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Windows giant continues march away from on-prem and into a cloudy future Microsoft is to discontinue the Microsoft Action Pack and Microsoft Learning Pack on January 21, 2025, sending partners off to potentially pricier and cloudier options....

Prompt injection, ASCII smuggling, and other swashbuckling attacks on the horizon Microsoft has fixed flaws in Copilot that allowed attackers to steal users' emails and other personal data by chaining together a series of LLM-specific attacks, beginning with prompt injection....

Business left Europe last year, but remains ticking away Fujitsu this week announced 16 new business notebooks, desktops, tablets, and workstations....

This is despite the German vendor's preferred upgrade path There is an even split for large enterprise customers of SAP ERP systems between on-prem and the public cloud - the German vendor's preferred upgrade path - according to NTT Data, a major global SI and partner....

Forget wrist acrobatics, we need smarter wake word detection and on-device voice recognition Opinion Apple is gearing up for its annual fall event, where new iPhone and Apple Watch models traditionally make their debut. This year marks a significant milestone: It's been 10 years since the launch of the original Apple Watch. To commemorate this anniversary, the tech giant is expected to unveil a special edition, unofficially named the Apple Watch X....

A personal collection of the memorable missteps and fumbles Part 1: The eight-bit era You'll find below an informal roundup of the slip-ups and missteps that stick in the mind of The Reg FOSS desk, from the dawn of the microcomputer industry onwards. We are certain that we've missed plenty - let us know your favorites....

'Enjoy the footage. It has cost us quite some money to generate' With impressive speed and candor, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) has provided an update on the anomaly that caused last week's rocket firing at SaxaVord in Shetland, Scotland, to end explosively....

Phew! Consumer-grade tracking devices are good for more than finding your keys and stalking Theft of packages is an ongoing problem, so one California woman tried a high tech solution to the problem - and her use of Apple's consumer-grade AirTags tracking devices led to two arrests....

Weak roadmap, tricky migration path, and Broadcom dependencies add up to uncertainty Analyst firm Gartner has advised customers of Omnissa - the company spun out from VMware's end-user compute business - that they need to take stock because the new org isn't yet able to offer a strong roadmap....

Asia Internet Coalition asks for rethink of social media licensing law with the old 'You'll scare away investors' line - a week after AWS opened a region The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), a lobby group whose members include Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter (aka X), LinkedIn, Apple, and other Big Tech players, has called on the prime minister of Malaysia to rethink laws requiring social media and instant messaging providers to secure operating licenses....

Ground stations are the perfect place for the Great Firewall to block things China finds unpleasant The multiple constellations of broadband-beaming satellites planned by Chinese companies could conceivably run the nation's "Great Firewall" content censorship system, according to think tank The Australian Strategic Policy Institute. And if they do, using the services will be dangerous....

What good is going fast if you can't get past the next rack? In modern AI systems, using PCIe to stitch together accelerators is already too slow. Nvidia and AMD use specialized interconnects like NVLink and Infinity Fabric for this reason - but at the 900-plus GB/sec these links push, copper will only carry you so far....

Frances Haugen says navigating the digital world requires a North Star Frances Haugen, a transparency and accountability advocate known for blowing the whistle on Facebook, believes the tech industry needs to find a North Star to navigate through ethical and privacy risks....

Shove 32 of 'em in a box and you've got nearly 24 petaFLOPS of FP8 perf Hot Chips RISC-V champion Tenstorrent offered the closest look yet at its upcoming Blackhole AI accelerators at Hot Chips this week, which they claim can outperform an Nvidia A100 in raw compute and scalability....

More of a storm in a teacup Today's news that Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) security system is open to abuse may be overstated....

A guided tour of vintage hardware set to be scattered to the winds The Living Computers museum's tech collection is set for auction. Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took a last look and mused on the theme of donor's remorse....

DCs on the Emerald Isle better be green, says Dublin council - unless your name is Microsoft Google's plans to expand its Dublin datacenter presence have been derailed by Irish county officials who say the project isn't sustainable enough....

While datacenter silos have left you so screwed' VMware Explore Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has opened the VMware Explore conference by saying CEOs' decisions to push their companies into public clouds have left their IT departments with post-traumatic stress disorder, while silos of datacenter tech have left tech teams screwed"....

The same Beijing-backed cyber spy crew the feds say burrowed into US critical infrastructure It looks like China's Volt Typhoon has found a new way into American networks as Versa has disclosed a nation-state backed attacker has exploited a high-severity bug affecting all of its SD-WAN customers using Versa Director....

Telum II Processor and Spyre Accelerator set to boost performance and expand IO capacity IBM has unveiled a more powerful processor for its famed mainframe systems, promising enhanced on-chip AI acceleration for inferencing plus integrated data processing unit (DPU) to boost IO handling....

Faster than you can read? More like blink and you'll miss the hallucination Hot Chips Inference performance in many modern generative AI workloads is usually a function of memory bandwidth rather than compute. The faster you can shuttle bits in and out of a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) the faster the model can generate a response....

Twitchy roll resolved, landing gear works on one-third size demonstrator Aircraft biz Boom Supersonic completed the second test flight of its XB-1 demonstrator vehicle on Monday, during which the landing gear was retracted and extended for the first time and its new roll damper was tested....

'The government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,' says Facebook founder Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving ammunition to conspiracy theorists with a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he claims the Biden administration pressured his company on multiple occasions to censor posts related to COVID-19....

Cracked Labs examines how workplace surveillance turns workers into suspects Software designed to address legitimate business concerns about cyber security and compliance treats employees as threats, normalizing intrusive surveillance in the workplace, according to a report by Cracked Labs....

Claims just two management consoles will emerge VMware Explore VMware by Broadcom has opened its annual user conference by teasing version nine of its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite - a major upgrade touted as delivering on past promises of an easy-to-consume hybrid cloud suite - but hasn't said when it will arrive....

As users wail, Microsoft tweaks its text to drop the word 'deprecated' Microsoft has updated its Windows system configuration tools document and excised all references to deprecating the venerable Control Panel in the wake of an outcry from Reg readers....

Teaming up with Sage Geosystems, house of Facbook plans to tap into Earth's fiery underbelly Meta and Sage Geosystems are striking a deal under which geothermal energy provided by Sage will be used to deliver renewable power for Meta's US datacenters, intended to help reduce their carbon dioxide footprint....

Must launch to catch the red planet alignment window despite occasional testing 'anomalies' Jeff Bezos's rocket venture, Blue Origin, has set a date of no earlier than October 13 for the inaugural mission of the New Glenn rocket, with a payload set for Mars....

Despite early promises, moving between providers remains a complex and costly endeavor Analysis One of the promises of the public cloud was that customers would be able to migrate workloads if they wished, taking advantage of market freedom to switch to a different provider if it offered lower costs or some other advantage. What happened to that dream?...

The return of Windows Recall is more than a bad flashback Opinion Companies love to use familiar words in unorthodox ways. "We value your privacy" is really the digital equivalent of a mugger admiring your phone. And "partnering"? Usually, it means "The one with more money is bribing the one with more cred."...

It's all about your chemistry Noted anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, who lead groundbreaking research into how the brain deals with love and passion, has died at the age of 79 after suffering endometrial cancer....

With a warning: Words have power A Pakistani court on Monday acquitted a man of cyber terrorism charges after he allegedly spread fake news on social media websites that sparked riots across the UK earlier this month....

But they have to show for unpaid training, or lose their jobs-in-waiting Infosys CEO Salil Parekh has promised to honor job offers made over two years ago to graduates yet to be employed by the outsourcing giant....

Kingdom sees growing demand for hard disks and drives to maintain global dominance The Kingdom of Thailand yesterday approved Western Digital's plans to expand its hard disk manufacturing facilities in the nation....

Lasted longer than expected, but hasn't been heard from since late April Japan's Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) has ended operations of the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) that it landed on Earth's sole natural satellite in January....

Hallucinating AI models excel at defamation Microsoft Bing Copilot has falsely described a German journalist as a child molester, an escapee from a psychiatric institution, and a fraudster who preys on widows....

Legitimate emails misclassified in software snafu Updated Many administrators have had a trying Monday after getting spammed out with false malware reports by Microsoft....

Also working to clean up inconsistent APIs and lack of SSO across vSphere, vSAN, NSX, SDDC Manager, vRealize and more VMware Explore VMware by Broadcom is working on a unified SDK for its core products and will deliver it before the major release of its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite that the virtualization giant has previously said will express its strategy of offering a unified hybrid cloud suite....

National security data up for grabs, Office of the Inspector General finds update The FBI has made serious slip-ups in how it processes and destroys electronic storage media seized as part of investigations, according to an audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General....

No word yet on if ransomware is to blame The Port of Seattle, which operates the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, is investigating a "possible cyberattack" after computer outages disrupted the airport's operations and delayed flights....

Multiple lawsuits doesn't mean investors are coming for the board yet, but better safe than sorry, right? Worried shareholders may drag it kicking and screaming into directions unknown, Intel has reportedly been meeting with advisors to hash out an anti-activist game plan....

Second sensitive info theft claimed by the same crims since June Digital data thieves have reportedly breached AMD's internal communications and are offering the allegedly stolen goods for sale....

The ride-sharing provider insists it broke no rules during the three-year legal gap Privacy authorities in the Netherlands have imposed a 290 million ($324 million) fine on ride-share giant Uber for sending driver data to servers in the United States - "a serious violation" of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)....

A few lines of Python is all it takes to get a model to use a calculator or even automate your hypervisor Hands on Let's say you're tasked with solving a math problem like 4,242 x 1,977. Some of you might be able to do this in your head, but most of us would probably be reaching for a calculator right about now, not only because it's faster, but also to minimize the potential for error....

Unprotected database with 12 years of biz records yanked offline Exclusive Nearly 2.7 TB of sensitive data - 31.5 million invoices, contracts, HIPPA patient consent forms, and other business documents regarding numerous companies across industries - has been exposed to the public internet in a non-password protected database for an unknown amount of time....

Sueball suggests outsourcer went out of bounds by developing competing product A subsidiary of IT outsourcer Cognizant filed a lawsuit on Friday in Texas federal court alleging that rival Infosys was involved in stealing trade secrets and engaging in anticompetitive behavior....

Buying PCs off the gray market can (literally) blow up in your face Who, Me? Welcome, gentle reader, to another Monday morning. We here at The Reg hope your working week is starting well - or at least better than it went for the protagonist of this week's instalment of Who, Me?...

It needs to - Virtzilla's customers, allies, and enemies are all pondering off-ramps and trying to lure unhappy users VMware Explore Adopting - or increasing the use of - a proprietary computing architecture like IBM's POWER is a very niche thing to do in 2024. Yet in June, Big Blue suggested doing just that: employing its single-supplier stack as a replacement for the VMware stack....

Rumors swirl that lack of content moderation has angered authorities The founder and CEO of made-in-Russia messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on Saturday - and subjected to further detention the next day - apparently over his company's failure to follow content moderation laws and assist with several criminal investigations....

Plus: Microsoft issues workaround for dual-boot crashes; ARRL cops to ransom payment, and more Infosec in brief Deniss Zolotarjovs, a suspected member of the Russian Karakurt ransomware gang, has been charged in a US court with allegedly conspiring to commit money laundering, wire fraud and Hobbs Act extortion....