The Register

No it's not happened, but officials want readiness in the South China Sea The US Secretary of Commerce says it would be "absolutely devastating" if China seized Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and locked down the South China Sea....

Duplication across geographies no defense against the 'one-of-a-kind' accidental deletion Google's Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has weighed in on the UniSuper fiasco and confirmed that UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription was accidentally deleted....

Now this is our kind of click bait A study into whale language using machine learning has uncovered a complex phonetic system, implying the cetaceans may speak to each other much like humans do....

Ubuntu Unity 24.04 arrives along with new little sibling, Ubuntu Lomiri Ubuntu Unity Noble Numbat is out, and alongside it, a very much not long-term-supported new variant of the distro: Ubuntu Lomiri....

Customers can be pushed into renewing agreements for fear of the unknown, but there are cheaper options Oracle is threatening software audits as customers seek to exit Unlimited License Agreements (ULAs)....

Gosh, here's us thinking recursion was a solved problem AI model collapse - the degradation of quality expected from machine learning models that recursively train on their own output - is not inevitable, at least according to 14 academics....

Intel and pals automate manufacturing in Japan while AWS pledges billions to Singapore Tech giants including Intel and AWS joined Microsoft and others this week in announcing investments in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region to build out infrastructure - cloud services, datacenters, and chipmaking facilities - in anticipation of growing AI demand....

Power shortages are driving the industry to once-unthinkable places Southeast Asia's hyperscalers face plenty of challenges - from securing talent, property, and keeping construction costs down - but these hurdles pale in comparison to the task of banking enough power....

AI may help drug discovery, but not US drug affordability Google and DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs has developed an AI model called AlphaFold 3 that can, it's claimed, predict the structure of molecules more accurately than existing tools....

BogusBazaar ripped off shoppers and scraped card details, but not in China A crime ring dubbed BogusBazaar has scammed 850,000 people out of tens of millions of dollars via a network of dodgy shopping websites....

A Pleasant spot to Mount an AI push After Foxconn failed to turn Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, into an LCD manufacturing mecca as promised, the site is getting a new lease on life: Microsoft will build a $3.3 billion datacenter campus there....

Leccy car maker ships bunch of vehicles, losing around $39K on each one Cost-cutting layoffs have had little effect on Rivian's bottom line, as the troubled electric car maker has limped from another quarter with more than a billion dollars in losses....

It's 'essential to national security' ex-Navy intel officer tells us Interview As undersea cables carry increasing amounts of information, cyber and physical attacks against them will cause a greater impact on the wider internet....

Projecting much, US semiconductor industry? By 2032 America is projected to produce 28 percent of the world's most advanced processors while China will be making just two percent, or so the US Semiconductor Industry Association predicts....

Brain-inspired chip folks set to show off hardware at ISC next week SpiNNcloud Systems says it is making commercially available a hybrid AI high performance computer system based on an architecture pioneered by Steve Furber, one of the designers of the original Arm processor....

Interrogations, confiscating flyers, and prohibiting literature is no bueno, board says in final decision of 2022 case Apple tried to protest, but the complaints fell on deaf ears as the US National Labor Relations Board has finally decided the tech giant violated labor laws by interfering with union organizing activities at a New York City location....

It ain't all sunshine and windmills - and guess who's in the lead? China Thirty percent of the world's electricity in 2023 was generated by renewable energy sources, according to a think tank....

Crashes continue even with recall fixes in place The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has written to Tesla as the automaker's electric cars keep crashing despite a recall to fix problems with the Autopilot software....

And it would seriously inconvenience the Chinese and Russians, too RSAC There's a way to vastly reduce the scale and scope of ransomware attacks plaguing critical infrastructure, according to CISA director Jen Easterly: Make software secure by design....

No more stress for TESS NASA has confirmed that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has recovered from a reaction wheel problem and resumed making observations....

So long SODIMM? Only in new Thinkpad so far, but memory format may well spread across market LPCAMM2 memory is getting the thumbs up from the team at iFixit, which hailed it as a return to the upgradeable laptop and reckons the writing is on the wall for models with soldered-down, non-serviceable memory....

Nearly 95M people in total snagged by flaw in file transfer tool Just short of a year after the initial incident, the state of Georgia's higher education government agency has confirmed that it was the victim of an attack on its systems affecting the data of 800,000 people....

Administrators, start your engines Microsoft has finally broken its silence on the fate of on-premises Exchange, and administrators will need to move quickly to keep their servers supported....

Multiple Marketplace accounts sold fake bottles, cartridges for 2 years+, claim companies Amazon and printer manufacturer Seiko Epson have filed a joint action against firms in Turkey and the UK which they claim sold counterfeit printer bottles and cartridges on the global online retailer's platform....

Faith in frunk flunks We know that Tesla Cybertruck owners are very special, and their mothers love them very much, but perhaps the most special of all is the one who "broke" his finger attempting to demonstrate the safety of the "frunk" closing mechanism....

That pesky 'previously unknown software bug' strikes again Australian superannuation fund UniSuper is lumbering back to life after an "unprecedented occurrence" at Google Cloud knocked its systems offline....

China vehemently denies involvement UK Government has confirmed a cyberattack on the payroll system used by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) led to "malign" forces accessing data on current and a limited number of former armed forces personnel....

Intel and Qualcomm reportedly among those cut off Updated The US Commerce Department has revoked some of the licenses held by tech companies to supply Chinese megacorp Huawei....

Approach could help make forever upcoming tech more reliable Intel says it has made two advancements towards realizing silicon-based quantum processors which involves optimizing a standard fabrication process and developing a means to test the quality of resulting individual devices across a full 300mm wafer....

Two years after going live, the project that left employees unpaid still needs work The fallout from Edinburgh University's ill-fated Oracle HR and finance implementation continues with one department recording thousands of mis-coded transactions relating to more than 300,000 in spending....

On the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career Interview This year is an unfortunate anniversary for information security: We're told it's a decade since ransomware started infecting corporations....

Where have you been, Cupertino? Analysis We can add Apple to the list of tech titans developing their own custom AI accelerators - at least that's what unnamed sources are telling the Wall Street Journal....

Keynotes, physical security, playlists ... the buck stops with Linda Gray Martin Interview The 33rd RSA Conference is underway this week, and no one feels that more acutely than the cybersecurity event's SVP Linda Gray Martin....

'I'm blown away by the fact that they weren't using MFA' Interview The cybersecurity practices that led up to the stunning Change Healthcare ransomware infection indicate "egregious negligence" on the part of parent company UnitedHealth, according to Tom Kellermann, SVP of cyber strategy at Contrast Security....

No child process left behind Later this year, MITRE is getting its hands on a modest supercomputer and is planning to use it to divvy out AI computing time to US government agencies....

Sources slam aggressive 'back to school' grading system as HR vows to track VPN use, badge swipes Exclusive Dell has told workers it will track the onsite presence of hybrid employees - those who work part remotely, part in the office - using electronic badge swipes, VPN monitoring, and a rather creepy color-coding system....

Or at least it might well be if these trial programs work out, with some civil lib oversight etc etc etc RSAC AI is a double-edged sword in that the government can see ways in which the tech can protect and also be used to attack Americans, says US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas....

Avoid traffic-redirecting snoops who have TunnelVision A newly discovered vulnerability undermines countless VPN clients in that their traffic can be quietly routed away from their encrypted tunnels and intercepted by snoops on the network....

Short on cores, big on threads and matrix math Not to be left out of the AI infrastructure game, on Tuesday IBM unveiled a pair of tiny Power 10 servers designed to preprocess data at the network edge....

In the first year alone, that's saved us all a lot of money and woe Interview As ransomware gangs step up their attacks against healthcare, schools, and other US critical infrastructure, CISA is ramping up a program to help these organizations fix flaws exploited by extortionists in the first place....

Oh, right - there's new iPad Pro and Air models, a pencil and some other stuff Apple held its anticipated iPad event today, and the most attention-grabbing news wasn't the new device models or the refreshed iPad Air lineup - it was the unveiling of Apple's homegrown M4 chip with a surprisingly powerful neural processing unit (NPU)....

Nothing like folks in Beijing lecturing us on the Constitution TikTok and its China-based parent ByteDance sued the US government today to prevent the forced sale or shutdown of the video-sharing giant....

Perhaps just make sure the stuff that is already there works properly? Microsoft will temporarily halt the rollout of Copilot features based on feedback from Windows Insiders....

Chipmaker outlines plans to save hundreds of millions and, hey presto, share price magically jumps Infineon, maker of chips for the automotive and industrial sectors, told investors that it is embarking on a cost purge after lowering revenue estimates for the full financial year amid weakened demand....

First new version in almost a decade now boasts TLS The Dillo web browser has returned with a new release, version 3.1. It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015....

Part of the race with Beijing to set standards and advance norms RSAC The US State Department's latest cybersecurity strategy will not be wildly different from current stances, but offers an alternative path to those presented by the country's adversaries....

Musk continues quest to make Tesla leaner, meaner, more profitable Another week, another round of layoffs at Tesla to report, and this time engineers are caught up in the mix....

Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev's $10M question is answered at last Updated Police have finally named who they firmly believe is the kingpin of the LockBit ransomware ring: Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev....

Customers brace for bumpy ride Updated Broadcom has ended the right of Amazon Web Services to resell VMware Cloud on AWS, meaning customers will now have a direct relationship only with VMware by Broadcom, casting doubt over the long-term future of the product....

Problems with Centaur rocket keeps first crewed flight on terra firma Boeing's long-delayed Starliner crewed launch, which was scheduled for today, has been postponed yet again, this time due to a valve problem on the Centaur upper stage. Managers pushed back the next attempt to no earlier than May 10....