1 billion of datacenter revenues in Q2 this year....

For the want of an underscore DigiCert has given some unlucky customers 24 hours to replace their SSL/TLS security certificates it previously issued them - due to a five-year-old blunder in its backend software....

E-super-souk isn't having any of it Amazon has been ordered by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to take full and proper responsibility for recalling faulty and dangerous products sold by merchants through its website and app....

Things are getting Tensor between Cupertino and Nv Apple has detailed in a research paper how it trained its latest generative AI models using Google's neural-network accelerators rather than, say, more fashionable Nvidia hardware....

Shut the Front Door! If you've had or are having problems using websites and apps today, it might well be due to the Microsoft Azure outage....

Everything's bigger in Texas -even the settlement deals Meta will pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit with Texas, which accused the Facebook giant of breaking privacy laws by performing facial recognition on people's photos without their consent....

Oh, Boies, here we go again Delta Air Lines lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to the CrowdStrike outage earlier this month - and it has hired a high-powered law firm to claw some of those lost funds back, potentially from the Falcon maker and Microsoft itself....

Latest silicon aims to bring Gigabit connectivity to sub-$100 handsets Qualcomm has been pushing high-end smartphone platforms recently, but its latest release targets the budget segment, aiming to deliver Gigabit 5G connectivity to sub-$100 handsets....

A model finetuned on your social media profile? What could possibly go wrong? SIGGRAPH Big public AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot have become near ubiquitous over the past few years - but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is banking that before long, everyone will have at least one, if not more, personalized AI assistants to call their own....

Partnership with NXP, Infineon, and Bosch finally gets under way TSMC and partners will break ground in Dresden, Germany, to start building the Taiwanese chip maker's first European fab....

Not to mention the skills gap, AI skepticism, and the unrelenting quest for power Datacenter operators face multiple challenges such as power and cooling requirements, while staffing issues persist and many are not tracking the right sustainability metrics. On the plus side, they can count on strong and growing demand for digital services....

Leaves a trail of ransomware infections, data theft, business email compromise in its wake Insight The developers of EvilProxy - a phishing kit dubbed the "LockBit of phishing" - have produced guides on using legitimate Cloudflare services to disguise malicious traffic. This adds to the ever-growing arsenal of tools offering criminals who lack actual technical expertise to get into the digital thievery biz....

Ready to talk it up to investors today, Redmond? Updated Microsoft's cloud services are having a bad day with users worldwide reporting difficulty connecting to Azure....

While some celebrate, the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group is not happy The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a blog criticizing Google's climbdown over the deprecation of third-party cookies, declaring that the move "undermines a lot of the work we've done together."...

Calculating ROI of neural networks turns out to be rather complicated Feature The tech industry's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence software - a conveniently amorphous term - has yet to generate much of an economic windfall....