The Register

Too expensive, slow, and risky for investors, and they're taking focus off renewables, say IEEFA experts Miniature nuclear reactors promise a future filled with local, clean, safe zero-carbon energy, but those promises quickly melt when confronted with reality, say a pair of researchers....

Brit chip design outfit sets sights on dominating AI market Arm chief exec Rene Haas netted himself a cool $70.1 million last year, becoming a major beneficiary of the CPU designer's IPO in New York....

Budget to be blown on construction and 20K GPUs among other things in the next 2 years Just weeks after reporting a hike in carbon dioxide emissions for 2023, Microsoft says it will invest $3.2 billion in Sweden over the next two years, expanding its cloud and AI operations in the country....

Exchange said the problem involves limit bands designed to prevent volatility Updated A glitch at the New York Stock Exchange has caused several high-profile stocks to rapidly lose value before being locked from trading....

Featuring Tom Cruise deepfakes and multiple made-up terrorism threats Still throwing toys out the pram over its relationship with international sport, Russia is engaged in a multi-pronged disinformation campaign against the Olympic Games and host nation France that's intensifying as the opening ceremony approaches....

Getting better, but more work needed The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has examined age estimation software and concluded that it has improved but still needs work....

'No agreement has been reached,' Euro cloud lobby insists Microsoft is reportedly preparing to ink a multimillion-euro deal with cloud lobbying group CISPE to make an EU antitrust complaint go away....

June 5 the day to opt for Onepoint-led consortium or Daniel Ketinsky's EPEI HPC heavyweight Atos has given itself until June 5 - this Wednesday - to decide between rival financial restructuring proposals to reduce the company's debt and put its future finances on firmer footing....

'Unfortunately a power supply generally does not fail ... until it does' Boeing's Starliner has failed to launch once again, this time due to a faulty power supply in a ground computer chassis....

Also, free pianos are the latest internet scam bait, Cooler Master gets pwned, and some critical vulnerabilities Infosec in brief Cybersecurity software vendor Check Point is warning customers to update their software immediately in light of a zero day vulnerability under active exploitation....

Still struggling to pull in supplies for homegrown 5G SoC, though It seems that US sanctions are not holding back Huawei, as the Chinese tech giant has now risen to the global top spot in smartphone shipments, at least as far as foldable models go....

Sitting in a not-spot in the countryside? It's not great news The UK's mobile networks are unlikely to hit the government target for 95 percent coverage of the country by December 2025, because the remaining locations will be increasingly harder and therefore costlier to reach....

Plus: Japanese billionaire cancels joyride with artists around the Moon The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has lost contact with the only active Venus probe, Akatsuki....

Yes, It's that darned AI again Opinion For many, VMware by Broadcom has meant misery by the boatload. The virtualization platform's new owners have embarked on price hikes for the big and forcible eviction for the little. The dividing line isn't clear. A 24,000 seat migration by share repository Computershare seemingly triggered by the gouge suggests things might not go to plan....

As Arm CEO declares his architecture is now the de facto Windows standard Computex Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has used his keynote at Taiwan's Computex tech conference to signal he wants to tackle more of the PC market....

We're starting to wonder if any of you know what those things are actually for Who, Me? Welcome once again, to another manic Monday, The Reg's very own fun day, on which we celebrate the less celebrated moments of our readers' careers in a column we call Who, Me?...

Eurocrats made them an offer they couldn't refuse STMicro will receive 2 billion ($2.17 billion) from the EU under the European Chips Act to build a manufacturing plant in Italy for high-power semiconductors used in electric vehicles....

The fusion of Lidar, radar, and cameras can be fooled by stuff from your kids' craft box A team of researchers from prominent universities - including SUNY Buffalo, Iowa State, UNC Charlotte, and Purdue - were able to turn an autonomous vehicle (AV) operated on the open sourced Apollo driving platform from Chinese web giant Baidu into a deadly weapon by tricking its multi-sensor fusion system....

CTO likes what he sees, but craves more memory and compute Computex The third version of text-to-image model Stable Diffusion will be released into public preview on June 12....

Arm, schmarm: new 50TOPS NPUs that talk Block FP16 really make AI sing, says CEO Lisa Su Computex Two weeks after Microsoft made the AI PC all about Arm-powered processors from Qualcomm, AMD has announced a pair of PC CPU ranges it boasts will handle AI as well or better than any rival - plus silicon that it claimed is the fastest consumer-grade processor ever built....

If only customers could find their keys after support portal migration VMware by Broadcom has won Microsoft's support for its license portability plan....

House of Zen hopes to catch its AI rival by moving to a yearly release cadence Computex AMD's flagship AI accelerator will receive a high-bandwidth boost when its MI325X arrives later this year....

911 is a joke Cisco has warned that its Emergency Responder product can send emergency services to the wrong location under some circumstances....

PLUS: Singapore intros AI safety tools; Satya Nadella fined by Indian gov; China stops influencers flaunting bling ASIA IN BRIEF China's Chang'e-6 Probe has landed on the far side of the Moon on Sunday....

In the not too distant future agency wants to found factories in the sky A space company with a troubled past has been thrown a possible lifeline by DARPA, which has awarded it a contract to demonstrate the first steps towards building an orbital factory....

Tiny percentage of users make X miss the spot About 80 percent of the fake news shared on Twitter during the 2020 US presidential election came from just 0.3 percent of users, according to researchers from Israel and the US....

And how do we feel about Palantir selling its ML-based targeting system to the entire US military? Tune in! Kettle There's no avoiding AI and LLMs this year. The technology is being stuffed into everything, from office software to phone apps....

Who needs experts when you have an army of hand-picked super users telling you what you want to hear? Twitch has reportedly dismantled its Safety Advisory Council, and apparently plans to replace the panel with chosen "ambassadors."...

Refurbishing the next machine to come from the original inventor of the Mac Feature Vintage systems guru Cameron Kaiser documents stripping down and fixing a Canon Cat - the most revolutionary computer you've never heard of....

Infosec house claims Ticketmaster, Santander hit via cloud storage Infosec analysts at Hudson Rock believe Snowflake was compromised by miscreants who used that intrusion to steal data on hundreds of millions of people from Ticketmaster, Santander, and potentially other customers of the cloud storage provider. Snowflake denies its security was defeated....

Similar cases have resulted in serious sanctions, and they were on a far smaller scale Serial tech and digital privacy critic Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) laid into UnitedHealth Group's (UHG) CEO for appointing a CISO Wyden deemed "unqualified"- a decision he claims likely led to its ransomware catastrophe of late....

Owner ByteDance may be hedging its bets on overturning sale-or-ban bill Developers for the short video app TikTok have reportedly been working on creating a clone of its content algorithm specifically for use in the US since late last year....

Follows arrests and takedowns of recent days After the big dog revelations from the past week, the cops behind Operation Endgame are now calling for help in tracking down the brains behind the Emotet operation....

Suggesting people eat rocks or put glue on pizza? Yeah, that's some artificial intelligence right there Google has finally addressed those unhinged web search results seemingly generated by its AI, screenshots of which circulated far and wide on social media this past week....

Scared of editing a config file? There'll soon be a GUI for that The Windows Subsystem for Linux is due to receive a user interface for settings as well as management enhancements to make the platform more attractive to enterprise administrators....

Astronauts clamber around a mock-up, launch of the real thing is only 4 years away ESA and NASA astronauts are taking the opportunity to clamber around a mock-up of the Lunar I-Hab, a European habitat intended to form part of the Gateway in 2028....

Document database company asking sales peeps to target workloads with 'higher growth potential' MongoDB's valuation tanked by as much as a quarter last night after it lowered expectations for revenue growth during the rest of the year, disappointing investors....

Sector-agnostic group is after your data, wherever you are Infosec researchers revealed today a previously unknown cybercrime group that's been on the prowl for three years and is behaving like some of the more dangerous cyber baddies under Kim Jong-Un's watch....

The Reg talks to Donald Chamberlin, Michael Stonebraker and more about the legendary programming language Feature In the fifty years since SQL was first proposed, it has become the dominant query language for working with relational databases. As such, it underpins the transactions vital to the workings of government, business and the world's economy. But like many standards, its path to global domination is not been a straight one, and in the early years of its gestation, the story could have been very different....

Ongoing fossil fuel use means maybe it's time to revise that idea that AI will kill us with robots Coal-generated energy in the US is set to stick around longer than previously expected, to fulfill increasing demand from datacenters....

800,000 metric tons of cabling is just lying there Increasingly redundant copper wires may be worth over $7 billion to telecommunications firms, should they take the trouble to recycle them....

Starting Monday, users will gradually be warned the end is near On Monday, June 3, 2024, some people using Beta, Dev, and Canary builds of Google's Chrome browser will be presented with a warning banner when they access their extension management page - located at chrome://extensions....

Multiple folks are working on FOSS servers for classic messaging apps Multiple independent efforts are underway to save ICQ from extinction... as well as MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and more....

Tell us what's worse Reg readers: Microsoft support or taking your broken hardware into one of those stores UK owners of borked Surface laptops can now pop into their local Currys rather than deal with Microsoft's own support channels for their device....

An extra-robust, novice-friendly distro, with local apps, that's not ChromeOS EndlessOS 6 is a toughened and much-simplified immutable Debian 12 with a friendly GNOME-based desktop, aimed at kids, education, and novice users....

Working under a cone of silence isn't easy if you get smart On Call Register readers know the secret of tech support is that it's often made harder than necessary by the very customers who require it. Which is why each Friday we offer a fresh episode of On Call, our reader-contributed tales of icky incidents and hidden horrors that we hope create a chance to share misery in company....

Kremlin-aligned gang used Cloudflare and GitHub resources, and they didn't like that one bit Cloudflare's threat intel team claims to have thwarted a month-long phishing and espionage attack targeting Ukraine which it has attributed to Russia-aligned gang FlyingYeti....

Has already hiked prices to cope and is prepared to do it again while you wait for boxes with Nvidia inside Dell believes the cost of DRAM and solid state disks (SSDs) will jump by 15 to 20 percent in the second half of 2024, and will adjust its prices accordingly to pass on the pain....

Whatever gear storied cycling site Wiggle used didn't propel it to a successful sale after the biz hit bumps If there's a MAMIL in your life - a Middle Aged Man in Lycra - you may have heard them lament the recent collapse of UK-based cycling and outdoor goods website Wiggle, which has been revealed to have had IT infrastructure in a state that scared away prospective buyers....

Tropical nation ends DC build hiatus and calls for energy optimization everywhere - even software Singapore will offer incentives aimed at encouraging enterprises to upgrade their hardware fleets, as part of a Green Data Centre Roadmap announced yesterday....