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Customers debate reasons behind move, say halo of Teams has slipped now Copilot is here Analysis Arguments over the retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams shows no sign of abating, with some users pointing to the EU-forced unbundling of the product, while analysts are wondering if this a sign of a new, pricier, era for the application....

Company keeps quiet amid high-profile compromises Security researchers are claiming a spate of DNS hijackings at web3 businesses is linked to Squarespace's acquisition of Google Domains last year....

They're gonna need a heck of a lot of memory bandwidth - not to mention capacity - to do it Analysis Within a few years, AMD expects to have notebook chips capable of running 30 billion parameter large language models locally at a speedy 100 tokens per second....

Fatter front end and execution engine meets a higher bandwidth backend and a true AVX-512 implementation With the first Zen 5 CPUs and SoCs set to ship later this month, AMD offered a closer look at the architectural improvements underpinning the platform's 16 percent uplift in instructions per clock (IPC) during its Tech Day event in LA last week....

Musk firm to work with the FAA on why the second stage leaked liquid oxygen SpaceX has confirmed the payload of last week's Starlink launch is pretty much a total writeoff. However, standing down Falcon 9 as authorities look into the incident could have major implications for the space industry....

Demain est un autre jour The future of French IT heavyweight Atos is on firmer ground after the company secured funding for its rescue plan by signing a Lock-Up Agreement with creditors, although the restructuring remains subject to certain conditions....

New project from Atom developer gains a second host OS Zed - sorry, US readers, that's its name, not "Zee" - is a new coding tool. Until very recently it was Mac-only, but not any more....

Deep experience of the older tech crowd is nothing short of vital, yet projects need new devs to move forward Opinion A "Youth and Open Source" panel was held at the United Nations (UN) Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for Good conference in the UN building in Manhattan. There was only one little problem with it. To quote Ruth Ikegah, a young Nigerian open source project manager, "We need more young people here because I see a lot of old people here."...

Case centers on 3G, 4G, and 5G patents held by US wireless IP holder InterDigital Lenovo is claiming a victory of sorts in a UK Court of Appeal ruling that bumps up the amount it owes US patentholder InterDigital in a telecoms licensing dispute - the payment is much lower than the total it might have had to cough up....

Hey, here's an idea... create a point system for every time Microsoft hurts us Opinion As Microsoft approaches its 50th birthday next year, it can look back with satisfaction at having created the first era of universal corporate computing, and of having ridden successfully on the coat-tails of the second....

Techie left spitting chips made sure the boss was, too Who, Me? Welcome to the working week, dear readers, and good luck navigating whatever it brings - a task we hope to illuminate with a fresh instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which you share tales of the times you weren't at your best but managed to get away with it....

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....