The Register

Training AI models doesn't need low latency. It needs cheap energy - wherever it can be found Feature Port Hedland is a town of just 16,000 people in a hot and dusty corner of northwestern Australia, 1,600 kilometers by road from the nearest substantial city. As such, it's seemingly an odd place for a datacenter run by Australian operator NEXTDC. Yet such locations are increasingly in demand, thanks to their proximity to energy sources - given the voracious appetite for compute capacity to train artificial intelligence models....

Years of crackdowns haven't stopped some revolting stuff China's many attempts to clean up its internet appear not to have prevented the proliferation of revolting material and products that abuse or target children....

The security industry has never had a clear leader - could it be the Chocolate Factory? Ask any techie to name who leads the market for OSes, databases, networks or ERP and the answers are clear: Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP....

Also: Velops routers love plaintext; everything is a dark pattern; Internet Explorer rises from the grave, and more Infosec in brief Commercial spyware maker mSpy has been breached - again - and millions of purchasers can be identified from the spilled records....

Plus: Japanese scientists ID ancient supernova; AWS dismisses China trouble rumor; and more ASIA IN BRIEF The interim CEO of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has criticized China's approach to bug reporting....

Just be careful not to shave off too many bits ... These things are known to hallucinate as it is Hands on If you hop on Hugging Face and start browsing through large language models, you'll quickly notice a trend: Most have been trained at 16-bit floating point of Brain-float precision....

And can AI save us from the scourge of malware? In theory, why not, but in practice ... Color us skeptical Kettle For this week's Kettle episode, in which our journos as usual get together for an end-of-week chat about the news, it's security, security, security....

High-end processor instability headaches, failures pushed one studio to switch to AMD One game developer says it's had enough of Intel's 13th and 14th-generation Core microprocessors, calling them "defective."...

15K dealerships take estimated $600M+ hit CDK Global reportedly paid a $25 million ransom in Bitcoin after its servers were knocked offline by crippling ransomware....

Windows maker insisted everything will be locked down and secure - which given its reputation, uh-oh! Two House committee chairs have sent a public letter to the White House asking it to look into a deal between AI R&D outfit G42 and Microsoft....

Red team exercise revealed a score of security fails The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says a red team exercise at a certain unnamed federal agency in 2023 revealed a string of security failings that exposed its most critical assets....

Mac migrants (if any exist) will find Powertoys Run strangely familiar Friday FOSS Fest Microsoft's collection of Power Toys for the current versions of Windows has some nifty little helpers, and Power Run may be comfortingly familiar if you're more used to macOS....

The slippery Ukrainian national must also pay a hefty $74 million on top of the jail time A Ukrainian malware kingpin who evaded law enforcement for a decade will face nine years in prison for his role in the IcedID malware operation....

Classic Outlook for Windows shuffles a little closer to the end of the road The new Microsoft Outlook will hit General Availability on August 1, and Microsoft is not backing down on the move away from COM (Component Object Model) add-ins....

Powered by Nvidia GPUs, natch, as GPU maker's CEO talks up mega bitbarn 'AI factories' HPE is to build a supercomputer for Japan's AIST research institution, using thousands of Nvidia's latest H200 GPUs to support large foundational models for generative AI in research....

Snowflake? Snowflake AT&T has admitted that cyberattackers grabbed a load of its data for the second time this year, and if you think the first haul was big, you haven't seen anything: This latest one includes data on "nearly all" AT&T wireless customers - and those served by mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) running on AT&T's network....

Preliminary findings also claim platform not compliant with DSA requirements for transparency, research access The European Commission says the blue checkmark system used by micro-blogging platform X - formerly Twitter - effectively deceives users and fails to comply with the newly introduced Digital Service Act....

Upper stage engine suffers a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, leaving Starlink satellites too low SpaceX has suffered a rare failure after a Falcon 9 upper stage malfunction left a batch of Starlink satellites in a lower-than-planned orbit....

Future Androids may let you dock them and use them as a desktop - as standard It's been tried before, more than once, but if it comes as a stock feature, maybe people will actually start to use the feature....

OK, now tell us why this isn't an EU DMA violation - asking for a friend in Brussels Running a Chromium-based browser, such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge? The chances are good it's quietly telling Google all about your CPU and GPU usage when you visit one of the search giant's websites....

German software giant says open source is a 'catalyst for innovation' but is unlikely to release proprietary code SAP's bid to cast itself as an open source friendly company is being met with some scepticism from the community, who suggest the projects are largely based on the German software giant's interests....

They're called role-playing games for a reason ... On Call Life on the frontlines of tech support can be tough, which is why each Friday The Register brings you a fresh instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed column in which you tell your peers what you've endured in the name of work....

Red clouds are in no rush to go green China's major cloud computing and datacenter players aren't going green in a hurry, according to a Greenpeace study - leaving Microsoft tied to a datacenter operator that uses just 4.35 percent renewable energy....

Ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side South Korea has commenced an effort to shoot drones out of the sky using lasers - and has named it the Star Wars project"....

Accessibility be damned, preventing phishing is the priority After around two decades of allowing one-time passwords (OTPs) delivered by text message to assist log ins to bank accounts in Singapore, the city-state will abandon the authentication technique....

Potential for combo with Arm tantalizes Japan's SoftBank, which owns CPU designer Arm, has acquired UK chip house Graphcore for an unspecified sum....

Meet DodgeBox, son of StealthVector Chinese government-backed cyber espionage gang APT41 has very likely added a loader dubbed DodgeBox and a backdoor named MoonWalk to its malware toolbox, according to cloud security service provider Zscaler's ThreatLabz research team....

Ultra-conservative org funnily enough not ready to turn the other cheek After claiming to break into a database belonging to The Heritage Foundation, and then leaking 2GB of files belonging to the ultra-conservative think tank, the hacktivist crew SiegedSec claims to have disbanded....

Ice ICE, baby The Biden administration's electric vehicle ambitions are getting another boost, this time in the form of $1.7 billion in public funding to convert 11 at-risk and shuttered auto manufacturing plants into electric vehicle (EV) factories....

If you were wondering how the US White House race is going in 2024, it's going like this... Florida Man Donald Trump has said that if elected President of the United States again, he will jail "election fraudsters" - with a direct warning to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. Or Zuckerbucks as Trump put it....

Newly discovered flaw affects OpenSSH 8.7 and 8.8 daemon The founder of Openwall has discovered a new signal handler race condition in the core sshd daemon used in RHEL 9.x and its various offshoots....

And the AI PC revolution probably won't help, we're told Owners of Apple Mac devices simply aren't buying new hardware as quickly as they used to....

Just 12% of providers have completed rip and replace of ZTE, Huawei The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reiterated to Congress that more cash is needed if smaller broadband providersare to be compensated for removing Chinese telecoms kit deemed a security risk....

Sushovan Hussain's failure in 2020 to appeal his 2018 fraud conviction in the US means he won't be a member of ICAEW for 20 years The expulsion of Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy's former CFO, from a chartered accountant organization is now set in stone....

Foundry and AI plaform available in OCI Palantir and Oracle are hooking up to promote the US spy-tech company's technology on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform....

Yesterday's settlement between MS and Euro cloud providers shouldn't 'fool' you, says Alphabet arm's cloud boss Google says Microsoft's confidential settlement with a group of European cloud providers is merely about using its financial muscle to make complaints about software licensing costs vanish....

Letters from CISO Ethan Steiger suggest the data related to job applications Advance Auto Parts' CISO just revealed for the first time the number of individuals affected when criminals broke into its Snowflake instance - a hefty 2.3 million....

Makes third-party wallets getting iOS NFC access a 'legally binding' thing Apple has avoided a potential hefty fine and an antitrust case in Europe after making concessions that include opening up access to iPhone hardware needed for "tap and go" applications....

First it comes for market leader's GPUs ... now it's nibbling at software AMD is set to swallow software biz Silo AI for $650 million in a bid to boost its own enterprise AI wares....

We all know the pain of reproducing that one pesky problem in test Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is set to spend a little longer attached to the International Space Station (ISS) as engineers on the ground work to recreate the oddities seen in orbit....

Scumbag targeted many victims - and those who tried to help them A scumbag who used to work as a privacy consultant has been put behind bars for nine years for a "grotesque" cyberstalking campaign against more than a dozen victims....

Get comfortable, it'll be here for a while Firefox 128 is out with a relatively modest feature set - but it will also be the latest Extended Support Release (ESR) release, meaning that the end for Firefox 115 is coming into view....

Driving a new car in the EU? Get ready for a cacophony of beeps and whistles if you're a bit heavy on the go pedal It was a big week for road safety campaigners in the European Union as Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) technology became mandatory on all new cars....

LockBit variant targets backup software - which you may remember is supposed to help you recover from ransomware Yet another new ransomware gang, this one dubbed EstateRansomware, is exploiting a Veeam vulnerability that was patched more than a year ago to drop file-encrypting malware, a LockBit variant, and extort payments from victims....

Admits it may struggle to fund and implement replacement infrastructure The Xen Project, creator and manager of the open-source Xen hypervisor and associated tools, has warned its community of potential problems flowing from the imminent closure of the colocation facility it uses....

Multiple malware attack saw personal data acessed, but rocket science remained safe The Japanese Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) discovered it was under attack using zero-day exploits while working with Microsoft to probe a 2023 cyberattack on its systems....

The joy of cloudy interoperability may be dampened by differently-sized free storage tiers Google and Apple have signed off on a tool that their cloud photo storage services interoperable, but it may come at a cost to some users....

Devs of OS named for a mythical beast join in the 'local models will will deliver legendary productivity' trope China has jumped on the AI PC bandwagon, with the team behind local OS openKylin creating a cut of its Linux-based software that can run AI models on the desktop....

Hitting youngsters with faked texts and calling them suckers is a bit of a no-no, watchdog sniffs The US Federal Trade Commission has thrown the book at NGL Labs and its founders for allegedly breaking a depressing amount of child internet safety law....

It'd be a shame if something happened to that HBM fab, warns NSEU Unionized Samsung workers in South Korea have extended their three-day strike indefinitely, claiming that company leadership refused to listen to demands when an end date was on the table....