The Register - Software: Recent Episodes
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What about notebooks, including AI-ready devices? Ah well, still months to go, eh Microsoft - With fewer than four months before Microsoft pulls the plug on standard support for Windows 10, businesses are replacing dusty – but in some cases perfectly working – desktop PCs in preparation for the migration to the little loved next generation of the Windows OS.
Framework agreement may rescue some unis from 'financial abyss' after Oracle per-employee Java license, says insider - Oracle requested Java audits with UK higher education institutions leading up to the negotiation of a national framework agreement — set to be worth up to £9.86 million ($13.33 million) — which aims to save the institutions £45 million when compared to standard commercial pricing.
Baseball, apple pie, and assisted programming - US-based software developers are the world's most prolific users of AI coding assistants, a trend that researchers believe has national economic implications.
FrontPage Remote Procedure Call and others set to be blocked in the name of 'Secure by Default' - Microsoft has warned administrators that legacy authentication protocols will be blocked by default from July, meaning that anyone who hasn't made preparations already could be in for a busy summer.
Probably the easiest way to a Google-free smartphone or tablet - Murena's /e/ OS is arguably the most mainstream de-Googled Android OS, and the new version catches up with important features.
‘Windows 365 Reserve’ will be usable ten days a year for undisclosed fee - Microsoft has announced a preview of “Windows 365 Reserve”, a service that provides pre-configured cloud PCs it suggests as ideal when physical machines aren’t usable.
EEG and recall tests suggest people who use ChatGPT to write essays aren't learning much - Using AI chatbots actually reduces activity in the brain versus accomplishing the same tasks unaided, and may lead to poorer fact retention, according to a new preprint study out of MIT.
New MCP server was shut down for nearly two weeks - Asana has fixed a bug in its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that could have allowed users to view other organizations' data, and the experimental feature is back up and running after nearly two weeks of downtime to fix the issue.
In case you forgot AI isn't the only thing GPUs are good for - Support for AMD's Instinct GPUs is coming to Voltron Data's accelerated SQL engine Theseus in the latest sign Nvidia's CUDA moat is getting shallower.
The richest and most customizable desktop for FOSS Unix - The second of three KDE point releases planned for 2025 is here, with more tiling options, accessibility improvements, and much more.
Such rules could be tricky to enforce in the Fediverse, though - Mastodon is the latest platform to push back against AI training, updating its terms and conditions to ban the use of user content for large language models (LLMs).
Cassandra rival releases new DBaaS relying on consensus algorithm - ScyllaDB, the wide-column database used by Comcast, Samsung, and banking giant Santander, has released a new database service it claims improves scalability and lowers cost.
Some servers can't renew IP addresses, and there's no fix yet - Microsoft has admitted that June's Patch Tuesday updates could break the DHCP service on Windows Server.
Mozilla, at least, has warmed to the Chocolate Factory's attempt to improve mic, camera, and location permissions - Google has been testing a new way for websites to ask permission to access sensitive browser controls, such as the microphone and camera, despite longstanding opposition from Mozilla and Apple. Following recent refinements to the proposal, Mozilla now appears to be warming to the changes.
Expect headcount reductions over the next few years, says Andy Jassy - Amazon staff on Tuesday got an email from their CEO advising that some of them will probably be replaced by bots.
Little agents everywhere - Salesforce is raising prices for a bunch of its products and claims that increasing integration with AI justifies the increased bills, even after one of its own researchers recently said that AI agents are often underdelivered on basic CRM tasks.
China's 'little dragons' pose big challenge to US AI firms - MiniMax, an AI firm based in Shanghai, has released an open source reasoning model that challenges Chinese rival DeepSeek and US-based Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in terms of performance and cost.
Promises silos for VMs, storage, and networks are out. Happy cloud-like days are in, without hyperscale complications - 573 days after closing the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom has released the product that expresses its vision for the virtualization giant's future and what it claims is the template for a modern private cloud.
Parent company Mozilla's not my fave either - I know some people still love Firefox. But, folks, it's a bad relationship, and the problems have been going on for a while now.
GLAM-E Labs report warns of risk to online cultural resources - Bots harvesting content for AI companies have proliferated to the point that they're threatening digital collections of arts and culture.
Last of Whitehall-wide ERP overhaul will not kick off until next year - The UK's Ministry of Defence has delayed procurement of a £92 million contract to implement Oracle's Fusion cloud-based ERP system.
As for agentic AI, don’t get him started about the enormous challenge of making it work vendors just won't discuss - “AI is not doing its job today and should leave us alone” according to analyst firm Gartner’s global chief of AI research Erick Brethenoux.
Mostly aimed at Europe and its increasingly nervous users - Microsoft has created a version of its 365 productivity suite that runs on-premises, as part of a move to satisfy European regulations.
DoD says deal covers 'warfighting'. OpenAI merely mentions healthcare and 'supporting proactive cyber defense' - The US Department of Defense has contracted OpenAI to run a pilot program that will create "frontier AI," but it's not clear what they're building together.
No need to plagiarize if you can have AI do it for you - A series of Freedom of Information requests shows that students in British universities are increasingly getting busted for using AI to cheat.
Next version to drop Windows 7 through 8.1, and 32-bit Windows support is on the way out, too - The LibreOffice project is preparing to cut some Windows support – and encourages users to switch to Linux.
6-in-10 success rate for single-step tasks - A new benchmark developed by academics shows that LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality.
But lose your code and it's gone for good - Windows 11 users in the European Economic Area will shortly receive a new Recall Export feature, allowing Recall snapshots to be shared with third-party apps and websites.
As others roll back use of tech due to quality, customers preferring to talk to humans - Not content with a corporate blueprint to cut up to 55,000 employees by 2030, UK telecoms giant BT now says even more staff could be replaced with AI, despite the experience of some orgs that have already tried this.
Student 'believed he could finish' software dev 'project alone and therefore that the rules did not apply to him' - A former GCHQ intern was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for stealing top-secret files during a year-long placement at the British intelligence agency.
Scandal-hit IT giant said it wouldn't take on new UK.gov contracts or continue bidding on existing ones unless asked - The Northern Ireland government did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for a £125 million ($167 million) contract, yet the Japanese tech giant to continued to do so, despite promising to quit competing for UK government work during the fallout from the Horizon scandal.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Not a problem with AI hype - Among the forever wars in geekdom, defining the difference between science fiction and fantasy is a hot potato destined to outlive the heat death of the universe.
German giant wants case heard in Germany, not the USA - German giant Siemens AG has tried to convince a US court to throw out the case in which VMware alleged it used unlicensed software.
Academics mull the need for the digital equivalent of low-background steel - For artificial intelligence researchers, the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, changed the world in a way similar to the detonation of the first atomic bomb.
We take a quick look at the headline features – and the growing differences - Rocky Linux 10 has caught up to the other high-profile RHELatives, but gaps between them are widening, both in tech and other ways.
Oracle’s 80-year-old co-founder pulls off a $25 billion cloud day to leapfrog Zuck and Bezos into the No. 2 spot - Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has reclaimed the No. 2 spot on Forbes's real-time billionaire list, trailing only Elon Musk after leapfrogging Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
Please insert another million dollars to continue - Broader AI adoption by enterprise customers is being hindered by the complexity of trying to forecast inferencing costs amid a fear being saddled with excessive bills for cloud services.
Mark Zuckerberg reached out to our source directly - Meta has made lavish and lucrative offers to a select set of AI researchers in an effort to develop superintelligent AI.
Jutes revolt against Redmond: Minister for Digital Affairs aims the longboats away from Vinland - The boss of Denmark's Ministry for Digitalization says her department will move away from Microsoft – starting with LibreOffice.
Deal includes 'waiver of historic fees' - UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to £9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023."
Mattel-OpenAI deal paves the way for an AI beach-off - Toy giant Mattel has signed a deal with OpenAI to bring the tech industry's buzziest technology to the very youngest generation.
Who'd have thunk? The bigger the iron, the more efficient it gets - With Moore's Law on its last legs and datacenter power consumption a growing concern, AMD is embarking on an ambitious new goal to boost the energy efficiency of its chips 20-fold before 2030. And it sees rack-scale architectures as a key design point to get there.
Distros align with GNOME 49's move to make Wayland the only supported session - Like any other distro with GNOME 49, the next interim release of Ubuntu will be Wayland-only – at least in its GNOME variant.
A survey from AI biz Qodo finds robo-coding productivity gains are unevenly distributed - Software developers largely appreciate the productivity improvements they get from AI coding tools, but they don't entirely trust their output, according to a survey conducted by AI coding biz Qodo.
UC San Diego hopes humans spend less time fighting fires, more time repelling 'exquisite' attacks from abroad that researchers accidentally invited - Experienced IT professionals should share their experience so their employers can create digital twins and AI agents that do parts of their own jobs, to relieve them of repetitive work and after-hours troubleshooting chores.
Big Red hails growth from 'astronomical' and 'insatiable' demand for cloud and huge IaaS growth - Oracle has surfed demand for cloud services to post revenues that beat its own forecast, fuelled by demand for non-AI cloud services.
'BrowserVenom' is pure poison - Suspected cybercriminals have created a fake installer for Chinese AI model DeepSeek-R1 and loaded it with previously unknown malware called "BrowserVenom".
Design software slinger warns it won't hire devs who aren't good at modern tools - Australian SaaS-y graphic design service Canva now requires candidates for developer jobs to use AI coding assistants during the interview process.
Everything is AWESOME!!! - OpenAI on Tuesday rolled out its o3-Pro model for ChatGPT Pro and Teams subscribers, slashed o3 pricing by 80 percent, and dropped a blog post from CEO Sam Altman teasing "intelligence too cheap to meter."
His work set the direction of modern computer interfaces, and much more - Bill Atkinson, widely acclaimed as perhaps the most brilliant computer programmer ever, has succumbed to pancreatic cancer at 74.
The 16 other flagged issues are on customers, says CRM giant - Salesforce has assigned five CVE identifiers following a security report that uncovered more than 20 configuration weaknesses, some of which exposed customers to unauthorized access and session hijacking.
Customers weren’t sold on automation, so the search for ROI continues - After lackluster results from customer-facing automation, Starbucks is now redirecting its tech ambitions toward helping its own employees.
Here's why they really should - I have been playing around with passkeys, or as they are formally known, discoverable credentials.
Uncultured swine prone to believe complexity of verse is machine-generated babble - A study in the US has found that readers can't tell the difference between poems written by famous poets and those written by AI aping their style. To make matters worse – for anyone fostering a love of literature at least – research subjects tend to like AI poetry more than they do verse from human poets.
Proof of concept allows geospatial datasets to be conversationally queried - Speculation over where Microsoft would take the Copilot brand next can now end thanks to the announcement of Earth Copilot in partnership with NASA.
It's memory-safe, with a few caveats - Developers looking to continue working in the C and C++ programming languages amid the global push to promote memory-safe programming now have another option that doesn't involve learning Rust.
LLM-controlled droids easily jailbroken to perform mayhem, researchers warn - Science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed three laws of robotics, and you'd never know it from the behavior of today's robots or those making them.
First true sign of AGI – blowing a fuse with a frustrating user? - When you're trying to get homework help from an AI model like Google Gemini, the last thing you'd expect is for it to call you "a stain on the universe" that should "please die," yet here we are, assuming the conversation published online this week is accurate.
Nearly 21 years since version 2.0 - Version 3.0 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is nearly ready for release. It has important new and long-awaited abilities – and you can try it now.
The lightest mainstream Linux desktop joins the tiny handful that support X.org replacement - LXQt 2.1 is the latest release of the lightweight Qt-based desktop used in Lubuntu – but this version has a significant edge over its rivals.
House of GPT says suit is 'baseless and overreaching' - Elon Musk has added Microsoft and the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman to the list of defendants in his long-running legal dispute with OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker called the claim "baseless and overreaching."
Flawed patch stops on-premises, hybrid server transport rules in their tracks for some - Microsoft is pausing the rollout of an Exchange security update after it became clear that the patch could break transport rules for some customers.
Brit mobile network's Daisy has time, patience, and plenty of yarns to spin - Watch out, scammers. O2 has created a new weapon in the fight against fraud: an AI granny that will keep you talking until you get bored and give up.
Discover how GitGuardian brings real-time secrets detection to VS Code - The recent Sisense breach, - where attackers exfiltrated customer data after discovering hardcoded AWS credentials in GitLab repositories - serves as yet another stark reminder: hardcoded secrets remain a primary attack vector.
NHS supplier that leaked employee info fell victim to fiddly access controls that can leave databases dangling online - Private businesses and public-sector organizations are unwittingly exposing millions of people's sensitive information to the public internet because they misconfigure Microsoft’s Power Pages website creation problem.
Revised sueball over WordPress brawl tries Sherman Antitrust Act on for size - WP Engine, a hosting provider for websites running open source WordPress software, has revised its legal complaint against rival Automattic and its CEO Matthew Mullenweg to include antitrust allegations.
Good news for supporting Windows on Arm devices and adding new ones - Microsoft is making ISO images of Windows 11 on Arm available at last, years after the hardware architecture made its debut.
Despite 49% surge in shipments, buyers seem unconvinced - Warehouses in the IT channel are stocking up with AI-capable PCs - industry watcher Canalys claims these made up 20 percent of all shipments during Q3 2024, amounting to some 13.3 million units worldwide.
And yes, that does include commercial use in production - Broadcom has made its desktop hypervisors freeware – even for production use. Not open source, but free stuff is still good, right?
Cortex-powered front end for easier access to insights across multiple sources - Snowflake is set to preview a new platform it claims will help organizations build chatbots that can serve up data from its own analytics systems and those external to the cloud data platform vendor.
LLM, LLM on the wall, who will be laid off first of all? - AMD has confirmed plans to cut approximately four percent of its global workforce - about 1,000 jobs out of a total headcount of roughly 26,000.
A former exec believes in the non-profit's mission, says the battle lines have changed - Mozilla's Firefox browser clocked its second decade over the weekend, an event celebrated by Mozilla Corporation CEO Laura Chambers.
Find out how to transform your business with AWS and RISE with SAP - In today's fast-paced business landscape, companies are looking for ways to stay ahead and modernizing their SAP environments in the cloud could be a good place to start.
Throwing novel hardware at academia. It's a tale as old as time - Amazon wants more people building applications and frameworks for its custom Trainium accelerators and is making up to 40,000 chips available to university researchers under a $110 million initiative announced on Tuesday.
Satya Claus has something special for all the good little girls and boys - Microsoft's next deadline for shipping its controversial Recall technology to Windows Insiders is fast approaching. Following a privacy outcry and mushrooming conspiracy theories, will the service ever be ready for users?
Memory-safe variant is planned for next year - C and C++ programmers may not need to learn Rust after all to participate in the push for memory safety.
Europe boss also speaks of 'nervousness' in any extension to the use of the controversial, aging system - Fujitsu's Europe boss has told a public inquiry into the Post Office scandal — one of the widest miscarriages of justice in UK history — that the company does not trust the UK public body in its use of Horizon system data to support future police prosecutions.
Somewhere to find AI settings, or just a button to uninstall the operating system once and for all? - Microsoft seems set to rebrand the AI-powered features in Windows to "Windows Intelligence" even if some of the more controversial elements, such as Recall, are to remain as they are.
It's not the first time the embedded microkernel OS has changed its terms - Version 8 of the Software Development Platform for the QNX microkernel real-time OS has gone freeware – but there are some strings attached.
No sign of 'rollback' yet - Microsoft has finally admitted that some instances of Windows Server 2019 and 2022 were unexpectedly upgraded to Windows Server 2025.
Talking to the distro's self-appointed benevolent dictator for life about 20 years of Ubuntu - Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth spoke to The Reg FOSS desk at Ubuntu Summit 2024 in The Hague about the Linux distribution's success, its missteps, his regrets, and what he'd tell his younger self.
What's the difference between a broken update system and a malware injection engine? - A seemingly simple, single mistake in metadata that auto-trashes a critical, major component in the Windows ecosystem sounds bad. And it is, in so many ways.
Got a modern Nvidia or AMD graphics card? Custom Llamas are only a few commands and a little data prep away - Large language models (LLMs) are remarkably effective at generating text and regurgitating information, but they're ultimately limited by the corpus of data they were trained on.
The new normal - The feud between Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and rival web hosting firm WP Engine has led Automattic to create a website that lists WordPress customers who have moved their site hosting away from WP Engine and those who haven't.
Raw Story and AltNet allowed to amend complaint - A US judge has thrown out a case against ChatGPT developer OpenAI which alleged it unlawfully removed copyright management information (CMI) when building training sets for its chatbots.
Does anyone want to tell Linus Torvalds? No? I didn't think so - I must be a glutton for punishment. Not only was my first programming language IBM 360 Assembler, my second language was C. Programming anything in them wasn't easy. Programming safely in either is much harder.
Affected business calls situation 'mindbogglingly dangerous' as sysadmins reminded to check backup and restore strategies - Microsoft remains silent over Windows Server 2025 turning up in the guise of a security update earlier this week, much to the chagrin of affected administrators.
Government-appointed commissioners say Birmingham severely lacked Oracle skills during disastrous implementation - UK government-appointed commissioners have labeled Birmingham City Council's Oracle Fusion rollout as "the poorest ERP deployment" they have seen.
UK data regulator says some devs and providers are operating without a 'lawful basis' - The UK's data protection watchdog finds that AI recruitment technologies can filter candidates according to protected characteristics including race, gender, and sexual orientation.
An emotionally manipulable AI in the hands of the Pentagon and CIA? Cool - Palantir has announced a partnership with Anthropic and Amazon Web Services to build a cloudy Claude platform suitable for the most secure of the US government's defense and intelligence use cases.
Data platform vendors can't meet all your needs, warns Gartner - Users should beware of the single platform approach when preparing for the demands of AI and machine learning on their data management systems, Gartner is warning.
Rewrite 'please leave my text editor alone' - Windows Insiders will soon get firsthand experience of Microsoft's AI ambitions for Paint and Notepad: the image editor is getting Generative Fill and Erase and the text editor is getting a Rewrite function.
IT spend set to rise nonetheless and it's not all about wundertech - Three is the magic number, or more specifically the amount of time in years before a killer app emerges that helps businesses more usefully use generative AI to drive meaingful producitivty gains.
21 lines that show the big man still has what it takes - A relatively tiny code change by penguin premier Linus Torvalds is making a measurable improvement to Linux's multithreaded performance.
Boost your organization’s AI application performance with optimized SQL vector data queries - Developing high-performance generative AI applications often hinges on efficient data management.
Screens sprayed with coffee after techies find Microsoft's latest OS in unexpected places - Administrators are reporting unexpected appearances of Windows Server 2025 after what was published as a security update turned out to be a complete operating system upgrade.
Need to know how to set up a business? There's an (experimental) AI for that - From the department of "this will go well" comes confirmation UK government is trialling an experimental chatbot with 15,000 business users, who can use it to ask questions about tax and available support.
'First impressions matter' but a KDE flavor is in the making – and more publicly at that - At this year's Ubuntu Summit in The Hague, we were really hoping to hear some news about Canonical's new immutable desktop distro.
Change of mind follows discovery China was playing with it uninvited? - Meta has historically restricted its LLMs from uses that could cause harm – but that has apparently changed. The Facebook giant has announced it will allow the US government to use its Llama model family for, among other things, defense and national security applications.
Firefox overlord to 'revisit' advocacy mission - The Mozilla Foundation is laying off about a third of its staff. The non-profit org, which oversees the corporation that develops the Firefox web browser, insists it will continue its advocacy mission, though its approach may change.
NP-hard to NP at all - Southeast Asia's Uber-esque superapp, Grab, has developed a tool that allows its employees to build large language model (LLM) apps without coding.
Don't do that, or risk a memory error - Microsoft has confirmed that opening too many emails at once in Classic Outlook could result in the application displaying an error before crashing. But don't worry; there's a registry change to fix it.
From meatballs and spaghetti to lasagna – same ingredients, different structure, says analyst - For the world's two dominant ERP vendors, the cloud is their future infrastructure. For customers of Oracle and SAP, getting there can mean technology and business process upheaval, but the commercial relationship with the vendor is also transformed.
You snooze, you lose, er, win - Google claims one of its AI models is the first of its kind to spot a memory safety vulnerability in the wild – specifically an exploitable stack buffer underflow in SQLite – which was then fixed before the buggy code's official release.
Yearly report finds explosion of GenAI projects, new users from outside the coding community responsible for boost - There's been an upset in the Octoverse, as Python has unseated JavaScript as the most-used programming language on GitHub.
Meanwhile, even Task Manager is no match for the broken patch - Even though Windows 10 has less than a year of support remaining, Microsoft has once again demonstrated its ability to break things with a seemingly innocuous update.
Stuffing it full of AI hasn't helped, so let's try financial incentives - We're not saying Microsoft is desperate for people to use Bing, but a $1 million sweepstakes that grants entries to users of the search engine sure quacks like a duck.
Open source tool chooses to become more open than ever - Fear not, FOSS fans. Bitwarden isn't going proprietary after all. The company has changed its license terms once again – but this time, it has switched the license of its software development kit from its own homegrown one to version three of the GPL instead.
Find out how to unlock business potential with AWS and RISE with SAP - As businesses evolve, modernizing SAP systems in the cloud can become an essential driver of agility and innovation.
Thank you, vNext... and yes, there are plenty of updates to keep you busy - Windows Server 2025 is officially generally available with some substantial changes for administrators including useful Active Directory Domain tweaks, plus the disappearance of some familiar friends including Wordpad.
Dark alley and a brick in a sock required to accelerate market share growth? - With Windows 11 still failing to set the world alight, campaigners are warning that millions of perfectly good PCs could become landfill fodder when support for Windows 10 runs out in eleven and a bit months.
Now, can someone come up with an emulator for the things, please? - Good news, everyone – well, everyone who's still onboard the Itanic, anyway. GCC 15 will de-deprecate Linux support for Intel's original 64-bit chip.
ASWF is the open source foundation run by the folks who give out Oscars, and you've probably seen the results - One of the things we didn't expect to see at this year's Ubuntu get-together was a chart showing Rocky Linux's dominance. Another was demos of whizz-bang special movie effects with open source componentry at their heart.
MIcrosoft extends its Extended Security Updates club to consumers, at last - Microsoft has thrown a lifeline to Windows 10 users ahead of the OS going end-of-life, by offering an extra year of patches for $30.
Activists press Redmond to come clean on ‘material reputational, legal, and operational risks’ - Microsoft shareholders may be exposed to the "material financial risks" from its links with the fossil fuel industry, which the megacorp identified as the top growth target for its AI and cloud computing services.
This will both ease and exacerbate price concerns and competitive sniping - VMware by Broadcom has upped the storage capacity allowed under licenses for its vSphere Foundation bundle – a move that addresses competitors' attacks, but may also give them new impetus.
Azure's acceleration continues, but so do costs - Microsoft has explained that its method of funding the tens of billions it's spending on new datacenters and AI infrastructure is to shun customers who want to rent GPUs to train new AI models.
And what do you know, Google's former CEO just so happens to have a commercial solution - Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead.
Plus a free micropatch until Redmond fixes the flaw - There's a Windows Themes spoofing zero-day bug on the loose that allows attackers to steal people's NTLM credentials.
After 19 years of losses, all it took was a machine translation of its posts to get out of the red - After months of uncertainty, it looks like going public was a good thing for Reddit's bottom line, as the online forum just posted a profit for the first time in its 19-year history.
Discover techniques for improving application performance and delivering relevant AI-driven insights - Scaling generative AI applications with foundational models (FMs) often presents challenges, particularly when working with vector data.
Fabbed by TSMC, needed for … it's a secret - OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Broadcom to build a custom inferencing chip.
Tractor maker has only turned over shoddy tools, half-baked info, may be breaking the law, says senator - US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has sent a letter to John May, CEO of agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company, questioning whether John Deere is living up to the promises it made to support the right to repair.
Is that a Mixed Reality headset, or just a complicated paperweight? Oh and farewell WordPad - With the release of Windows 11 24H2, it is time to pay our respects to the features and functions removed from Microsoft's flagship operating system.
Find out how in this on-demand webinar - Artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the way IT is managed, but how can it be applied effectively in operations?
AI Overviews get links to referenced websites – and ads - Almost two decades ago, the head of Google's then nascent enterprise division referred to the firm's search service as "an uber-command line interface to the world."
Distro behind the handheld console announces corporate sponsorship - Valve is officially sponsoring the Linux distro that powers the gaming giant's Steam Deck console.
Former Apple engineer and Apache PMC member Russell Spitzer describes efforts to unite around a single format - In June, Databricks shelled out $1 billion for Tabular, a startup backer of the open source Apache Iceberg table format, signalling just how important the rather niche topic had become. It was a move which shocked the Iceberg community.
British retailer Asda admits tech divorce from former owner Walmart has been delayed again - Asda, the UK's third largest retailer, discovered a multi-million pound discrepancy between its distribution system and SAP ERP tech installed earlier this year, according to an internal Major Incident report seen by The Register.
Shifting battle-hardened systems to document model – are your skills and tools ready? - MongoDB has used the release of version 8.0 to defend its viability as the underpinning of business-critical transactional systems.
For version 2025, out on November 1st and adding various modern goodies - Microsoft has revealed that the 2025 edition of its System Center management tool will debut on November 1st, at prices ten percent higher that it charged for its predecessor.
It’s called ‘Cosmos’ and Nvidia, Cisco, X, SuperMicro and VAST Data all think it will help – them and you - A group of top enterprise vendors feel that AI is changing so fast it’s “undigestible” to many, so they’ve created an org they hope will function like the Open Compute Project so you don’t make a meal of it.
If you think VMware has gone to the dogs, maybe check it out? - OpenStack Dalmatian, the 30th edition of the open source cloud stack, has bounded out of the kennel.
Just two of the gang of eleven remain as safety concerns swirl - Anthropic has hired yet another of OpenAI's founders, this time bringing on Durk Kingma in an unspecified role.
Trademark royalties is one way to force support of open source, we guess - WordPress developer Automattic on Wednesday published details of its efforts to pressure rival WP Engine to sign a trademark license agreement costing millions of dollars.
What would you like the power to do? Not having an heart attack would be nice - Some US customers using the Bank of America app to keep an eye on their accounts got a shock Wednesday morning when their checking and savings accounts were unexpectedly empty or out of date.
It's easy being Elon - Tesla has managed to persuade a California judge to throw out a lawsuit that claimed the automaker misled shareholders about its Full Self-driving (FSD) system's true capabilities.
Complete with Copilot Vision – but sessions won't be stored, insists Redmond - Microsoft has made Windows 11 24H2 generally available, dishing out several new features - some that are even useful and interesting - as well as a generous dollop of known issues.
Now that's the kind of stability we like - Tcl/Tk 9.0 has moved to Unicode and 64-bit data structures, and can now access compressed files as if they were file systems. It has been worth the considerable wait.
Fun experiment, but yeah, don't pipe an LLM raw into /bin/bash - Buck Shlegeris, CEO at Redwood Research, a nonprofit that explores the risks posed by AI, recently learned an amusing but hard lesson in automation when he asked his LLM-powered agent to open a secure connection from his laptop to his desktop machine.
Research institute seems to have found Huawei to do it – perhaps with Arm cores - despite sanctions - China Telcom's AI Research Institute claims it trained a 100-billion-parameter model using only domestically produced computing power – a feat that suggests Middle Kingdom entities aren't colossally perturbed by sanctions that stifle exports of Western tech to the country.
Code-controlled taxi biz tiptoes back with supervised driving in Phoenix and Dallas - Embattled driverless taxi outfit Cruise has been fined $1.5 million for leaving some essential details out of its initial reports to the US government about an accident involving one of its robo-vehicles and a pedestrian last year.
Find out how to unlock seamless data integration in this AWS Zero-ETL webinar - AWS is changing the way businesses integrate and analyze their data with its latest zero-ETL initiatives.
Microsoft's latest OS is performing dismally compared to predecessors - Windows 11 has finally reached more than half of Windows 10's market share, with just over a year before support for Windows 10 ends.
Might be best to give it a miss for now - Microsoft has offered a Known Issue Rollback (KIR) for users affected by the many and varied problems with the KB5043145 build of Windows 11.
Unix-like to work on infrastructure, SMB reimplementation on 'key milestones' - Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), which is backed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, is funding open source work again. This time, the recipients are the FreeBSD Foundation and SerNet, which is one of the backers of the Samba Project.
And that Broadcom has prevented vendors from selling to the telco giant - AT&T has claimed that Broadcom made it an offer to increase prices by 1,050 percent, and may be influencing other vendors to make a migration harder.
Alleges Korean giant's app store lockdown is no accident, and anticompetitive - Epic Games has launched another lawsuit in pursuit of its goal of selling its apps direct rather than through platform owners' app stores – this time placing Samsung in its sights.
As eggheads reckon Musk-mobiles need human interventions every 13 miles - Owners of Tesla's Cybertruck are reporting that a software update enabling the self-styled Full Self Driving (FSD) has become an option for their giant rolling wedges of stainless steel.
Newsom doesn't want Golden State to lose its golden goose - California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed a controversial AI bill, tho don't assume it was necessarily a final win for the tech industry.
No one really wins when a troll, sorry, assertion entity scores a victory - A Delaware jury has determined that Amazon Web Services infringed two networking patents and now owes the current patent holder $30.5 million.
Who wants to join his so Solid crew? - After fifteen years of fighting to make the web safer and more accessible, the World Wide Web Foundation is shutting down.
io_uring is getting more capable, and PREEMPT_RT is going mainstream - Released remotely from Vienna, Linux kernel 6.11 is here, with improved monochrome TV support. Yes, in 2024.
Allegations of fraud and unfair business practices dismissed after private mediation - A claim against Oracle-owned Netsuite was recently settled out of court following private mediation with a customer that alleged the vendor oversold and under-delivered on software.
Find out how AWS and SAP are harnessing this new technology for their customers - Generative AI (GenAI) is more than just a buzzword; it's already well on the way to reshaping industries and redefining business processes.
Blue is the color of some screens after optional KB5043145 update - Microsoft's Patch Tuesday preview, KB5043145, arrived last week and is already causing some headaches thanks to serious stability issues.
Only 2 out of 5 tested products were equitable across demographics - A study by the US General Services Administration (GSA) has revealed that five remote identity verification (RiDV) technologies are unreliable, inconsistent, and marred by bias across different demographic groups.
Tie-up between AI toolmaker and Bezos biz doesn't qualify for merger partnership probe - The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has decided to drop its investigation into Amazon's alliance with Anthropic, saying the significant deciding factor was a lack of local turnover for the AI toolmaker.
Release codenamed 'Denver' will hit Fedora and Ubuntu next month - The latest release of the de facto default desktop of most Linux distros brings some new features – but the GNOME 4x transition isn't done yet.
One branch of tech has learned to work together to solve the near-impossible. Now it's our turn - To say cybersecurity is mostly very good is like saying Boeing's Starliner parts mostly work – true, but you're still going to be sleeping in the office. Moreover, it's questionable whether either are getting any better.
Autofocus would have been nice, though - Raspberry Pi has launched a camera module with AI smarts on board. But all that inferencing goodness comes at a price.
The call was coming from inside the house - Well, gentle reader, we have some bad news: the weekend is over, and another five days of labor have commenced. The good news is Monday means it’s time for a dose of Who, Me? in which Reg readers send in their tales of … let's say … hard-earned experience.
Is this AI showing the would-be leader of the free world who's really the boss? - Artificial intelligence may have shown the would-be-leader of the free world who's really in charge, after rogue robo-taxis halted the motorcade of US vice-president – and Democratic Party presidential candidate – Kamala Harris.
LLMs are helpful, but don't use them for anything important - AI models just can't seem to stop making things up. As two recent studies point out, that proclivity underscores prior warnings not to rely on AI advice for anything that really matters.
AI screengrab service to be opt-in, features encryption, biometrics, enclaves, more - Microsoft has revised the Recall feature for its Copilot+ PCs and insists that the self-surveillance system is secure.
Licensing mixes also needed lest vendors give too much away - On the eve of the Cockroach Labs' annual conference, CEO Spencer Kimball commented about the virtues of a rival database company. "There are real benefits to the way MongoDB does things, and that's why a lot of developers like it," he told The Register from RoachFest in New York.
Even investors might not get much out of it - Once upon a time, OpenAI was purely a non-profit. Really. It was established in December 2015 as a non-profit AI research organization. Now it appears increasingly likely that OpenAI will become a for-profit company.
Find out how to unlock innovation potential with the help of AWS and SAP - The potential of generative AI (GenAI) to transform industries is undeniable, and it's revolutionizing how enterprises operate.
New VMware by Broadcom subscription model may force tough decisions around ongoing software support, maintenance and security - Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and subsequent changes to its software licensing model has caused a degree of uproar amongst its customers.
Text Edit emerges, plus tinted terminal title bar when it's time to tread tactfully - For those on the RPM side of the fence, Fedora 41 has hit beta, and works better in VirtualBox than ever if you're curious to try it.
'He sat in a chair, rubbed his temple, and began to recite syntax as if performing magic' - The end of the working week brings with it magical possibilities for fun and frolics, which is why The Register celebrates each Friday with a fresh incantation of On Call – the reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales.
Engineers at Grab don't need to ask each other questions any more - Asia's answer to Uber, Singaporean superapp Grab, has admitted it gathered more data than it could easily analyze – until a large language and generative AI turned things around.
Starting at SoftBank, using its own PayPay service - Ten subsidiaries of Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank Group have begun paying employees' salaries into SoftBank's own PayPay digital wallet.
From allegations of lying about capabilities to fake reviews. Plus: Biden AI robocaller finally fined $6M - The FTC has made good on its promise to crack down on suspected deceptive AI claims, announcing legal action against five outfits accused of lying about their software's capabilities or using it to break the law.
33% of cloud environments using the toolkit impacted, we're told - A critical bug in Nvidia's widely used Container Toolkit could allow a rogue user or software to escape their containers and ultimately take complete control of the underlying host.
Onion Amnesia: Steaming up your digital disguise - The Tor Project, a non-profit focused on network anonymity, is joining forces with Tails, an anonymity-focused Linux distribution, in an effort to make better use of financial and technical resources.
Learn about the vision of a Smarter AI for All at this year’s Lenovo Tech World conference - The 2024 edition of Lenovo Tech World promises an in-depth discussion on the future of innovation centered on AI and computing.
No patches yet, can be mitigated, requires user interaction - After days of anticipation, what was billed as one or more critical unauthenticated remote-code execution vulnerabilities in all Linux systems was today finally revealed.
Looks like it's going to be the Sam Altman show from now on - Three key OpenAI staff members – CTO Mira Murati, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, and Research VP Barret Zoph – are leaving the ChatGPT maker.
Single digit price hikes suspected for UK and Europe and double digit mooted for everywhere else - Like car insurance, software support contracts can renew annually by simply doing nothing, a phenomenon with which SAP users should be all too familiar... but sometimes they are not.
Grafana Labs CTO looks at the options - The CrowdStrike chaos was caused by software running riot in the Windows kernel after an update tripped up the code. eBPF is a useful tool for kernel tracing and observability, but could it have mitigated the CrowdStrike incident?
iThing-maker is Putin Kremlin repression ahead of privacy, rights orgs argue - Apple has pulled 60 VPNs from its App Store in Russia, according to research from anti-censorship org GreatFire.
HQ in Sweden, made in China, programmed in Bengaluru, but with a traditional offshoring marque - Indian tech services giant Infosys has scored a deal to write code for Swedish electric vehicle outfit Polestar.
Crikey! $40M of investments in 'digital employees' allegedly went down faster than a frosty Fosters - The former CEO of an AI startup that promised to replace humans with "digital employees" has been accused by the US Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission of raising $40 million from investors, including venture capitalists, after showing them deliberately falsified financial records.
That escalated quickly - WordPress on Wednesday escalated its conflict with WP Engine, a hosting provider, by blocking the latter's servers from accessing WordPress.org resources – and therefore from potentially vital software updates.
Counsel for aggrieved authors will view info in a secure room, without internet access, and no devices present - OpenAI has agreed to reveal the data used to train its generative AI models to attorneys pursuing copyright claims against the developer on behalf of several authors.
Add compliance requirements to your AI to-do list - If juggling the extreme cost and hazy ROI of AI weren't enough of a headache, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) now expects enterprise compliance officers to start weighing the tech's potential for harm – or risk stiff fines if it breaks the law.
With 2.5 million Blackwell GPUs, would gobble enough energy to power millions of homes - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly trying to convince the Biden administration that an enormous network of AI datacenters, each consuming up to five gigawatts of power, is imperative to ensuring US national security and maintaining its technological lead over China.
No more cold calls: Recruit 360 pinpoints top prospects from millions - Plagued by recruiting shortfalls, the US Army is turning to AI to help it sift through the chaff for fresh recruits.
Memory safety flaws used to represent 76% of 'droid security holes. Now they account for 24% - Google says its effort to prioritize memory-safe software development over the past six years has substantially reduced the number of memory safety vulnerabilities in its Android operating system.
Fun retro tweaks, App Center facelift, and more as Oracular Oriole moves into view - The beta version of Ubuntu 24.10 has just come out, with GNOME 47 as its default desktop and some fun retro touches.
Tracking alternative is less invasive than other methods, but is opt out by default - Privacy activist group noyb has filed a complaint against Mozilla over a "Privacy Preserving Attribution" feature that was quietly enabled in Firefox following a July update.
Better or worse than a surprise U2 album? - Apple's on-device AI model, dubbed Apple Intelligence, will require 4 GB of device storage space, and more at a later date. That's about the size of an HD movie, for now.
Buying computers without the tech to get harder as chipmakers compete for cash, say analysts - AI PCs are forecast to account for 43 percent of PCs by 2025, says tech market sales number cruncher and consultancy Gartner, and by 2026, an AI device may be the virtually the only laptop a big business can choose.
Prithvi, Prithvi, Prithvi good - Researchers at IBM and NASA this week released an open source AI climate model designed to accurately predict weather patterns while consuming fewer compute resources compared to traditional physics-based simulations.
Broadcom's software bundles under scrutiny after perhaps irking Fujitsu - Japan's Fair Trade Commission, the nation's anti-monopoly agency, has reportedly commenced an investigation into VMware's software licensing practices.
Service due to roll out later this month, despite fears AI will crash the market - AI has driven the stock market into a hype-fueled frenzy, and an Israeli startup has even convinced regulators to let its chatbot hallucinate an investment portfolio on your behalf.
Cease'n'desist letter claims top boss demanded tens of millions for trademark license - WordPress hosting service WP Engine on Monday sent a cease and desist letter to WordPress maker Automattic, to force the latter's CEO Matthew Mullenweg to stop making allegedly false and misleading claims about WP Engine following a purported trademark license demand.
Four Chocolate Factory trackers cracked the Top 25 in all regions - Google, once again, is the "undisputed leader" when it comes to monitoring people's behavior on the internet, according to Kaspersky's annual web tracking report.
Poorly received by investors, the moves comes in a difficult year - Cloud-based data warehousing and analytics biz Snowflake has issued $2 billion in bonds with the aim to buy back shares and potentially launch an acquisition strategy.
So say our sources, who warn job cuts, outsourcing risk depriving biz of seasoned technical talent - IBM's plan to replace thousands of roles with AI presently looks more like outsourcing jobs to India, at the expense of organizational competency.
When robots.txt just ain't cutting the mustard - Cloudflare on Monday expanded its defense against the dark arts of AI web scrapers by providing customers with a bit more visibility into, and control over, unwelcome content raids.
But work on big ticket items needed to make the combo a contender is yet to commence - The effort to bring the Xen hypervisor to the RISC-V instruction set architecture has advanced – a little – but big jobs that would make both projects a contender for more workloads are still on developers' to-do lists.
More like ServiceNo, or maybe ServiceNotforawhile - Some customers of enterprise cloud vendor ServiceNow have been up in arms after a mistake with root certification left many stymied on a Monday morning.
No room for your spy mobiles on our streets - The US Commerce Department has decided not to wait for the inevitable, and today announced plans that would ban connected vehicle technology - and vehicles using it - from Chinese and Russian sources.
There are other ways to keep things patched, but this one will sting for some - Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away, as administrators using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) will soon find out.
Kubernetes whizz says devs can redefine their roles and capitalize on coding ML rewards - Software industry veteran and developer advocate Kelsey Hightower, well known for his contributions to the Kubernetes community, has an interesting take on generative AI: he won't be paying too much attention to it for now, except insofar as how it will be instrumental in changing what it means to be a software engineer.
Framework promised last year set to reach value of up to £2.5B after chat with supply chain - The UK's health system has added £1 billion to a tech deal for software and infrastructure after an "engagement" with suppliers.
The result was no joke, thanks to a Microsoft glitch - Welcome, dear reader, to another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers share tales of techie woe to remind you that your day could, in fact, be worse.
Counter-arguments in support spat paint unflattering picture of telco giant's IT estate - Broadcom has claimed that AT&T plans to stop using VMware software, but has been tardy about making the move.
Plus: Indian gov's fact-checking unit ruled unlawful; Fukushima datacenter boom; GoTo partners with Tencent, too - Huawei's current PCs are the last it will make that run Windows, and future machines will run its own HarmonyOS instead, according to the chair of the Chinese giant's consumer business group, Yu Chengdong.
Valkey leads interest in FOSS alternatives after database slinger tightens terms - Around 70 percent of Redis users are considering alternatives after the database company made a shift away from permissive open source licensing.
If you hadn't guessed, that's the artist formerly known as Remote Desktop - Microsoft's breathtaking ability to rename things badly carries on with the Windows App, a hub to stream Windows from a variety of sources.
Workers forced to manually correct setup that struggles to produce auditable accounts after customizations - The Oracle finance system implemented by stricken Birmingham City Council allocated £2 billion ($2.65 billion) in cash to the wrong financial year, leaving public sector workers to unpick the errors manually.
Definitely not punishment for someone leaking internal data - There's no fairy tale ending for Slack at entertainment behemoth Disney following reports that the Salesforce-owned messaging service will be ditched in favor of Microsoft Teams.
BSL shenanigans continue to make waves - Virter is a useful little tool if you often create – and then remove – VMs to try stuff. It's arguably carried on the ripples from HashiCorp dropping the BSL into the FOSS pond.
Then he stopped being a coding whiz, which is when the trouble started - Welcome once again to On Call, the weekly column in which readers tell their tales of tech support troubles and triumphs.
License changes and product bundles aren't going down well, says Gartner's DaaS magical quadrant - Citrix has added the ability to control remote macOS machines through its desktop-as-a-service suite, but customers of the product are said to be upset with changed licensing practices.
Also reveals boosted utilization rates, upgraded IaaS and more – all in the name of AI apps - Alibaba Cloud has revealed a modular datacenter architecture it claims will help it to satisfy demand for AI infrastructure by improving performance and build times for new facilities.
Write better code, urges Jen Easterly. And while you're at it, give crime gangs horrible names like 'Evil Ferret' - Software suppliers who ship buggy, insecure code need to stop enabling cyber criminals who exploit those vulnerabilities to rob victims, Jen Easterly, boss of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has argued.
Fail to comply may cost up to 10% of annual revenue - The European Commission intends to force Apple to open its walled garden.
This is like vi vs Emacs with 'religious overtones,’ project chief laughs - The Linux kernel is 33 years old. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, still enjoys an argument or two but is baffled why the debate over Rust has attracted so much heat.
27 days to get your users' third-party apps on Google’s sign-in - Google Workspace administrators, consider yourselves on notice: In less than a month, many third-party apps (mail, calendar, etc.) will stop connecting to Workspace accounts.
First major version in two decades years is worth getting to know - GNU screen is included in most Linux distros, but newer, fancier tools such as tmux often outshine it.
Now the Numbat has been neatened, you can replace your Jellyfish – if you dare - Ubuntu 24.04.1 is here, which means that users of the previous LTS release, 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish," will be offered the update.
Board member offers apology for 'inappropriate' behavior - SAP CTO and executive board member Jürgen Müller is set to depart the German software corporation over an "incident" at a company event.
It's going to take more than CAPTCHA to prove you're real - Researchers at Microsoft and OpenAI, among others, have proposed "personhood credentials" to counter the online deception enabled by the AI models sold by Microsoft and OpenAI, among others.
Machine learning helps, but more data catches more faults - so Chinese champ has shared its data - Alibaba Cloud has revealed homebrew tech it used to improve server fault prediction and detection, which it claims saw its ability to detect problems beat comparable tech by ten percent.
Needs new investors to get beyond current modest products - Chinese GPU-maker Xiangdixian Computing Technology has admitted it has not met its development targets and let go of some staff as part of a restructuring plan.
VP Adam Meyers to testify about that faulty software update which ruined July and some of August - Crowdstrike is to be hauled before the US House Homeland Security Committee this month to explain why its faulty software update - the one that took down millions of computer systems worldwide - ever happened.
A Firefox fork aimed at power surfers - The Zen Browser is a new effort to modernize web browsing by bringing tiling, workspaces, and so on – and it's blissfully free of Google code.
Almost three years on and many customers have yet to make the move - Windows 11 continues to nibble at the market share of Windows 10, although has a way to go before finally surpassing its predecessor.
Despite mogul's US acquittal and recent death, IT giant will follow UK fraud case to its 'conclusion' - HPE will pursue the widow of Mike Lynch for the $4 billion in damages it sought from him over the Autonomy merger following the Brit tech tycoon's recent death in a sailing tragedy off the coast of Sicily.
Set the Control Panel for the heart of the Sun - We may not know exactly when or how, but we do know that the Windows Control Panel is gasping its last. Hurrah.
The technology was willing, but the cache was weak - Greetings, gentle reader, and may peace be upon you, for yea verily it is once again Monday and unto Monday we render another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with confessions of technical mishap.
Community seems to C Rust more as a burden than a benefit - Efforts to add Rust code to the Linux kernel suffered a setback last Thursday when one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux project stepped down – citing frustration with "nontechnical nonsense."
More help for Nutanix, too - Data protection software vendor Veeam has delivered its promised support for open source virtualization contender Proxmox.
Tim Boucher objects to the mischaracterization of his work in authors' copyright claim - Tim Boucher, a Canadian artist, author, and AI activist, sent a letter to the San Francisco judge overseeing an authors' lawsuit against AI firm Anthropic to object to the way the legal filing characterizes his work.
Researchers say that implementing Actions omit privacy details and expose info - Many of the GPT apps in OpenAI's GPT Store collect data and facilitate online tracking in violation of OpenAI policies, researchers claim.
Open source competitor is still the most popular database among devs, though - NoSQL database vendor MongoDB says it is making significant gains against open source relational rival PostgreSQL in a claim that seems to fly in the face of recent research.
Claims about much-hyped tech show flawed understanding of language and cognition, research argues - In May, Sam Altman, CEO of $80-billion-or-so OpenAI, seemed unconcerned about how much it would cost to achieve the company's stated goal. "Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don't care," he told students at Stanford University. "As long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills, we're making artificial general intelligence. It's going to be expensive."
But users aren’t optimistic it will land softly - I’ve attended VMware’s annual conference every year since 2007 and this year the event had a very different flavor.
The setback won't stop us from banking billions, CFO insists - Nvidia has confirmed earlier reports that its Blackwell generation of GPUs suffered from a design defect that adversely impacted the yields of the hotly anticipated accelerators.
Insists it's not cutting jobs and pays harder-to-automate people more with AI savings - Buy-now-pay-later outfit Klarna's CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is so thrilled with the performance of AI at his business that he's planning to shrink the human headcount by half – and predicts he won't be alone.
Isn't the education system in enough trouble already? - The UK government is set to equip teachers with AI tools to help them "mark and plan lessons."
Still growing in China, ramping Hopper prods and predicting Blackwell billions soon - Nvidia has again achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, but its expansion is slowing.
Total revenue for Q2 grew 32 percent - CrowdStrike's major meltdown a month ago doesn't look like affecting the cyber security vendor's market dominance anytime soon, based on its earnings reported Wednesday.
Virtzilla's sales swing decisively to the Cloud Foundation bundle - Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has told members of VMware's user group that public clouds are not entirely happy with his private cloud push.
If you haven't deployed August's patches, get busy before others do - Windows users who haven't yet installed the latest fixes to their operating systems will need to get a move on, as code now exists to exploit a critical Microsoft vulnerability announced by Redmond two weeks ago.
The proof of concept shows promise despite big limitations - A team from Google and Tel Aviv University have developed a generative AI game engine capable of simulating the cult classic Doom at more than 20 frames per second because research.
Seeks customizable cloud and less lock-in - US auto insurer GEICO has decided to migrate from VMware to OpenStack.
Because who needs yet another lawsuit? - Elon Musk's X has caved to requests from several US Secretaries of State and updated Grok AI to no longer push out misinformation about the 2024 presidential election.
Significant improvements to Microsoft's in-house Linux may follow - Microsoft's in-house professional networking site is moving to Microsoft's in-house Linux. This could mean that big changes are coming for the former CBL-Mariner distro.
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.
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.
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.
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 - 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.
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.
The return of Windows Recall is more than a bad flashback - 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."
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 - 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 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.
A few lines of Python is all it takes to get a model to use a calculator or even automate your hypervisor - 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 - 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.
It needs to – Virtzilla's customers, allies, and enemies are all pondering off-ramps and trying to lure unhappy users - 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.
If you guessed TOPS and FLOPS, that's only half right - Ready to dive in and play with AI locally on your machine? Whether you want to see what all the fuss is about with all the new open models popping up, or you're interested in exploring how AI can be integrated into your apps or business before making a major commitment, this guide will help you get started.
Spending returns to pandemic levels as tech deals make up bulk of framework agreements - UK public expenditure on management consultancies has returned to COVID-era levels, despite repeated plans by the previous government to reduce dependency on external expertise.
Cupertino quits screwing around with defaults – for those in the EU - Apple has agreed to change the way it implements web browser choice screens and browser capabilities to comply with Europe's monopoly-busting Digital Markets Act.
Algorithm just a fancy way to collude using private info, prosecutors say - The Justice Department and the Attorneys General of eight states in the US on Friday filed a civil antitrust complaint against real estate service firm RealPage for providing landlords with software that maximizes rent at the expense of renters.
For 100 concurrent users, the card delivered 12.88 tokens per second—just slightly faster than average human reading speed - If you want to scale a large language model (LLM) to a few thousand users, you might think a beefy enterprise GPU is a hard requirement. However, at least according to Backprop, all you actually need is a four-year-old graphics card.
A glimpse into the rapidly advancing world of Chinese open source - After a couple of years in development, Linux Deepin 23 arrives, with some new shiny that throws shade on the leading Western desktop distros.
Orgs are accessing restricted tech, raising concerns about more potential loopholes - More claims are emerging that developers in China are using US-based cloud services to bypass measures intended to block its access to advanced chips and other technologies for accelerating AI development.
As VC-owned fauxpen source biz yells 'show me the money,' more may follow to the peril of the community - Repeat after me: Open source is not a business model. It is a programming model. Still businesses keep trying to make it one, and far more often than not, they fail.
Mature, stable – and can rescue corrupt files - The second LibreOffice release of 2024 is here, with additional spreadsheet functions, improved presentation layouts, better searching, and more.
LY Corp's QA team struggled to manage projects while wading through prolix posts - LY Corp, a joint venture between Japan's SoftBank Group and South Korea's Naver Corporation known for its flagship messaging app LINE, has detailed how it uses an in-house ChatGPT implementation to keep its quality assurance (QA) tasks on track.
The data analytics vendor's CEO says rival's over $1 billion Tabular acquisition is the 'vindication' - Databricks' $1 billion plus purchase of Tabular demonstrates Iceberg has won the data table format wars, according to rival data analytics and ML vendor Snowflake.
Complaints about lack of notice plus an inquiry from El Reg prompt U-turn by web giant - Google Chrome 128, released on Wednesday, does not function without intervention on Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver," and Google initially had no plans to fix it.
Unless you're cool with an unauthorized criminal enjoying admin privileges to comb through your code - A critical bug in GitHub Enterprise Server could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a user account with administrator privileges and then wreak havoc on an organization's code repositories.
Plus: Three-year-old ProxyLogon flaw added to CISA's exploited bugs list - Microsoft says it's investigating issues with a patch intended to plug a two-year-old flaw in the GRUB open source boot loader that is crashing some dual-boot computers running both Windows and Linux. In that crash users are aptly told: "Something went seriously wrong."
Tycoon's demise follows US acquittal after years of legal battles with HP - UK software tycoon Mike Lynch has been found dead two days after he went missing in a sailing tragedy off the coast of Sicily.
That annoying requirement to switch between home and work accounts has finally gone - Microsoft has released a unified Teams app, doing away with the requirement to have one app for work or education and another for personal use.
Securiti's Jack Berkowitz polled 20-plus CDOs, and half have hit pause - Security and corporate governance concerns are weighing heavily on large enterprises as they try to work Microsoft Copilots into their organizations amid a complex web of existing tech products and access rights.
Documents from NHS England meeting reveal scope of politicos spending intent - The total planned budget for the English health service's controversial Palantir-based analytics system was set to reach £485 million over four years, according to figures seen by The Register.
Whack yakety-yak app chaps rapped for security crack - Slack AI, an add-on assistive service available to users of Salesforce's team messaging service, is vulnerable to prompt injection, according to security firm PromptArmor.
Another day, another lawsuit over how AI lands training sets - Anthropic was sued on Monday by three authors who claim the machine-learning lab unlawfully used their copyrighted work to train its Claude AI model.
AWS first, others to follow - VictoriaMetrics has become the latest open source company to offer a hosted product, claiming around five times the savings for customers.
Microsoft-backed extension aims to address open source database's perceived weaknesses - A Microsoft-backed open source project aims to help address PostgreSQL's weaknesses as an analytics database.
Automaker claims it has to ‘make bold choices’ - General Motors (GM) is cutting more than 1,000 salaried positions worldwide in its software and services division, with the majority based in the US.
Founder's side-project is letting in water - News is bubbling up both from the Gentoo project and its successor, the tellingly named "Funtoo" – what Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins did next.
Bad news for impatient LTS users, balanced out by tweaked policy - The launch date for the next Ubuntu point release is being pushed back, but there's a silver lining: Canonical is promising fresher kernels in future builds.
Autonomy founder's wife rescued, daughter and others unaccounted for - Mike Lynch, often dubbed the UK's answer to Bill Gates, is missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily this morning.
Distributed database biz doesn't like bigger customers using the free version of its software - CockroachDB, the distributed transactional system with a mostly PostgreSQL compatible front end, plans to retire its free open source "Core" product in favor of a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users.
Innovation dead for twenty years? Tell that to 2004 - Want a good time on stage, but you’re not a performance artist? Surprisingly easy. Fill a hall with an audience of your peers, tell them the world’s gone to hell in a handcart, then that they’re the only ones who can fix it. You’ll feel the love. Guaranteed.
Plus: China's richest man used to work for Google; Singtel profit jumps; most APAC governments don't have AI governance policies, and more - Chinese semiconductor equipment manufacturer Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMMEC) is challenging its inclusion on a US blacklist for alleged ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), according to numerous reports.
Here's how to get started with the open source tool Continue - Code assistants have gained considerable attention as an early use case for generative AI – especially following the launch of Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. But, if you don't relish the idea of letting Microsoft loose on your code or paying $10/month for the privilege, you can always build your own.
But the cost of battling Apple and Google? A hefty $1B lost in revenue - Epic Games, booted from Apple's walled garden four years ago for crimes against App Store policy, has built its own digital store for customers in Europe.
And as Anthropic CEO reckons there's 'a good chance ... we'll be able to get models that are better than most humans at most things' - Legislation to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) software in California has been revised in response to industry discontent with the bill, which awaits a State Assembly vote later this month.
Arrives in the Canary Channel and updated via the Microsoft Store - Build 27686 of Windows 11 is out for Canary Channel Windows Insiders including the Sandbox Client preview, a fix for a potentially alarming registry issue and a warning for owners of Copilot+ PCs.
Oracle of Omaha's exit follows revenue growth shortfall, CEO switch, and customer data leak - Berkshire Hathaway has offloaded nearly $1 billion in Snowflake stock as it exits the former IPO chart-smashing cloud data warehousing and analytics specialist.
Entrepreneur vows to keep on buffering - Kim Dotcom, founder and CEO of defunct file hosting service Megaupload, revealed this week that his long-fought extradition to the United States was finally approved.
There can be only one … annoying management technique - Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has penned a blog that gives further insight into the inner workings of the software titan under Bill Gates's leadership.
The CMP boasts to be the orchestration platform behind GreenLake since 2022 - Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced the acquisition of yet another partner, this time scooping up cloud management biz Morpheus Data for an unspecified sum.
Hype is peaking now and digital employee experience stuck in trough of disillusionment - Mainstream adoption of AI in the office and among employees remains around two years off, according to analysis from consultancy Gartner.
A business breakup may be coming – but what comes after may not be better - After more than 15 years of insisting that "competition is only a click away," Google's antitrust mantra is no longer keeping the regulators at bay.
Everyone knows automation will happen, which is why everyone needs proof of human involvement - Earlier this year I got fired and replaced by a robot. And the managers who made the decision didn't tell me – or anyone else affected by the change – that it was happening.
Thesps at least get final say on what their doppelgängers will say - AI-generated voices in ads might become more common thanks to an agreement between SAG-AFTRA and an AI cloning upstart.
Don't use LLMs for anything important and don't try to reverse engineer it - Microsoft is notifying folks that its AI services should not be taken too seriously, echoing prior service-specific disclaimers.
A patch to fix the patch that caused admins to scamper for their recovery keys - Microsoft has fixed a problem that sent affected Windows PCs scurrying into BitLocker recovery.
Investors still shovelling money into AI but 'path to monetization' still far - Is the Gen AI bubble about to burst? You'd better hope not, as it appears to be one of the only major growth areas in the US tech economy, according to S&P Global.
iPhone version of mobile browser sees surge of interest in wake of EU competition rules - Browser maker Opera has released an iOS version of Opera One, a variant of its AI-infused desktop browser that complies with the strictures of Apple's mobile ecosystem.
Targets impossible unsubscribes, elusive human assistance, and other wallet-draining time sinks - Businesses that use labyrinthine subscription cancellation procedures, flaky customer service bots and other cynical schemes used to give customers the run around have been put on notice by the Biden administration.
Penguins reiterate commitment to 'fostering open, collaborative' development, licensing - The Open Model Initiative (OMI) has joined orgs under the Linux Foundation's umbrella as it continues to push open standards for training and developing AI models.
Because apps talking like pirates and creating ASCII art never gets old - Despite worries about criminals using prompt injection to trick large language models (LLMs) into leaking sensitive data or performing other destructive actions, most of these types of AI shenanigans come from job seekers trying to get their resumes past automated HR screeners – and people protesting generative AI for various reasons, according to Russian security biz Kaspersky.
We can misremember it for you wholesale - AI chatbots, known for their habit of hallucinating, can induce people to hallucinate too, researchers claim.
You don't get to be the biggest business in the world by being nice - Patreon today said Apple will soon take a 30 percent cut of new subscriptions bought via its iOS app.
Unloved multi dimensional doodler set for axe as its predecessor gets an AI update - Microsoft has hammered home a final nail in the coffin of its Mixed Reality adventures with confirmation that Paint 3D is to be ditched once and for all in the not-too-distant-future.
43% of the time, it really, really works 45% of the time - Although a lot is promised of generative AI, it has the potential to be expensive at scale, and the return on investment isn't always clear. It's understandable why some enterprises, big and small, may be hesitant to invest in the technology at this stage.
Automatic for the people? Don’t mind if we do - Rust changes worlds. The iron ore we mine to feed the industrial age started out as iron atoms dissolved in oceans two billion years ago. Then photosynthesis happened, pouring out oxygen that rusted that iron out of the water into the solid minerals we've found so useful today. Much the same is happening with Rust the programming language, as it becomes the mechanism of choice for turning prehistoric C code into secure, performant material fit for the future.
Mobile app analytics software said to surreptitiously snarf data - Twilio, a communications service provider, was sued on Thursday based on allegations that the developer's Segment software siphons data from mobile apps without consent.
Come to 2019. The in-place upgrades to the Subscription Edition will be lovely - Microsoft is getting serious about the impending end of extended support for Exchange 2016 and has published a guide on stripping the product from an environment that already has Exchange 2019 installed.
Code of Conduct violations include allegations that posts created 'atmosphere of FUD' - The Python Steering Council has decided to suspend a core Python developer for three months for alleged Code of Conduct violations.
Meanwhile, UK watchdog contemplates breaking Cupertino's WebKit rule - Apple this week revised its alternative contractual terms for devs selling apps in the European Union – a revision that was immediately dismissed by critics as more "malicious compliance."
Poor cloud titans, just trying to give a helping hand to AI startups valued at billions of dollars - Britain's competition regulator is embarking on a full blown deep dive into Amazon's multi-billion dollar investments in Anthropic to ascertain if the exchange equates to a stealthy "merger situation."
I'm a Mac. I'm a PC. You're both annoying me - The Register knows that tech support is a vocation that induces frustration, which is why each Friday we offer a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column that details real-life support stories so you can at least enjoy misery in company.
We guess the House of Zen wants all you HIP kids to ROCm out with its own runtimes instead - AMD's legal team appears to have clawed back control of much of the ZLUDA project's code base. The open source project, for which the House of Zen pulled support earlier this year, enabled compiled CUDA code to run natively on non-Nvidia GPUs.
Can't reach someone's private server on localhost from outside? No problem - A years-old security oversight has been addressed in basically all web browsers – Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, WebKit browsers like Apple's Safari, and Mozilla's Firefox.
Middle Kingdom netizens can look forward to the same kind of letdown Windows users get with Copilot - Developers behind openKylin, the desktop Linux distro backed by China's National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, have decided local users need to take advantage of Intel's Meteor Lake silicon and the neural processing units it includes, tuning the latest release of the OS to Chipzilla's AI PC SoC.
Academic, non-profit organizations told to start paying up – or else - Research and academic organizations are just now finding out that they will have to pay for software made by Anaconda, when for years these groups were under the impression it could be used at no cost.
Bad news: They aren't, and Windows 10 end of support is looming - There is some good news for Microsoft on the Windows 11 enterprise adoption front as a survey of more than 750,000 Windows endpoints indicates that a healthy 88 percent of those not already running the tech giant's latest operating system are ready for an upgrade.
Users just want stuff that works. How hard can it be? - You can have your software fast or in a state where it won't blow up in your face. But getting both at the same time in an era of layoffs and restructuring is, at best, challenging and, at worst, impossible.
Platforms owe billions after they stopped paying and sent thousands of SMEs into cashflow crunches - South Korea's government will shrink the period in which e-commerce marketplace platforms must settle up – from 60 days to 40 – to ensure that small sellers aren't caught in a cash crunch.
And you're replacing Chromecast with TV Streamer? Great! That's a logical step for the evolving landscape of ... - Google's Gemini AI is making its way to Nest cameras and Google Assistant, with the web goliath claiming the upgrade will make its smart devices smarter.
Devs invited to ROCm out with FP8 precision, quantize to their heart's delight - AMD today released the latest version of ROCm, claiming the improved software will bring about strong performance boosts for its Instinct GPU family.
And Qualcomm addresses 'permanent denial of service' flaw in its stuff - Google released 46 fixes for Android in its August security patch batch, including one for a Linux kernel flaw in the mobile OS that can lead to remote code execution (RCE).
$4,500 per GPU per year adds up pretty quick – even faster when you pay by the hour - In the wake of the AI boom, Nvidia has seen its revenues skyrocket to the point at which it briefly became the most valuable corporation in the world.
The preferred tool of Arthur C Clarke, Anne Rice and George R R Martin - Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans.
Will you see the Lite? - Back in June, Google's Chrome Web Store began alerting users of uBlock Origin who had developer-oriented versions of Chrome that the popular ad-filtering extension could soon stop working.
These two are going through a really, really bad breakup - Elon Musk has decided he wants to bring Sam Altman and OpenAI to court after all in a brand-new lawsuit over whether OpenAI is actually open and not-for-profit.
Web giant to seek second opinion after bench labels biz 'a monopolist' in DoJ win - Google's payments to make its search engine the default for smartphone browsers and elsewhere violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday.
In the gold rush, be the one handing out the shovels - Even as at least some investors begin to question the return on investment of AI infrastructure and services, venture capitalists appear to be doubling down. On Monday, AI chip startup Groq — not to be confused with xAI's Grok chatbot — announced it had scored $640 million in series-D funding to bolster its inference cloud.
They're doing you a favor, probably best not to look today - As stock markets suffered a bit of a wobble today, share-trading apps and sites fell over as investors barreled in to see how badly their portfolios had been hit.
Badger, badger, badger your CIO to let you use this, perhaps - Anaconda, the maker and distributor of data science tools, has unleashed a public beta of Anaconda Code that enables Python code to be run locally within Microsoft Excel.
The technology remains highly controversial despite widespread rollout - Responding to the riots across England over the past week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he's backing a wider rollout of facial recognition technology to track and prevent "thugs" from traveling to areas where they plan to cause unrest.
Happy to have 'em go hybrid as it wises up to the enterprise - Fresh from moving its smaller customers off its server-based products onto and into its cloud, Atlassian has softened its cloud-first approach after recognizing that its larger customers can't or won't go there in a hurry – if ever.
Automated price-fixing screwing over tenants? Fog off! - The San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week approved a ban on algorithmic price setting in the rental housing market, a measure targeting real estate management software from the likes of RealPage and Yardi that has been blamed in part for high rents.
Microsoft's distribution gets a new LTS kernel - With impeccable timing considering recent Windows issues, Microsoft has made Azure Linux 3.0 generally available. It includes an update to the Linux kernel and new versions of various packages.
In 1974, Gary Kildall got the first version working and changed the world of operating systems - Late in the summer of 1974, CP/M first started running on hardware. It became one of the first cross-platform microcomputer OSes, and revolutionized the hardware and software industries.
CrowdStrike reminded the public that BSODs still exist. Their origins go back decades - Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has taken to his Old New Thing blog to clear up an apparent mystery regarding the origins of the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
After McDonald’s puts chatbots on ice, TB decides to take a bite - Yet another fast food franchise thinks it has what it takes to make the AI-powered drive-thru work.
Hold that thought, citizen - The government of President Javier Milei in Argentina last week announced the creation of an artificial intelligence group within the country's Cybercrime and Cyber Affairs Directorate that will use statistical software to predict crime.
2025 could be Peak Nvidia when reality finally kicks in - The tech world has been banging on about the amazing benefits of generative artificial intelligence – so when are we going to see them?
That horse has not just bolted, it's trampled all over kernel space - CrowdStrike, after suggesting canary testing as a way to ensure it avoids future blunders leading to global computer outages, has been sued in federal court by investors for not using a phased approach in rolling out updates to customers in the first place.
Either Sam and Satya are on the rocks, or this is just more maneuvering to avoid regulatory scrutiny - OpenAI – the recipient of billions of Microsoft's dollars in exchange for access to the super-lab's generative AI technology – has been listed as a competitor in the Windows maker's latest annual report.
Snapshots, failover, recovery, and uninstallation on a plate - The big names mostly can't yet, but some lesser-known Linux distributions offer the ability to undo updates and recover from damage, even automatically.
Pesky test infrastructure woes seem to be solved, too - The Xen Project has delivered a new cut of its open source hypervisor.
Sweet sweet GenAI money not yet flowing, Zuck reckons other ML efforts are paying off - Meta has told investors generative AI won't bring it revenue this year, but that the massive investments it's planning will pay off over time – and be configured so they're not tied to training workloads.
Adds L40 bare metal option to the O-Cloud, plus A100 and H100 VMs. And teases a GH200 beast - Oracle has created a pair of for-rent AI infrastructure options aimed at medium-scale AI training and inference workloads – and teased the arrival of Nvidia's GH200 superchip in its cloud
28-year-old mowed down in US state where cars ordinarily aren't allowed to operate autonomously - Washington State Patrol investigators have found that the Tesla involved in the death of a motorcyclist on Friday, April 19, 2024 was operating in Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode.
Feedback prioritized, unless it's about a feature customers really miss - Microsoft has announced an ad-free update for Skype, now headed to testers in the company's Insider program. However, this update is unlikely to appease users who are still missing features previously dropped from the once-premier chat app.
Users and developers warned to prepare for what's coming with human resources a focus in 'high-risk' category - As the world's first legislation specifically targeting AI comes into law on Thursday, developers of the technology, those integrating it into their software products, and those deploying it are trying to figure out what it means and how they need to respond.
Open source TerraForm rival introduces a new file extension so users can 'keep older code around for compatibility' - Terraform alternative OpenTofu has reached version 1.8 amid further signs of fragmentation.
In front, unmodified GNOME; underneath, it's all a bit strange, but purposefully so - Vanilla OS is an experimental distro testing out new implementations of immutability, cross-distro packaging, A/B failover, and more.
The workaround is going to be inevitable in the future anyway, say Chinese boffins - Leading Chinese computer scientists have suggested the nation can build large language models without imported GPUs – by using supercomputers instead.
All a simple misunderstanding, we're told - A meeting intended to allay fears that Emirati AI firm G42's deal with Microsoft could result in China accessing advanced US technology was reportedly cancelled by the UAE ambassador to the US.
Everyone loves Copilot, execs claim – and hope they can say the same for Copilot Plus PCs - Microsoft has tried to convince investors that AI is paying off, but they appear unimpressed by news of customer adoption and revenue revealed Tuesday in the software giant's Q4 and full-year results for 2024.
Which is nice, but way behind Nvidia, while other segments are soft and supply-chain pain persists - AMD has told investors that its Instinct MI300X GPUs – the chip designer's alternative to Nvidia AI accelerator hardware – landed over $1 billion of datacenter revenues in Q2 this year.
For the want of an underscore - DigiCert has given some unlucky customers 24 hours to replace their SSL/TLS security certificates it previously issued them – due to a five-year-old blunder in its backend software.
Things are getting Tensor between Cupertino and Nv - Apple has detailed in a research paper how it trained its latest generative AI models using Google's neural-network accelerators rather than, say, more fashionable Nvidia hardware.
Shut the Front Door! - If you've had or are having problems using websites and apps today, it might well be due to the Microsoft Azure outage.
Everything's bigger in Texas – even the settlement deals - Meta will pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit with Texas, which accused the Facebook giant of breaking privacy laws by performing facial recognition on people's photos without their consent.
A model finetuned on your social media profile? What could possibly go wrong? - Big public AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot have become near ubiquitous over the past few years – but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is banking that before long, everyone will have at least one, if not more, personalized AI assistants to call their own.
While some celebrate, the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group is not happy - The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a blog criticizing Google's climbdown over the deprecation of third-party cookies, declaring that the move "undermines a lot of the work we've done together."
Calculating ROI of neural networks turns out to be rather complicated - The tech industry's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence software – a conveniently amorphous term – has yet to generate much of an economic windfall.
Yes, you've heard the term 'AI Factories' before but Europe has its own spin - Europe's supercomputing body has officially added a new pillar to its strategy – to develop and operate AI Factories to drive "a more competitive and innovative" European AI ecosystem.
New release does something you might have thought it already did - The new version of the high-speed compression algorithm LZ4 gets a big speed boost – nearly an order of magnitude.
Just when you think you've ban-hammered them all, more pop up - This month Anthropic's ClaudeBot – a web content crawler that scrapes data from pages for training AI models – visited tech advice site iFixit.com about a million times over a 24-hour period.
Solaris support persists and support for Armed Macs improves - Oracle last week debuted a beta for a major update to its VirtualBox desktop hypervisor.
At last, the world-changing innovation of ML emojis can be yours to enjoy - Apple Intelligence, Cupertino's promised suite of generative AI services, has debuted in beta versions of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1.
'Ignore previous instructions' thwarts Prompt-Guard model if you just add some good ol' ASCII code 32 - Meta's machine-learning model for detecting prompt injection attacks – special prompts to make neural networks behave inappropriately – is itself vulnerable to, you guessed it, prompt injection attacks.
Ads in the Start Menu not annoying enough for you? Hold my beer - Microsoft is always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to annoy Windows users. Its latest wheeze is a full-screen pop-up in Windows 11 to urge the non-initiated to back up their files.
Fnding your code on the cutting room floor decades after the event - Ever thought you'd committed an elegant bit of code, only to find that somebody else decided to drop it because "that's the way we've always done things"? If so, you aren't alone. It happens to Microsoft engineers too.
Outsmarting Ubuntu's midlife crisis and dodging Flintstone-sized bugs - Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" debuted late last week and holds on to the crown as the most sensible choice if you're looking to move across from Windows.
Promises to discourage use of kernel drivers – so they don't crash the world again - Microsoft has admitted that its estimate of 8.5 million machines crashed by CrowdStrike's faulty software update was almost certainly too low, and vowed to reduce infosec vendors' reliance on the kernel drivers at the heart of the issue.
Plus: Grab drops cab merger, Kakao founder goes to the clink, Alibaba denies Jack Ma cronyism, and more - Chinese researchers have told The New York Times that open source software has helped them to accelerate AI development.
Google adds machine learning to climate models for 'faster forecasts' - Climate and weather modeling has long been a staple of high-performance computing, but as meteorologists look to improve the speed and resolution of forecasts, machine learning is increasingly finding its way into the mix.
You wouldn't download a performer - Actors are back on strike for an entirely unsurprising reason: Studios aren't willing to give video game actors enough protection from artificial intelligence.
Sure, it took three days to do what teenaged brainiacs do in nine hours – but who's counting? - Researchers at Google DeepMind claim they've developed a pair of AI models capable of taking home a silver medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) – although not within the allotted time limit.
Management drank the Kool Aid but staff can't cope with new demands - Bosses expect artificial intelligence software to improve productivity, but workers say the tool does the opposite, according to a survey by find-a-workplace research org the Upwork Research Institute, a limb of talent-finding platform Upwork.
We think this means easier-to-administer virtual desktops with extra shiny - Omnissa, the newly independent business created by Broadcom's spinoff of VMWare's end-user compute arm, has proclaimed it will become a source of "AI-infused autonomous workspaces".
- Hybrid working is an increasingly important component of a successful modern business strategy.
Team America AI Police? - Sam Altman has called for a US-led coalition of nations to ensure AI remains a vehicle for freedom and democracy, and not a tool for authoritarians to keep themselves in power and dominate others.
Launching in Beta is so 2014. We're in the pre-Beta limited sign-up era now - After months of speculation, shy and retiring OpenAI has showed the world a glimpse of its very own web search engine powered by AI.
And the forking Microsoft-owned code warehouse doesn't see this as much of a problem - Researchers at Truffle Security have found, or arguably rediscovered, that data from deleted GitHub repositories (public or private) and from deleted copies (forks) of repositories isn't necessarily deleted.
Looks a lot like Google's AI Overviews, hopefully without some of the early unfortunate summaries - Microsoft is adding generative search to Bing despite the search engine's market share showing no increase after prior AI tech additions.
Chrome and Edge on Windows can now join the fun - Apple has introduced its mapping technology to devices outside its ecosystem with a web version that works in Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs.
Read the unredacted complaint against Photoshop giant and its software plans - Adobe's controversial billing practices and punitive fees for those terminating their subscriptions early follow from the software titan's addiction to revenue, the FTC has said.
Recursive training leads to nonsense, study finds - Researchers have found that the buildup of AI-generated content on the web is set to "collapse" machine learning models unless the industry can mitigate the risks.
X11 isn't dead while people still keep working on it - It isn't quite XKCD 2347, but it's close. At least one developer is still working away on the X.org codebase with an effort to improve variable refresh rate support in several different OSes.
If you want a simple step-by-step, this is the best we've seen - French BSD enthusiast Joel Carnat has written a how-to guide on setting up a laptop with OpenBSD for general use. It's worth a go for the Unix-curious.
Big Blue brings in more cash and profit than predicted - Generative AI's powers extend to helping the ancient concept of a proprietary enterprise OS and hardware stack to thrive, if IBM's Q2 2024 results are any guide.
But the books look good, because of real AI - ServiceNow has parted ways with president and chief operating officer Chirantan "CJ" Desai after an internal investigation found he had violated company policy when hiring the former CIO of the US Army as the workflow vendor's public sector boss.
This one weird trick saved countless hours and stress – no, really - Not long after Windows PCs and servers at the Australian limb of audit and tax advisory Grant Thornton started BSODing last Friday, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz remembered a small but important fact: When PCs boot, they consider barcode scanners no differently to keyboards.
It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it - Mistral AI on Wednesday revealed a 123-billion-parameter large language model (LLM) called Mistral Large 2 (ML2) which, it claims, comes within spitting distance of the top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
'In the short term, they're going to have to do a lot of groveling' - The great irony of the CrowdStrike fiasco is that a cybersecurity company caused the exact sort of massive global outage it was supposed to prevent. And it all started with an effort to make life more difficult for criminals and their malware, with an update to its endpoint detection and response tool Falcon.
Is this what the kidz call a glow-up? - Microsoft has tasked network operator Lumen Technologies — formerly CenturyLink — with scaling up its network capacity as the Windows giant looks to grow its burgeoning AI services business, the duo revealed Wednesday.
Claims 'everyone on Earth is going to want one' - Tesla profits were nearly halved in the second quarter of 2024, extending a run of woe for the company, lightened only by a surge in energy generation and storage.
China is playing a long game, which could pay off on an enormous scale - Some of the common arguments for moving away from proprietary operating systems are about increasing personal (or corporate) freedom and decreasing expenditure, but there are bigger things at stake.
A nice surprise, but some other vAdmins have an August 1 deadline to sort out subscriptions - VMware users have had a little win, as the Broadcom business unit has extended the supported life of its flagship vSphere software.
As the G-Cloud brings in big bucks and plentiful profit - Google has managed to cap the costs it incurs when using AI to generate results.
Zuck says he wants to mimic Linux and go open source, kind of - Meta today released Llama 3.1 405B, its largest and most capable large language model yet, which the social network claims can go toe-to-toe with OpenAI and Anthropic's top models.
Ever had to shop in incognito mode to avoid paying more? This one's for you - The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into "surveillance pricing," a phenomenon likely familiar to anyone who's had to buy something in an incognito browser window to avoid paying a premium.
But not necessarily health - The results of the largest universal basic income (UBI) trial program in the United States – this one backed by billionaire Sam Altman, no less – are in and entirely unsurprising.
Revenue and underlying profit please markets in Q2 as German software giant retains focus on costs - SAP has expanded the number of jobs affected by its restructuring program by up to 20 percent after generating higher revenue but lower operating profit in the most recent full quarter.
Boss faces grilling before Congress over disastrous software snafu - The US House Committee on Homeland Security has requested public testimony from CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in the wake of the chaos caused by a faulty update.
Strictly for performance fiends with ultra-modern kit who want a distro to match - CachyOS is a performance-optimized rebuild of Arch Linux, with a simpler installer and dozens of desktops and options to tweak. Stable reliability, not so much.
For now it's Capgemini to the rescue (again) - The UK's Treasury ministry is to determine the fate of aging SAP software that runs the nation's tax system – processing £750 billion ($968 billion) of transactions a year – over the coming weeks.
Proprietary code goes unpublished – but no FOSS package ever dies - One of the delicious promises of open source software is eternal life. In literature from Gilgamesh on, this has been a classic trap for the careless and greedy, but this is FOSS so it must be true. No package ever dies. Proprietary code goes unpublished: if its host company dies, it probably dies with it the moment the servers are wiped.
Another sign of China's technological turn inwards – but not, sadly, a SPARC revival - Tencent Cloud has launched a version of its homebrew cut of Linux distribution CentOS.
Ad giant promises to protect privacy, as critics say surveillance continues - Google no longer intends to drop support for third-party cookies – the online identifiers used by the ad industry to track people and target them with ads based on their online activities.
After 24 years, bug report finally gets fixed - Mozilla's Thunderbird team has fixed a 24-year-old feature bug, bringing system tray mail notifications to GNOME and KDE desktop environments for Linux users.
Big misconception is that data ingestion is occurring, we're told - Google, after facing accusations about its AI model ingesting private files, says Gemini can read and summarize this type of sensitive data in real time – but only with Workspace users' express permission.
Shrinks training pool, but hurts services like the Internet Archive - The internet is becoming significantly more hostile to webpage crawlers, especially those operated for the sake of generative AI, researchers say.
UK university users face migration path following plan to withdraw support for product some build £1M solutions around - Software used to cost the University of Oxford's Covid vaccine research has become the subject of an end-of-life announcement from enterprise application developer Unit4.
Cloud group companies free of Redmond's compliance cops for 2 years in return for ditching EC antitrust complaint - Part of Microsoft's settlement with a bunch of cloud providers in Europe to make an antitrust complaint disappear is a two-year moratorium on software audits, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
When someone kicks a chair across the room out of fear they'll be fired it's stopped being funny - It's another Monday, dear reader, which means the working week has begun anew. On the bright side, it also means another dose of the reader-submitted tales of IT hijinks we call Who, Me?
New instance types and discounts galore, and Broadcom all smiles as its preferred licensing finds more friends - Google Cloud has delivered a Broadcom-compliant version of its cloudy VMware offering, and pitched it as a keenly priced migration target.
This is exactly what we said would happen post-Blizzard merger, laments watchdog, as its appeal continues - Microsoft plans to raise the price of its Game Pass subscriptions significantly – and one US watchdog isn't amused.
Who loves a global outage? Phishers, fraudsters and all manner of creeps - Well that was fast. Criminals didn't waste any time taking advantage of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft chaos and quickly got to work phishing organizations and spinning up malicious domains purporting to be fixes.
Oh, was it supposed to be Y2K24? - Today is one of those days that will go down in history as an unmitigated IT disaster, with CrowdStrike responsible for taking systems down all over the globe. We know airports, hospitals and the usual critical infrastructure suspects have been affected, but CrowdStrike is disrupting daily life in some unexpected ways, too.
CrowdStrike? More like ClownStrike! Amirite? - IT administrators are struggling to deal with the ongoing fallout from the faulty CrowdStrike file update. One spoke to The Register to share what it is like at the coalface.
Cancer treatments are in jeopardy across multiple healthcare facilities - A UK hospital is battling what it is calling a critical incident as the ongoing global IT outage caused by a CrowdStrike update is impacting its Varian system.
Emergency services, medical practices, airlines, banks, and more all crippled - CrowdStrike's share price is currently tanking amid a major global IT outage its leadership has attributed to a dodgy channel file.
Love affair between HMRC and French outsourcer set to last 25 years - The UK tax collector is awarding Capgemini a contract worth up to £574 million ($741 million) to run legacy tax management systems until 2029, one of which was first built under a controversial arrangement that was supposed to end in 2020.
Falcon Sensor putting hosts into deathloop - but there's a workaround - An update to a product from infosec vendor CrowdStrike is bricking computers running Windows globally.
Plus: Meta Euro model drama; Mistral and Nvidia find NeMo; and more - OpenAI has made available GPT-4o Mini – a smaller and cheaper version of its GPT-4o generative large language model (LLM) – via its cloud.
Leaking skylights, collapsed roof, garbage-clogged pipes - did ChatGPT make this? - Serial entrepreneur and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman has made a bunch of lucrative moves in his time – but his $27 million mega-mansion certainly hasn't been one of them. His lawyers even called it a "lemon" in a recently filed lawsuit accusing the builder of negligence, fraud, and other failures.
Big Green's software remains tricky, but Fedora and AMD are finding ways to cope - Nvidia says its forthcoming release 560 driver will be as open as releases 515 and 555 were – and will support more devices.
Recipients of six-digit investments aren’t required to use Claude - Anthropic is setting up a $100 million fund for AI startups with the help of venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
Elimination of most Next Generation Internet funding 'incomprehensible,' says OW2 CEO Pierre-Yves Gibello - Funding for free and open source software (FOSS) initiatives under the EU's Horizon program has mostly vanished from next year's proposal, claim advocates who are worried for the future of many ongoing projects.
Birmingham, Europe's largest local authority, plans to reimplement software years after it replaced SAP - Europe’s largest local authority will not have a fully functioning cash system until April next year, three years after it went live on an Oracle ERP system intended to perform the task.
The nonprofit behind the desktop environment of the world's most profitable Linux company will be looking for money again - The executive director of the GNOME Foundation has quit after less than a year in the role.
Ozzie definitely not Satoshi Nakamoto, faces £6M legal bill and possible perjury trial - Australian Craig Wright has finally admitted he is not the inventor of Bitcoin after losing several cases in the High Court of England and Wales, whose judge has suggested he be investigated for perjury.
Will become exclusive route to market for joint projects - Fujitsu has made a "significant investment" in Toronto-based Cohere, a developer of large language models and associated tech, and will bring the five-year-old startup's wares to the world.
What next, nutrition labels on cartons? Probably - FYI: It's not just Reddit posts, books, articles, webpages, code, music, images, and so forth being used by multi-billion-dollar businesses for training neural networks. AI labs have been teaching models using subtitles scraped from at least tens of thousands of YouTube videos, much to the surprise of the footage creators.
Excel-lent, Smithers, have we fired accounting yet? - Researchers at Microsoft have developed a framework designed to make it easier for large language models (LLMs) to analyze the content of spreadsheets and perform data management and analysis tasks, because why not?
Meanwhile, software vendors are left paying the GenAI 'tax' as users yet to see value - Gartner has nudged down its expected growth in worldwide IT spending for 2024 from 8 percent to 7.5 percent, with the total figure now expected to reach $5.26 trillion.
AI supremacy is a helluva drug, and Redmond's old habits die hard - UK antitrust regulators today announced the beginning of a merger inquiry into Microsoft's cash deal with startup Inflection AI, which included poaching employees.
The mission? To spend less time in patch purgatory - Microsoft is making yet another attempt to combat update bloat with checkpoint cumulative updates coming to both Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 2025.
Oracle's priorities may lie elsewhere but it is unfair to say all innovation can go in community edition, reckons analyst - The latest release of MySQL has underwhelmed some commentators who fear Oracle — the custodian of the open source database — may have other priorities.
Jon Kern is looking for Agile exemplars, not the 'Agile Industrial Complex' - The Agile Manifesto was published almost a quarter of a century ago. Yet as the years have rolled by, its lofty ideals have run headlong into the brick wall of management desire for process and reporting.
18 months late, overbudget... report finds council's SAP ERP rip 'n' replace with Unit4 had hidden complexity - A UK public authority responsible for about £1.1 billion ($1.43 billion) in annual spending damaged its ERP project — which saw SAP ditched in favor of Unit4 — by underestimating its complexity and kicking off with an "unrealistic timeline of 15 months," according to a public report.
There's a lot of territory to cover here - Qualcomm has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in India against Chinese smartphone-maker Transsion.
Euro trade body tires of being a pawn in the war of the tech giants - From the department of "the lady doth protest too much, methinks" comes news that Microsoft wasn't the only tech giant willing to offer cash to a European cloud trade body. It seems Google was also keen to get a piece of the action.
After all we've done for you, America, sniffs antivirus lab - Kaspersky has confirmed it will shutter its American operations and cut US-based jobs following President Biden's ban on the Russian business last month.
Cloud biz claims it's full speed ahead – and damn the torpedoes - The FTC is taking a close look at IBM's acquisition of HashiCorp, according to a filing made to America's financial watchdog.
Plus: Broader Rust abilities, better sandboxing, and more - The latest Linux kernel is here, with relatively few new features but better support for several hardware platforms, including non-Intel kit.
'It seems like they really don't have a full grasp of what's going on with this patch' - A Microsoft zero-day vulnerability that Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative team claims it found and reported to Redmond in May was disclosed and patched by the Windows giant in July's Patch Tuesday – but without any credit given to ZDI.
Customers debate reasons behind move, say halo of Teams has slipped now Copilot is here - 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.
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 - 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."
Hey, here’s an idea… create a point system for every time Microsoft hurts us - 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.
Training AI models doesn't need low latency. It needs cheap energy – wherever it can be found - 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.
Just be careful not to shave off too many bits ... These things are known to hallucinate as it is - 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.
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."
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.
Mac migrants (if any exist) will find Powertoys Run strangely familiar - 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.
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.
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 ... - 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.
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.
What's that Lassie? The IRS hopes to offer free direct tax filing for everyone next year? - Intuit has announced plans to lay off 1,800 people, which is roughly 10 percent of its workforce.
Redmond 'confident in the company's direction' says withdrawal letter - Microsoft is giving up its non-voting observer seat on OpenAI's board, citing progress in the company's direction - yet fear of regulatory scrutiny no doubt also played some part in the decision-making process.
X co-designer David Rosenthal looks back at why his other project failed - A couple of weeks after its anniversary, one of the original engineers behind X has explored why it succeeded where rivals – one of which he co-developed – failed.
Market share increases for Microsoft's latest operating system - There is finally some good news for Microsoft in the operating system market share stakes: use of Windows 11 continues to rise as Windows 10 falls.
A handy standalone translator, but you'll need deep pockets, both figuratively and literally, if you want one - One of the more useful applications of AI technology is translation and interpreting. The Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter hub attempts to move things forward with a pleasing industrial design.
Fixes have been made, it appears, but disclosure or discussion is invisible - Found a bug? It turns out that reporting it with a story in The Register works remarkably well ... mostly. After publication of my "Kryptonite" article about a prompt that crashes many AI chatbots, I began to get a steady stream of emails from readers – many times the total of all reader emails I'd received in the previous decade.
Citrix, SAP also deserve your attention – because miscreants are already thinking about Exploit Wednesday - Clear your Microsoft system administrator's diary: The bundle of fixes in Redmond's July Patch Tuesday is a doozy, with at least two bugs under active exploitation.
RT News snarks back after it's accused of building social nyet-work for Kremlin - The FBI and cybersecurity agencies in Canada and the Netherlands say they have taken down an almost 1,000-strong Twitter bot farm set up by Russian state-run RT News that used generative AI to spread disinformation to Americans and others.
A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond – who did you think was going to win? - Claims by developers that GitHub Copilot was unlawfully copying their code have largely been dismissed, leaving the engineers for now with just two allegations remaining in their lawsuit against the code warehouse.
Purists needn't worry – you can turn it off - As text editors go, Microsoft's Notepad has never been big on creature comforts. But after more than 41 years, Redmond has finally seen fit to bestow its humblest of utilities with spell check and auto-correct.
Chat widget allegedly fed data to third party, which used it to train AI without telling customers - Peloton is pedaling toward a court date after a California judge denied its bid to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges the pandemic darling violated the US state's privacy laws – by allowing a third party to intercept and record chat records between Peloton reps and customers without their consent.
Arguments over buttons set to continue while European Commission looks on - Apple performed an abrupt U-turn over the weekend to approve the Epic Games Store in the European Union.
Birmingham struggles to get current version of Fusion fit for purpose - Troubled Birmingham City Council, which was declared effectively bankrupt last year owing in part to a disastrous Oracle implementation, has awarded the tech giant £10 million ($12.8 million) for additional professional services.
Attorney for families of victims files objection - Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to criminal fraud charges related to deadly 737 Max crashes, according to a Sunday night court filing from the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
Apache Iceberg support makes it a good option for a transactional layer over data lakes, he tells The Register - SingleStore, the database that promises analytics and transactions on a single system, took three attempts to get its technology working in the cloud, CEO Raj Verma admitted to The Register.
Save the headaches, ship your dependencies - One of the biggest headaches associated with AI workloads is wrangling all of the drivers, runtimes, libraries, and other dependencies they need to run.
What's in the box! No seriously, what's in there that sets our wages - Algorithmic wage discrimination, as described in an academic paper last year by UC Irvine law professor Veena Dubal, involves "the use of granular data to produce unpredictable, variable, and personalized hourly pay."
After button brouhaha, CEO rages Cupertino 'must be stopped' - Apple has twice unfairly blocked Epic Games from opening its iOS app portal in the EU, the Fortnite maker claims, and thus is in violation of the continent's Digital Markets Act (DMA).
UEK-next is bleeding edge – unlike most CentOS-alikes - Oracle's Linux engineers have released their build of kernel 6.9 for Oracle Linux – and they're already planning for 6.10 and beyond.
Promise of AI features, but Big Blue won't reveal much more about next steps of its highly regarded relational database - Last week, I committed a crime. No, I did not defraud the IRS/HMRC or steal some Snyder's Pretzels/Cheesy Wotsits. It was much worse. A keen reader pointed out that I had miscounted the number of versions of Db2, IBM's relational database.
Miracle-WM takes several more steps forward - The Miracle-WM tiling window manager for Canonical's Mir display server has hit 0.3 – and also reaches places you may not expect to find Canonical code.
Not content with drinking up all our water, now we'll compete with DCs for power - Demand for datacenter space is currently at a high in many markets around the globe because of the AI boom, despite issues with securing adequate power, at least according to commercial real estate firm CBRE.
You think the US leads the field? Wrong – OpenAI is way down WIPO's charts - The World Intellectual Property Organization has counted the patents and scientific publications related to generative AI it could find between 2014 and 2023, and found 54,000 GenAI-related inventions and over 75,000 scientific publications – and that China utterly dominates the field.
Take that for ignoring robots.txt! - Cloudflare on Wednesday offered web hosting customers a way to block AI bots from scraping website content and using the data without permission to train machine learning models.
Zuckerborg's justification isn't good enough, says watchdog - Meta's plan to expand its AI presence in South America has been hamstrung, with Brazilian officials today banning the Facebook parent company from using its citizens' data to train AI algorithms.
Taste at your own risk - The Linux Mint project has released the beta version of version 22, codenamed "Wilma" and featuring the latest Cinnamon desktop.
Tributes paid to passionate LGBTQ+ equality champion - Tech entrepreneur Bruce Wayne Bastian, co-founder of WordPerfect, died last month at the age of 76 at his home in Palmdale, California.
AI is 'like the fast food of creativity' - Web and app design toolmaker Figma has temporarily pulled its generative AI "Make Design" feature because it seems to think Apple's Weather app is the be-all and end-all of mobile forecasting.
Latest datacenter Hype Cycle also includes augmented reality, new types of memory, nuke power - Analyst firm Gartner has published its 2024 Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies, and added virtual-to-physical migrations – aka "devirtualization" – to its list of ideas that are set to take off, thanks to Broadcom's licensing changes.
And hit AI operators 'with all the fines', says Cory Doctorow - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has proposed that the FTC apply rules prohibiting unfair trade practices to punish those operating deceptive chatbots.
How about a nice game of chess instead? - The US Army is keen to integrate commercial private-sector AI algorithms into its operations and it's hoping industry can also figure out how to address the inevitable security concerns that will come from the move.
Anniversary time and both are going strong into their 30s - The FreeDOS project celebrates its 1994 beginnings, about a week before Amazon – and just a year after FreeBSD got started.
And if court finds for gaming giant? It's-a me! Bankruptcy! - Mario has tossed blue shells at what Nintendo alleges are two figures deeply involved in the piracy and circumvention of the Switch console ecosystem.
Ta shoh scansh mie, son ymmyd - Google is adding more languages to Google Translate – lots more. This time around, 110 of them, including Manx.
FOSS, AI, blockchain, and the cycle of empty nonsense - This year, along with all the usual in-depth technical talks about Linux at Red Hat's Devconf.cz developer conference, there were also several people there to promote AI-linked projects and the tech bros' previous favorites – blockchain projects.
As ever, terms and conditions apply - YouTube has enacted privacy guidelines that allow people to request the removal of AI-generated videos that mimic them.
Euro nation's monopoly gendarmes cheesed off with GPU giant's dominance - French regulators are reportedly poised to bring charges against Nvidia over alleged anti-competitive practices.
Why sell shovels when you can rent them - In the AI gold rush, if you can't be the one selling the GPUs then the next best thing could be to rent them. This week, we learned that Lambda is seeking $800 million in funding to do just that.
It's already sold out of stock for this year and next - High bandwidth memory (HBM) is becoming a key technology in the continued AI investment race as SK hynix plans to spend billions on memory chip production and China's Huawei looks to develop its own in partnership with a local foundry.
With so many DB vendors to choose from, our vulture claws over the bewildering choices - DataStax recently joined a growing band of database specialists in launching new tooling with the promise of helping customers build GenAI apps on its data platform. Yet the question remains for customers employing multiple databases: Which vendor – if any – should they choose as the main plank to support GenAI application development?
Yes, Joe totally had editing help that night, he was certainly impresszzz.... - OpenAI's ChatGPT fell for an inaccurate claim that Thursday night's US presidential debate between Trump and Biden on CNN would have a one to two-minute delay, rather than the usual few seconds.
Unless you've got a lawyer, that is - Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, said this week that machine-learning companies can scrape most content published online and use it to train neural networks because it's essentially "freeware."
So, so many lines of memory-unsafe routines in crucial open source, and unsafe dependencies - The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has analyzed 172 critical open source projects and found that more than half contain code written in languages like C and C++ that are not naturally memory safe.
Same APT29 crew that hit Microsoft and SolarWinds. How close were we to a mega backdoor situation? - TeamViewer says it was Russian intelligence that broke into its systems this week.
So that's fine then - Bill Gates says the massive power draw required for AI processing is nothing to worry about as AI will ultimately identify ways to help cut power consumption and drive the transition to sustainable energy.
Horizon system expert denied tailoring evidence in convictions later quashed - Gareth Jenkins, former distinguished engineer at Fujitsu Services Ltd, said he "clearly got trapped into doing things that I shouldn't have done" when giving technical evidence that led to the wrongful conviction of Post Office workers in one of the biggest IT scandals to hit the UK.
Tech giants can't play the RAG-time blues until they pay their dues – in this case to quality publishers - OpenAI and Google on Thursday independently announced fresh collaborations with major publishers as they work to expand paid access to information used by their AI products and services.
Cooling tech left to sweat the details - AI is currently the big driver in datacenter investment and will push capital expenditure on the facilities up by nearly 30 percent this year, and is also on track to become the top server workload by deployment within a few years.
Get your hands off my computer, Microsoft! - I've been pointing out Windows security bugs since Windows for Workgroups showed up in 1992 and I showed how you could steal data from your coworker's spreadsheets using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). You'd think Microsoft would have figured security out by now.
Simple jailbreak prompt can bypass safety guardrails on major models - Microsoft on Thursday published details about Skeleton Key – a technique that bypasses the guardrails used by makers of AI models to prevent their generative chatbots from creating harmful content.
When your chatbots outshine their human trainers, you could pay for expertise ... or just augment your crowdsourced workforce - To help catch code errors made by ChatGPT, OpenAI uses human AI trainers in the hope of improving the model. To help the human trainers, OpenAI has developed another AI model called CriticGPT – in case the humans don't spot the mistakes.
Normally it's the iGiant's prices that give the ol' ticker a hard time - A quartet of heart doctors are trying to resuscitate health-monitoring tech outfit AliveCor's antitrust lawsuit regarding the Apple Watch, by arguing changes made to the iMaker's gadget "resulted in a loss of access to a potentially life-saving product."
Claims customer data, prod environment not affected as NCC sounds alarm - TeamViewer on Thursday said its security team just "detected an irregularity" within one of its networks – which is a fancy way of saying someone broke in.
Software techie says he was snubbed because he wasn't on an H-1B - Meta is headed for a legal showdown after judges ruled a discrimination case shouldn't have been dismissed and can go to trial.
The database Big Blue doesn't like to talk about gets makeover in November - IBM likes to be secretive about Db2, the 41-year-old database still used by some of the world's largest banks and retailers, but occasionally something leaks out.
Not keen on smart weapons, more interested in stopping human trafficking - Anthropic wants governments to think of it when they want AI to make the world a better place. No, seriously.
Tour of recovery options not supposed to be part of KB5039302 - Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures.
Pay up or go away, pretty please? - For many Reddit has become the go to repository of community and crowdsourced knowledge, a fact that has no doubt made it a prime target for AI startups desperate for training data.
15,000 GPUs per DC, in hosts packing eight apiece, plus nine NICs – helped by switches with custom heat sinks - Alibaba Cloud has revealed the design of an Ethernet-based network it created specifically to carry traffic for training large language models – and has used in production for eight months.
NAS vendors, healthcare software vendors, and government buyers join the march to silicon sovereignty - Chinese chip shop Loongson, which has built modest CPUs based on its own MIPS-like architecture, is on the march towards enterprise workloads.
$137M needed to overhaul Play Store too great to bear, Google argues. Oh, and user security is important, too - Google has asked a California judge to deny Epic Games' requested remedies after the Play Store was found to be an illegal monopoly, arguing the changes would be too costly and create new security risks for Android users.
After Databricks snaffled Iceberg-linked Tabular, CEO insists there are more than two horses in this race - OneHouse, a data lake company based around the open source Apache Hudi table format, has secured $35 million in Series B funding led by Craft Ventures.
Because if there's one thing it really needed more of... - Google on Wednesday rolled out additional enterprise browser management features to help IT admins to keep corporate browsing software fit for purpose.
Watch this webinar for advice on how to choose the right cloud platform after the VMware acquisition - Navigating the cloud platform landscape after a major acquisition can be challenging.
Startup says Sohu chip will be 20x faster than Nvidia's H100 in Llama 70B … assuming it's actually built - Following ChatGPT's debut in late 2022, GPUs – Nvidia's in particular – have become synonymous with generative AI.
And there's a special offer on the CentOS-compatible Liberty Linux - As SUSE ascends its self-imposed ALP, this version may be the last of the fixed release cycle for openSUSE Leap.
Watts down, doc: Boffins find machine learning models can function with more modest power requirements - Large language models can be made 50 times more energy efficient with alternative math and custom hardware, claim researchers at University of California Santa Cruz.
We sure hope this won't upset European regulators given how great their relationship is with Apple right now - A pair of developers have come away from encounters with Apple's latest rules regarding video game emulators in its App Store and concluded the iGiant is not okay with software that emulates a whole operating system.
Text-to-image AI outfit can now buy time to build products and profit - Generative AI company Stability AI says it's poised to accelerate development of its text-to-image products thanks to a fresh round of investments and a management shakeup.
Scripts turn malicious, infects webpages after mysterious CDN swallows domain - The polyfill.io domain is being used to infect more than 100,000 websites with malware after what's said to be a Chinese organization bought the domain earlier this year.
It’s not entirely clear what actions the ChatGPT maker plans to take, if any - ChatGPT developer OpenAI has sent out emails to users based in countries it considers "unsupported," saying it will block their access for good starting July 9.
Now windshield wipers are failing and trim is detaching of its own accord - Tesla has issued two more physical Cybertruck recalls, bringing the total number of hardware issues the electric-car maker has had to fix on the troubled vehicle to three in as many months.
But RISE with SAP can also be too rigid for some customers, Gartner says - SAP customers looking for infrastructure support for ERP software from community cloud, cloud-like, or former co-location providers should do so with care, as they could take a hit on risks and TCO in the long run.
Cisco was briefly the world's most valuable company too, you know, just before the dot com bust - Nvidia has rapidly lost about $500 billion off its market capitalization amid concerns that the GPU maker may have become overvalued or that the AI market powered by its chips is a bubble set to burst.
Software System Award recognises his contributions to education - Andy Tanenbaum, creator of MINIX, has been recognized for his code, seminal textbooks, and wider educational influence over much of the modern FOSS world.
Compute, storage, and networking virtualization brought together – with live ESXi patching - VMware by Broadcom has previewed an update to its flagship Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation bundles that appear to deliver on past promises to make the virty giant's wares easier to acquire and operate.
Which isn't to say Nvidia and hyperscalers will win, says analyst Steve Brazier, as regulators circle - Walking the floor at HPE's Discover show in Las Vegas last week, this vulture was left with the distinct impression that HPE and its partners believe that the age of turnkey on-prem enterprise-level AI has arrived.
Low-code and report production vie for early use cases, but risks remain - With vendors obsessed with adding generative AI to everything, does it really have a place in ERP software? It's very early days, say analysts at Forrester.
Qatari telco reckons deal will give it an 18–24 month lead in region - Amid US restrictions curbing the export of certain high-end AI accelerators to much of the Middle East, Silicon Valley's Nvidia has reached an agreement to furnish Qatari telecom Ooredoo's datacenters with "thousands" of GPUs.
Like Bedrock or Azure OpenAI Studio – but with the added fun of geopolitical risk - Alibaba Cloud has created an English language version of Modelscope, its models-as-service offering.
Recording Industry Ass. of America orchestrates war on Udio and Suno - Big name record labels are together suing two AI startups for allegedly training their music-generating models on copyrighted tracks without permission, resulting in the software emitting audio that rips off commercial work.
About a thousand vulnerable instances still exposed online, we're told - A now-patched vulnerability in Ollama – a popular open source project for running LLMs – can lead to remote code execution, according to flaw finders who warned that upwards of 1,000 vulnerable instances remain exposed to the internet.
Same old whinging: We can't change the world if you ask us to do it openly - Venture capitalist Y Combinator and more than 140 machine-learning startups have signed an open letter in opposition to a proposed hot-button AI safety law making its way through the California legislature.
Steve Teixeira sues Firefox maker alleging disability discrimination, retaliation - Mozilla Corporation was sued this month in the US, along with three of its executives, for alleged disability discrimination and retaliation against Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira.
AlmaLinux and upstream kernel support for Raspberry Pi 5, plus a forthcoming high-performance Arm64 Tuxedo laptop - Encouraging noises are coming from multiple directions around Linux support for both current and next-generation Arm64 kit.
Those with curious disposition spoilt for choice as KDE 6.1, Cinnamon 6.2, and IceWM 3.5 all arrive - New versions of two of the most popular "traditional" desktops are out, alongside a new release of one of the oldest and smallest.
A head-on assault on Nvidia seems unlikely – but dumping AMD from Exynos has merit - Samsung has teased its entry into the GPU industry, but its plans are obscure.
Plus: Huawei closer to divorcing Android; India probes Amazon warehouses; Singapore gets autonomous street sweepers - SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son last week told investors he believes an "artificial superintelligence" that has 10,000 times the intelligence of humans could arrive in as little as three years.
All depends on how you count it – Chocolate Factory claims 1% fail rate - Google this week offered reassurance that its vetting of Chrome extensions catches most malicious code, even as it acknowledged that "as with any software, extensions can also introduce risk."
In Rust, we trust. But in gen-AI to not hallucinate? Eh, that's another story - Large language models (LLMs) are generally associated with chatbots such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini, but they're by no means limited to Q&A-style interactions. Increasingly, LLMs are being integrated into everything from IDEs to office productivity suites.
It's been a long time coming. Now our journos speak their brains - The US government on Thursday banned Kaspersky Lab from selling its antivirus and other products in America from late July, and from issuing updates and malware signatures from October.
There should be honor among techies, but it can be hard to admit error - Few among us are faultless, but more often than not it's users and managers who are in the wrong when IT goes awry. Which is why each Friday The Register offers a fresh instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of being asked to bail out bores, brats and blockheads.
Open Web Advocacy report calls for these extensive changes to iGiant's rules - The results of the European Commission's inquiry into Apple's response to the continent's competition rules are expected to surface soon – and reports indicate the regulators are less than enamored with Cook & Co.
It’s no hallucination: Roughly 4 in 1,000 inferences inaccurate due to this alone - Meta has identified another reason AI might produce rubbish output: Hardware faults that corrupt data.
Fast, funny, visionary, perhaps, but hey at least there's real-time output tweaking - OpenAI challenger Anthropic has delivered its latest model — Claude 3.5 Sonnet — and claimed it outperforms rivals on many tasks.
Won't somebody pleeease think of the ... oh, right, they are - A lawsuit accusing Google of breaking America's child privacy laws will proceed to trial as a judge denied the web goliath's motion to throw out the case.
Blockade begins July 20 over national security fears - The Biden administration has banned the sale of Kaspersky software in the United States, arguing the Russian biz is a national security risk.
Oh, Mike, what have you got yourself into now - Dell Technologies and Supermicro have been confirmed as the computer makers building an Nvidia-powered AI supercomputer for Elon Musk's xAI startup.
Fixes catastrophic data loss, er, bug, er poorly documented feature... user error - Following closely after the release of version 256, version 256.1 fixes a handful of bugs. One of these is emphatically not systemd-tmpfiles recursively deleting your entire home directory. That's a feature.
IP address of downloads offers crumb trail to orgs who should be ready for Big Red, says licensing expert - Organizations that do not consider themselves Oracle customers, but who use Java, can expect a call from the Big Red in the next three to nine months, according to a software licensing specialist.
What if it's LLMs all the way down? - Researchers in computing and linguistics have devised a new way to detect errors in large language models, which relies on employing more LLMs.
The English FA is using Google Cloud AI to gain insights from scouting reports to nurture star footballers of the future - The drive to nurture aspirant footballing talent is one of the latest ways that advanced technology is helping transform the beautiful game.
Yes, AI will volunteer to run your IT estate. You might be a fool to trust it - Analyst firm Gartner has published its annual hype cycles for cloud tech and enterprise networking, and both suggest cooling your jets rather than rushing towards AI-assisted tools to operate your tech.
He's in competition with – and critical of – his former workplace - OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever – who last month quit the GPT creator – has unveiled his next gig: an outfit dubbed Safe Superintelligence Inc. that aims to produce a product of the same name – without the "Inc."
If you call 'client-side scanning' something like 'upload moderation,' it still undermines privacy, security - On Thursday, the EU Council is scheduled to vote on a legislative proposal that would attempt to protect children online by disallowing confidential communication.
Launch comes as Runway, Pika, Kling push the boundaries of machine-imagined video - Mainstream adoption of generative AI technologies has, in large part, centered around the creation of text and images. But, as it turns out, the statistical probabilities on which these models are based are just as good at generating all manner of other media.
Is such a thing possible for an industry that never respected people's wishes? - Mozilla this week said it has acquired ad metrics firm Anonym, touting the deal as a way to help the online advertising industry support user privacy while delivering effective adverts.
Everyone wants to be best buddies with Jensen Huang's GPU juggernaut - This year HPE Discover 2024 is all about AI hardware developed through an expanded partnership with chip heavyweight Nvidia.
Graphic design giant slammed for using graphic design to bury T&Cs - The FTC has sued Adobe in federal court alleging the Photoshop titan and two of its executives deceived artists by concealing termination fees for its subscription software.
Automated voice ordering still on the menu for the future, though - McDonald's is pulling out of its venture with IBM that brought AI to some of its drive-thrus.
Claim analytics and data platform biz misled investors about size of public cloud forecast - Teradata faces the prospect of a class action suit relating to statements to investors.
Is it lingering somewhere between fusion power and self-driving cars? - In thinking about the decade-plus worth of efforts to automate the configuration and operation of networks – of which intent-based networking may be the most well-known and ambitious example – are we actually any closer to the automation of networking that we were a decade ago?
Everything is fine, despite Recall setting fire to the house that Gates built - And just like that, Windows 11 24H2 is back.
Infrastructure teams have 'eye on door' as SAP migration enters critical phase - Asda is transferring more than 100 internal IT workers to Indian outsourcing company TCS as it labors to meet deadlines to move away from IT systems supported by previous owner, Walmart, by the end of the year.
That beige box running a server is easily forgotten ... until it goes wrong - IT asset management platform Lansweeper has dispensed a warning for enterprise administrators everywhere. Exactly how old is that SQL Server on which your business depends?
You know what they say about headlines that end in a question mark - AI – loud, confident, and wrong. That's not talking about generative AI's ability to hallucinate, although why not? Rather, it's about the big picture, the platform-wide Recall from Microsoft and, oh dear, Apple Intelligence.
Who needs ransomware when you can scare techies into coughing up their credentials? - Notorious cyber gang UNC3944 – the crew suspected of involvement in the recent attacks on Snowflake and MGM Entertainment, and plenty more besides – has changed its tactics and is now targeting SaaS applications
A push for interoperability is accelerating, but maybe not fast enough to stop biometrics taking over - From Bangalore to Beijing, when Asians go out to shop, they seldom use a credit or debit card and instead pay using their smartphone to scan a QR code.
Nine out of 10 execs recommend adding Retrieval Augmented Generation to your daily regimen - If you've been following enterprise adoption of AI, you've no doubt heard the term “RAG” tossed around.
iBiz potentially facing hefty penalties under the Digital Markets Act - The European Commission is said to be preparing to file charges against Apple alleging that its "steering" rules, imposed on third-party developers distributing software through the App Store, violate Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Business as usual needs a real change - Microsoft president Brad Smith struck a conciliatory tone regarding his IT giant's repeated computer security failings during a congressional hearing on Thursday – while also claiming the Windows maker is above the rule of law, at least in China.
Facebook parent calls step forward for privacy a 'step backwards' - Meta has caved to European regulators, and agreed to pause its plans to train AI models on EU users' Facebook and Instagram users' posts — a move that the social media giant said will delay its plans to launch Meta AI in the economic zone.
All businesses use FOSS now, but Big Red never been entirely comfortable with it - All companies use open source now, but some, such as Oracle, have never been completely comfortable with it.
Browser maker decided not to follow Putin's orders. Well done - Mozilla has reinstated certain add-ons for Firefox that earlier this week had been banned in Russia by the Kremlin.
El Reg queries author Matei Zaharia on a decade of the project - Big data is no longer hailed as the "new oil." It has gone out of fashion, both in terms of hype and because its foundational technology – Apache Hadoop – was surpassed by cloud-based blob storage such as AWS S3. However, a sister project born in the big data era has become more influential in the modern world of LLMs and internet-scale data systems.
Wider release coming real soon – promise – after the Windows faithful give it a thrashing - Microsoft has cancelled the wide release of Recall – the controversial tool for Copilot+ PCs that takes regular snapshots of a machine to create a record of everything users do with their machines – and will instead make it available only to Windows Insiders for the foreseeable future.
Some would say ads for cabbage are futile – can pics from space at least make them timely? - Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and marketing agency Dentsu have developed a means to use snaps captured by satellites to smooth out agricultural supply chains and enhance advertising.
Bill proposes appointment of chief AI officers, privacy safeguards, and lots of testing - Two US senators have introduced a bipartisan bill that defines guardrails for the acquisition and implementation of AI across the federal government.
And it's subsuming another bit of Linux by replacing sudo - The latest version of the systemd init system is out, with the openly confrontational tag line: "Available soon in your nearest distro, now with 42 percent less Unix philosophy."
Costs cut deeply, with more to come, and forward bookings surge - VMware's quarterly revenue appears to have fallen by $600 million during its first full quarter of ownership by Broadcom, which revealed strong growth in forward bookings and huge cost cuts at the virtualization giant.
'Large portions' of droid tech stack going into laptop OS plumbing - Google's ChromeOS team has begun borrowing "large portions" of Android's tech stack to innovate faster, to reduce the burden of maintaining multiple operating systems, and to enhance device interoperability in the face of vendor kernel variability, the web giant says.
NHTSA already probing robo-car biz over crashes with 'clearly visible objects' - Waymo is updating its self-driving cars' software after another accident in Phoenix, Arizona, that the driverless taxi biz is blaming on faulty maps and code.
But candidate Victor Miller tells The Reg he'll use machine learning to help govern - Officials in Wyoming are trying to figure out how to respond to an application to run for mayor of the City of Cheyenne that comes with the promise of AI-assisted governance.
Growing coalition joins federal fray, accusing iGiant of playing monopoly - Four more US states have jumped on the Department of Justice's (DoJ) antitrust lawsuit against Apple.
Hello, blackmail: Posters can still see who liked their stuff even if it's a secret from the rest of the digital town square - After making the option available for Premium users last year, the site formerly known as Twitter has decided to begin hiding everyone's "likes" to "better protect your privacy."
No wonder most orgs are slowing their spending - Businesses have become more cautious about investing in artificial intelligence tools due to concerns about cost, data security, and safety, according to a study conducted by Lucidworks, a provider of e-commerce search and customer service applications.
'If everybody's got their own little ecosystem, it's very inefficient' - AMD and Intel have been rivals for decades, but there's at least one thing they can agree on: they have a common enemy in Nvidia. And the enemy of your enemy can be your friend.
Give yourselves a pat on the back - all 88,000 of you - In 2014, Google released Kubernetes, an open source cluster management system that takes its name from the Greek word for "helmsman" or "pilot."
The FA is partnering Google Cloud in building player performance tracking tools to boost the England national side - Performance data – information that shows how well performance objectives are being achieved – has become a key determinant of success across many competitive sports, but perhaps none more so than the game of football.
French firm has nearly tripled in value since beginning of the year - France's Mistral AI drew €600 million ($640 million, £510 million) in its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to €5.8 billion ($6.2 billion, £4.9 billion).
Small businesses have seldom had the chance to understand how they work. A history of PC use makes it possible - A year and a half into the explosion of AI fueled by ChatGPT, the hype and fear of missing out has begun to thin just enough to make out the shape of two starkly different visions for AI: one that imagines using it to replace people and the other that wants AI to enhance people.
But we're America's friends, insists Omar Al Olama - Fears that China could be using Middle East countries as a proxy to overcome US sanctions on machine learning accelerators are justifiable, according to the United Arab Emirates minister of AI and digital economy.
Speed up the gradual refactoring of legacy software and deliver demonstrable results in months rather than years - You've migrated most of your applications to the cloud and are reaping the benefits. But you still have one or two problem children.
Court docs suggest this matter could have run for years - Elon Musk has aborted his legal action against OpenAI.
Bills from legal fights reach 1% of GDP. Hallucination rate no doubt higher - Brazil has apparently hired OpenAI in an attempt to help prosecutors get better at handling cases and save the administration money.
This benefits management, but not us shareholders! - Enterprise software firm HashiCorp and its executives have been sued by an investor who claims the public company's agreement to be acquired by IBM is designed to enrich corporate leaders at the expense of shareholders.
Farewell, we hardly scripted thee - Microsoft has announced the retirement of GPT Builder. It is giving users just one month before their data is deleted.
Hear how the Xactly Intelligent Revenue Platform can enhance your business growth - The ability to integrate and assemble reusable, modular components has long been a key pillar of flexible software development.
Preference for proprietary features restricting open source MySQL adoption, says Peter Zaitsev - An experienced MySQL database engineer has questioned whether Oracle might unintentionally kill off the open source database with its preference for adding features to its proprietary systems.
Concerned about secrecy... or just mad no one's buying his AI tech? - AI laggard Apple introduced the world to its fashionably late spin on the tech yesterday, and of course mewling billionaire manbaby Elon Musk had to stick an oar in – not that anybody asked.
As usual, things are more complicated than 'bigger number better.' - For chipmakers, the AI PC has become a race to the TOPS – with Intel, AMD and Qualcomm each trying to one up the others.
Japanese supplier gets £4.75M contract extension amid promise not to bid for govt work - The UK's Department for Education has awarded Japanese IT services supplier Fujitsu a £4.75 million ($6 million) contract, despite its promise not to bid for government work before the Post Office Horizon Inquiry concludes.
How The FA uses Google Cloud AI to identify future England football stars - The countdown is on for Euro 2024, the international football championship organised by UEFA every four years.
Mashup of iOS and macOS runs on homebrew silicon, with precious little for sysadmins to scry - Apple has revealed it created its own datacenter stack – servers using its in-house silicon and operating system – at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on Monday.
Lenovo and HPE have also signed deal to carry on hyperconverging - VMware by Broadcom has re-signed three key hardware vendors to original equipment manufacturer (OEM) resale agreements.
Cupertino promises private smarts, on-device or in the cloud - At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, CEO Tim Cook proclaimed from the roof of Apple's headquarters the arrival of "profound" intelligence capabilities in the iPhone giant's products.
What's German for 'thank goodness for actually useful privacy regulations'? - Meta will start training its AI models using everyone's social media posts though European Union users can opt out, a luxury the rest of the world won't enjoy.
The greatest enemy to modern cars – poorly written code - Volvo has announced a recall of every single EX30, nearly 72k in all, and it's all because of a relatively minor software error.
Torn between keynote and blog: Not all AI coding assistant's features appear available - Microsoft stands accused of making misleading claims about the general availability of products at its recent Build conference.
Expansion of compliance activity follows per-employee licensing change - Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.
Putting such a dominant power in the middle of your supply chain a risky move... - European banks are concerned that growing use of AI will serve to increase their dependence on the big US tech companies and lead to fresh risks for the industry.
Recall controversies, performance problems, apps freezing as some call it 'disastrous' - Microsoft has quietly frozen the rollout of Windows 11 24H2 to Windows Insiders on the Release Preview Channel.
Version 7.0 has landed – the Ubuntu Noble based one - Linux Lite 7.0 "Galena" is out, the new release of this simplified and Snap-free distro based on Ubuntu 24.04, aka "Noble Numbat."
Changing the fig leaf can't change what lies beneath ... - You've got to be light on your toes to keep up with Agile. Some say it's the inherently right way to do software. Others call it a cult, overblown and misleading. One way to tell would be to compare Agile and non-Agile project success rates, and that's just what consultancy Engprax did.
What's in a name? Quite a bit, it turns out, when 50 servers all have the same one - Hold your nose, gentle reader, as we dive headlong into the bucket of ice water that is the start of the working week. But fear not, for The Reg is here to warm your innards with a dose of Who, Me? – our weekly tale of technical shenanigans gone wrong.
Windows maker acknowledges 'clear signal' from everyone, then mostly ignores it - Microsoft is not giving up on its controversial Windows Recall, though says it will give customers an option to opt in instead of having it on by default, and will beef up the security of any data the software stores.
How do you say something's crash-prone without saying it's crash-prone ... - Microsoft is adding the ability for Voice Access to automatically pick itself up should the service fall over.
Customers remain cautious about adoption, while analysts warn of unforeseen costs - SAP marked its annual shindig in Orlando this week by pulling the sheets off of AI features for its popular enterprise application platform, but failed to impress analysts attending.
And it's time to upgrade any Mantic Minotaurs you have lying around - Canonical has followed up the latest LTS release of Ubuntu with real-time and IoT editions, while ushering the last interim release into retirement.
How embracing open source can help organisations overcome tech skills challenges - Good news: the IT skills shortage is over. Bad news: it's been replaced by an IT skills crisis – a humongous human resource deficit that's causing hydra-scale headaches for businesses across all sectors.
Knowing your supplier is always good – and super lab's auditors promise to check for conflicts of interest - OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Helion to get access to the startup's not-yet-possible nuclear fusion-driven electricity generators.
City known for blues, BBQ, and now possibly the 'world's largest supercomputer' - xAI plans to build the "world's largest supercomputer" in Memphis, Tennessee according to the city's local government.
There's also an off switch - The privacy-focused DuckDuckGo search engine that \ has introduced AI Chat, an optional, free chatbot service – within limits – that provides a choice of models and "can be easily switched off."
Jury in San Francisco finds him and finance VP not guilty - British entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been cleared by a jury in San Francisco.
Update that triggered user rage didn't really change much – software company has always been able to scan your stuff - A practically ancient terms of use update has landed Adobe in freshly boiled water over how the company gives itself the right to review user content stored in its cloud.
Network scan reveals 26 percent of Linux boxes are CentOS 7, EOL later this month. What happens next? - Lansweeper's scans of its customers' networks found an awful lot of Linux boxes facing imminent end of life, with no direct upgrade path. This, for clarity, is a very bad thing.
Opt out or prepare for your posts to be ingested - Meta's plans to use customer data in AI training have resulted in complaints to data protection authorities in 11 European countries.
Join this webinar to learn how composable applications can help you achieve and maintain market dominance - Agility is a often essential to business development, but for some organizations it can be difficult to maintain without application development.
Hmm... world's most valuable companies furthest ahead with world's most coveted tech. WCGW? - Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia are set to be investigated for potential antitrust violations with regard to their dominant positions in the burgeoning AI industry, according to reports.
Trend Micro says cloudy email scans trigger GDPR warnings that deter users. Local models that use NPUs don't - Trend Micro has outlined how it will tailor its desktop security software for AI PCs, and thinks it might improve security in ways that normal, bog-standard PCs can't match.
As tool emerges to probe OS feature's SQLite-based store of user activities - Asked to explore the data privacy issues arising from Microsoft Recall, the Windows maker's poorly received self-surveillance tool, Jaime Teevan, chief scientist and technical fellow at Microsoft Research, brushed aside concerns.
We're from the government and we want you to find love and procreate - The city of Tokyo plans to launch a dating app in coming months, in the hope it helps to address Japan’ declining population.
May come in handy for healthcare orgs, or to turn you off private 5G - Delta is a Taiwanese company that specializes in power management kit, the sort of thing that datacenters need. It’s therefore very much in demand right now but also, as revealed in the final keynote address of the 2024 edition of the Computex conference, undertakes some tangential R&D
Legacy apps on Chromebooks is the goal, which won't terrify VDI incumbents like Citrix and Omnissa - Google has decided to take on the likes of Citrix and VMware by acquiring an outfit called Cameyo whose tech makes it possible to stream apps into browsers – including on Chromebooks.
In praise of knowing the requirements before you start cranking out code - A study has found that projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not.
I feel the need, the need for ... a Euro-made military drone - AI-piloted drones that accompany and assist human-piloted fighter jets are very much on military minds – and Airbus is showing off its take on the technology.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger wants benchmarks to go beyond TOPS but warns we’re in for months of uncertainty - The dominant theme at this year's Computex conf in Taiwan is that tens of millions of "AI PCs" will sell this year, and more the year after. But despite all the enthusiasm, the qualities of an AI PC have become even more uncertain – and clarity is many months away.
We sifted through hours of presentations so you don't have to - At the annual Computex conference in Taipei this week Intel, AMD, and Nvidia showed off their latest datacenter and AI kit, and offered a tantalizing glimpse of what's coming next on their respective roadmaps.
We had a record quarter, so sorry to see you go - Microsoft plans to lay off about 1,000 people across the tech giant, despite what CEO Satya Nadella described during the corporation's April earnings call as "a record third quarter."
Windows 10 still king of the hill for now - Windows 11 is just like Linux. They're both growing their market share on Steam.
Or so this Thomson Reuters bot boss claims - Jake Heller, head of product for CoCounsel – an AI bot from multinational information conglomerate Thomson Reuters – has a tip for anyone selling AI software: Don't sell software.
'Does any of this add real value for users or enterprises?' - If Microsoft intended the 2024 Build event to be overshadowed by controversy then it succeeded as calls intensify for the company to rethink its strategy around Recall.
Edge cements its number two position for desktop browsers - Microsoft is set to launch Copilot+ AI PCs this month, aiming to boost adoption of the little loved Windows 11 operating system.
Bots just as likely to fall over as everything else in the cloud - OpenAI's ChatGPT has suffered a "major outage," leaving customers unable to converse with the super lab's chatbot.
GPT-4o is far better than other models, but still made illegal moves 13% of the time - A new benchmark for large language models (LLMs) shows that even the latest models aren't the best chess players.
Intel boss reveals first 18A silicon will run next week as he undercuts H100s on price and dismisses X Elite metrics - Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has used his keynote address at the Computex conference in Taiwan to fire back at competitors Qualcomm and Nvidia, and reveal a product he thinks will make his assertions more than words.
13 TOPS for $70 has PiBoss Eben Upton predicting an ML explosion - Raspberry Pi has created a machine-learning addition for its single board computer that features the Hailo-8L AI accelerator.
Not unobtanium or vaporwareum, as it's coming soon to a 16-inch Zenbook lappie - ASUS has given the world what it claims is a new substance, and it's got a catchy name: Ceraluminum.
Just as we saw with housing, Facebook giant's advertising system seems to treat Whites and POC differently - Meta's algorithms for presenting educational ads show signs of racial bias, according to researchers from Princeton University and the University of Southern California.
Billionaire Arista chief architect to pay inconsequential sum via SEC - A California federal court has entered a final judgment in the US Securities and Exchange Commission's insider trading case against billionaire Andreas "Andy" Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Arista Networks.
Disabling the AI snapshotter requires a trip into Settings for ordinary users - Microsoft's controversial Recall feature is enabled by default during Windows setup and users must delve into Windows Settings to turn it off.
Exchange said the problem involves limit bands designed to prevent volatility - A glitch at the New York Stock Exchange has caused several high-profile stocks to rapidly lose value before being locked from trading.
Yes, It’s that darned AI again - 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 - 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.
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 - 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 - 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 - 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.
And how do we feel about Palantir selling its ML-based targeting system to the entire US military? Tune in! - There's no avoiding AI and LLMs this year. The technology is being stuffed into everything, from office software to phone apps.
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.
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.
The Reg talks to Donald Chamberlin, Michael Stonebraker and more about the legendary programming language - 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.
Starting Monday, users will gradually be warned the end is near - On Monday, some people using Beta, Dev, and Canary builds of Google Chrome will be presented with a warning when they access their browser's 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.
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.
How F5 NGINX tackles API security and app modernization hurdles - Speed is a critical success factor for application development teams modernizing to keep up with rapid changes in technology and market demands.
That said, use of generative ML to sway public opinion may not always be weak sauce - OpenAI on Thursday said it has disrupted five covert influence operations that were attempting to use its AI services to manipulate public opinion and elections.
OTOH, 'If we chase a shiny object, we could put ourselves in a perilous position' - California Governor Gavin Newsom wants his state's legislators to know that he appreciates their efforts to put the home of Silicon Valley at the forefront of AI regulation, but he's still concerned heavy-handed laws could stifle innovation.
Uncle Sam wants Maven Smart System to be in use across DoD by 2029 - Palantir is unlikely to put critics at ease with its latest US government contract: A $480 million award from the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) to get the data-gobbling biz's Maven AI warfighting code in the hands of the entire DoD.
Avoidance of evil intent means required SMB signing and no more guest fallback - Microsoft's Ned Pyle has issued a warning to Windows 11 24H2 users. Security has been tightened up, so attempting to access some third-party Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices or a USB drive plugged into certain routers might fail.
Welcome to the 'agentic' era - The GenAI Summit 2024 opened at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, and the people, who came to hear about artificial intelligence, had made a mess of things.
How to lower costs on your self-managed database with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP - It's easy to see why running enterprise applications in the cloud seems like a no-brainer for chief information officers (CIOs) and other C-suite executives.
As it offers 3nm shake-and-bake Cortex-X925, A725 processor designs for phones, PCs - Arm this week announced the availability of new top-end CPU and GPU designs ready made for system-on-chips for laptops, smartphones, and similar personal electronics. These cores are expected to power next-gen Android phones, at least, by late 2024.
Big Mike's server shack offered a cryptic response. PLUS: Nutanix results - Lenovo has claimed that Dell's breakup with VMware by Broadcom goes deep – so deep that Virtzilla's ex-owner is currently unable to sell jointly engineered systems.
Gartner gives us a ray of hope amid ongoing hype and pressure to buy more hardware - Gartner is predicting a 33 percent rise in revenue generated by AI chip sales in 2024 versus 2023.
Some derivatives haven't got there yet, but it's time to get a move on... - Two notable North American Linux distributors have emitted the last release in their 8.x series – although other vendors have yet to catch up with that cycle.
Claims she and other members 'learned about ChatGPT on Twitter' - OpenAI's board was only aware that ChatGPT had been launched after reading about it on Twitter, according to a former board member.
Bring-your-own-AI by any other name is shadow AI, and unsanctioned AI poses risks to your business - Generative AI adoption within organizations is probably much higher than many realize when you account for the tools employees are using in secret to boost productivity.
Feed AutoQuizzer a URL and it will use LLaMa-3 to make a decent multiple-choice test - A developer has put large language models (LLMs) to the test, literally, by creating AutoQuizzer – a tool that creates quizzes from text on web pages.
Tiny, powerful, uncluttered: not easy, but a lot to like - Alpine Linux 3.20.0 is out, with initial support for a whole new CPU architecture: RISC-V.
Royal Society warns black box models, a lack of documentation, and limited access to computing hamper efforts to understand results - Using AI in science promises to add to problems in reproducing important results, the UK's highly prestigious Royal Society has warned.
It's easier to foresee growing inequality than surging growth - Artificial intelligence (AI) may not do much to boost productivity – and could end up widening the income gap between owners of capital and workers.
Another endorsement for the theory that on-prem power generation trumps tapping the grid - Mitsubishi Heavy Industries – Earth's largest source of electricity-generating gas turbines – has tied its future growth to surging demand for datacenters spurred by adoption of AI and new semiconductor plants.
Training exercises test suitability for both reconnaissance and lethal kinetic action - China has shown off a pair of robot dogs – one of them toting a machine gun and the other powered by AI.
GitHub trove details API features that 'contradict' Big G’s public statements about how its engine works - A trove of documents that appear to describe how Google ranks search results has appeared online, likely as the result of accidental publication by an in-house bot.
New models will come with a year of Gemini Advanced, too - Not to be outdone by the shiny new AI PCs Microsoft showed off last week at its Build conference, Google on Tuesday said various generative AI features will be rolling out to Chromebook Plus laptops over the next few weeks.
AI biz forms Safety and Security Committee to succeed Superalignment team as it trains latest GPT model - OpenAI has created a new safety group as it works on the successor to GPT-4 while grappling with the recent departure of high-profile members who criticized its commercial intent.
Just because you could doesn't mean you should - Windows Recall has been coaxed into life on a computer lacking the AI hardware shown off by Microsoft at its recent unveiling event.
As Lenovo says it'll cram hybrid AI into multiple devices, CIOs and analysts remain unconvinced - Morgan Stanley is betting AI PCs will drive the next wave of commercial fleet refreshes after Microsoft made public its line-up at Build, and is forecasting the machines will comprise 65 percent of total sales by 2028.
Investors continue to buy into the AI hype - Elon Musk's xAI has announced a series B funding round of $6 billion that takes the company to a valuation of $24 billion, according to the billionaire.
Prepare for the HyperAssistant of the future, maybe - Half a decade hence, software development will be transformed by AI assistance, argue four academics from the University of Lugano in Switzerland.
Nation of 17,000 islands operates 27,000 bits of software - Indonesian president Joko Widodo on Monday ordered government officials to stop developing new applications.
Former Pentagon deputy CIO Rob Carey tells us guardrails should steer Feds away from bad ML - President Biden's October executive order encouraging the safe use of AI included a ton of requirements for federal government agencies that are developing and deploying machine learning technologies.
Suggested heir is Putin-approved and hard to download outside Russia - Venerable instant messaging service ICQ has announced it will shut down for good in June.
PLUS: Indian TV channel adopts 24x7 AI anchors; Google building first Africa-Australia sub cable; Singtel's strategy reset; and more - Samsung has disputed a report which claimed its high-bandwidth memory products are not performing to Nvidia's satisfaction.
Our vultures weigh in on the week that was more 'what we Built' than 'what you can Build' - Microsoft held its annual Build developer conference this week with that bizarre Copilot+ PC launch tacked on the side.
FCC wants to hit this political genius with first-of-a-kind punishment - The political consultant who admitted paying $150 to create a deepfake anti-Biden robocall has been indicted on charges of felony voter suppression and misdemeanor impersonation of a candidate.
Enjoy some Noble Numbat novelty now – but excluding GNOME 46.1 - It comes a bit later than usual, but if you are running Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur, you should start seeing prompts to upgrade to the new release.
ChatGPT? Write me a really horrid nondisparagement exit clause - OpenAI has told former and current staff that it won't enforce nondisparagement agreements that could have cost employees dearly.
Installation problems with non-English language systems resolved - Microsoft has released a fix to fix the fix for NTLM traffic spikes on Windows Server 2019 after the original fix failed to install on some devices where Windows was not set to English language.
Surging demand, the AI plan, and spinning FPGAs into gold - AMD claims it is touching 33 percent in server CPU market share as it looks towards the launch of its next-gen "Turin" processors, and is promising a GPU roadmap for what comes after the MI300 product line.
Because not everyone has time to be a tech guru - Manjaro Linux is the DIY-spirited Arch Linux distro, but made easier – so that those still on their way to guru status will be able to say: "I run Arch, BTW."
Here's the tea, for all open sourcers inclined to drink it - Oracle is dropping Terraform for OpenTofu, and IBM's CEO is talking up open source. What does all this mean for both programs? Here's what I see happening.
That's half a billion from generous taxpayers in 2.5 years - The UK's tax collector has awarded tech consultancy and service provider Capgemini a contract worth up to £245.5 million to keep legacy systems up and running.
Shinkansen maintenance tricks boost reliability on the ground, so why not? - Japan's space agency JAXA has teamed up with West Japan Railway Company to apply the latter's AI-powered failure-prediction technology to operating spacecraft.
ShrinkLocker throws steel and vaccine makers into the hurt locker - Yet more ransomware is using Microsoft BitLocker to encrypt corporate files, steal the decryption key, and then extort a payment from victim organizations, according to Kaspersky.
Uncle Sam just might want to have a word about key technology exports - Microsoft may end up exporting advanced computer processors, AI model weights, and other key technologies to the Middle East and beyond via the Windows giant's cozy relationship with United Arab Emirates giant G42.
Updates now optional, but Azure security is not - Microsoft has given administrators additional flexibility in managing Windows updates and clarified what it meant by stating: "Microsoft will require MFA for all Azure users."
The writing's on the wall for veteran scripting language - Microsoft has sent Windows 11 24H2 into the Release Preview channel and confirmed that VBScript will be starting its journey to full deprecation by becoming an on-by-default Feature On Demand (FOD).
We have not changed our minds, the industry has evolved, data warehouse stalwart claims - With its vision of a unified enterprise data warehouse, Teradata attracted globally dominant customers including HSBC, Unilever and Walmart. But earlier this month, it confirmed backing of the lakehouse concept, which combines both messy data lakes and structured data warehouses, together with the idea of analytics anywhere, supported by object storage and open table formats.
Remember Intel's 'Larrabee' many-core Pentium-based GPU? GCC doesn't - After dropping Itanium support, GCC 15 is set to kill off more ancient platforms, with the Xeon Phi facing the firing squad alongside the penultimate version of Solaris.
More than four years after procurement began, authority has no go-live date - East Sussex County Council is conducting "a further health check of the system and programme" after it failed to go live with Oracle Fusion, its replacement for SAP R/3.
Models with flaws can be harmless … yet dangerous. So why are reports of problems being roundly ignored? - Imagine a brand new and nearly completely untested technology, capable of crashing at any moment under the slightest provocation without explanation – or even the ability to diagnose the problem. No self-respecting IT department would have anything to do with it, keeping it isolated from any core systems.
Pact made with WSJ, New York Post, Sunday Times, Australian publisher as lawsuit bullets ping around the industry - OpenAI and News Corp on Wednesday announced a partnership that will bring the publisher's output to the super-lab's models, marking yet another in a series of data content deals for the industry.
What next? Kim-Jong-AI? Don't laugh – Nvidia has pondered rebuilding a digital Napoleon - China's Cyberspace Research Institute has revealed it's created a large language model and conversational AI based on the philosophies of president Xi Jinping.
Vague ML definitions subject to change – yeah, great - The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted Wednesday to advance a law bill expanding the White House's authority to police exports of AI systems – including models said to pose a national security threat to the United States.
How about just flag up the adverts not using machine learning - The Federal Communications Commission is considering a proposal that would require US political ads to disclose their usage of AI technology.
How platform engineering is coming of age - Some industry forecasts predict that 80 percent of software companies will have a dedicated platform engineering team in the next two years.
Computershare CTO says he got a bill 15 times his previous quote - Global stock-market share registry operator Computershare looks like it has just decided to bail from VMware rather than suffer Broadcom’s latest licensing regime and price hikes.
But if they can't, AMD is well positioned to mop up - Nvidia had quite the showing at the International Supercomputing show in Hamburg last week. Its GH200 claimed a spot among the 10 most powerful publicly known supercomputers, while the CPU-GPU frankenchips dominated the Green500 for the efficiency prize.
Here’s why IT teams should lead GenAI initiatives in order to unlock its full business potential - In baseball, "sitting in the catbird seat" means holding a position of strategic advantage. Like a batter with no strikes and three balls.
Plans robo-tractors to help as folks flee the farm but the planet stays hungry - Agricultural equipment maker John Deere has decided virtual machines are legacy tech.
'Sid' is looking a little sickly of late, but it will pass - The intrepid users of Debian's "testing" branch just discovered that a bunch of their password manager's features disappeared… but their package manager is going to get new ones.
It's only a preview, and maybe it should stay there ... forever - Microsoft's Windows Recall feature is attracting controversy before even venturing out of preview.
Zero bucks to start but then the meter runs on everything – for years - IBM has decided the time is right to bring its Power-powered cloud on-prem.
Windows? We're the Copilot company now - Microsoft's Build 2024 conference is getting under way in Seattle. As the Copilot company makes a multitude of AI announcements, one question seems pertinent: Is Build and Microsoft's commitment to developers starting to wither?
On the bright side, someone made up to $30,000+ for finding it - GitHub has patched its Enterprise Server software to fix a security flaw that scored a 10 out of 10 CVSS severity score.
Seoul Summit follows up Bletchley Declaration with more non-binding and vague promises - Sixteen global AI leaders – including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and OpenAI – have made fresh but non-binding pledges to deactivate their own tech if it shows signs it is driving a dystopian outcome.
ByteDance added a cheap service and the market followed it down - China's top AI players have made enormous cuts to the price of their services.
Be careful not to over-inflate, you may burst your bubble - Scale AI's valuation soared to nearly $14 billion on Tuesday after the startup revealed it has raked in a billion dollars in venture capital in a late-stage funding round led by VC house Accel with support from industry titans Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta to name a few.
And real-time video translation for things like this: ¡Apestas, Redmond! - Edge for Business, Microsoft's year-old entry in the enterprise browser race, has received a handful of security and productivity upgrades that were announced on Tuesday at the technology giant's Build developer conference.
Predicts worse to come for customers as he builds AR for slot machines around Nutanix - Gregg Lowe is feeling thoroughly chuffed about his technology buying decisions.
Redmond is ready to help folks build AI 'copilots' - At Microsoft's Build developer conference on Tuesday, CEO Satya Nadella announced that Redmond's AI Studio is moving to general availability.
Includes a Raspberry Pi version, which works well on the Pi 5 - The latest update to MX Linux is out, and has some small but handy improvements to make it easier to get online and install.
Assistive software is being modified to exchange data with different services - At Microsoft, "it's Copilots all the way down for us."
'High-risk' AIs will have hoops to jump through if they want to keep doing business in Europe - The EU Council has given final approval to the bloc's landmark AI Act, setting the stage for enactment of a benchmark first-of-its-kind AI law across Europe.
From SPAC and back as 68% say yes - MariaDB shareholders have backed a private equity takeover offer for the troubled database vendor.
Or so says CIQ, which coincidentally has issues obtaining RHEL's kernel sources - A new hire at Rocky Linux creator CIQ is rocking the LTS-Linux-distro boat – by shining a spotlight on the elephant in the room (or one of the herd).
Users given less than three months to move to the new platform for some services, analyst points out - As Microsoft Build in Seattle kicks off today, one analyst has pointed out that the Redmond software giant is giving users scant time to get off its popular BI system and re-implement their solutions.
Sam Altman liked the sound of a fictional ScarBot, which makes this all a bit creepy - Movie megastar Scarlett Johansson has complained that one of the voices OpenAI's ChatGPT uses in voice interactions sounds eerily like her own – despite having rebuffed an approach to record a bot for the AI market leader.
Drone island too – in part to keep China at bay, and to keep TSMC's sweet silicon flowing - Taiwan's recently elected president, Lai Ching-te, has used his inaugural address to call for the island state to upgrade to an AI nation.
Plus: Windows set for ML-powered always-watching-you Recall feature - Microsoft isn't waiting around for Intel and AMD to get their neural processing units (NPUs) up to snuff and is pushing its AI PC agenda forward with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus system-on-chips (SoCs).
As OpenAI's safety culture comes under scrutiny, CEO bemoans his lack of privacy - Spare a thought for poor Sam Altman. Amid the ongoing drama that is OpenAI, with high-profile departures and regulators worrying about safety, the CEO is complaining that his fame put an end to impromptu dining in his own city.
Less middleware plus more AI equals … fewer people? - Red Hat is slowing or stopping development of some of its middleware software, a situation which could result in some staff layoffs.
Already delayed, IBM and Deloitte's 'Single Trade Window' presents SaaSy challenge's to tax collector - The UK's public spending watchdog is warning that the nation's tax collector needs be become an "intelligent client" in its handling of tech service providers contracted to create a "single trade window" for post-Brexit border arrangements already beset with delays.
Several people are typing. And something might be learning... - Salesforce division Slack has responded to criticism by users outraged that its privacy principles allowed the messaging service to slurp customer data for AI training unless specifically told not to, claiming the data never leaves the platform and isn't used to train "third party" models.
PLUS: Grab's fintech profits surges; TSMC exec gets ASML sticker shock; US and China talk about AI, and more. - Jean Qing Liu, the president of China's top rideshare biz DiDi (and daughter of Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi) on Sunday "informed the Company and its board of directors her wish to resign from her current position as a director and president, with a view to focusing on the company's talent and organization, development of supporting functions and social responsibility work."
The enemy of my enemy is my best friend - With its newly formed partnership with Arm server processor designer Ampere Computing, Qualcomm is slowly establishing itself as AI infrastructure startups' best friend.
The problem isn't just that LLM-bot generated code is bad – it's where it came from - The Debian project has decided against joining Gentoo Linux and NetBSD in rejecting program code generated with the assistance of LLM tools, such as Github's Copilot.
Now Google and OpenAI can slurp up your precious memes and priceless comments - Still upset that Reddit decided to sell all its content to Google for training its AI? Well, bad news: Now OpenAI has jumped into the mix as well.
But incumbent is mentioned a lot more in attack material - Although Joe Biden spends more on Facebook and Instagram ads than Donald Trump, ads attacking the US president outnumber those attacking his likely rival in this year's presidential election, according to data analysis.
Funds to be used for purchasing servers and networking kit - AI server startup CoreWeave has raised $7.5 billion in a debt deal from private equity companies Blackstone, BlackRock, and others.
You get a GPU, you get a GPU, everyone gets a ZeroGPU! - Open source AI champion Hugging Face is making $10 million in GPU compute available to the public in a bid to ease the financial burden of model development faced by smaller dev teams.
And what it can mean for your software development team - You'd be forgiven for thinking there was nothing good about 2019.
Watchdog drops official probe but IT giant's deal with Inflection AI and Amazon's with Anthropic still in play - Britain's competition watchdog does not think Microsoft's investment in Mistral AI constitutes a merger situation – just weeks after calling for industry views on the agreement.
Rival coders must have Europe-based staff to build and test non-WebKit surfing - Apple's grudging accommodation of European law – allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices – apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region.
How to handle sales pressure and licensing 'negotiations' to make sure it plays to your advantage - You might be able to tell what time of year it is by the blossom on the trees or bluebells in the woods. But for Oracle customers stuck in an office somewhere, there is another way of knowing that it's May without consulting a calendar.
The machine was so dead, hospital staff treated it like a corpse - The Register knows that tech support people are heroes. That's why each Friday we offer a new installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column featuring your stories of dutifully and selflessly taking on the endless and thankless challenge that is tech support.
Office could be decimated with around 800 offers reportedly made - Microsoft is said to have offered up to 800 China-based employees the chance to relocate to the US, Australia, New Zealand, or Ireland.
Browser ditches x64 blues for a snappier tune - Opera has become the latest Chromium browser for Windows on Arm, fueling industry talk about Microsoft's plans for the neglected operating system.
Fake science challenges academic publishing - US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal.
Bug or feature? - Users looking for Windows repair tips via the Microsoft PC Manager app may be recommended to switch Edge's default search engine back to Bing.
Meanwhile, the creator of Open Source Definition argues the real problem is unauthorized copying - The Open Source Initiative – the non-profit overseeing the Open Source Definition, which lays out the requirements for software licenses – is taking its effort to define Open Source AI to the wisdom of the crowds.
Sort of a FOSS Norton Ghost, now updated to Ubuntu 24.04 base - A fresh release of Rescuezilla, a free Ubuntu-based rescue disk for imaging the drives of a sickly computer, is available.
HMRC forgot to tell Brits about its digital support channels - Appalling service levels at Britain's tax collector meant customers phoning in with inquiries were collectively left on hold for 798 years in fiscal 2023.
'Reads like it was written by Sam Altman and Big Tech lobbyists,' say critics - A quartet of US senators have released an AI legislation roadmap that calls for billions of dollars in research funding, but largely kicks the can down the road on determining federal AI legislation.
Smaller bills mean more fine-grained control over vastly different AI products - The AI legislation roadmap published this week by a bipartisan group of US senators hasn't pleased everyone, but the Federal Trade Commission's former chief technologist believes it takes the perfect approach.
Distro formerly known as Zinc cuts the fat, rather than just replacing it - The latest version of Teejeetech's take on Ubuntu offers what many users wish Canonical did – natively packaged Firefox and the choice of whether to use Snap, Flatpak, or neither.
LLMs running on a dedicated card: The final frontier as hacker makes it so - Consider your wish for an AI digital assistant that runs locally and offline officially granted. Not by a major industry player, naturally – your personal data is too enticing – but by a guy on GitHub who built one to run on a Raspberry Pi.
Another push for backup buyers uneasy about Broadcom buy - Data protection outfit Veeam has confirmed it is to add support for the open source virtualization platform Proxmox, bringing more backing behind the VMware alternative.
Sutskever leaves behind mysterious message on next venture - Co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, has announced he is leaving the company and posted a mysterious message about what might be next.
Saturday's power failures toppled border-check system offline - A power outage affecting one of the IT systems used to process imports to the UK has caused delays to perishable goods crossing the border, which businesses have described as a "disaster."
Multimodal models promise machines can do more – if you let them - In the future, "Google will do the Googling for you" – or so suggests Liz Reid, VP of search.
'A series of large ocean waves caused by a sudden and powerful disturbance,' according to ChatGPT - International Monetary Fund managing director Dr Kristalina Georgieva has warned of a "tsunami" hitting the global labor market as businesses adopt AI technologies.
It's not settled law. And it's going to mean trouble - I've been writing software for almost half a century, and my recent experiences with AI suggest that developers may soon find ourselves in a very sticky situation.
Plus: Google Chrome, Apple bugs also exploited in the wild - Happy May Patch Tuesday. We've got a lot of vendors joining this month's patchapalooza, which includes a handful of bugs that have been exploited — either in the wild or at Pwn2Own — and now fixed by Microsoft, Apple, Google and VMware.
Chrome is getting an onboard artificial intelligence model that devs can query - Google's annual developer conference is still called Google I/O, though this year Google A/I would be equally apt.
Hit by a return-to-office mandate? Let the Copilot Company help you find co-workers and a desk to work at - Return-to-office mandates are all the rage, and Microsoft is shoehorning AI into the conversation with Microsoft Places, a service aimed at coordinating employees heading back to their desks on a flexible basis.
Drama between two of the leading secure messaging services - Telegram CEO Pavel Durov issued a scathing criticism of Signal, alleging the messaging service is not secure and has ties to US intelligence agencies.
After years of people being victimized, it's about time - Google and Apple are rolling out an anti-stalking feature for Android 6.0+ and iOS 17.5 that will issue an alert if some scumbag is using a gadget like an AirTag or similar to clandestinely track the user.
A nice gesture among the sh!tshow of Broadcom's acquisition - VMware has made another small but notable post-merger concession to users: the Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro desktop hypervisor products will now be free for personal use.
Aux.computer fragments the community – but doesn't fix the technological objections - Recent ructions in the Nix project over moderation, leadership, and funding, have led to a fork… but one that fails to address the technical and human issues with Nix packaging itself.
Breaking news, perhaps literally: AI content blocking tool in Safari for iOS - The UK News Media Association (NMA) has written to Apple, warning that its reported plan to provide AI-powered ad blocking in iOS 18 threatens the revenue of news publications.
What good is great power use effectiveness if your DC is packed with inefficient kit? - Power use effectiveness – PUE for short – has long been the spec by which datacenter efficiency has been measured. But after nearly two decades Nvidia believes it's time for a new metric.
No negotiations on tech sanctions, just talks about not destroying the world - American and Chinese officials will meet in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday to try and broker a deal for the two countries to get on the same page concerning AI and potential restrictions on its use.
Three most energy-friendly systems all driven by Nv's CPU-GPU chip. AMD's APU could soon change that - Despite growing alarm over spiraling datacenter power consumption, this spring's Green500 ranking of the world's most sustainable publicly known supercomputers shows that the same energy-hungry server accelerators behind the AI boom are also driving sizable improvements in efficiency.
The o is not short for 'Oh sh...' for Google and co - OpenAI on Monday showed off GPT-4o, its latest multimodal machine learning model, making it partially available to both free and paid customers through its ChatGPT service and its API.
And the windows are opened to 6.10 in September or so - Linux kernel 6.9 is here, with many under-the-covers improvements that won't be very visible to users, but which tidy things up, fix bugs, and pave the way for future changes.
Catz talks up company's feel-good efforts... Just don’t mention the margins - Oracle CEO Safra Catz has opened up about the motives driving the world-dominating enterprise software, database and cloud company forward.
Time for 22H2, the LTSC version, or perhaps something completely different? - Microsoft is warning customers still clinging to Windows 10 21H2 that mere weeks of servicing remain for enterprise and education users.
Hint: It's the 'the largest' maker of a key computer component - An unnamed tech business hired IBM's X-Force penetration-testing team to break into its network to test its security. With the help of AI automation, Big Blue said it was able to do so within hours.
It's called Copilot Runway, not run away - IBM Consulting has boarded the Microsoft Copilot bandwagon with Copilot Runway, a service aimed at assisting businesses to integrate their own AI assistants into their workflows.
NHS England's own survey also reveals suspicions that it would sell data to third parties - Four out of five patients worry NHS IT systems may be vulnerable to cyber attacks while around half are concerned that the world's largest single health system will sell their data, according to a recent survey.
Ah, just nod and smile when they talk about Britain and Europe - American GPU cloud operator CoreWeave is expanding its operations across the pond, setting up a new European headquarters in London and revealing plans to build a pair of AI datacenters in the UK, all valued at £1 billion ($1.3 billion).
'Everybody's learning as they go. But there's a rush to get these apps out' - As corporations rush full tilt to capitalize on the AI craze and bring machine-learning-based apps to market, they aren't paying enough attention to application security, says AWS Chief Information Security Office Chris Betz.
Turns out the See 'n Say folks might have been on to something - AI researchers looking for better ways to train large language models are turning to the masters of language acquisition – children – to find out how it's done.
Sheesh, you just can't trust anything on the internet, huh? - OpenAI, the maker of many chatbots and taker of much Microsoft money, denies it's planning to unveil a web search engine on Monday.
First big update of the go-to Linux for newer Macs - Lagging the mainstream edition by a couple of weeks, the Asahi-flavored version of Fedora 40 is here – redolent with KDE Plasma 6.
The deepfake dystopia we’ve been waiting for has already arrived - TikTok intends to begin labelling AI-generated images and videos uploaded to its video-sharing service.
Sometimes your own invention just isn't enough anymore - The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS.
Terraform maker's programs are ideal fit for Big Blue, but why splash out when the software's free and open? - In some ways, IBM paying a cool $6.4 billion for HashiCorp makes perfect sense. HashiCorp's infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool Terraform is very popular and would work well with Red Hat Ansible. And, yes, I've heard the joke about how if you put them together, you'd get "Terrible."
Research lands weeks after the Copilot company said it was still trying to convince customers of benefits - Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index makes grand claims about the benefits of AI, but might make disturbing reading for administrators worrying about shadow IT.
Stick to data pipelines and ontology, says expert after share price dip - Spy-tech biz Palantir has overstated its claim to be a generative AI company, according to one investment analyst who thinks this might explain its recent slowdown in growth from commercial markets.
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.
How application developers can scale new apps and services across multiple geographies quickly and easily - The past year has seen huge growth in the spread and popularity of 5G services.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where have you been, Cupertino? - 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.
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.
Or at least it might well be if these trial programs work out, with some civil lib oversight etc etc etc - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, and Alex Karp's forecasts disappoint the market after strong revenue growth - Analytics platform biz Palantir saw its share price dip yesterday despite posting on-the-nose revenue growth of 21 percent year-over-year to reach $634 million in the first calendar quarter.
Possibly its most helpful codename yet - 9front, the most active project continuing development of the sequel to Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, emitted a new version. We did not follow its advice.
What next, trouble at tmill? - A row in the UK has locals and council members at odds over apostrophes, and yes – this does actually have a tech angle.
And the iOS titan doesn't seem that bothered with data leaking out - Last week, Apple began requiring iOS developers justify the use of a specific set of APIs that could be used for device fingerprinting. Yet the iGiant doesn't appear to be making much effort to ensure that Google, Meta, and Spotify comply with the rules, it's claimed.
Microsoft-backed super-lab gets direct access to answers – and code forum gets its own AI - Stack Overflow, a community-driven Q&A site, and OpenAI, maker of AI models, have agreed to work to improve each other's products, the latest deal in a series of tie-ups to feed machine learning models' thirst for data.
Fake it until you make it, literally - The US government on Monday earmarked $285 million in CHIPS Act funding for the development of semiconductor digital twins.
Decentralization is great until everyone wants to grab data from your web server - Mastodon has pushed back an update that's expected to fully address the issue of link previews sparking accidental distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
'Used in a pro-social way, it's got terrific benefits to society. But, I don't know how you make sure that happens' - You can add Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett to the list of folks worried about the implications of artificial intelligence on society.
Users continue to give Microsoft's latest and greatest a wide berth - According to market share figures from Statcounter, the gap between Windows 11 and Windows 10 usage is slightly growing, and not in a way we imagine Microsoft wants.
Say goodbye to 23c and hello to 23ai - Oracle has celebrated the general availability of its latest database upgrade by renaming it.
Meanwhile, Alma Linux gets into supercomputers - Good news for users of RHEL versions old and new – and for the freebie CentOS Linux 7, which is approaching its end of life next month.
Cupertino drops the Core Technology Fee for hobbyist developers with no revenue - Apple is reluctantly bowing to the European Commission's demands that it align iPadOS with the changes planned for iOS. It has also grudgingly added two conditions in which the Core Technology Fee will not apply.
Need a bigger partition for the update? You'll be manually resizing it then - Microsoft has decided that there will be no automatic resolution for a problem with some Windows 10 devices as they attempted to install a BitLocker security vulnerability patch.
If you read about 'meticulous commendable intricacy' there's a chance a boffin had help - Linguistic and statistical analyses of scientific articles suggest that generative AI may have been used to write an increasing amount of scientific literature.
Rovo will write to-do lists, create graphics, become virtual colleagues to whom you offload scutwork - Atlassian is the latest vendor to have a crack at addressing the perennial problem of enterprises scattering data across multiple applications and then finding it's impossible to understand what's happening and why.
Lords committee slams government response to complaints from creators - A committee of UK legislators has slammed the government for its response to alleged copyright theft as a "de facto endorsement" of the way tech companies build large language models.
Windows giant extends passwordless tech to everyone else - Microsoft today said it will now let us common folk — not just commercial subscribers — sign into their Microsoft accounts and apps using passkeys with their face, fingerprint, or device PIN.
Meanwhile, Xiaomi slapped down 20 - Oversecured, a business that scans mobile apps for security issues, says it has identified more than two dozen vulnerabilities over the past few years affecting Android apps from smartphone maker Xiaomi and Google's Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Satya reaches once more into his wallet - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a $2.2 billion investment to advancecloud and AI infrastructure in Malaysia.
Chocolate Factory relies on dominance for bulk of its revenues, says US - Both the US government and Google will today present their closing arguments in the search engine monopoly case from September.
Tweaks to sorting in Notes and Bookmarks, but WebKit still holds conductor's baton - Vivaldi has updated its eponymous browser on iPadOS to take advantage of Split View, although the browser engine remains WebKit-based for now.
Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else - The new version of RISC OS, the original native Arm OS, runs on eight or nine Arm-based platforms, including the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and on that last two, this release supports wireless networking.
Chatbot vendor should end the campaign and apologize - Genius Group has broken free of a crowded field to launch what can only be described as the most tasteless marketing campaign in tech history.
Because nobody wants a big surprise - Japan's Toyama Prefecture is launching an AI bear monitoring system, following a recent string of encounters with the wildlife.
Also adds a Teams plan that's still under development - Anthropic, flush with funds from Amazon and Google, has made its Claude chatbot service available in an iOS app and introduced a business-oriented Teams plan.
A $19B valuation sounds like a lot, but then you look at OpenAI - AI cloud firm CoreWeave scored $1.1 billion in a recent investment round, bringing its valuation up to $19 billion.
Always read the terms and conditions carefully - IBM has managed to overturn a $1.6 billion judgment against it after an appeals court decided the IT giant was well within its rights to replace software on a customer mainframe belonging to rival BMC with its own code.
U-turn necessary to comply with Chinese law - Despite Elon Musk's insistence that high-definition maps aren't necessary for self-driving cars, Tesla's vehicles in China will technically rely on them now through a partnership with Baidu.
Historical email in antitrust case shows execs 'very, very worried' about capability gaps - A fascinating insight into Microsoft's inner workings has been thrown up in some redacted document dumps related to the ongoing Google antitrust trial in the US.
Issue now resolved and isn't thought to be the work of criminals - Aussie airline Qantas says its app is now stable following a data breach that saw boarding passes take off from passengers' accounts.
Connection failures reported following installation - Microsoft admits that April's Windows update can potentially cause VPN connection failures in both Windows 10 and 11.
Data warehousing giant abandons stance against hybrid analytics - Data warehouse stalwart Teradata has shook off its aversion to the lakehouse concept, embracing the idea of performing enterprise analytics on unstructured data – a situation it once argued against.
If you lower you expectations, of course. Think more Llama2-7B, less GPT-4 - Popular generative AI chatbots and services like ChatGPT or Gemini mostly run on GPUs or other dedicated accelerators, but as smaller models are more widely deployed in the enterprise, CPU-makers Intel and Ampere are suggesting their wares can do the job too – and their arguments aren't entirely without merit.
As the rumor mill whispers about a breakup with AWS - VMware by Broadcom has made some fresh concessions to its cloud service provider community – and the customers who rely on it.
Pulumi claims it has culled bad infrastructure-as-code samples - Google has indexed inaccurate infrastructure-as-code samples produced by Pulumi AI – a developer that uses an AI chatbot to generate infrastructure – and the rotten recipes are already appearing at the top of search results.
New Relic report also sees accelerated uptake of freshly-ground JDK releases - The nearly three-year-old Java 17 has overtaken Java 11 as the most widely used long-term support (LTS) version of the programming language, according to app monitors at New Relic.
Superapp GoTo has an angle on everything – even taming TikTok - Indonesian superapp provider GoTo will soon offer to take you for a ride – or loan you money to buy your own.
An ACE in the hole for miscreants - The open source R programming language – popular among statisticians and data scientists for performing visualization, machine learning, and suchlike – has patched an arbitrary code execution hole that scored a preliminary CVSS severity rating of 8.8 out of 10.
Promises to train 850,000 workers and build datacenters - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company will invest $1.7 billion in expanding its presence and building datacenters in Indonesia.
Publishers want ChatGPT models destroyed after ML tech trained 'unlawfully' on articles - Eight big-city American newspapers have banded together to sue Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming the tech duo unlawfully used the publishers' copyrighted articles to train AI models.
Unless you live in Europe or Korea - OpenAI's Memory feature is now broadly available for ChatGPT Plus users, meaning many more can feel vaguely uncomfortable about how much the chatbot is "remembering" about their preferences.
Big rise in valuation... for browser that won't let you Control-V any data copied inside it - Insta-unicorn Island, with its browser built for the enterprise, has some interesting funding news: it just hit a $3 billion valuation in an era where it's AI or bust in the VC world.
Software doyen hopes to achieve a third impossible thing - Bruce Perens believes he can do three impossible things, having already accomplished two of them.
This nearly Snap-free Ubuntu remix may be about about to win friends and influence people - Xubuntu 24.04 is out, and offers a minimal installation option that is considerably more minimal than the other official flavors.
No it's not Birmingham this time. West Sussex County Council ERP replacement price to hit £40M - A local authority on the southern coast of England expects the cost of swapping its ERP system from SAP to Oracle to go from £2.6 million ($3.26 million) to nearly £40 million ($50 million), as the council seeks a new implementation partner for a project that began nearly five years ago.
No it's not Birmingham this time. West Sussex County Council ERP replacement price to hit £40M - A local authority on the southern coast of England expects the cost of swapping its ERP system from SAP to Oracle to go from £2.6 million ($3.26 million) to nearly £40 million ($50 million), as the council seeks a new implementation partner for a project that began nearly five years ago.
'This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation' - Austria's foreign minister on Monday likened the rise of military artificial intelligence to the existential crisis faced by the creators of the first atomic bomb, and called for a ban on "killer robots".
'This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation' - Austria's foreign minister on Monday likened the rise of military artificial intelligence to the existential crisis faced by the creators of the first atomic bomb, and called for a ban on "killer robots".
Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too - Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules.
Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too - Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules.
Whether the project will bear fruit is perhaps questionable - Zilog's classic Z80 chip is soon to be dead, though it might not be gone forever if one open source project succeeds in its goal to clone the legendary processor.
Whether the project will bear fruit is perhaps questionable - Zilog's classic Z80 chip is soon to be dead, though it might not be gone forever if one open source project succeeds in its goal to clone the legendary processor.
iFought the law, but the law wasn't particularly interested in my line of reasoning - The European Commission just brought months of legal wrangling to an end with a decision to add Apple's iPadOS to the Digital Markets Act's list of gatekeepers.
Never mind the record revenues, costs must be cut - Google's latest round of layoffs have hit engineers working on its Flutter and Python teams.
Aiven's bold move to scale up services for Redis users - As applications continue to scale up in the cloud, businesses face a daunting problem: how can they deliver the data to power those online services without missing a beat?
Irresistible magical tech runs headlong into immovable personal data regulations - Privacy activist group noyb (None of Your Business) has filed a complaint against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT service violates GDPR rules since its information cannot be corrected if found inaccurate.
Sometimes Linux releases are like buses… frequently clustered together, and rarely as reliable as you might ideally want - Last week was a busy one for the open source community: EndeavourOS and TrueNAS Scale arrived on Tuesday, Fedora landed on Wednesday, and Ubuntu on Thursday.
Sometimes there's more than enough blame to go around - Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we like to call Who, Me? wherein Reg readers may unburden themselves with tales of times their tech prowess might have let them down.
No, really. Look at the evidence - One of the knee-jerk arguments made by companies abandoning their open source roots is that they can't make money because the bad hyper-cloud companies "steal" their open source services. True, at one time, the hyper-clouds took more than they gave. That's often no longer the case.
Shareholders are loving it. What are customers getting out of it all? - This week a chunk of Big Tech reported its latest quarterly financial figures, and our beady eyes were on whether the ongoing AI obsession will pay off for these mega corporations.
Stacking the deck – we've heard of it - Leaders of the world's most prominent AI companies are being recruited for the Homeland Security Department's new advisory group.
Cloud giant directs users to pack their bags for DropBox, gives them a year to get affairs in order - Amazon is killing its WorkDocs document sharing and content collaboration service, notifying users that sign-ups are no longer available and giving them a year to migrate any data stored.
Tuta cries foul, Chocolate Factory denies service unreachable - Tutao, known for the encrypted email service Tuta Mail, has filed a Digital Markets Act (DMA) complaint to the EU over an alleged de-ranking in Google Search.
Doing business in Beijing? 'You need to do a what-if scenario' - It didn't seem America's divest-or-ban bill for TikTok was going to make it into law when we last spoke with former White House chief information officer Theresa Payton – but law it now is.
Cloudy hosts given short license change deadlines, customers warned of support portal brownouts - VMware by Broadcom’s breakup with its end-user compute products will enter a new phase next week, with cloudy service providers and customers both warned of imminent changes.
Discloses ongoing experiments with usage-based pricing - Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar has announced he will step down in August, leaving Mike Cannon-Brookes alone at the top of the Australian collaborationware company.
If ML proves an expensive habit in future, these money printers won't have much to worry about ... probably - Alphabet and Microsoft's stock prices jumped in after-hours trading today after the AI-infatuated businesses delivered higher-than-anticipated quarterly earnings.
Athletics boss accused of deep-faking Baltimore school principal - Baltimore police have arrested Dazhon Leslie Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School (PHS), for allegedly impersonating the school's principal using AI software to make it seem as if he made racist and antisemitic remarks.
As app boss vows to nuke America's divest-or-ban law in the courts - Between shutting down or selling TikTok, owner ByteDance would prefer doing the former.
Pulumi's CEO on new products and that other Infrastructure as Code company - Infrastructure as code biz Pulumi has updated its eponymous Deployments product with drift detection and automated clean-up for an untidy reality.
App maker accuses Cupertino of defying EU rules - Spotify claims Apple rejected an update to the popular music streaming app that would have informed users about purchase methods outside of the Apple ecosystem.
Europe's largest local authority had no way of knowing if fraud took place - Birmingham City Council, Europe's biggest local authority, has no way of knowing if financial fraud has been committed after it failed to run security and audit features in a new Oracle Fusion ERP system.
Revenues up, but is the AI hype bubble is threatening to burst? - Meta's shares tumbled after company boss Mark Zuckerberg said the quiet bit out loud: it will take a while before AI bets start paying back the huge financial investments it is making.
The software redemption - Teaching prisoners how to design and program websites turns out to improve their sense of self-worth and provides them with digital literacy skills that help them stay out of prison.
Tech giants confident everything's in order - UK regulators want to hear from "interested third parties" on whether Microsoft and Amazon's investments in AI startups is impeding competition.
'Software companies try to extend their reach and their usage, but this can't be by locking in users,' says process mining lead - BMW's process mining leader has called for greater openness among enterprise application and software vendors to avoid data lock-in.
Machine learning has its place, just not in ways that suits today's hypesters - Full disclosure: I have a history with AI, having flirted with it in the 1980s (remember expert systems?) and then having safely avoided the AI winter of the late 1980s by veering off into formal verification before finally landing on networking as my specialty in 1988.
Investors want to know what Big Blue is smoking after growth disappoints - IBM has announced it will acquire Hashi for $6.4 billion, and touted the deal as meaning its hybrid cloud platform will emerge with a “comprehensive” set of products.
Now Jensen has a control plane to play with his army of NIMs - Nvidia on Wednesday announced the acquisition of AI-centric Kubernetes orchestration provider Run:ai in an effort to help bolster the efficiency of computing clusters built on GPU.
It's not the fastest machine learning model, but you can't have everything - Apple, not normally known for its openness, has released a generative AI model called OpenELM which apparently outperforms a set of other language models trained on public data sets.
And you thought the Bing begging was annoying - Microsoft has made good on its promise, or threat, to put advertisements inside the Windows 11 Start menu with its latest update.
Why OpenJDK is as important as ever in the big picture of IT - For nearly 30 years, Java has been one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, thanks to its versatility, reliability, stability and continuous evolution in addressing the needs of the DevOps community.
CISPE says concessions 'solve nothing' - Euro cloud trade body CISPE has hit back at concessions offered by Broadcom over VMware licensing, saying these do not address key issues that led it to lobby the European Commission into investigating.
Big tech backlash and animus against the machines will invite stifling red tape - Generative AI is destined to drown in a tsunami of regulation, argues Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman.
Standards body adoption could help ease portability between vendors - GQL, the query language for graph databases, has been recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), offering users more portability of queries and skills between graph database systems.
You read that right – it's a bit like Pokémon Go, but for telephone poles - Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) – which manages infrastructure including the Fukushima nuclear power plant – is reportedly involved in an IP dispute over an app that gamifies the crowdsourced identification of faulty power poles.
China Mobile alone wants almost 8,000 machines - Giant Chinese telco China Mobile, which boasts over a billion customers, wants to purchase nearly 8,000 AI servers.
Strange tales from San Francisco - A self-driving Waymo taxi in San Francisco was filmed passing unicyclists and scooters – which would have been mundane if it weren't for the fact that the autonomous vehicle drove down the wrong side of the street to do so.
What are Mir and Wayland all about anyway? - Mir-based tiling window manager Miracle-WM version 0.2.0 is here, building on the basis of the initial release. Will Mir bring peace and harmony and convergence after all?
Motorists file class action alleging breach of contract and more after their premiums went up - Two New Jersey drivers claim they now pay more for their car insurance because General Motors (GM) and its OnStar app snooped on their driving behavior without their consent and sent metrics to "various insurance carriers."
Language model focused on reasoning fits on a smartphone and runs offline - Microsoft claims the latest incarnation of its lightweight Phi-3 Mini AI model rivals competitors such as GPT-3.5 while being small enough to be deployed on a phone.
Even tighter requirements, so it's time to put old hardware out to pasture... or find an alternative OS - Microsoft's war on old PCs appears to have intensified as the latest builds of Windows 11 will not boot if your CPU does not support the SSE4.2 instruction set.
Cloud migration good for margins, CEO says - SAP booked revenue of €8.04 billion ($8.58 billion) in the first calendar quarter of 2024, up eight percent on the same period of 2023.
Digital reform conference sees PM repeat calls to get online government services right at last - Usually when a government announces it's drawing up a digitalization roadmap, it's being metaphorical. In Japan's case, it's quite literal: roadways dedicated to autonomous vehicles handling logistics-related traffic will be mapped out.
Lachwani faked it but didn't make it - Manish Lachwani, former CEO of app testing firm HeadSpin, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and will pay a fine of $1 million.
Chinese tech juggernaut eyes global expansion despite US tech restrictions - Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies.
The Reg accepts no responsibility for borked installations - Worried about Windows 11 bloat and want a bit more control over what goes into its ISOs? Over the weekend, a new version of Tiny11 Builder in PowerShell guise arrived.
KDE edition has the most conspicuous changes, and could become future flagship - Fedora 40 is in the final stretch before launch tomorrow, with release candidate 1.14 in testing.
LGBTQ+ dating app's maker previously denied selling sensitive user data - Hundreds have joined a UK class action lawsuit against LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr, seeking damages over a historical case of the company allegedly forwarding users' HIV status as well as other sensitive data to third-party advertisers.
High-flying AI scientist claims unfair dismissal following pregnancy leave - A lawsuit is alleging Amazon was so desperate to keep up with the competition in generative AI it was willing to breach its own copyright rules.
Clippy 2024 is something else - Microsoft has acknowledged an error – Copilot is auto-launching for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel as well as the Canary and Dev builds.
Syzmon Jastrzebski bagged six figures, money written off as he's left the country - UK government is kissing goodbye to the £100,000 an IT consultant-cum-software developer wrongly secured under the Bounce Back Loans scheme that was created during the pandemic to financially support firms.
For once, Redmond's finest saved the day - by being rubbish in unexpectedly useful ways - It's Monday once again, dear reader, and you know what that means: another dive into the Who, Me? confessional, to share stories of IT gone wrong that Reg readers managed to pretend had gone right.
For now, Redmond is dogfooding Azure for product simulations - Microsoft has bragged that its own Azure HPC service was able to reduce the length of its Surface laptop design process – most notably for a hinge, which was reduced to one iteration, and hopes to use AI to do even better in future.
VASA-1 framework can turn a still image and a cloned voice file into a plausible video of a person talking - Microsoft this week demoed VASA–1, a framework for creating videos of people talking from a still image, audio sample, and text script, and claims – rightly – it's too dangerous to be released to the public.
4-letter survivor's move to Qt 6 means that, love it or hate it, Wayland is looming - Version 2.0 of the LXQt desktop updates its foundations to Qt 6, as also used in KDE Plasma 6 – but still has one foot in the Qt 5 past, to ease the transition.
You can leave your personal vendettas at home – we have work to do, Pichai warns - Google is consolidating the various teams working on generative AI under the DeepMind team in a bid to accelerate development of more capable systems.
Hot on the heels of Ubuntu Noble beta come the betas of the Qt-based remixes, with some interesting differences - The beta versions of Lubuntu and Kubuntu 24.04 are out, showing that there's room to improve on the standard Ubuntu formula.
Decision to combine user-curated feed with algorithmic stuff leaves coders fuming - A week ago, GitHub fused its home page feed with algorithmic recommendations, infuriating more than a few users of the Microsoft-owned code-hosting giant.
Think Debian 12 plus Mint's polish and a friendlier UX for non-techies - The next version of Linux Mint's alternative flavor, its Debian 12-based edition, is looming, and it's reassuringly unexciting.
Deal for tax collector’s legacy application services goes to troupe of suppliers including Accenture, Capgemini and IBM - UK government has named the winning suppliers on the first tranche of a tech deal which could be worth a total of £4.2 billion ($5.24 billion) for application software services supporting the nation's tax collector.
White House bags more voluntary commitments - Eight big names in tech, including Nvidia, Palantir, and Adobe, have agreed to red team their AI applications before they're released and prioritize research that will make their systems more more trustworthy, the White House tells us.
Another would be copyright class action - Pulitzer Prize winning US novelist Michael Chabon and several other writers have filed a proposed class action accusing OpenAI of copyright infringement for allegedly pulling their work into the datasets used to train the models behind ChatGPT.
Don't expect 'armies of programmers' to rewrite Cerner, says Larry, talking up low-code app dev platform APEX - Software and hardware giant Oracle disappointed the stock markets with slightly less than expected revenue for Q1 of 2024, while CTO Larry Ellison teased a closer alliance with Microsoft and its Azure cloud platform.
Science shocker: Real BFFs understand authenticity and sincerity can't be machine-generated - People feel less confident in their friendships if they discover that their buddies have been sending them messages written with the help of AI.
Accused software giant of MFA error that rendered work address useless - The New Jersey attorney who sued Microsoft for $1.75 million claiming verification gremlins had cut him off from his paid work email filed for voluntary dismissal on Friday.
Promised change to allow Windows system links open in the actual default browser not yet evident - Last month, Microsoft said that for customers in Europe, its Insider build of Windows 11 now opens web links associated with Windows system components in the user's actual default browser instead of in Microsoft Edge.
Claims it's already comparable to finance industry pros and capable of recommending insurance plans - Alibaba's fintech arm, Ant Group, has unveiled a large language model and related applications for the financial services industry that it thinks can offer advice to both professionals and consumers.
IPO-hungry chip biz promises to donate copies to universities – may also demand a reprint - Reverse-engineering expert Maria Markstedter, whose domain names were wrestled from her by Arm the other week for trademark reasons, has said the British processor design biz's lawyers are now reviewing her Arm assembly language book for any trademark violations – and may make her issue a reprint.
You can't take a machine to lunch or put it to sleep with PowerPoint, but you can try to shape its worldview - Billions of new buyers of goods and services will emerge in coming years, but salespeople won't be able to woo them all with slideware, gifts, football tickets, or lunch – because many of these new customers are machines.
Open AI boss to get 'red carpet' at immigration - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been granted Indonesia's first ever golden visa – entitling him to reside in the archipelagic nation for up to ten years – in recognition of his potential to generate inbound investment.
Musk snaps up Nvidia GPUs even as he builds Dojo. Finance bods foresee SaaSy AI, rivers of cash - Tesla's forthcoming Dojo supercomputer could add as much as $500 billion to the automaker's valuation – which currently sits at $875 billion - according to a Morgan Stanley Research note.
Mull it over, think tanks, while we roll out this tech into every corner of life - Google has put together a $20 million to fund studies into how artificial intelligence can be developed and used responsibly and have a positive impact on the world.
The clock is ticking for Windows troubleshooters, plus Microsoft's preparing a new OS release - As the arrival of the next version of Windows 11 looms, it is also time to prepare a not-so-fond farewell to the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) and its troubleshooters.
Samsung's KSMBD server hitting primetime has several significant implications - The next release of the Linux kernel, 6.6, has hit release candidate status. As usual, it contains a number of new features, but we think one has more potential ramifications than all the others put together.
Go native or go home: End of servicing plan rolled out for legacy printer drivers in fresh update - Microsoft has made it clear: it will ax third-party printer drivers in Windows.
Plus: Google CEO says AI will be biggest tech shift in our lives, new official AI words on Dictionary.com - The US Internal Revenue Service has said it will use AI software to go after wealthy individuals and corporations violating tax laws.
Oracle's repeated public sector failures prove a different approach is needed - Fill in the blank: "_______ project fails, costing millions." Five points if you chose "Government IT," five points for "Oracle," and a gold star if you had both.
Leaders settle for modest action on issues including AI, stablecoins, cross-border payments - The annual G20 leaders' summit has delivered a tame set of resolutions regarding technology, with a 2027 target year for the implementation of a planned CryptoAsset Reporting Framework (CARF) the most impactful proposal as it is designed specifically to take into account the crypto sector's aim of providing an alternative to established and regulated financial institutions.
Managers warn company goals can't be achieved unless coders get more face time and less FaceTime - IBM Software has mandated a swift return to the office for staff globally, telling those living within a 50 mile (80km) radius of a Big Blue office to be at their desks at least three days a week – to "spend more meaningful time together."
It’s not 'Alexa: build me a K8s cluster' but could become Ansible or Chef using models trained on log files to recommend what your app needs - Generative AI boosters are beginning to explore how the technology could be used to augment infrastructure as code tools, according to Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.
NixOS event organizers say community unhappy about funding from Pentagon contractor - On Monday, the organizers of NixCon, which celebrates the NixOS Linux distribution, welcomed Anduril Industries as a sponsor of the event.
As it reaches Release Candidate status, one change among many will have more visible impact - GNOME 45 has reached the RC stage, but it has a change that will impact more users: it's altering the way extensions work, which will impose strict versioning requirements.
Boss Mark Liu says silicon ready but advanced packaging isn't - Bad news for anyone looking to get their hands on Nvidia's top specced GPUs, such as the A100 or H100: it's not going to get any easier to source the parts until at least the end of 2024, TSMC has warned.
Banks aren't very creative, which became an issue for one customer - With Friday once more upon us, another week has descended from the energetic optimism of a Monday to the deflated downtime of Friday. To ease that slump The Register as always presents a new instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares tells of tech support triumphs and terror.
Floats draft guidelines prohibiting 'dark patterns' developed with help from Amazon, Google, and Meta - The Indian government has commenced a consultation on how to regulate – and possibly prohibit – tricky tactics called "dark patterns" designed to fool consumers as they transact online.
Tough luck, freeloaders: You're on your own - Microsoft vowed on Thursday it would step in and defend paying customers if they face any copyright lawsuits for using Copilot.
A quiet period for the IT industry is a good time to rebuild and refresh, apparently - Taking advantage of the summer lull, there are new versions of a slew of distros: Nitrux, Ubuntu DDE, Linux Lite, Manjaro, and siblings Mageia, OpenMandriva and PCLinuxOS.
Learn to love Microsoft Graph or say hello to Mr 404 - Microsoft will finally kill off the Outlook REST API v2.0 in 2024, years later than planned after the company bowed to protests from its customers and partners.
Accelerating the integration of GenAI and LLMs - Sometimes, just sometimes, Star Trek's inimitable Starship Enterprise would suffer damage to its hull which would set the cast falling about like skittles. Only with some nail-biting engineering derring-do could the craft enter a state of warp speed safely.
Microsoft among in-memory AI chip startup's backers - Generative AI infrastructure builds have given chip startups a hardware niche yet to be targeted by larger players, and in-memory biz d-Matrix has just scored $110 million in Series-B funding to take its shot.
It's not all bad news. Poets are safe. And machines will take some jobs no human wants - Generative AI will replace 2.4 million US jobs by 2030, and influence another eleven million, but other forms of automation will cost more jobs, according to a report from analyst firm Forrester.
Perhaps the Chocolate Factory didn't feel like staring down 36 state AGs with two other competition cases pending - Google's antitrust docket is one case lighter, as it's reached a tentative deal with 36 states and Washington, D.C. to settle a case alleging unfair practices in the Google Play Store.
NATS explains last week's UK chaos as bug delays 211 United Airlines flights - It has been a bad few days for anyone with a fear of flying or, perhaps more accurately, a fear of getting to an airport only to find that flying is the last thing that will happen.
A glitch that makes the lives of users better? Where do we sign? - An exploit for a bug in Windows appears to increase the performance of File Explorer in Microsoft's flagship operating system.
Schedule is unrealistic... it takes 2 years just to tender, protests board member - The German-speaking SAP user group has called on the European software giant to extend support for a specialist industry solution based on its ageing ECC platform amid fears of disruption to hospital billing processes in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
Replacement due more than a decade ago, Casework Information Database soldiers on as case backlog hits record highs - The UK’s Home Office has failed to meet its own deadline for the retirement of a decades-old immigration database in a program vital to cutting the backlog of asylum claims, currently at historic highs.
'Bugdroid' goes a bit 'Village People' to become 'as dynamic as Android itself' - Google may have felt that 12,000 of its workers were surplus to requirements, but the search and ads giant has clearly kept plenty of designers on staff – someone at the Big G has found time to redesign logos for the Android operating system and associated frippery.
YMMV, based on where you are - Google has been gradually rolling out Chrome's "Enhanced Ad Privacy." That's the technology that, unless switched off, allows websites to target the user with adverts tuned to their online activities and interests based on their browser histories.
Deepfakes of underage girls sets off alarm bells for legal eagles - The National Association of Attorneys General, the body that all US states and territories use to collaboratively address legal issues, has urged Congress to pass legislation prohibiting the use of AI to generate child sex abuse images.
Getting strong FOMO vibes from devs – tho how ML is actually used among engineers may surprise you - Almost a quarter of organizations are already using AI to augment human software development, and over two-thirds of them are planning to use such systems, according to a survey from GitLab.
Switch to Calamares aims to make setup simpler - The forthcoming Asahi/Fedora distro for Arm64 Macs will use the Calamares installer – but the mainstream Fedora 39 might get a new, simpler installation program too.
Authority effectively bankrupt as ERP car crash adds to equal pay liability - Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from £20 million to around £100 million ($125.5 million).
How to responsibly negotiate AI/ML advances with maximum impact - In psychiatry, neophobia is the fear of anything new. In its milder form it can be simply a reluctance to try anything different and outside our everyday routines, including perhaps artificial intelligence (AI).
UK tender hopes to boost beleaguered local bus services - The UK's Department for Transport is promising a £24 million ($30 million) contract to a tech biz that can help set up a wide range of data services to provide information on local bus services.
Head to Google Cloud Next London ’23 and learn about the latest challenges, solutions and technologies - London may be the best place to learn about Google Cloud's latest innovations in AI, data, security and more next month, when the city will bring together a mix of IT decision makers, application developers, business leaders and anybody else interested in building an accessible, scalable and socially responsible cloud.
Authorizes strike for voice and motion capture talent at major game studios - The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has authorized its members employed in the interactive media industry at giant games studios – including Activision, Epic Games, and Electronic Arts – to strike.
When your '90s nostalgia craves a modern touch - In the OS/2 world, ArcaOS 5.1 is a long-awaited release which enables this 32-bit OS from the late 20th century to run on modern PC hardware.
Plus: AI luminary Douglas Lenat passed away, and US newspaper chain halts publishing of AI-generated articles - X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, updated its privacy policy this week stating that it may train its AI models on user posts.
Take up less CPU time and memory? What amazing tech is this?! - Eggheads at Vrije Universiteit (VU) in the Netherlands recommend that people with Android devices use native apps rather than web apps when viewing popular sites like ESPN, Pinterest, Spotify, and YouTube because native apps are more energy efficient.
Microsoft ends development of free basic word processor bundled with Windows - Microsoft has quietly deprecated WordPad, the bare bones word processor it's offered at no additional cost to users ever since including it with Windows 95.
Turns out we can have nice things? - The sudo command-line tool has been implemented in the Rust programming language to hopefully rid it of any exploitable memory-safety bugs.
Stock prices shoot up thanks to tech flavor of the moment - Dell and Samsung are the latest beneficiaries of the current frenzy of speculation surrounding anything AI related, with both vendors seeing a rise in share prices related to their future AI prospects.
UK emergency services organizations urged to consider alternatives - What3Words, the website and app that translates physical coordinates into short memorable combinations of words, has been praised and criticized over the years.
Still, it's blisteringly fast and systemd-free too - The latest release of antiX is Linux how it used to be, in the good way. It's not the friendliest, but it does everything – and, wow, it's fast.
WebAssembly is getting a lot of hype, but is it the game-changer some think it is? - Beginning in 1995 and for decades after, JavaScript was the only game worth playing when it came to web-based scripting. While incredibly versatile, JavaScript had its limitations, especially regarding performance-intensive tasks. As the web evolved, so did the demand for more power, speed, and flexibility in web applications. Enter WebAssembly (WASM).
The past seven years have seen improved mapping, AR and AI, and the developer's gotta catch 'em all ahead of Monster Hunter launch - Niantic, the Google spin-out behind the smash success augmented reality game Pokémon Go, is set to release Monster Hunter Now – a game that even before launch is struggling in its predecessor's shadow.
As Nutanix celebrates Cisco hook-up and quirky cloud repatriations - Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has dismissed concerns that China could derail the semiconductor giant's acquisition of VMware.
Hey, stop Zucking up my data! - Netizens can ask Meta, the home of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, to not train its generative AI models on at least some of your personal data.
Using AI and ML with ethics at the heart of implementation - There's so much extraordinary, evolutionary promise in AI, but the advancement for our common good is often overshadowed by the fear factor – concerns about the harm it can cause if used unwisely and malevolently by bad actors.
Maria Markstedter spent years writing about chip biz's ISA, is a tad miffed by heavy-handed takedown tactics - If you fancy creating a blog or website to discuss the Arm architecture or the Softbank-owned outfit that develops it, keep the British CPU designer's name out of the domain name you choose – or draw the wrath of its lawyers.
It also beats its main rival in some speed tests now - The latest version of the flagship FOSS browser is out, and it's picked up one of the main features for which we keep Chrome around.
May as well give up already - A fully autonomous flight AI has steered a drone through a racetrack faster than human pilots in the fledgling sport of first-person view (FPV) drone racing.
The linking together of SAP and non-SAP data sources - In the past, if humans wanted to look ahead and plan for the future, they would stare into a crystal ball, scan the heavens for a sign, or pray for a revelation.
Exec chuffed regulators accepted perhaps-overstated lame duck argument - "You write what you need to win."
CEC-IDE is re-skinned Visual Studio Code with added censorware to spot terms like ‘Taiwan Independence’ - Chinese consultancy Digital Guandong has apologized after publishing a product based on open source code from Microsoft without properly disclosing that fact.
ChatGPT's prose harvesting protected by fair use, super-lab argues - OpenAI is trying to dismiss various claims in two legal actions launched by authors and comedians, who sued the machine-learning super-lab for scraping their books to train ChatGPT without explicit permission.
Clicking a URL from a system service will actually open in your chosen browser. For some. How fancy - Microsoft has released a Windows 11 preview build that will open links generated by Windows system components in the user's default browser – but only for those in the European Union and a few other countries.
NHTSA is already worried Autopilot and FSD make drivers irresponsible – this surely won't help matters - The discovery of a secret Tesla Autopilot configuration that allows the self-driving system to operate without driver attention isn't sitting well with US regulators who have cut a special order to get more information for their ongoing investigation.
Third-party and bespoke apps most likely candidates for the switch - Google is looking to capture some of Oracle's workloads by promising to help users migrate from Big Red's databases to PostgreSQL with a set of services and automation tools.
Scalene, Scalene, Scalene, Scalene, I'm beggin' of you please improve my code - To make Python code run faster, you can now get performance optimization advice from the Scalene Python profiler and its associated chatbot – and mostly its recommendations help.
Replaces surveillance systems installed after 9/11 - and years before drones became a threat - The Pentagon will upgrade the air surveillance technology it uses around Washington DC with a computer vision system that can identify and warn officials of suspicious objects flying around or near the capital.
And adds rivals Claude 2, Falcon, Llama 2 to Vertex AI - Google is rolling out a bunch of generative AI models and tools across its Workspace apps and Cloud, including an expansion of the promised Duet AI, its personal virtual assistant.
Llama 2 avoids errors by staying quiet, GPT-4 gives long, if useless, samples - Computer scientists have evaluated how large language models (LLMs) answer Java coding questions from the Q&A site StackOverflow and, like others before them, have found the results wanting.
TPU v5e, A3 VMs, and GKE Enterprise headline first in-person shindig since pandemic - Google is razor-focused on AI at this year's Cloud Next, with a slew of hardware projects, including TPU updates, GPU options, and a bevy of software tools to make it all work.
On AWS Firecracker – but there are other new micro-VM engines around, too - Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more… and although it's aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone.
Quango must show Palantir does not have unfair advantage in procurement - England's health data watchdog has warned the government quango in charge of the country's health service that it must show how it will avoid vendor lock-in in the forthcoming £480 million ($604 million) deal for a Federated Data Platform (FDP).
Here's what you actually get for this VIP level. And how is Microsoft happy with this? - OpenAI launched ChatGPT Enterprise on Monday, a tier of the text-generating chatbot focused on alleviating concerns about privacy and other fears business customers may have. What does enterprise-level access actually get you?
It doesn't matter if your GPU is better at training if no one can get hold of them - Nvidia's latest quarter marked a defining moment for AI adoption.
Pilots' Goose cooked as uncrewed vehicles prove cheaper and perhaps more versatile - The US Air Force wants to spend around $5.8 billion on up to 2,000 pilotless AI-powered drones, to serve alongside human pilots.
Dude, stop hitting yourself - Two weeks after HashiCorp changed the terms under which its Terraform software is licensed, users of the infrastructure automation project – corporate rivals among them – have created a fork of the Terraform code.
This assumes MySQL, PHP, the web – and humanity – will be around that long - Content management and hosting outfit Wordpress wants to sell you some legacy technology: a domain name and website it will keep alive for 100 years, for $38,000.
ALSO: News publishers block OpenAI's text-crawling bot; YouTube does a deal for AI tunes - Researchers have helped a woman paralyzed by a brain stem stroke to speak through a digital avatar, thanks to AI algorithms that analyze her brain waves and translates them into speech and simulated movements.
Summer push proved less disruptive than feared - Linus Torvalds has decided the time is right to give the world a new version of the Linux kernel, announcing its delivery in a brief Sunday afternoon post.
New exec works on 'strategic, operational and financial reviews' as existing loan maturity nears - MariaDB has yet to conclude its discussion with a "large commercial bank" as it nears the maturity of an existing loan.
With a choice of kernel versions, and even a 32-bit edition - Bodhi Linux 7.0 is the latest release of one of the oldest Ubuntu-based distros, with one of the more unusual desktops.
Detection algorithms also fail to distinguish between answers from real people and large language models - OpenAI's ChatGPT outperforms the average university student in computer science, according to researchers, but interestingly, not in math.
Was this source-generating model used to bang out Threads in a week or something? - Meta has released yet another sort-of-open machine learning model, this time tuned for generating software source code.
Drop into this webinar to hear tips on how best to bring generative AI to your business - Anyone involved in devising and implementing strategies, tools or operations for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within their organization likely needs all the help they can get.
Realistically you're going to look stuff up anyway, so you might as well learn how to do it right - Microsoft has made some of its certification exams open book affairs, allowing access to its learning portal while candidates sit tests.
Upstart now valued at $4B after Salesforce, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, and pals dish out dosh - Hugging Face, which maintains a huge repository of open and non-open source AI models and training data, just closed a $235 million funding round backed by top tech players and a Hollywood heavyweight.
Pay particular attention if you're MSI and Intel powered - Microsoft is probing reports of dreaded blue screens of death from users who installed a recent Windows 11 update. Some folks suggest it's a particular problem for machines equipped with Intel chips and MSI motherboards.
Clean, simple, quick, and an example of how less can give you more - There are legions of Ubuntu and Debian remixes out there, but most try to add stuff to the basic distro. Xebian is a refreshing change because it's simpler than its progenitor.
Message brokering software blamed for dumping backed-up print jobs on idle devices - On August 15, 2023, 3D printer maker Bambu Lab experienced a service outage caused by what it’s described as "abnormal network traffic" that caused some customers' cloud-connected printers to start creating plastic objects without user intervention.
vSphere to also add support for PCIe cards packed with CXL RAM to give boxes a boost, faster vCenter upgrades, and more - Buyers have not rushed to adopt SmartNICs in their VMware environments, but the virtualization giant will soon support their use in more servers – a move it hopes will spur a new wave of adoption.
Proposed trade rules offer substantial pay rises in the hope they halt writers' strike - The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has offered not to credit generative AI as a co-author of scripts in its negotiations with the Writers Guild of America (WGA).
Some of it will go to get you upgrading more often, other cash might smooth internal dev conflict - VMware intends to use the billion dollars a year Broadcom has promised to add to its R&D budget to simplify and extend its platform, to ease upgrades, and encourage users to adopt more of its stack.
When there's a machine-learning gold rush, make sure you're the one selling the shovels - Unrelenting demand for AI accelerators fueled an 843 percent year-over-year surge in profit for Nvidia in the three months to July 30.
What comes next, and what the end of the 7.x release series really means - LibreOffice 7.6 is the latest – and last – fresh version in the 7.x release series of the FOSS office suite. From next year, the organization is moving to a date-based release cycle.
Unless you're a woman in a clerical position, in which case your role might never come into existence - Generative AI will probably not replace most current workers, with its impact instead confined to automating some tasks for a minority, according to a report released on Monday by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations agency that develops standards for the world of work.
x86 still gets you to where the useful action is, even on the edge - For years, VMware's strategy has been to run any app in any environment.
And work out cheaper than top-end model - Developers can now fine-tune OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo model to improve its performance on specific tasks – making it potentially more effective and cheaper to run that OpenAI's more advanced GPT-4 model.
SeamlessM4T seems less open source than some might wish - Meta on Tuesday released a multimodal AI foundational model called SeamlessM4T that's designed for translating and transcribing speech and text.
Snakes on a dataframe - Microsoft has added support for running Python code from within Excel, bringing the world's most popular programming language, by some measures, to the world's most popular spreadsheet.
Folks in the Z mainframe game can have a play soon... if they dare - IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java as part of application modernization efforts.
More of the same is the name of the game, across clouds and app-taming - VMware has kicked off its annual Explore conference with a series of announcements that advance its core strategy of using virtualized compute, storage, and networks to allow workloads to run with consistent security wherever their owners choose to have them execute.
Latest revision takes inspiration from TypeScript, Python, and GraphQL - Fauna, which offers a distributed document-relational database service, on Tuesday introduced a new version of its Fauna Query Language, promising a better developer experience with less database code.
All to appease the UK's competition watchdog, the last hurdle to the deal - Microsoft so desperately wants its $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard to happen that it's willing to divest cloud streaming rights for the publisher's games to France's Ubisoft.
NB: That will involve handing over your selfies and other personal info to AI outfits to experiment with - The US government hopes to add face-based logins to .gov websites – though first it wants to check whether this technology is as biased or unreliable as experts warn.
Pioneer of hidden-line removal, co-inventor of Postscript and PDF, author of Illustrator, and charitable benefactor - As the creator or co-creator of much of the technology that made Apple's Macintosh and modern computer graphics in general a success, John Warnock's impact is beyond reckoning.
'A Recent Entrance to Paradise' lost - Copyright issues have dogged AI since chatbot tech gained mass appeal, whether it's accusations of entire novels being scraped to train ChatGPT or allegations that Microsoft and GitHub's Copilot is pilfering code.
Middle Kingdom has made a habit of scuppering western mergers of late - After all the drama, the UK's competition regulator has given chipmaker Broadcom its unconditional blessing to acquire VMware. However, the merger can still not be considered done and dusted as it faces a potential roadblock from China.
50% chop effective 'immediately' as department investigates traffic and safety issues - San Francisco Bay Area techies who want to hail a driverless Cruise robo-taxi have fewer to pick from after officials said it must reduce its fleet "immediately" in the wake of several incidents, just a day after a collision between an emergency vehicle and an AV on Thursday night.
Plus: Bing AI hasn't helped Microsoft eat into Google Search, and more - OpenAI has acquired its first company, Global Illumination, creators of an online role-playing game that has been compared to Minecraft.
Debian Bookworm without the controversial init – or the platform support, or the polish - Devuan 5.0 "Daedalus" is derived from Debian 12 "Bookworm", but with the controversial systemd init replaced by the user's choice of sysvinit, openrc or runit.
They've also thought of the children, and the poor SMEs trying to stay secure - The G20 bloc's ministers responsible for the digital economy met in India on Saturday and proposed something interesting: a Framework for Systems of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
PLUS: Lucasfilm quits Singapore ‘Sandcrawler’; China criticizes India’s tech push; Red Apple celebrates 30 years in China - Tencent's chief strategy officer James Mitchell has told investors the Chinese web giant's hyperscale cloud operation is bullish on its AI-models-as-a-service (MaaS) business because customers will find migration away from it hard.
Magical models less a replacement for human DMs and more a familiar for GMs - Boffins have found a role for AI chatbots where habitual hallucination isn't necessarily a liability.
Sometimes nothing fails like success - Company after company has had their start in open source software, and then gone on to dump their open source licenses once they've achieved a measure of success. It's time to stop it.
When you need to patch a problem in your drone and no one's got the source - Imagine a world where, rather than inspiring fear and trembling in even the stoutest of IT professional's hearts, snipping bugs out of, or adding features to, legacy closed-source binaries was just another basic, low-stress task.
The search for a politically neutral 'truth' goes on - Academics have developed a method to assess whether ChatGPT's output displays political bias, and assert the OpenAI model revealed a "significant and systemic" preference for left-leaning parties in the US, UK, and Brazil.
Buyout offer is at €16 per share, compared to €30 at its 2021 IPO - Linux-loving software house SUSE is to quit the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and become a private company again, just two years after it listed in 2021.
France likes its payment system, Saudi Arabia is close to co-operating, and the Caribbean is calling - India's government has announced that the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to share India Stack, making it the latest territory to adopt the collection of digital public goods the world's most populous nation has created as a means to assist development of government digital services (and its own diplomacy) around the world.
Bizarrely, Bezos's bookshop is also promoting a book about the book - A book that purports to recount the history of this month's deadly Maui wildfire has become a bestseller on Amazon, despite reviewers panning the work because its prose is on a par with that of AI.
Software's alleged inability to handle cross traffic central to court battle after two similar road deaths - Tesla's Autopilot engineers have claimed the automaker's leadership not only knew the software was unable to detect and respond to cross traffic, it did nothing to fix it.
August 16 was an especially big day for this island of stability - Debian is an island of stability and sanity in the constant swirling chaos of Linux and open source. Long may it continue to be.
Web devs, rejoice: Finally something is happening in the quiet and steady world of JavaScript - For Chrome 117, Google has expanded the browser's Developer Tools, aka DevTools, with 16 new features – the largest capability jump since Chrome 91 surfaced in 2021.
Machines have no experience in the real world, so why would you turn to them for advice? - Google is reportedly developing generative AI tools to power chatbots capable of performing 21 different tasks – including writing plans, tutoring users in new skills, and dispensing life advice.
Tired? Drink coffee, says Starbucks. Bored? Try whiskey, says Jameson. Lazy? Why not drive, says Ford. Etc etc - GPT-4 can help moderate content online more quickly and consistently than humans can, the model's maker OpenAI has argued.
Billions of downloads and no defense against typosquatting feels like a bad combination in this day and age - A trio of PowerShell Gallery design flaws reported to Microsoft almost a year ago remain unfixed, leaving registry users vulnerable to typosquatting and supply chain attacks, according to Aqua Nautilus.
This is not the robotaxi future that was promised - Just days after Cruise won the right to operate completely computer-controlled taxi rides in San Francisco at all hours, one of its units has got stuck in wet cement.
Big Purple may be moving away from the desktop or it could be more strategic - A blog post from senior Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera indicates that the company is further consolidating its development efforts on desktop Linux.
Read on for tips on scaling AI from Dataiku and IDC - According to the 2023 Dataiku-sponsored IDC InfoBrief - Create More Business Value From Your Organizational Data - "Although [AI] adoption is rapidly expanding, project failure rates remain high. Organizations worldwide must evaluate their vision to address the inhibitors for success, unleash the power of AI, and thrive in the digital era."
'Hey our enemies are going to use this technology, so why shouldn't we?' - The US Department of Defense has set up Task Force Lima, a new team to investigate what generative AI can do for the military, with the stated aim of protecting national security.
Design this bad should sicken developers – but it's the rest of us who end up feeling queasy - "I have a problem," my medical specialist said – before he saw the fear on my face and quickly corrected himself. "No, not with you – you're fine! With this." Both hands swept past the shiny new convertible laptop-slash-tablet that sat on his desk.
In footsteps of GiveUpGitHub, campaign follows AI ToS fiasco - The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is calling on free and open source software (FOSS) contributors to stop using Zoom video conferencing in light of the software maker's terms-of-service scandal.
New AI Services policies also prohibit any reverse engineering and data collection of its products - Microsoft prohibits users from reverse engineering or harvesting data from its AI software to train or improve other models, and will store inputs passed into its products as well as any output generated.
You need resources in lots of places, which is the hybrid cloud taming trick the company exists to perform - Interest in AI workloads has reached the point at which major enterprise vendors are packaging it for easy consumption, with Nutanix the latest to prep its platform for binary brainboxes.
Time for some fresh GRUB - Although it's not long after job cuts at Red Hat, the company's team in Mexico is looking for a developer to work on the Linux bootloader stack.
Digital safety org worries OpenAI and pals aren't doing enough - Popular generative AI models produce problematic content when prompted with terms associated with eating disorders, according to research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) – a London-based non-profit focused on protecting people online.
Plus: Tome bans decided by ChatGPT, watch out who's listening to your keyboard hammering, and more - Amazon has removed multiple sham books that may have been AI-generated and were published with Jane Friedman as the author – after the real writer complained that someone was misappropriating her name.
From one untrusted source to another ... and another - Amazon is now using generative AI to produce written summaries of customer reviews for products on the shelves of its sprawling e-commerce empire.
Just a day after getting green light to expand autonomous ops - A day after General Motors was given the green light to accelerate the roll out of its self-driving Cruise taxis in a US state, a congregation of the robo-rides broke down – holding up traffic on a busy night – after reportedly losing wireless connectivity.
'No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome' - A non-profit called the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) has been formed by Oracle, SUSE, CIQ, and other organizations that make Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS rebuilds.
I am become Tux, destroyer of warez - Indian mythology is rich beyond measure in tales of gods, demons, and humans doing battle. Deception, alliances, betrayal, supernatural weaponry, and devastating consequences tangle with morality and greed. If you think that sounds like today's global technology maelstrom, that's forgivable.
It can be so hard to tell one column from another in a spreadsheet. They all look the same - Welcome once again, dear reader, to the sanctuary we call Who, Me? in which Register readers can safely share their burdens and tell the tales of technical not-quite-expertise.
Browser has added multi-process support - Mozilla has teased an upcoming plan to allow plugins developed for its desktop browser to run on its Android app.
Company transitions to BSL, and fundies are furious - HashiCorp, the vendor of Vagrant, Terraform, and a number of other deployment-automation tools, is changing its software license to the Business Source License. You can still get the source code, but it's not technically FOSS any more.
An option if Ubuntu interim releases are too slow, easy and stable for your liking - The first release of Rhino Linux brings the rolling release model of Arch Linux to an Ubuntu base, along with the do-it-yourself ethos.
Welcome to the coding couch. We hope you sleep well - As Friday rolls around and the prospect of fleeing the office looms, The Register brings you another instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed stories in which techies are asked to help – but too often end up needing to help themselves.
Some of its suggestions are poison. Others - like banana and tomato tea - might as well be - An AI recipe generation bot released by New Zealand discount supermarket chain Pak'nSave has raised eyebrows for recommending home cooks whip up chlorine gas cocktails, bleach rice, and combine .
In the ML arms race, GPUs are the ammunition - China's largest web and cloud providers are lining up to buy as many Nvidia GPUs as they can while they still can get their hands on them.
Codenamed Riga after the venue for this year's GUADEC conference - GNOME 45 has just graduated from alpha test to beta, and will see final release late next month. Here is what to expect.
A relationship forged in UK government IT continues to blossom - Software magnate Larry Ellison is a leading contributor to the policy institute built by former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
Almost certainly based on a FOSS engine, but with tweaks for the nation's particular needs - India's government has decided the nation needs an indigenous web browser and has launched the Indian Web Browser Development Challenge (IWBDC) to make it happen.
If you're so smart, prove it by safeguarding our infrastructure - In a surprise announcement at the opening Black Hat keynote today, DARPA unveiled what it's calling an AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). That's a two-year competition to build protective machine-learning systems that can safeguard software and thus critical infrastructure.
What's new in the world of Irish Ubuntu derivatives - It seems to be kernel update season out there. The current Ubuntu LTS gets a new kernel, Zorin OS 17 gets a new point release – and Mint announces two updated editions, coming really soon now.
Rival to CoPilot and CodeWhisperer sees the Big G join the error-ridden robo-coding market - Google on Tuesday announced Project IDX, an AI-infused cloud-based integrated development environment.
Approach follows successful contracts in the health sector - US spy-tech firm Palantir launched a direct lobbying campaign targeting UK government departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Big Blue bakes in brainbox tech to get models running – because kids these days don't want a career in big iron - IBM has, as promised, announced an imminent upgrade to z/OS, the operating system for its Z-series mainframes, and promised an infusion of AI enablers.
641GB of total memory ought to be enough for anybody (and their LLM) - Less than three months after Nvidia's Grace Hopper superchips went into full production, CEO and leather jacket aficionado Jensen Huang this week took to the stage at SIGGRAPH 2023 to unveil an even more capable version of the silicon.
Senator won't be PaLMed off as web giant eyes up healthcare industry - Google is under pressure from a US lawmaker to explain how it trains and deploys its medical chatbot Med-PaLM 2 in hospitals.
Aww, c'mon, let us scrape your pages, we've got billions at stake - OpenAI, the maker of machine learning models trained on public web data, has published the specifications for its web crawler so that publishers and site owners can opt out of having their content scraped.
US, UK watchdogs also question proposed $20B deal - The European Commission has launched an "in-depth" investigation into Adobe's $20 billion deal to acquire Figma, citing concerns that the proposed takeover could harm competition in the design software industry.
Welcome – but weird – after months-old policy change that seemingly allowed it went viral - Vidchat and collaboration outfit Zoom has insisted it never intended to give the impression vidchats it hosts would be fed into an artificial intelligence model, after a delayed viral outrage to a March change to its legalese.
Not-so smart tech, or officers, it seems - Early one February morning this year, six Detroit police officers brought an arrest warrant to the home of Porcha Woodruff. A 32-year-old mother of two, she was eight-months pregnant with a third.
But its suggestions are so annoyingly plausible - ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.
:wq buddy - Dutch free software developer Bram Moolenaar has died. He was 62. His Vim text editor is probably one of the single most widely used Linux programs of all time.
Plus: Apple has spent $22.1B on research for generative AI, and Kickstarter introduces new AI policies - Production companies are scanning the faces and bodies of actors and actresses, who fear their likeness will be used to create fake AI doubles for TV shows and films in the future.
FAR out, man: first build for Apple Silicon Macs might make it out this month - The Asahi Linux project, which is working on getting Linux working on Apple Silicon-based Macs, is partnering with the Fedora Project for its new flagship distro.
Plus: news of the tawdry Musk vs Zuck bout - Japan’s Ministry of Finance issued a warning late last week regarding an account on the platform formerly known as Twitter that impersonates its top currency official, Masato Kanda, in just one of a string of incidents involving X Corp and Elon Musk in recent days.
Lead dev Graber quits Ubuntu maker, helps out this new project - SUSE developer Alexa Sarai has created Incus, a fork of Canonical's LXD code, with the backing of the now-former lead developer of the container-manager-cum-hypervisor.
Microsoft is moving Windows to the cloud and Apple will be happy to have you run macOS on the cloud - If you count Android and Chrome OS as Linux, which I do, the Linux desktop accounts for 44.98 percent of the end user market. But if your idea of the "Linux desktop" has a front end of Cinnamon, GNOME or KDE, then it's more like 3.06 percent. Better than it has been at times, but it's no "Year of the Linux desktop." Maybe, though, it will be someday.
What could possibly go wrong with this Fujitsu tech? - A Japanese supermarket has started analyzing customers' in-store behavior and feeding it to a generative AI to drive an avatar that makes real-time suggestions about stuff you might want to buy.
Some people just want to watch the world burn - IBM and NASA have put together and released Prithvi: an open source foundation AI model that may help scientists and other folks analyze satellite imagery.
Redmond bugs out of that side quest - Microsoft yesterday released then quickly pulled an internal tool for enabling experimental Windows 11 features.
'Play sports and live longer' apparently now applies to ChromeOS as well as sedentary geeks - The Lacros project – a contrived acronym for Linux and Chrome OS* – is an internal Google development project with a goal that may sound bizarre: to run the standalone Linux version of the Chrome web browser on top of ChromeOS. According to reports, it looks like this feature could go mainstream after ChromeOS release 116.
UK and German user groups issue strong statements after Klein courts investors with cloud strategy - User groups representing some of Europe's largest industrial businesses have reacted strongly to SAP's decision to double down on its cloud-only innovation strategy, arguing it breaks trust with anyone that invested in the latest on-prem software and asks them to pay double for innovation.
Debian 12-based version should be your first choice for a non-systemd distro - The MX Linux project has rolled out a new major release, based on Debian 12, and is on its way to becoming our favorite distro.
Drawing flying pandas is useful. But Chinese web giant isn't saying how AI on wheels is practical - China's AI-forward web giant Baidu has delivered on its promise to have its ERNIE large language model (LLM) used in cars, naming carmaker Great Wall Motors and "digital cockpit" creator ECARX as collaborators.
Set to join Intel, Nvidia in observing bus speed limits - After the US slapped restrictions on the sale of AI accelerators into China, Nvidia – and later Intel – launched nerfed versions of their silicon that could be shipped to the Middle Kingdom without Uncle Sam blowing his stack. Now AMD is working on an export-compliant processor of its own to sell overseas.
AudioCraft is for musicians what ChatGPT is for content writers, maybe - Meta on Wednesday released AudioCraft, a set of three AI models capable of automatically creating sound from text descriptions.
Ten ways you can blow a hole in your software by misusing AI tech - The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) has released a top list of the most common security issues with large language model (LLM) applications to help developers implement their code safely.
However boffins in academia need to match the progress made in Big Tech, and always challenge poor data quality - The last decade has seen great strides in the application of artificial intelligence to scientific discovery, but practitioners need to know when and how to improve their use of AI and must challenge poor data quality.
Where does Agent P work again? - Version 254 of systemd marks the 115th release of this ever-growing init system for Linux. Expect to see it in the autumn releases of Ubuntu and Fedora, and in Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed sooner.
Big Blue scores £54.7M project, taking business from Fujitsu as Home Office consolidates work - The UK's Home Office has handed IBM a £54.7 million ($70 million) contract to work on the biometric matcher platform to support its police and immigration services in identifying suspects against a database of fingerprint and photo data.
Current boss bails for unspecified non-tech gig - Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it had hired Puneet Chandok as its new leader for India and Southeast Asia. Chandok's previous gig was president of AWS for India and South Asia.
Citrix's virtualization spin out goes a bit Musky by revealing its own X-centric logo - XenServer, the Citrix spin-out that will offer a hypervisor and associated management tools for x86 systems, has teased a plan to lure VMware customers as well as a little more detail about its plans to operate as an independent entity.
Does that include Zuck or? - The chatbot craze isn't slowing any time soon. Google is understood to be injecting generative AI features into its digital assistant. Meanwhile Meta is said to be planning to launch virtual agents with various personas.
Open source image-massage works … up to a point - Computer scientists claim they've come up with a way to thwart machine learning systems' attempts to digitally manipulate images and create deepfakes.
Bringing automatic window tiling to the mainstream could be big – but what is it and how do you use it? - The GNOME desktop is considering adding support for automatic window tiling. This could be a significant productivity boost for the most common Linux desktop environment – as well as further afield.
Join Snowflake, Cloudera, Google as Apache format fans - Cloud giant AWS has picked table format Apache Iceberg to extend the reach of its Redshift data warehouse to data lakes, in a move replicated by IBM's Netezza last week.
If you need to trick a classifier into thinking a gun is a banana, just use these prompts - A Google scientist has demonstrated that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM), despite its widely cited capacity to err, can help smash at least some safeguards put around other machine learning models – a capability that demonstrates the value of chatbots as research assistants.
Go ahead, spend up big. But be warned: many models 'will never make it to widespread use because they are quite frankly rubbish' - Dell can't wait to tap into the frenzy of spending on … er … interest surrounding generative AI, so has cooked up hardware bundles and consulting chops to bring it on-prem.
Some Ryzen Linux machines still stumble along despite efforts to fix it all - Ongoing issues with Linux and AMD's fTPM – the chip designer's firmware-based TPM – appear to be wearing on kernel overseer Linus Torvalds' nerves, who has suggested switching off the module's random number generator altogether.
Plus: Google DeepMind's latest visual-language model robot, and more - Four research papers this week concluded that users' political beliefs and behavior don't seem to be all that impacted by information amplified by Facebook's algorithms.
How they do it remains a mystery, say boffins in research paper - Large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-3 can display the ability to solve complex reasoning tasks which humans crack using analogies.
In an industry that runs on hype, this might just live up to it - Arc is a new Chromium-based web browser which shakes up the standard workflow that browsers have had ever since tabs were invented. It's good, but it will take some getting used to.
Techie installing an upgrade did everything right. But the user was already wrong - Greetings and felicitations, dear reader-folk, and welcome to the soft landing to the working week that we at The Reg call Who, Me? in which we share tales of readers like you who found themselves in unfortunate circumstances – often of their own making.
Comms vendor's employee allegedly generated bogus licences and hijacked sysadmin accounts to make more - A New Jersey man has plead guilty to selling pirated Avaya software licenses, allegedly generated and shopped by one of the vendor's system administrators.
It might be the only non-boring thing about the release, which has Linus Torvalds celebrating - Linus Torvalds has noticed a "weird numerological coincidence" during work on version 6.5 of the Linux kernel.
Privacy ritual aims to deter fingerprinting of the iFaithful - Apple has told developers writing apps for its shiny stuff that they will soon have to explain why their programs use certain sensitive APIs.
Give them Z80s, Joe, and tell 'em to like it - Some American lawmakers aren't happy with US efforts to limit exports of AI chips to China, and have called on the Biden administration to enact tighter controls.
Mir 2.14 and its easily installable sibling Miriway - Canonical is still working away on its own Mir display server, used in several of its IoT product lines. Version 2.14 gains more functionality useful for full desktop environments.
Watch out, mad scientists – your careers are over - AI systems are rapidly improving and will accelerate scientific discoveries – but the technology could also give criminals the power to create bioweapons and dangerous viruses in as little as two to three years, according to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Both support biz and vendor claim victories in latest chapter in 13-year legal saga - In litigation dating back to the year the first iPad was released, Oracle and SAP support specialist Rimini Street is vowing to appeal against the latest court ruling that it infringed Big Red's copyright, removed copyright notices, and made false statements about support practices.
There's still life in the wider Version 6 Unix family – and 9front too - Not only are various editions of Version 6 UNIX, often known as V6 for short, still being maintained – but new ones continue to appear.
CFO says paying customers expected to flood in from 2024 - Microsoft is betting big on generative AI by spending many billions of dollars more on building datacenter capacity in anticipation of a rapid uptick in demand from paying customers, expected to start in anger from calendar 2024.
Boffins build automated system to smash safety guardrails - The "guardrails" built atop large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude to prevent undesirable text output can be easily bypassed – and it's unclear whether there's a viable fix, according to computer security researchers.
Machine learning helps take fuzz out of thermal imaging - A machine learning-assisted approach to thermal imaging could transform the night vision of autonomous vehicles and other nascent robots.
Experience Neo4j on your desktop with this free download - Trying to make sense of the deluge of data being thrown at your organization, but struggling to find the right management and analytics tools?
'The solution to the surveillance economy seems to be more surveillance' Vivaldi boss tells El Reg - Google's Web Environment Integrity (WEI) proposal, according to one of the developers working on the controversial fraud fighting project, aims to make the web "more private and safe."
Experts warn agreement needed and skills lacking in HMRC-led project - The UK's major government projects experts have warned a programme to overhaul ERP systems in three central government departments is undeliverable in its current state.
It's just some if-then statements, no AI here, insurer sniffs - Cigna has been sued in California based on allegations the US healthcare insurer unlawfully reviewed insurance claims using automated systems rather than relying on humans.
Are you sure that's an exec on the line? Also, smart move distracting folks from revenue growth slowdown, profit slide - AI was mentioned 175 times during Microsoft's conference call with analysts to discuss the megacorp's Q4 financial results – it seems there will be no let-up to the hype in an industry already bursting at the seams with marketing bluster.
BLISS this: Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail project wants to head into space on the cheap - Boffins believe the future of space exploration may belong to small, affordable probes sailing away under the Sun's power.
Earnings calls from the Big Four show massive reskilling in progress - India's top four IT outsourcers saw a quarter where clients were hesitant about everything except their desire to discuss AI, according to earnings reports from TCS, HCL, Infosys and Wipro.
If getting stuff right is such a deal breaker, why are we still so deep into this ML hype? - OpenAI has taken down its AI classifier months after it was released due to its inability to accurately determine whether a chunk of text was automatically generated by a large language model or written by a human.
The next version, 'Trixie', is starting to take shape and boasts an additional official CPU architecture - The first point release in the Debian "Bookworm" series is here, but version 12.1 is a modest bugfix. It might be time for even the ultra-cautious to start taking a look.
Try reading this e-book – ‘The Definitive Guide to Graph Databases for the RDBMS Developer’ - There are some who would have you believe that the relational database has had its day. This is simply not the case. Devised in the 1970s as a new way to structure data for easy accessibility, the RDBMS is still a staple of the developer universe and the reliable cornerstone of many of today's most mission critical applications.
With 34 designs to pick from, you can choose your own ML adventure - To encourage techies and engineers to try out its AI acceleration hardware, Intel has put together a bunch of software reference kits it claims will reduce the time and resources required to deploy machine learning systems on its silicon.
Lawyers look to scale the walled garden - Apple is facing a legal challenge over the "creator tax," or the commission it charges developers who write the apps that populate its digital walled garden.
Scavenging for disgruntled former Twitter users? Fellow vulture, we honor thee. - Chinese short video platform TikTok announced yesterday it will offer text-based content – a feature that mimics capabilities of various other social media sites, including what is formerly known as Twitter, Meta's Threads and even Instagram.
Safe to say, this proposal has gone down like a poweroff -fn - Googlers have proposed a way to determine whether browsers can be trusted, as a defense against criminal fraud and other bad behavior. Some in the internet community fear this is the end of the web as we know it.
The pain and joy of using an old OS on hardware newer than it is - Warning: the stunts in this article were performed by professionals, so for your safety and the protection of those around you, do not attempt any of the stunts you're about to read unless qualified.
Plus: Apple is building its own large language models internally, and AI South Park is terrible - Judges have tentatively rejected Google's request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a former engineer who accused the company of firing him for challenging an internal AI chip design research project.
Penguins are OK with glaciers. Academics not so much - Ah, gentle reader, we find ourselves once again at that juncture of the week we call Who, Me? in which your fellow Regizens' tales of technical not-quite-competence brighten an otherwise dull Monday.
ALSO: Singapore's government LLM, China beats 5G base station target, and Malaysia telecom gives in to 5G bandwidth purchasing policy - Mastercard announced last week it will allow linking of its credit cards to AliPay's digital wallet without advancing the cash to a prepaid account, thus easing foreigner travel in China.
Ousted opposition seeks ways to circumvent military junta and access resources - In the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, the exiled government is betting on cryptocurrency to help it overthrow a military junta as it backs the Saturday launch of the nation's first crypto-based bank.
Nice one, Joe, get those non-binding voluntary pledges in early - Seven top AI development houses have promised to test their models, share research, and develop methods to watermark machine-generated content in a bid to make the technology safer, the White House announced on Friday.
For Zuck, open source is just another marketing phrase. For developers, it's the rules of the road - Meta's newly released large language model Llama-2 is not open source. Yes, I know Meta AI people proclaim: "Llama 2 [is] the next generation of our open source LLM available for research and commercial use." So what? It's not.
Yet mission vital to ERP giant's financial future remains on track - SAP has disappointed markets following a readjustment of cloud revenue forecasts despite robust sales in its calendar Q2 profit and loss accounts.
COPPA load of this - Technology that estimates how old someone is based on their face geometry may soon be used to verify internet users' ages, if an approach submitted to the US government gets the green light.
Case is without merit, finance and HR SaaS vendor insists - HR and financial management software vendor Workday has moved to dismiss a class action case which alleges it produced a screening system resulting in racial bias.
Just the facts, ma'am. More facts, in fact - A US federal judge almost threw out a lawsuit brought by artists accusing text-to-image AI developers of copyright infringement, but decided to give the creatives a chance to improve and resubmit their complaint.
Multiple safety investigations, patches for unsafe behavior, and the fact it's still a beta haven't dissuaded other OEMs? - Tesla CEO Elon Musk let an interesting tidbit slip during yesterday's Q2 earnings call: his car company has plans to license its as-yet Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers.
Qualcomm's venture arm among the firms under investigation - A US congressional panel is investigating four venture capital firms, including the investment arm of semiconductor company Qualcomm, regarding financing of Chinese AI, semiconductor and quantum technologies.
How GraphQL offers a new way of building APIs - Today's full-stack developers enjoy all the tools and frameworks they need to build the kind of complex applications that drive a modern, digitally enabled business. They can bring the end result into service much quicker and with a smaller headcount of experts than ever their predecessors could manage.
Every organization is data-driven and using AI, which makes protecting your most valuable asset even more important - It's not a revolutionary statement to say data has value - how many times have we heard it's the new oil? But what might not be readily apparent is how much.
Do distros even matter in the era of cloud and microservices? - Linux is everywhere. Servers, phones, laptops, and more, whether people know it or not. And it's all over our headlines lately – for good reason.
Who needs a graphical desktop manager anyway? - This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development.
Behavior of OpenAI models about as consistent as Office 365's uptime - GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 – the models at the heart of OpenAI's ChatGPT – appear to have got worse at generating some code and performing other tasks between March and June this year. That's according to experiments performed by computer scientists in the United States. The tests also showed the models improved in some areas.
On the hunt for price performance gains that Amazon can pass on to its customers - Information wants to be free. It also tends to be expensive - especially when you have to process it. As we struggle to squeeze more insights out of our data, the race is on to reduce the computational cost involved. And the cloud is helping to increase the performance of the gargantuan data warehouses needed to drive new insights, without breaking the bank.
Results were anticipated to be dim, so where does this put outsourcer now? - IT outsourcer Infosys has signed a five-year $2 billion AI and automation deal with an unnamed existing client just three days before it releases its Q1 2024 earnings, a report that experts have predicted would be dismal.
Temasek's head of ML is optimistic about 'overhyped' technology - In order to make generative AI accurate, new layers must be inserted into its stack, according to the head of AI at state-owned Singapore investment company Temasek.
Only obstacle left is the FTC, which is still licking its wounds from other recent antitrust defeats - Broadcom was today given a provisional OK from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to close its $61 billion bid to acquire VMware, leaving only one major regulatory hurdle in the way of the deal: the US Federal Trade Commission.
Regional trade group applies to partake in Germany's probe of Redmond's cloud software policies - A trade association of mostly European cloud providers and Amazon Web Services has filed an application to "actively participate" in a probe by Germany's competition watchdog to examine the dominance of Microsoft.
Nifty new features mostly go to Cinnamon users, though - The latest update to Linux Mint is here, with expanded video file format support and a tweaked Cinnamon desktop. It's as cool and refreshing as ever.
Software expected to top $1 trillion next year, according to analysts - In the face of continuing economic uncertainty and geopolitical conflict, spending on computer software continues at a staggering pace, forecast to grow 13.5 percent in 2023.
John Kelly is building approach around Microsoft, but there's room for flexibility - The UK government is to spend £1.2 trillion in the current financial year overseen mainly by HM Treasury, the department also responsible for keeping the economy on track and overseeing financial markets. To do its job, the Treasury aims to create a "production model" of a new data platform by the end of the 2024-2025 financial year.
As Microsoft warns it'll charge $30 per user per month for Copilot for Business - Llama 2, Meta's latest collection of large language models, can now be downloaded for free and commercial use is supported.
Also: OpenAI enters deals with the Associated Press and Shutterstock to license content, and more - More than 8,000 writers have signed an open letter penned by the US Authors Guild urging leaders from six top AI companies to obtain consent and compensate them for training models on their copyrighted work.
Momentum ramping up for graph database development, explains new book - Graph databases have been one of the fastest growing database technologies for almost a decade, new research has revealed. The August 2022 report, Gartner Market Guide for Graph Database Management Solutions, notes that based on the increasing usage, popularity, and maturity of graph, the market for graph technologies, including graph database management systems (DBMSs), will grow to $3.2 billion by 2025 with a more-than-health CAGR of 28.1%.
It would be twice as much if people could stop arguing about who counts and who doesn't - Linux is now a little more than three 3 per cent of the desktop OS market, excluding the just over four per cent that is ChromeOS. Which is also Linux, but the wrong kind of Linux.
Trust and safety push promises ability to delete app-associated accounts - Google, citing trust and safety concerns, has issued updated policies for those distributing Android apps through the Play Store.
A worrying concession means that the shape of the marketplace is changing - The AlmaLinux distribution's goal is shifting from being one-to-one, bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to being application binary interface (ABI) compatible. But this represents a larger shift in the enterprise Linux market.
Employees are kicking back and letting chatbots do the work - Almost one in two fleshbags that have dabbled with generative AI believe its responses are always bang on the money, and some are using it at work despite knowing their employer frowns upon it.
PIGEON homes in on your geolocation - A trio of Stanford computer scientists have developed a deep learning model to geolocate Google Street View images, meaning it can figure out generally where a picture was taken just by looking at it.
The artist formerly known as Bierstadt - Haters of official Microsoft Office font Calibri finally have their wish – the infuriatingly 11-point default typeface has been chucked to the bin in favor of Aptos, the new official font to be used in all the Microsoft Office apps.
AWS Sydney users less fortunate – the backup was deleted - Luck, rather than judgement, has given InfluxDB users some hope of restoring 100 days of data after the vendor decided to shut down its Belgium Google Cloud region. Customers depending on the database in Australia are not so fortunate.
How to solve MLOps challenges + scale using Dataiku - There can be clear gaps and persistent friction points that hamper an organization's ability to scale and deliver value, fast. Some of these include tool and model complexity, a lack of automated workflows, and a monolithic approach. Organizations might need a new and modern approach to scale and regain control over the proliferation of their models and analytics.
Union prez Fran Drescher thinks Hollywood’s digital desires have no style or flair - Hollywood's top labor union for media professionals has alleged that studios want to pay extras around $200 for the rights to use their likenesses in AI – forever – for just $200.
Redacted document filed with UK regulator states customers aren't buying Virtzilla's poorly-executed vision - Broadcom has argued that VMware will fail to execute its multicloud strategy – and hyperscale clouds therefore won't face strong competition – unless it is allowed to acquire the virtualization titan.
Brainboxes will need a license, but their makers may get to share digital public goods - Chinese authorities published the nation's rules governing generative AI on Thursday, including protections that aren't in place elsewhere in the world.
That bot ain't ruining people's reputation or trampling their privacy, right? Right? - America's Federal Trade Commission has started looking into whether OpenAI's ChatGPT is breaking consumer protection laws by causing reputational or privacy damage.
Software could be 'an emerging competitive threat' to luxury design SaaS maker, notes regulator - The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has decided to launch a full-blown probe of Adobe's takeover of web-first collaboration and software design house Figma after the companies failed to offer remedies to worries about the merger.
New book - Building Knowledge Graphs, a Practitioner’s Guide - provides practical help for technology professionals - Volumes of data being generated across the earth are growing at seemingly exponential rates: Statista predicts that the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is now on track to rack up an eye-watering 180 zettabytes by 2025.
There are only 1,300 souls left from 7,500 before Musk, complaint claims - Former Twitter employee Courtney McMillian has filed a complaint claiming the company owes $500 million in severance pay to the thousands of people that were chopped from its once 7,500-strong workforce.
May be about to join systemd as the new tech for graybeards to scorn... but adopt anyway - It has taken about 15 years to get there, but there is mounting evidence that the Wayland display server may soon topple X11 as the most common way to get a GUI on Linux.
Amazon, Microsoft and VMware make their moves in the game of machines - IBM claims it can cut the cost for AI models in the cloud with custom silicon to cash in on the surge of interest in generative models like ChatGPT.
See how the company is helping AI-first European startups - Launching and sustaining a successful company that can turn even the best idea into a real-world product or service is no easy task. This is where the good folks at the new Google for Startups Accelerator come in.
Improved service massively and slashed costs. Gulp - Here's a story from the Department of Massive and Terrifying Irony: a startup Indian software developer struggled to afford its customer support team, so outsourced it – to an AI chatbot that was more efficient and cheaper.
We'll just take a look at the training data, oh... wait - In order to comply with data protection regimes, AI chatbots and associated machine learning applications will have to be capable of forgetting what they've learned.
Not even Uncle Sam can stand between x86 titan and its profits - Intel has followed Nvidia's lead and will produce a modified version of its AI accelerator – specifically the Habana division's Guadi 2 – for the Chinese market.
With xAI, second time's the charm, eh, Elon? - With so much uncertainty and hype surrounding artificial intelligence today, it's about time someone reliable, credible, and brilliant stepped forward.
Hyperbole, scant information, ambition: Yep, it's an EM venture - Elon Musk is founding of his own AI company with some lofty ambitions. According to the billionaire, his xAI venture is being formed "to understand reality."
Multibillion-dollar lawsuit namechecks El Reg – twice - Google, DeepMind and parent company, Alphabet, have been accused of "secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans" to build their own AI chatbot, Bard.
Chip biz pledged to allow hardware interoperability - The European Commission has granted conditional approval for the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom.
The chameleon-rancher chooses a new, Rocky course - SUSE is reconsidering the change of course it made at the beginning of last year: it is launching its own RHEL-compatible distro, or as it puts it, a fork of RHEL.
But people keeping jobs might find they are less boring, study shows - An international policy think-tank has found 27 percent of jobs are in occupations under threat from AI and other forms of automation.
Data here, model there, Virtzilla’s usual abstraction principles in between - VMware has teased looming announcements outlining how it will enable generative AI to run on it stack, drawing on resources housed across multiple clouds.
Despite attempts to inform customers, some say they never got the memo - InfluxData has lost the data of customers using its services in Australia while users in Belgium are struggling to figure out if they can restore the last 100 days.
Avoid the temptation to barrel right in without first setting the stage for your success, says Dell - Call it an overnight success years in the making. Generative AI (GenAI) has exploded on the scene as one of the most critical areas organizations need to invest in. Decades of AI innovation paired with a natural language interface created the magic that has captured our collective attention. This is a wave for the ages.
MongoDB joins joins Cassandra, PostgreSQL and SingleStore in implementing AI-friendly features - Last month MongoDB announced its public preview of Vector Search among the updates to its developer platform of its Atlas database-as-a-service. The move means document database MongoDB joins Cassandra, PostgreSQL and SingleStore among the systems supporting similar features as the interest in putting large language models (LLMs) into production gathers pace.
Sonic the Hedgehog unsure NFTs are golden rings worth collecting - Sega's co-COO Shuji Utsumi has said the Japanese gaming giant still hasn't figured out what blockchain is good for, and may not make it part of a flagship "supergame" slated for a 2026 release.
The work is hard to spot – which is bad for science, but good for paranoia - Chinese researchers published 850 papers pertaining to artificial general intelligence (AGI) between 2018 and 2022, indicating Beijing's efforts to create a thinking machine are real and active – possibly including research on brain/computer interfaces.
How open-source tech can be quietly manipulated to mess up apps - French outfit Mithril Security has managed to poison a large language model (LLM) and have made it available to developers to prove a point about misinformation.
Big Blue is just a gold digger, says avid auditor of software licenses - Oracle claims IBM is trying to kill open source competition among Linux distributions to boost its bottom line, and has pledged to keep distributing Oracle Linux source code for free.
Presumably Red Hat feels it hasn't alienated enough people recently - The Fedora Project is considering a proposal to introduce some limited usage telemetry in a future release. Predictably, quite a few users are not delighted with this development.
Plus: Adobe is limiting how staff can use external generative AI tools, and the Pentagon is testing different large language models - Award-winning novelists Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, and, separately comedian Sarah Silverman and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued OpenAI and accused the startup of training ChatGPT on their books without consent, violating copyright laws.
War is obscene but it's also responsible for many technological advances - Every week there are so many stories about different things but with a common theme.
Expect the saga of this release to stretch out a bit over northern summer - Linux kernel overseer Linus Torvalds has delivered the first release candidate for version 6.5 of the kernel, but warned this release may not go entirely smoothly.
Slow June, people voting with their feet amid this AI craze, or something else? - Global traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT website fell by an estimated 10 percent between May and June, marking the first time the number of visitors to the conversational large language model has decreased since it was launched in November.
Snafu blamed on config change - GitLab, a hosted git service not unlike Microsoft's GitHub, was down for some users as of Friday morning, Pacific Time.
It's certainly not the country's 'first homegrown open source desktop operating system' - Version 1.0 of the openKylin Linux distro for the domestic Chinese market is here – and it works pretty well in English, too.
Ubuntu vendor takes its toys… back into the crib? - Canonical's LXD tool, previously maintained in public under the auspices of the Canonical-sponsored Linux Containers project, is being taken in-house.
Tender designed to bring together 48k users running Oracle, Microsoft and more into 1 SaaS system - A five-month-old UK government department is set to lead a massively complex ERP procurement to bring together software running some of Whitehall's largest units.
Report on 'Robodebt' scheme calls for major reforms, plus review of Feds' automation, data-sharing - An Australian government initiative described by the then-minister in charge as "a great example of the Government using technology" has been described by a Royal Commission as "a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals."
Yes, funnily enough, it does involve training an AI to be nice - OpenAI says it is dedicating a fifth of its computational resources to developing machine learning techniques to stop superintelligent systems "going rogue."
Just make this 'self driving' system drive itself over to the filing cabinet and fish out the documents needed - An investigation by America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) into the safety of Tesla Autopilot has led to a threat of fines if Elon Musk's electric car company doesn't hand over the data requested.
Firefox maker promises it'll use ML responsibly – as critics say: Fork this - Mozilla on Thursday attempted to explain its decision to disable, at least temporarily, the error-prone AI Explain button implemented last week on the MDN documentation website.
One's a bit raw and touchy, but the other is vintage stuff, brought up to date - Maybe the DBUS developers have a point: desktops are like buses… you wait for ages, then two of them come along at once: Lomiri on Debian, and GSDE, the GNUstep Desktop Environment.
Hey, we're just being honest, says web giant - Google has updated its privacy policy to confirm it scrapes public data from the internet to train its AI models and services – including its chatbot Bard and its search engine that now offers to generate answers on-the-fly to queries.
Organizers change rules as generative ML takes over everything - Artists using machine learning software to make music can win a Grammy someday, thanks to a change in the awards' rules.
Release is good news for fans of Windows 7, 8, and macOS from Sierra to Mojave. - The latest version of Firefox browser is out and should help keep some older operating systems viable, at least for another year.
ChatGPT back to partying like it's 2021 - OpenAI's experiment with allowing ChatGPT to search the web via Bing has been suspended because the feature inadvertently allowed users to bypass paywalls.
No immediate risk of delisting, but company intends to claw its way back - The New York Stock Exchange has notified MariaDB, the database services biz formed around a fork of MySQL, that it is not in compliance with its listing manual after the company's share price dipped below $1 over a 30-day period.
The rise of generative AI calls into question whether it makes sense to silo AI into a central organization - To centralize or decentralize? That was once the salient question for many enterprises formulating a strategy for deploying artificial intelligence. Whether it was nobler to support a singular AI department or suffer the slings and arrows that accompany distributed AI projects.
Wants administrators, manufacturers, and the software they use, to be better - China wants its manufacturers to become more reliable, after finding that three key sectors – machinery, electronics, and automobiles – aren't at levels that match global standards of excellence.
Despite Redmond's best efforts to convince competition regulators that product bundles are OK - European Union antitrust regulators are edging closer to launching a full-blown probe into Microsoft's bundling of products with Office 365 amid failing efforts by the vendor to deter an official investigation.
When you're on the wrong side of Red Hat, these could be subject to change - Last week, the Rocky Linux project said it had found a way to continue delivering its RHEL-based distribution. Now we have some information on how it's doing it.
Cognitive scienists question bold claims from OpenAI, Microsoft and others - Another day, another headline. Last week, a year-old startup attracted $1.3 billion from investors including Microsoft and Nvidia, valuing Inflection AI at $4 billion.
Also: OpenAI to open a new office in London, and why the FTC has its eye on the generative AI market - A researcher is under fire for collecting course materials from lecturers without consent to train a chatbot, which he claimed could solve problems in assignments and exams for a computer science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Will someone please think of the poor shareholders? Oh, they already have - Following a wave of layoffs and stagnating pay, dissent among some of Microsoft's workforce is breaking out against CEO Satya Nadella after he thanked them for their contribution to the "landmark" fiscal '23.
Firefox-maker presses pause on generative AI assistant as complaints mount - Mozilla Developer Network, a widely used technical resource for web developers, this week introduced an assistive service called AI Help, perhaps unaware that its robo-helper gives incorrect advice.
And so far, they might succeed: Where's the smoking gun? - Microsoft and GitHub have tried again to get rid of a lawsuit over alleged code copying by GitHub's Copilot programming suggestion service, arguing that generating similar code isn't the same as reproducing it verbatim.
Vendors have days to answer cost and innovation concerns, may face potential delay to merger... or worse - Adobe's aim to complete its $20 billion purchase of web-first collaboration design startup Figma by the end of the year is less certain after Britain's competition regulator referred the deal for a deeper probe on concerns it'll reduce innovation.
$940m agreement with one of world's largest employers is value for money, we are assured - England's National Health Service has inked a £774.5 million ($940 million) contract with Microsoft to license its Office 365 and security software.
The skilful handiwork of merging bits from different kernels into one, and keeping it secure at the same time - Maintaining the kernel of an enterprise distro is not only hard work, it also involves conflicting goals.
Conservative peer admits he can't tell between dogs and cats either - Experts in technology law and software clashed with the UK House of Lords this week over whether it was technically possible to hand responsibility for battlefield decisions to AI-driven weapons.
Overrules decision that Cambodian leader Hun Sen's threats of political violence were newsworthy - Meta's Oversight Board – the quasi-independent body the social networking giant established to review content moderation decisions – has recommended a national leader be banned from Facebook and Instagram for six months for promoting political violence. It has overridden a decision not to take down videos in which Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen threatened his political opponents.
Malwarebytes and Trellix upgrades fix the issues - Some Windows users are still feeling the fallout from apparent conflicts between recent OS updates and certain antimalware and antivirus software.
Enterprises want a single data platform for data lakes and warehouse, but tech's not there yet, say analysts - With confirmation of support for table formats Apache Iceberg and Hudi this week, Databricks is striving to broaden the appeal of its approach to data lakes, strengthening its dominance in machine learning to branch out to data warehouse-type workloads.
Desktop Ubuntu, but without the nonsense - It's been a while coming, but the beta of Linux Mint 21.2, codenamed "Victoria", is here with a new version of the Cinnamon desktop among other updated features to enjoy.
Decision to adapt software now subject of an independent management investigation - Birmingham City Council is running parallel systems to compensate for the troubled implementation of an Oracle system which will suck in £46.5 million ($58.81 million) in additional spending in the current financial year.
Ads and search giant also open sources offensive stereotype database, and gives Amazon a poke - Google's Indian operation will test a feature that would offer navigation based on mentions of landmarks – kind of the way people do.
Only for Ampere – but with a licencing twist that means Intel and AMD can't relax - Oracle has certified its flagship Database 19c Enterprise Edition database for the Arm architecture, in the cloud or on-prem – provided it runs on an Ampere processor.
Where did they get the idea this bot was potentially spitting out personal info? Oh, from The Register - Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies' AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent.
A tale of emergency firewalling, a little bit of victim blaming, and workflow scripts gone berserk - This month you may have noticed the servers used by the GMP project – an open source arithmetic library at the heart of GCC and other programs – slowed to a crawl. It was due to a deluge of network traffic, the source of which is quite surprising.
Ripples rebounding and reflecting from Red Hat's rebuff of RHEL rebuilds - The backlash against Red Hat's decision to stop distributing the source code of RHEL for free to non-customers continues to widen.
The labs will look at AI and robotics for manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and cities - European officials – who reached political agreement on the EU's new Data Act last night – have launched four labs to test AI applications before they're released to the general public.
How to establish the true state of your systems in a distributed world - Computing is supposed to be binary. One or zero. On or off. But the reality, we know, is much more nuanced.
Clunky, costly, literally sickening data silos just aren't better than the real world - Businesses are not rushing to adopt the metaverse, according to analyst firm Gartner – because it's just not very good or useful.
Proof-of-concept study shows it's possible to bypass high levels of security - The rise of off-the-shelf AI tools that can clone human voices has forced developers of voice authentication software to build an extra layer of security to detect whether an audio sample appears to be human or machine-generated.
The 'upgrade' is free, yet an amnesty is needed despite months of warning - Microsoft's bid to have customers of Teams Rooms hardware acquire corporate licenses is going so well – not! – that the software giant has extended the deadline to sign up by 90 days, even though the move involves price reductions.
Submerge an Nvidia LLM 20,000 leagues under the data lake - Nvidia and cloud data warehouse company Snowflake have teamed up to help organizations build and train their own custom AI models using data they have stored within Snowflake's platform.
How relational database providers like AWS offer its customers the freedom to innovate - Remember when open-source software was a cottage industry? Those days are long gone. Software issued under an open-source license now runs most of the internet - and database users are also interested in this model.
Acquisition means for both parties get a shot at leading the roll-your-own AI market - Databricks has announced it will acquire generative AI startup MosaicML for $1.3 billion, in a deal that will make it easier for private entities to train and run their own custom machine learning models.
Alleges he's still locked out and at risk of losing his licenses over missing comms - A New Jersey attorney is suing Microsoft for $1.75 million, claiming it didn't fix a verification issue that has cut him off from his paid work email, and therefore from communications with judges and clients, crippling his ability to deal with his caseload and leaving him at risk of making ethical violations.
Plus: IBM builds AI commentator for Wimbledon; US regulator dithers on generative AI political ad policy - Nvidia's second-generation A100 GPUs, currently the subject of export controls that mean they're not for sale in China, can fetch up to $20,000 in black markets - double the regular price.
Latest cut of the kernel gets RISC-ier, moves towards Wi-Fi 7, ejects PCMCIA cards - Version 6.4 of the Linux kernel has debuted, after an exemplary development push.
PLUS: US joins India’s software diplomacy push; Suzuki to make flying cars; Indonesia's broadband bird - Singapore's central bank, the Monetary Authority (MAS), last week published a white paper that proposes the concept of "Purpose Bound Money" (PBM).
Should you really believe the doomsayers? We're going to go with no - The question over whether machine learning poses an existential risk to humanity will continue to loom over our heads as the technology advances and spreads around the world. Mainly because pundits and some industry leaders won't stop talking about it.
Version 12.5 brings in Finnish language support, traffic node path visualization and more - The Tor Browser, which strives to provide anonymity online rather than the limited data sharing internet companies call "privacy," has reached version 12.5, a milestone that brings usability and accessibility improvements alongside attention to legacy issues.
On the other hand, some old settings are set for a comeback - Microsoft is investigating why recent updates to Windows 11 are causing systems to be more power-hungry than normal.
From now on, only CentOS Stream's source code is available to all - Red Hat has decided to stop making the source code of RHEL available to the public. From now on it will only be available to customers — who can't legally share it.
GenAI is transforming everything, including the datacenter - find out what it could mean for your organization - In the age of automation and generative AI (GenAI), it's time to re-think what "datacenter" really means. For those who have become heavily invested in public cloud, the datacenter might not be the first place you think of when it comes to automation and GenAI, but these technologies are rapidly changing what is possible in all environments.
Time to get with the program... before artificial intelligence does - Free software and open source licenses evolved to deal with code in the 1970s and '80s. Today it must again transform to deal with AI models.
Judge sanctions attorneys for failed reality check - Attorneys who filed court documents citing cases completely invented by OpenAI's ChatGPT have been formally slapped down by a New York judge.
They weren't kidding about this facial, er, spatial computing thing - Apple's Vision Pro goggles won't be available until next year, though registered developers can now explore the iGiant's tools for making apps for the virtual-reality headset.
Bundling everything together means others don't get a look-in, says competition body - Google's bundle-or-nothing offer to car manufacturers for their in-car infotainment systems is a potentially anti-competitive move, Germany's market watchdog has said.
We talk to MosaicML, a startup driving down training costs with open source models - Companies don't need to splash millions of dollars to train AI as software improvements and open source models drive down costs.
Golang project also works with the CentOS Linux replacements - Forester is a new network-based unattended OS provisioning tool for Fedora and Red Hat family OSes, still being implemented – in Go.
Dark patterns at Amazon worthy of a Homeric epic? Surely not! - The Federal Trade Commission today filed a lawsuit against Amazon for what it describes as a "years-long effort to enroll consumers into its Prime program without their consent while knowingly making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions."
There's an old saying in business: Time, money, quality – you can have any two - Workers tasked with improving the output of Google's Bard chatbot say they've been told to focus on working fast at the expense of quality. Bard sometimes generates inaccurate information simply because there isn't enough time for these fact checkers to verify the software's output, one of those workers told The Register.
Oh no, over there, look, the killer robots, OMG here they come – just pay no attention to us shaping the rules - OpenAI – the maker of GPT-4, and other generative AI models – has been publicly calling for more AI regulation while privately seeking less of it.
‘We thought you'd like some terrible news in the comfort of your own home’ was the gist of it - Singaporean superapp Grab has revealed it will lay off 1,000 staffers, or eleven percent of its workforce – and did it with an after-hours email.
Shifting those duties to Outlook set for next year – well, maybe - Microsoft intends to shut down its at-times-maligned Mail and Calendar apps, fold their capabilities into a new Outlook for Windows, and use the opportunity to – unsurprisingly – bring in more AI.
But you'll need the right hardware to take advantage - SUSE's latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) has a focus on security, claiming it as the first distro to offer full support for confidential computing to protect data.
Redmond says problems stemmed from a datacenter in Germany, though UK spared the worst of it - Some Microsoft 365 users in Western Europe earlier today were reporting service problems today, though those in the UK seem to have avoided many of the issues.
Latest £24.9M 'transition' contract an attempt to bridge gap to contract UK.gov is due to award in September - The NHS has awarded US spy-tech firm Palantir a £24.9 million ($31.7 million) deal to cover the one-year transition, from June 12, 2023, to a new £480 million ($611 million) data platform.
Meanwhile, users are left to figure out how to cut their cloth - A relative newcomer to the enterprise data and analytics world, Microsoft didn't hold back when it launched its Fabric platform last month.
Singapore dollar snafu used to illustrate workaround - SAP has admitted the cloudy cut of its S/4HANA service does not allow an organization to use currencies other than what a user's location suggests is appropriate.
NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD and DDN Storage implementing enterprise AI at scale - There are conflicting and competing emotions surrounding the evolution of generative AI. The genie is out of the bottle.
If Jesus was my Copilot, what would he do? - Open source. It's open. You can look. Mostly, you can use. There's a clue in the name. Not so fast, claims a class action brought against Microsoft, OpenAI and GitHub. Copilot, an in-IDE AI-powered and open source trained suggestion bot, works by offering lines of code to programmers - and that, the class action suit alleges, breaks the rules, and is being sneaky in trying to hide it. A judge has ruled that some of the claims deserve their day in court. Dear lord, not another copyright battle.
As the customers lined up with pitchforks and burning brands, the question in the cleanup meeting was 'Who, me?' - Welcome once again, gentle readerfolk, to the comforting haven that is Who, Me? – in which Reg readers share tales that show we're all just human underneath.
But police are allowed to fly them for 'public safety' missions - Illinois Governor JB Pritzker on Friday signed HB 3902, which allows the US state's law enforcement agencies to use drones at some public events – but prohibits equipping them with facial recognition software or weaponry, with some exceptions.
The AI tentacles grab supply chain management, projects, and finance - Microsoft plans to spread AI through more of its 365 ERP portfolio, including supply chain management, project operations, and finance.
Health acquisition freezes recruitment after $10 billion contract put on hold - Oracle has launched a round of job cuts at its acquired Cerner health tech biz after one of its mega projects stalled.
How a commercial Linux distribution can help you - Why pay for Linux? After all it's available in the datacenter or on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, or other public cloud environments as part of the default configuration at no cost.
We speak to brains behind study into murky world of model teaching - Workers hired via crowdsource services like Amazon Mechanical Turk are using large language models to complete their tasks – which could have negative knock-on effects on AI models in the future.
You’d think vendors would know when their products are working – not this one - As the weekend approaches, a question for our readers: was your week a success? Asking because in this week’s instalment of On Call – The Register's regular reader-contributed stories of techies being asked to assess the asinine – a failure to recognize success was the crux of the matter.
Stop! Or I'll move very slowly towards you and stream video to HQ - The Singapore Police Force (SPF) plans to ramp up its use of robot officers, according to local media on Thursday.
While Apple has Vision Pro, Redmond's taking vision slow? - News in recent months about Microsoft's mixed reality business has itself been mixed. First were reports of Congress pumping the brakes on a $22 million Pentagon contract for custom HoloLens headsets and layoffs hitting the equipment's team, including shuttering its AltspaceVR social platform.
It's not a doctor, it just plays one on the internet - Embracing the chatbot standard of unreliable information, Google has updated the Lens image recognition feature in its eponymous iOS and Android apps to possibly identify skin conditions.
Revenues shrank and net profit evaporated but progress made in other areas, says board - DXC Technology Chairman, President and CEO Mike Salvino was awarded a pay package of $20.3 million for the company’s recently closed financial year - the one in which sales shrank and profit evaporated
IT leaders must pick the right servers, storage and network technologies to fuel their generative AI workloads and large language models - Speed and performance often play an outsized role in determining outcomes of many competitions. The famed Schneider Trophy races of the early 20th century offer a classic example, as multiple nations pushed the boundaries of speed in feats of aerial supremacy.
Can you guess what it is yet? Here's a clue: It starts with 'A' and ends with 'I' - The French recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't have a product and was founded four weeks ago. The few employees it has only started work in the last few days.
Shoddy predictive systems labeling gender, race, emotion would be verboten - The European Parliament passed the AI Act on Wednesday, the first legislation of its kind in the world, which bans applications imposing an unacceptable level of risk to people's safety and privacy.
The combination of LLMs and autonomous agents will pour fuel on AI anxiety - My favorite punchline this year is an AI prompt proposed as a sequel to the classic "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" exchange between human astronaut Dave Bowman and the errant HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If Virtzilla's serious about multicloud, surely this gets real soon? - VMware has released another update to its hypervisor for the Arm architecture, without showing any signs it will soon be productized.
We've not had any of the required paperwork yet, Irish watchdog tells El Reg - Google has had to delay the debut of its Bard chatbot in the European Union while privacy questions are resolved.
It's time to distinguish image from reality among tech's exhibitionists, though - Divisive 20th century artist Andy Warhol famously said: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." The statement, eerily prophetic of reality show celebrities and social media influencers, appeals to the tech industry as companies scramble for investors' attention. Even the business that first brought Warhol into the public sphere is in on the act.
Less GPU time, better generated images - Meta has announced a computer vision model that learns to recognize images while also building contextual knowledge that makes artificial intelligence less clunky and costly.
Let VAST Data for NVIDIA SuperPOD scale up your AI initiatives - There was a time when it seemed as if nothing could be more memorable than man's first footfall on the moon. Yet, we have steadily been pushing the boundaries of science and human endeavour ever since the moment in 1969 when Neil Armstrong climbed out of Apollo 11 to make history. Who would have thought then that we would be where we are now with AI?
Proposes global brainbox-bossing body based on the International Atomic Energy Agency's blueprint - United Nations secretary-general António Guterres has called for the formation of a global AI watchdog modelled after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Plans to bulk brainbox workforce by 40,000, months after ejecting 19,000 accountants and HR types - Tech consulting giant Accenture will invest $3 billion over three years to grow its AI workforce to 80,000 people after it axed 19,000 jobs in March this year.
This from the Administration that made infosec a priority - The Biden Administration has extended the deadline for federal agencies to submit documentation proving that the software they use was developed with appropriate security practices, because the form for reporting on such matters isn't complete.
Android and Microsoft sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G! But not too much - Microsoft is adding the ability to share files between Windows 11 and its Android subsystem, a much-requested feature that marks the latest step by Redmond to play nice with Android and iOS.
Agency concerned the pair are planning to combine before it's able to make a decision whether to allow it - Moving quickly to avoid what it worries could be a surprise merger finalization announcement, the US Federal Trade Commission has sought a temporary restraining order to prevent Microsoft from completing its $69 billion acquisition of video game giant Activision Blizzard.
We're fine being judged by code, now that we're getting an assist - GitHub, which has been doing a brisk business selling subscriptions to its litigation-encumbered Copilot AI helper, surveyed 500 US-based developers to find if any of them are already using AI coding tools at work.
Public spending watchdog says scale of task was massively underestimated - A decision to ride two horses at the same time left the UK tax collector's plans to go digital with a three-year delay and a budget bursting from £226 million to £1.3 billion.
DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic promise to give Blighty priority access to their models for safety research - UK prime minister Rishi Sunak believes taking a leading role in AI safety research is key to boosting Britain's innovation capability and growing its economy.
Only took 'em 46 years … - Oracle has declared it has changed its culture and is now "totally focused on our customers' success."
Don't take our word – these eggheads claim to have proved it - Employees working with AI software to complete tasks at work are more likely to feel lonely, which can drive them to insomnia and drinking, according to a paper published by the American Psychological Association.
PHBs should fear the PFYs with the ML skills, not the BOFHs - When US companies invest in skills associated with artificial intelligence, they tend to gain more educated junior employees while shedding middle-management and senior roles, according to newly published research.
Plus: Cohere raises $230m in its latest Series C round, and more - Lawyers facing legal sanctions from a federal court for filing a lawsuit containing fake legal cases generated by ChatGPT, say they feel duped by the software.
Risk-based approach puts onus on developers and sees bloc diverge from US, UK plans - The European Parliament is to debate legislation that could cement a divergent approach to regulating AI between the US, the UK and the EU.
If a tiny typo brings down half of Brazil, perhaps we’re the nuts - “ELY (n.) – The first, tiniest inkling that something, somewhere has gone terribly wrong.” One the finest definitions from Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff, it describes perfectly the start of that nightmare scenario for ops in a big service provider - the rising tide of alerts after that update went live.
It’s a major upgrade to venerable groupware suite that might break it a bit - HCL Domino, the product that started life last millennium as Lotus Notes, will soon reach its 14th version.
Microsoft retiring the calendar board view a few short years - That didn't take long. Relatively speaking, anyway. Microsoft has drained the Moca cup for Outlook.
Copilot code-cloning case clarifies claims - GitHub is alleged to have tuned its Copilot programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent output from being flagged as a direct copy of licensed software.
The database had to be architected from ground up, former GIMP dev Spencer Kimball tell us - Distributed SQL database CockroachDB has taken nearly five years to port its service to Microsoft's Azure platform – in contrast to rival MariaDB, which released SkySQL in March 2020 on all three major clouds. But the time has been well spent, CEO and co-founder Spencer Kimball promises The Register.
China spends twice as much on AI as everyone else put together: expert witness - Policymakers should insist manufacturers include controls in artificial intelligence-based weapons systems that allow them to be turned off if they get out of control, experts told the UK Parliament.
Implementing enterprise AI at scale - Charles Babbage and Alan Turing, two fathers of computing with giant-sized brains, might never have imagined the arrival of generative AI. But Philip K. Dick almost certainly would not be in the least surprised.
Actually, the better question is: When will they replace most desktop Linux programs? - I've been using desktop Linux since before many of you were born. Seriously. I first ran it when I downloaded the source code from Linux kernel developer Theodore Ts'o's MIT FTP server in 1991. So, when I say it's time to wave bye-bye to using package managers such as apt or dnf and replace them with containerized package managers such as Appimage, Snap, or Flatpak, I do have a clue about what I'm talking about.
Is he human? Is he an avatar? Does it really even matter? - If you decide to visit the Computex tech fest, it's important to understand two things: Taiwan's weather is stinking hot that time of year; and Taiwan's signature snack – stinking tofu – is well-named and very much an acquired taste.
Two third-party Reddit apps have thrown in the towel over increased expenses - Social media community Reddit plans to lay off about 90 employees, amounting to about five percent of its 2,000-person staff.
What could possibly go wrong? - The generative AI boom has reached the US federal government, with Microsoft announcing the launch of its Azure OpenAI Service that allows Azure government customers to access GPT-3 and 4, as well as Embeddings.
Nips and tucks aim to give decades-old app a more modern vibe - Microsoft is redesigning File Explorer with the help of relatively new developer tools that are being applied to the decades-old Windows operating system.
Probably the first defamation suit involving an AI, but will it stick? - ChatGPT maker OpenAI is facing a defamation suit from a man seeking damages over statements it delivered to a journalist. The suit says the AI platform falsely claimed he'd been accused of embezzling money from a gun rights group.
They're being asked to sell, or modify, their code – and trust in your favourite add-ons could be a casualty - Code can be bought and sold, or access can be lent, but trust doesn't necessarily come along for the ride, as has been shown.
Will be followed soon after by SLE 15 SP 5 as org continues prep for ALP - The openSUSE Project has released its newest stable version, which should be closely followed by its enterprise sibling.
Boffins and machines write very differently – and it's easy to tell - Academics have apparently trained a machine learning algorithm to detect scientific papers generated by ChatGPT and claim the software has over 99 percent accuracy.
Brush up on your coding – more tech jobs are going to be hybrids that mix ops and software, or require AI skills - System administrators and IT operations pros might want to rethink their careers, because analyst firm IDC is predicting substantial drops in the number of people employed in such roles.
Suggest that Zuck has yet again unleashed stuff without a thought for the downsides - US senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to address AI safety concerns after its large language system LLaMA was leaked online for anyone to download and use.
And makes developer-grade OS betas available to all ducking loyalists - It's taken a ducking long time, but Apple has tweaked iOS's ducked-up autocorrect to get rid of its tendency to replace swearing with waterfowl references.
Deadly accident said to be unavoidable - A Waymo self-driving car has hit and killed a dog in San Francisco, California.
This could be a useful way to show what you’re up against, or give the clueless a stick to beat you with - Atlassian has decided that its Jira issue-tracker needs one more category of issue to track: security flaws.
Research shows developers have to find new ways to manipulate information for AI - Access to search engines doesn't tend to improve an AI chatbot's ability to generate accurate and up-to-date answers to queries, which means developers will have to find new techniques to make the interaction more useful, according to research.
Scaling up AI Initiatives to SuperPOD levels - The question dominating the media is how do we all exist alongside and move forward with AI? What does it mean for every business and organization across all vertical sectors and industries? And is it a stark, binary choice between adopting AI or embracing the risk of falling behind?
The sky isn't falling… but it's sign of bigger changes to come - Red Hat is to stop packaging a native version of the LibreOffice suite for its enterprise Linux distro.
Chocolate Factory under pressure to reverse decision to abandon image format - Apple is now supporting JPEG XL – a novel royalty-free image codec that Google last year controversially abandoned – in its Safari browser.
No single entity tells you to stay in your lane, why should brainboxes be any different? - The world will need an ecosystem of interlocking AI regulators, pundits argued at the ATxSG conference in Singapore today.
The doctor, and their steno-bot, will see you now. Then see another patient quickly because they don't have to stop and scrawl notes - US healthcare chain Carbon Health has introduced an AI tool to generate medical records automatically, based on conversations between physicians and their patients.
When Open Source Linux might be better with a price tag - These days there's such a big choice of community-supported Linux operating system distributions around, it sometimes seems like a mystery why anyone would pay to use them.
Changes are happening in Fedora and openSUSE immutable distros, too - Initially leaked in a forum comment, it has been confirmed in a blog post: Canonical will soon snappily jump aboard the immutable distro bandwagon.
Many people die in car crashes but we don’t outlaw cars, so bad AI might be OK, says Microsoft Asia president - Singapore's ATxSG conference has opened with a feisty encounter in which Microsoft's president for Asia argued that bad AI's worst effects - even deaths - may need to be tolerated.
Customers either face update cliff edge or loss of access in licensing shift - Intuit, purveyors of small business accounting software, has infuriated some customers after committing to turning off access to on-prem licensed desktop software or ending support and upgrades by the month's end.
'This is certainly the biggest change we've made since the campaign to remove SMB1' - Microsoft is getting closer to requiring cryptographic signing of SMB traffic by default for all connections on Windows 11 at least.
Researchers find 100,000 accounts spamming child abuse material - Twitter failed to take down numerous images of child sexual abuse material posted on its platform over two months, researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory will allege in an upcoming report.
Analysts positive about time-saving move - Couchbase has introduced a slew of new features that analysts say could help make life easier for developers when using its NoSQL database.
Hell hath no fury like a subreddit admin scorned - It didn't take long for the Reddit community to react angrily to details of the site's planned API pricing, with dozens of one million user-plus subreddits and hundreds of others joining a planned 48-hour blackout protest due to start next week.
If Ubuntu is getting you down, check out its grandad - Debian 12 "Bookworm" should arrive in a little over a week from now, with a raft of updated components – and no nasty surprises.
Plus: Around 3,900 jobs have been axed and replaced with AI, and Microsoft cosies up with a GPU provider to support OpenAI - The US Air Force denied testing software that led to an AI-powered drone "killing" its human operator in simulation after its chief of AI test and operations gave an eyebrow-raising presentation at a defence conference.
Intellectual property law crushed by zombie horde - On April 8, 2014, Emmanuel III Delly, the Primate Emeritus of Babylon of the Chaldeans and erstwhile Primate of the Chaldean Catholic Church, departed this life, in the full expectation of an eternal life to come. On the same day, another entity entrenched in the lives of millions also passed away as Microsoft declared Windows XP to be EOL – end of life. This being technology rather than theology, the afterlife kicked in straight away. Nearly 10 years on, XP is still remarkably healthy and this illustrates a truth that commercial software companies try to deny.
Errant code fix deleted entire servers rather than snapshots of database - Microsoft Azure DevOps, a suite of application lifecycle services, stopped working in the South Brazil region for about ten hours on Wednesday due to a basic code error.
Get Help? Yes, we highly recommend it, Redmond - Microsoft on Friday disclosed it will drop support for Cortana as a standalone app in Windows 10 and 11.
Have you considered taking up cycling? - Nothing says Happy Friday like news that Cisco is trying to help your boss pry yet more of your time and personal space from you: the Webex collaboration app will be equipped in select Audi cars from next year.
It’s not a crime if you don’t have a record - It is a sleepy corner of the United Kingdom, but even the southwest peninsula is likely not a place where there is no crime whatsoever for a whole quarter.
ML-powered fighter went HAL 9000 to rack up points, says colonel - An AI-powered drone designed to identify and destroy surface-to-air missile sites decided to kill its human operator in simulation tests, according to the US Air Force's Chief of AI Test and Operations.
Any chance of an ML model to identify labor law violations? Union busting? No? What a surprise - Amazon is reportedly deploying artificial intelligence to inspect goods and look for signs of damage before they are packed and shipped to people.
Next: Alcohol in non-alcoholic booze, bacon in vegan salads. We kid, we kid - The California State Assembly on Wednesday approved a law bill that will prevent autonomous trucks from operating on the US state's roads without a driver on board.
Second time lucky? But departments still lack funding to complete strategy, watchdog says - UK government has put £934 million ($1.15 million) on the table to update an ERP system in a cluster of Whitehall departments, a mega-project that was heavily criticized over lack of funding and business case.
Keep that hype train rolling, please - Chip designers like Nvidia aren't the only companies riding high on the AI hype train. Foxconn chairman Young-Way Liu Wednesday forecast surging server sales over the next year as adoption of large language models and other powerful AI systems – needed to train and run that tech – grows.
Just as helpline staff say they were laid off after forming a union - The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) has taken down its Tessa chatbot for giving out bad advice to people.
After that New York case in which attorney cited ChatGPT-hallucinated proceedings as real - After a New York attorney admitted last week to citing non-existent court cases that had been hallucinated by OpenAI's ChatGPT software, a Texas judge has directed attorneys in his court to certify either that they have not used artificial intelligence to prepare their legal documents – or that if they do, that the output has been verified by a human.
In-mem data warehouse unifies approach across environments, beefs up cost optimizer - In-memory data warehouse and analytic system Exasol is bringing the separation of storage and compute it introduced in its SaaS offering to hosted public cloud and on-prem installations.
'We need to prepare now' - There's another doomsaying open letter about AI making the rounds. This time a wide swath of tech leaders, ML luminaries, and even a few celebrities have signed on to urge the world to take the alleged extinction-level threats posed by artificial intelligence more seriously.
Rollbacks and workarounds abound - Microsoft is dealing with a couple of unrelated processor driver problems that are causing headaches for some Windows users.
No fault found, but execs responsible punished with reduced compensation - Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, Temasek, has taken the unusual step of announcing its disappointment with a particular investment, and punishing those responsible for it.
We almost forgot Redmond had an interest in anything but x86 - Microsoft is bringing its Windows data-protection security tools to the Arm architecture.
Plus: Anthropic raises $450m in Series C round, and Waymo cozies up to Uber to expand self-driving robotaxi fleet - AI may be progressing rapidly, but it appears Google still hasn't quite fixed an eight-year problem with its image recognition system: identifying pictures of gorillas accurately.
Python package pile prefers protecting programmer privacy - PyPI, the Python Package Index, began evaluating ways to reduce the amount of identifying information that it stores even before the US Justice Department came asking for data on suspect users.
Come for the Kubernetes, stay for the containers - After using Azure Linux internally for two years and running it in public preview since October 2022, Microsoft this week finally made its distribution generally available.
New beta versions of Thunderbird (and Firefox, while we're at it) to help set you up - It's beta season in Mozilla land and some cool shiny stuff is on the way. Versions 114 of both the Firefox browser and its distant cousin the Thunderbird email client are heading our way.
Take that, Acinetobacter baumannii! You may hide on hospital doorknobs but you can't outrun binary brainboxes - Neural networks have helped scientists to develop an antibiotic capable of fighting a highly resistant superbug commonly found in hospitals.
Says it'll keep track of what it hoovers up at post-layoff summit - In Red Hat land, some things remain the same – Fedora will still be supported, we're told – while others, including AI-driven applications, are starting to surface.
The unkillable OS rises from the grave… Again - Over 21 years after it first came out, the Microsoft operating system that will not die is receiving another lease of life. It's possible to activate new Windows XP installations, safely and securely, without a crack, offline.
No surprise: Nvidia is in the picture - Microsoft made sure to include Azure in the AI-fest that was the Build 2023 developer conference this week.
Python package packhouse ponders privacy position - In March and April, three subpoenas seeking data on users of PyPI, the Python Package Index, were presented to the Python Software Foundation (PSF).
Microsoft seems to have fixed update glitch for all OS versions but latest W11 - Some Windows users are seeing 32-bit applications failing to copy, save, or attach files, according to Redmond itself.
At least that's what internal comments from the CMO make it sound like - If you work at Microsoft, hey, good job. Stock's up 31 percent this year and the way top brass decided to reward you was to... not reward you. But we do sympathize, especially when the CMO says this is because the company wants to "invest in the AI wave."
Gartner asks for some fundamentals in a slew of AI-in-analytics announcements - Following a fortnight festooned with analytics and data management announcements, Gartner has warned that users are not keeping pace with analytics vendors' fashion-following desire to inject just about anything they get their hands on with some AI serum.
Doubts over Birmingham’s decision to replace SAP in plan once hailed an exemplar win by Larry Ellison - Birmingham City Council is set to pay up to £100 million ($123 million) for its Oracle ERP system — potentially a four-fold increase on initial estimated expenses — in a project suffering from delays, cost over-runs and a lack of controls.
Next step, AI-generated advertisers with AI-generated products for AI-generated people - Google plans to roll out generative AI tools that can automatically create online advertising campaigns personalized to users' search queries.
How to improve innovation in hybrid environments - Hybrid can offer the best of worlds and the worst. It can serve up too much complexity which can slow down innovation. And if your IT world is a mix of old and new applications, diverse infrastructure, and a variety of processes, you may be asking yourself how you can simplify in order to innovate faster and more efficiently.
Middle Kingdom users told to acquaint themselves with the Windows Subsystem for Android - Amazon.com has pulled the plug on the Chinese outpost of its Appstore.
Biden Admin expands plan for 'responsible' ML research and seeks to drive international talks on making binary brainboxes behave - The US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has updated its National AI R&D Strategic Plan for the first time since 2019, without making enormous changes.
Which when you think about it, is a pretty good reason to build a sustainable business - Australian software house Atlassian has decided to share its sustainability practices in a booklet titled Don't #@!% the Planet*.
Who wouldn't want to feed their enterprise into Project Helix for training and inference? Anyone? - Dell has hooked up with Nvidia to pitch enterprises on tools to build generative AI models trained on their own corporate data, rather than publicly available information such as that used by general-purpose large-language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT.
Maybe letting AI models loose on patients ain't a great idea, prof tells us - ChatGPT has failed to pass the American College of Gastroenterology exams and is not capable of generating accurate medical information for patients, doctors have warned.
No more downloading decompressors and dodging malware and payment demands, maybe - Microsoft has signaled it will add native support for tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and "many other" archive file formats to Windows.
Running an OS from local storage is soooo last year - Microsoft has delivered a preview of tech that lets a physical PC boot into a virtual one, running in Azure, instead of running Windows from its local drive.
If you like the idea of building software on Windows in the cloud, this may be for you - Microsoft, having tested its cloud-based software development environment on more than 9,000 of its own engineers, plans to invite external coders to think inside its Dev Box on July 10, 2023.
How VAST and NVIDIA can help you win the generative AI race. - This is no time for business to take a leisurely pit stop, as the rapid increase in generative AI and HPC use-cases across industries and business sectors shows.
ERP giant losing points on execution and flexibility - SAP's drive to move customers to cloud-hosted and SaaS systems is not being matched by its flexibility and operational sophistication, the user group representing the Americas has told The Register.
We speak to infra director after project temporarily freezes new user accounts - The Python Package Index (PyPI), home to more than 455,000 Python code repositories, caged itself to new users and their projects over the weekend because it could not deal with a rush of efforts to create malicious accounts and code libraries.
Now they want to catch up, prevent crooks, protect IP ... real soon now … after more talking - A weekend of high-level diplomatic meetings has seen the G7 and the Quad blocs prioritize regulation of AI, cyber security, supply chains for critical minerals, and open radio access networks.
Meanwhile, rivals circle and the hybrid cloud management market morphs - VMware last week extended the deadline for the completion of its acquisition by Broadcom – again.
The Australian Securities Exchange became a poster child for seriously serious distributed ledgers, but now wants to walk away - The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has signalled it will abandon plans to rebuild its core platforms on blockchain technology.
Plus: Official ChatGPT iPhone app debuts; Debt collectors using chatbots to chase debtors - Sci-fi author Tim Boucher has produced more than 90 stories in nine months, using ChatGPT and the Claude AI assistant.
Icon and UI purge plan premuted after organizations object - Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) as a desktop application on Windows 10 back on June 15, 2022, and permanently disabled its legacy browser on certain versions of Windows 10 on February 14.
Oracle, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux and EuroLinux all put out same version - Red Hat has released version 9.2 of its enterprise Linux distro, which is free for existing customers with current contracts. As usual, there are a load of recompiled rebuilds to choose from as well.
Didn't stop OpenAI rolling out iOS ChatGPT app, just made things a bit awkward - Apple has become the latest company to ban internal use of ChatGPT and similar products, ironically just as the OpenAI chatbot comes to iOS in the form of a mobile app.
Nearly quarter of a century after it wasn't released, Windows 2000 for DEC Alpha found on a discarded disk - A 64-bit test build of Windows 2000 Professional for the DEC Alpha processor has been rediscovered – shortly after the discovery of a C compiler that could generate binaries for it.
ServiceNow reckons it can shrink it with integrated cloudy observability - In a multicloud world in which IT teams are asked to manage their own infrastructure and apps as well as help out when lines of business buy and then break their own tech, ServiceNow thinks you might wish to consider shrinking Mean Time To Innocence (MTTI) – the amount of time it takes to prove that a problem isn't your fault.
Federal Digital Platform Commission proposed as specialists to sort out the stuff other agencies can't grok - US Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Peter Welch (D-VT) proposed legislation on Thursday to create a federal agency to oversee social media platforms and the development and use of AI systems.
ChatGPT, how many thousands of people should I replace today? - If there's one thing AI software seems to be good at right now, it's helping executives justify huge layoffs.
How Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized puts predictability into I/O pricing - Now that cloud computing has minimized capital expenditure for users, many of them face a new challenge: making operating costs more predictable. So, this month saw AWS tackle the last frontier in price predictability for its Amazon Aurora, fully managed relational database, input/output (I/O) costs.
Tricked-out template language offers alternative to verbose, plaintive prompts - Powerful language models like Bard, ChatGPT, and LLaMA can be difficult to control, which has spurred the development of prompt engineering – the art of phrasing input text to get the desired output.
Unlike AI's output, the web giant's profits are not hallucinatory - Chinese web and AI giant Baidu has suggested its long experience of working with local regulators means it, unlike others, is ideally positioned to bring artificial intelligence services to the Middle Kingdom.
Future robots don't need to be killers, they can just turn us against ourselves - An instructor has accused students taking his agriculture science class at the University of Texas A&M-Commerce of cheating by using AI software to write their essays.
Go go gadget data collection - The stewards of Google's open source Go programming language (Golang) have reversed course and committed to implementing software telemetry on an opt-in basis rather than turning data collection on by default and requiring developers to opt-out.
HR chatbots and more as maintenance deadline looms - SAP has launched a raft of AI and cloud technologies amid ongoing attempts to shift its majority on-prem ERP customer base onto a stack better suited to the fluffy white stuff.
Long, costly wars not the only thing US government good at getting stuck in - In a bid to find an exit strategy for its electronic health record quagmire, the US Department of Veterans Affairs has renegotiated its contract with Cerner parent Oracle to hold it accountable for a messy EHR deployment after pausing the rollout last month.
Got an Apple Silicon Mac? Want to run Linux? Then you'll need a Wayland-based desktop - Hector Martin, one of the lead developers of Asahi Linux, is warning that Wayland is the future of graphical desktops on Apple Silicon Macs.
Devs should need a license to build powerful models, OpenAI CEO adds - AI luminaries grilled by senators at a hearing on Tuesday agreed that fresh laws are needed to regulate the tech before wider real-world deployments.
Electric automaker has twice settled similar suits before they made it to trial - Tesla is back in court, this time over allegations its automatic software updates severely hobbled or completely disabled the batteries in Model S and X vehicles, with the only official recourse being a $15,000 battery replacement.
Private equity investor Thoma Bravo's portfolio swells - Qlik has closed its acquisition of Talend, tying together two data analytics and visualizion vendors backed by private equity biz Thoma Bravo.
Forget those huge hyped-up systems, that smaller one might be right for you. And here's why - GPT-3, PaLM, LaMDA and other next-gen language models have been known to exhibit unexpected "emergent" abilities as they increase in size. However, some Stanford scholars argue that's a consequence of mismeasurement rather than miraculous competence.
Google X-born upstart pushes graphical approach to industrial control - Intrinsic, a robotics platform upstart founded in 2021 by Google's X "moonshot" research group, showed off its first product and announced a partner on Monday.
Plus: Hollywood writers go on strike to fight against AI stealing their jobs, and more - Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris met with leaders from some of the top players in AI – Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic – this week to discuss AI safety risks as the government steps up efforts to regulate the technology.
Sometimes legacy systems must be preserved to safeguard a vital function. This was not one of those times - Welcome once again dear reader, to the sanctuary of sympathy we call Who, Me? where tales of technical derring-do are shared alongside stories of derring-at-least-you-tried.
Putin FOSS to work when Microsoft et al abandoned pariah state - Russia tops the global table for downloads of open source software over the last quarter, according to a survey tracking around 2,000 FOSS projects.
LLVM champ Chris Lattner is at the helm, so consider us intrigued - Modular, an AI startup with above-average technical cred, has unveiled a programming language called Mojo that aspires to combine the usability of Python with the speed of C.
Slack GPT and Einstein GPT for Salesforce users currently under development - Slack previewed generative AI tools on Thursday, aimed at helping boost worker productivity by automatically summarizing text in channels users might miss, or even drafting messages of a specific tone or length.
Indian software giant thinks you’ll ignore that in favor of the many tracker-killers - India's Zoho has decided the world needs a more secure and private browser, so has created one called Ulaa.
Don't let the robots take your money! That's the IRS's job - A bipartisan group of US senators has urged the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to "use all the tools at its disposal to counter AI-generated tax scams," and protect American taxpayers from money-grubbing crooks using chatbots and deepfakes to dupe marks.
Review will also look at barriers to entry where hyperscalers hold all the cards - Britain's competition watchdog is to cast an eye over the development and use of AI, saying it wants to ensure that innovation in the field proceeds in a way that benefits consumers, businesses and the wider UK economy. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears to be thinking along similar lines.
For those envious of Rust and Cargo - The recent debut of a Python tool called Rye has raised hopes that the programming language's long standing setup and packaging shortcomings may be solvable.
Climbing the software stack, new owner sees IBM and ServiceNow as rivals - It is nearly three years since Micro Focus recorded a $1bn plus loss, owing to COVID-19 disruption and the fall-out from the $8.8bn acquisition of HP Software in 2017. None of this stopped content management and enterprise integration vendor OpenText from paying $6 billion for the company in August 2022.
And a reminder that experience points matter a lot - Python is still a top choice for software developers, beating out other programming languages, according to a widely respected industry poll.
Digi-dollars are toxic in many ways and the administration wants the sector needs to clean up its act - The Biden Administration on Tuesday detailed a proposed tax designed to counter the environmental and economic effects of cryptocurrency mining.
Hock Tan thinks hybrid multicloud can be made much easier to use - Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has promised to spend $2 billion a year on research and development at VMware.
VR headset maker and software dev clash over blame - Drone-racing goggles from Orqa stopped working over the weekend due to what was alleged by the manufacturer to be a "ransomware time-bomb" embedded in the hardware's bootloader by a "greedy former contractor." Or as contractor put it, the code was provided under license, which had now expired, leading to the shut down of kit.
Microsoft OS stutters with Japanese and Chinese languages - If some of the applications on your Windows 11 systems are having problems with features like speech recognition and handwriting when using Japanese or Chinese languages, it's likely linked to recent updates to the operating system.
50-year-old ERP vendor reaches for 15-year-old AI to be down with the kids - ERP giant SAP has inked an agreement with IBM to use its Watson AI technology, the aim being to help users find apps on its solutions cloud.
Gosh, you're a fussy old lot, aren't you? - There are lots of distros out there. Some people hop from one to another, some stay on the same one for decades. What constitutes a good enough reason?
Don't get too comfortable, machines are doing more thinking - Businesses globally have introduced automation into their operations at a slower pace than previously anticipated, the World Economic Forum (WEF) opined this week.
This top-drawer AI tech has a major science-fiction habit - Boffins at the University of California, Berkeley, have delved into the undisclosed depths of OpenAI's ChatGPT and the GPT-4 large language model at its heart, and found they're trained on text from copyrighted books.
Student app maker says it's 'not a sky falling thing,' customizes own LLM just in case - Chegg's stock price plummeted 49 per cent on Tuesday, wiping nearly $1 billion off its market valuation, after the education technology biz blamed a slowdown in subscriptions on ChatGPT.
It's now easier to whip up the conversational tool of your HR department's dreams - Developers who want to create their own chatbot are getting help from Microsoft, a company itself deeply mired in AI and large language models (LLMs).
Others also blocked as company works on its own generative AI tech - Samsung has imposed a "temporary" ban on generative AI tools like ChatGPT after what appears to be an accidental source code leak.
Long-suffering Big Red customers 'may finally be ready,' says analyst - EnterpriseDB, a support and services company for database PostgreSQL, has launched what it calls a "risk-free" approach to migrating applications from Oracle's database to the open source relational system.
Issues remain in the costs for development and quality assurance in the cloud - Nearly half of SAP users in its German-speaking heartlands are either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the software giant’s cloud pricing strategy, according to the latest survey.
Brit regulator is merely heeding the Call of Duty - If IT was a perfume market, there'd be little to touch Petulance du Big Tech for a strong and unmistakable fragrance. Amid overtones of sour grapes and crocodile tears, the bitter almonds of injured innocence and aromatic arrogance linger long on the nose.
Not like it made that big of a difference or anything - Software vendors and the EU weren't interested, so giving it away was the best option. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Sunday celebrated the 30th anniversary of releasing the World Wide Web into the public domain.
Thousands of back-office jobs to go as Big Blue replaces them with brainboxes - For decades, IBM's slogan has been a single word: "Think". Now its CEO wants to replace thousands of human workers with AI.
What else are you going to do while waiting for it to charge? - What are you going to do in the 90-odd minutes it takes to charge your electric car?
The 1990s are back, baby - Microsoft plans to make web links in the Outlook for Windows app and Teams open by default in its Edge browser, regardless of the default browser chosen in Windows Settings.
NewsGuard finds 49 websites spewing robo-written garbage to scoop ad money - Makers of the content rating tool NewsGuard warned on Monday that "a new generation of content farms is on the way" after it found 49 news sites publishing content that appears to be completely fabricated by AI.
'Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That's scary' - Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in machine learning who is best-known for his research of neural networks, has resigned from Google to speak freely about the dangers of AI.
Watch the AI-generated anti-Biden advert from the GOP, and more - European lawmakers recently added a clause to the AI Act – legislation proposed to regulate machine learning systems – requiring AI developers to disclose copyrighted data used to train their models.
'Reject this capitalist logic' urges French legion within Linux slinger - Red Hat's decision to lay off around 800 people, or four percent of the company, has not only upset employees, it's fueled calls to unionize.
Shift off to Win 11 now, go on... better hope the company is giving out hardware upgrades - Windows 10 is reaching the end of the road, with the current release – version 22H2 – confirmed as the final one, and support for the platform scheduled to end on October 14, 2025.
Managed offerings now work in tandem to crunch data where it resides - Two SaaS products targeting open source data management and analytics technologies have joined forces in a move hoped to attract users who wish to model and manage data for crunching.
Boffins devise query language for LLMs to make them more civil and less expensive - Scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland believe one way to make large language models (LLMs) more affordable, and perhaps a bit more safe, is not to address them directly in a natural language like English.
Generative AI hallucinations are the least of our problems - A year ago, AI was big news… if you were a data science geek or deeply concerned with protein folding. Otherwise? Not so much. But, then along came generative AI, you know it as ChatGPT, and now everybody is psyched about AI. It's going to transform the world! It's going to destroy all "creative" jobs. Don't get so excited yet sparky! Let me re-introduce you to an ancient tech phrase: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO).
Windows Phone did this ages ago but flopped - Folks who use both Windows 11 and an iPhone will soon be able to get calls, receive notifications, and see iMessages pop up on their PCs, after Microsoft revealed plans to add iOS support to its Phone Link software.
Three minutes of video, 100 sentences of speech, and 24 hours gets you a bot to front your livestreams and answer questions - Tencent Cloud has announced it's offering a digital human production platform – essentially Deepfakes-as-a-Service (DFaaS).
We've progressed from blaming this kinda thing on millennials, immigrants, China, woke libs, etc - Dropbox axed 500 employees, or 16 per cent of its workforce, on Thursday as the online storage biz pivots to AI amid slowing growth.
Tycoon hopes to swerve deposition in Tesla death crash lawsuit - Tesla CEO Elon Musk may face a deposition in a civil lawsuit over a death allegedly caused by Autopilot – after a judge rejected arguments made by the billionaire's lawyers.
And a pin to pop this hype bubble would be nice, too - The US National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee has urged President Joe Biden to fill key positions and create new organizations to address rising societal concerns with AI models, in its upcoming first report.
NeMo Guardrails stops everything that made these chatbots so much fun - ChatGPT's testing phases pretty quickly revealed that the OpenAI chatbot and others like it could go off the rails – or "hallucinate" – with enough poking and prodding.
In the rush to commercialize LLMs, security got left behind - Large language models that are all the rage all of a sudden have numerous security problems, and it's not clear how easily these can be fixed.
It also required £20 million in extra funds – and Larry wants to brag about this? - Birmingham City Council's ERP overhaul to replace SAP with Oracle has required £20 million ($24.9 million) additional spending and is three years late, a meeting heard last week.
Addresses annoyances like 20-core VMs requiring 24 licenses - Microsoft has made the terms on which it licenses Windows Server 2022 a little more generous.
Plus: Bias bounties are the new bug bounties - Anyone with ChatGPT or AI or LLMs on their RSA Conference Bingo card is clearly winning at this year's event in San Francisco, as they all keep coming up over and over.
Also: ChatGPT Business tier will be available in the next few months - OpenAI, the Microsoft-bankrolled outfit behind the chatbot star of the moment, ChatGPT, launched a feature on Tuesday that allows users to restrict the company from using text generated in their private conversations to train large language models.
Dungeon master Sunak talks up 'funky' Silicon Valley sales pitch while schools left without maths teachers - Political leaders are given to the odd flight of fancy, but yesterday UK prime minister Rishi Sunak created a whole new fantasy realm in which his dreams for the nation's future could flourish unhindered by encounters with reality.
Figure not a typo, tho it will be paired with £900M 'BritGPT' supercomputer, which is a bit more like it - The UK government on Monday said it's putting up £100 million ($125 million) to launch a Foundation Model Taskforce, which is hoped will help spur the development of AI systems that can boost the nation's GDP.
No surprise for a panel that appears to enjoy taking away rights rather than granting them - The US Supreme Court has refused to hear a case arguing that AI algorithms should be recognized and protected by law as inventors on patent filings.
Customers shouldn't even notice, sniffs Linux distro CEO - On Monday, Matt Hicks, CEO of IBM-owned Red Hat, said the Linux distro maker plans to lay off just under four percent of its roughly 20,000 person workforce, which amounts to less than 800 people.
Despite Ellison's health world ambitions, Uncle Sam resets massive project over harm to patient health - A $10 billion Oracle Cerner project has ground to an indefinite halt following repeated problems with the rollout of electronic health records, some of which have caused physical harm to patients.
Anyone else who wants to take on Musk, please take note - Tesla has convinced a California jury to side with it in a court battle brought by a driver who sued the electric car maker over a 2019 accident she alleged was Autopilot's fault.
Silver Lake set to grab control of firm with legacy from Moon landing era - Private equity investor Silver Lake has tabled a bid to take over Software AG, a longstanding stalwart of the European software industry, for an implied value of around €2.2 billion.
NSFW? You'll need to check outputs for accuracy. Plus: OpenAI CEO says massive model era's over, Microsoft said to be building custom AI chip - Bard, Google's AI-powered internet search chatbot, can now generate and help debug code in over 20 different programming languages.
Rust never sleeps. Sometimes it dozes at the wheel - It's a classic story. An outfit, in this case the Rust Foundation, decides to change some rules, in this case the acceptable use of trademarks. The outfit's best friends, in this case the Rust community, takes umbrage and the outfit backs down.
If the news is bad for Broadcom, a remedy will need to be found very quickly indeed - The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has detailed its concerns about Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, plus a roadmap that would leave around two months to sort out any regulatory objections to the deal if Broadcom is to meet its self-imposed October 2023 deadline for the deal.
Secretary worries about critical infrastructure being held to ransom - In an address at the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday, secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas announced the department has created a task force to look for AI tools that can detect and defend against threats to national security – including those posed by China.
Sapphire Rapids joins the fun, and there's even something for s390x users - Developers of the open source machine emulator QEMU have hatched the project's 8.0 release.
Preps for Intel's Meteor Lake, improves support for Chinese RISC-V silicon, and gets to the starting line with a racing wheel - Linux 6.3 has arrived after a push that project boss Linus Torvalds characterized as "a nice, controlled release cycle" that required the seven release candidates he prefers and was supported by helpful developer behavior.
Next stop, Euro human rights court? - UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch is running out of options in his efforts to avoid extradition to the US to face wire and securities fraud, conspiracy, and similar charges in connection with the $11 billion sale in 2011 of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
That's news to some as analysts claim on-prem will be here for the foreseeable - SAP is telling investors that customers' migration to the cloud is only a matter of when – not if – despite evidence to the contrary from users, analysts, and other third parties.
Capgemini gets the job of saying goodbye to the Chocolate Factory - The UK's Cabinet Office is to migrate away from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 — in line with the rest of central government — in a move set to cost up to £15 million in third-party project support alone.
Governments also have no theory on how nefarious groups might behave using the tech - The proliferation of AI in weapon systems among non-state actors such as terrorist groups or mercenaries would be virtually impossible to stop, according to a hearing before UK Parliament.
Palo Alto Networks spots suspicious activity spikes such as naughty domains, phishing, and worse - ChatGPT fans need to adopt a "defensive mindset" because scammers have started using multiple methods to trick the bot's users into downloading malware or sharing sensitive information.
Assures advertisers 'guardrails' will stop anything bad from happening - With the rise of ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google's Bard, generative AI is seemingly inescapable, and it will soon power many of the ads you see on the internet.
Compares three-year development push to a famous battle that saw Communist forces triumph - Huawei has announced it created a homegrown ERP in just three years, and that the app now runs its entire business flawlessly.
Boffins warn of risks from chatbot model that, Dunning–Kruger style, fails to catch its own bad advice - ChatGPT, OpenAI's large language model for chatbots, not only produces mostly insecure code but also fails to alert users to its inadequacies despite being capable of pointing out its shortcomings.
Great minds in tech come together to solve hard problems – such as, why did anyone think Bard was a good name? - Google Brain and DeepMind are merging to form a new unit named, predictably enough, Google DeepMind to accelerate the development of general AI, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai argued on Thursday.
You may be all a Flutter over the installer - Ubuntu 23.04, codenamed Lunar Lobster, has crawled out of beta and onto public release today.
Martin, for it is him, tells El Reg: 'We've looked around for a real LLM-powered chatbot' - Just because you're banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life, that doesn't mean you can't launch a medical chatbot to dispense advice.
Plus: Musk threatens lawsuit, claims Redmond trained models 'illegally using Twitter data' - "Is Elon on crack? I'm not paying $42K PER MONTH for Twitter API access." These were the words of a Reddit user last night when it emerged that this was indeed the starting price for any more than zero pull requests on the "cheap" tier. Microsoft also swiftly erased Twitter access from its Ads platform with CEO Elon Musk then threatening to sue it for training "illegally using Twitter data."
It'll also give staff career advice - Keeping up with the must-have trend of 2023, Oracle has sprinkled a smattering of "AI" across its human capital and supply chain management applications.
Learn how bulk Amazon S3 imports open the floodgates for Amazon DynamoDB - Amazon's DynamoDB is eleven years old this year. The NoSQL database continues to serve tens of thousands of customers with high-volume, low-latency data thanks to its performance-intensive key-value pair and scalable architecture. Until recently, customers wanting to take advantage of its speed and capacity had just one primary challenge: how to easily get their data into DynamoDB.
Would you trust your life to the current generation of AIs? Yeah, we wouldn't either - Would you trust your life to an artificial intelligence?
Are you still so keen to have generative AI write your emails, sales proposals, blog posts ... ? - Problematic, racist, and pornographic web content is seemingly being used to train Google's large language models, despite efforts to filter out that strata of toxic and harmful text.
The union doesn't fsck around - Euro leaders officially opened the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) on Tuesday, an institution that will support the regulation of social media and search algorithms.
A bot shows up to help with a problem. Hopefully that's not two problems now - Australian collaborationware slinger Atlassian has licensed OpenAI's tech and sprinkled generative AI functionality on its flagship products.
A year after the EU, 2 years after Korea ... but it's all because of this CMA probe - Th UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says Google has promised to allow developers in the country to use alternative payment options after investigating the tech giant's control over Google Play in-app purchases.
Deal done as UK.gov negotiates new £12 billion framework - The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has awarded reseller Softcat a contract worth £249.7 million ($310 million) for a variety of Microsoft software.
vCentre will go straight to GA while vSphere still does a two-step tango - VMware has debuted the first major update to version 8 of its flagship vSphere suite and tweaked the product release cycle for future releases.
End of free money era and end of free data for building billion-dollar models - In a move seemingly designed to stop being used as a free training library for large language models, megaforum Reddit said it's going to begin charging companies who make excessive use of its data-downloading API.
Boris Eldagsen tells El Reg why he did it - A photographer selected as a category winner of this year's international Sony Photography Awards has rejected the prize, saying his entry was actually generated using AI.
Boffins foretell LLMs infiltrating finance and politics with confidently held views - If you want a picture of the future, imagine asking a large language model for a prediction.
New CFO sees interesting in-tray at 20 percent year-on-year growth database company - Database vendor MariaDB has cut a number of jobs and reiterated a "going concern" warning over its medium-term financial viability.
Rules proposed in EU AI Act are not enough to control 'very powerful AI' - Legislators from the European Parliament believe new laws are needed to regulate general purpose AI systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, as the technology is unpredictable and progressing faster than expected.
Should have wrapped proposed rules on name and logo use in unsafe {} ? - The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes.
Others are resigned to inevitability and argue it's better than a subscription - Microsoft is looking for user feedback on ads it's putting into the Windows 11 Start Menu for its products and services. If responses on Reddit is any indication, the response hasn't been great.
Mountain View may have nothing to fear, though – Microsoft's browser is still the underdog - Google is hurrying to add AI to its search platform following Microsoft's debut of OpenAI tech in Bing – a major motivator being that Samsung and Apple might be looking to switch lucrative mobile search deals.
But then opted for spreadsheets instead - The UK government considered using technology from Palantir – the US spy-tech firm – to help manage the National Health Service while it was disrupted by severe industrial action. But it ultimately opted to use spreadsheets instead.
6.4 is based on Ubuntu 22.04.2 with a lot of the questionable aspects fixed - Linux Lite version 6.4 is the latest point release from this Ubuntu remix aimed at new migrants from Windows.
Which is just how Linus Torvalds wants it and who can argue after what he recommended you eat for Easter - Version 6.3 of the Linux kernel is on track to debut next week after what emperor penguin Linus Torvalds has described a “nice uneventful release cycle’”.
Plus: Elon Musk wants Twitter to develop generative AI, and ChatGPT bots are flooding Reddit - OpenAI is not training a fifth version of its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) and is instead focusing on increasing the capabilities of its latest GPT-4 model, CEO Sam Altman confirmed last week.
PLUS: Warren Buffett’s TSMC worries; CHIPS Act bits China; Japan’s quantum investment; and more - China’s State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS) has reportedly allowed artificial intelligence to control a satellite.
Where there's a will… - The market for stolen ChatGPT accounts, and especially Plus subscriptions, is on the rise as miscreants in countries blocked by OpenAI try to hop the chatbot's geofences.
How to PostgreSQL MongoDB out of the equation - Halfway up a Himalayan mountain might not be the usual place to start a database company but then maybe FerretDB is not a usual company.
Middle aged spread begins as it joins IBM - When you turn 30, you're not a kid anymore. For some of us, 30 is a traumatic birthday. For Red Hat, which turned on March 27, it was a cause for celebration. From a business that got started in one of its co-founder's wife's sewing room, it became the first billion-dollar pure-play open-source company and then the engine driving IBM.
An ill-considered cron job turned into a nasty 2AM job - With Friday upon us, and a weekend next on the schedule, The Register once again brings you an instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tales of being dragged out at all hours to fix failures inflicted by the foolish, flummoxed, or fatuous.
Amazon Bedrock offers APIs for multiple models, plus EC2 to run 'em and create custom LLMs - On Thursday Amazon Web Services announced a new API platform, named Bedrock, that hosts generative AI models built by top startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI on its cloud services.
As Europe forms task force to steer probes into ChatGPT - US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is lately bent on passing bipartisan legislation enabling independent public audits of commercial AI products before they're unleashed on the world.
In Windows 11, it'll soon default to the Snipping Tool. And that's just fine with users, right? - Now that Microsoft has put that whole "aCropalypse" privacy problem in the rear view, the software maker is ready to get the Snipping Tool feature in front of more Windows 11 users.
Both FreeBSD 13.2 and OpenBSD 7.3 are here - New point releases of both the general-purpose Linux rival FreeBSD and the security-focused, traditional and rather minimalist OpenBSD have landed.
We should know why we see what we see, not be left in the dark - As it’s been about forty years since I’ve had pimples, it astounds me that YouTube’s recommendation engine recently served me videos of people with some really severe skin problems - generally on their noses. The preview images themselves are horrifying, and should really come with some sort of content warning. I immediately tell YouTube “I don’t want this” and “never recommend this channel.”
VSI releases OpenVMS 9.2-1 and x86 hobby licenses - VMS Software Inc (VSI) has opened its hobbyist licensing scheme for the x86-64 version of one of the most reliable OSes in the business.
And also, privacy safeguards - Italy's privacy watchdog will lift the country's ban on ChatGPT if OpenAI agrees to enforce rules protecting minors and users' personal data by April 30, it announced on Wednesday.
Strangling competition won't fly here, says Brussels - The European Commission has filed a statement of objections regarding Broadcom's proposed purchase of VMware, which the EC said may be harmful to competition.
Is this what the kids mean by owning the libs? - In early 2002, then Microsoft chairman Bill Gates issued his Trustworthy Computing memo to ensure that computing "is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony."
Software fix coming – that'll be a braking change we'd actually like to see - A mayhem of self-driving Waymo cars succumbed to San Francisco fog on Tuesday morning and came to a halt, briefly tying up traffic in the city's Balboa Terrace neighborhood.
For those who think spreadsheet app isn't wild enough, try some of these potential future widgets - Microsoft is going to let organizations try out experimental Excel projects it's working on.
Red-tape vague enough to land open source volunteers in hot water for iffy code - The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is concerned that proposed EU cybersecurity laws will leave open source organizations and individuals unfairly liable for distributing incorrect code.
If it reflects 'core values of socialism' it'll be fine. No pressure, then, given that chatbots make many mistakes - As China's tech giants deploy their ChatGPT clones, Beijing has released proposed regulations for research, development and use of generative AI chatbots, without quite answering whether the tools can conform to socialist ideals.
Commerce Dept knows it needs to know more as it ponders regulation - The Biden Administration on Tuesday issued a formal request for public comments to help shape potential policies that would improve accountability of artificial intelligence products and services.
Windows giant would never try to get an unfair Edge over rival, surely - After five years, Microsoft has addressed a bug in its Windows Defender antivirus software that led to high CPU usage and wasted electricity for users of Mozilla's Firefox web browser.
Web code-based cross-platform app kit offers a P2P alternative - Socket Supply Co introduced Socket Runtime today, an open source runtime for creating native mobile and desktop applications for Linux, macOS, or Windows using web technologies, but with optional peer-to-peer connectivity as a way to supplement or even avoid backend cloud services.
Has science GONE TOO FAR? - Chatbots like Google's LaMDA or OpenAI's ChatGPT are not sentient nor that intelligent. Nonetheless, boffins believe they can use these large language models to simulate human behavior inspired by one of the world's most popular early computer games and some AI code.
'Tongyi Qianwen' will drive cloud consumption, industry-specific AI, and smarter smart speakers - Alibaba Cloud has revealed a new large language model and plans to use it in everything from the cloud to smart speakers.
Plus: Aussie mayor threatens to sue OpenAI; Minors face ChatGPT ban; President Biden on AI - Meta has declined to detail how it will treat AI-generated deepfake content that appear on its social media platforms.
Robo-ride driven round the bend, or at least, should have - Cruise pushed a software update to its fleet of 300 self-driving cars operating in San Francisco after one vehicle crashed into the back of a bendy bus.
Someone in China upset its tech was ripped off? The irony - Baidu has sued Apple and some app makers after what's said to be fake copies of the Chinese web giant's ERNIE AI chatbot appeared in the iGiant's app store.
AI chat comes at a social cost by putting words in your mouth - You might find using AI technology helpful when chatting to others, but this latest research shows people will think less of someone using such tools.
It’s a complex argument, but there are good reasons why inference shouldn’t head into accelerators or GPUs - Training an AI model takes an enormous amount of compute capacity coupled with high bandwidth memory. Because the model training can be parallelized, with data chopped up into relatively small pieces and chewed on by high numbers of fairly modest floating point math units, a GPU was arguably the natural device on which the AI revolution could start.
Thanks.dev wants to spread the wealth directly to coders - In 2016, the Ford Foundation published a report on the lack of financial support for public source code and there's still a massive funding gap, but a new scheme may sort that out.
Service level agreement should really specify services, not just arrivals - Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tales of futile and furtive tech support chores.
Report says code has improved – and thousands could still end up falsely ID'd, argue privacy advocates - Police in the UK are preparing to reintroduce real-time facial recognition technology after a report found the latest versions of software used by law enforcement have improved accuracy and have fewer false positives.
Well that didn't take long, now did it? - Less than three weeks after Samsung lifted a ban on employees using ChatGPT, the chaebol has reportedly leaked its own secrets at least three times – including sensitive in-development semiconductor information.
Also clambers aboard the RISC-V bandwagon - India's government has decided not to regulate the growth of artificial intelligence in the country, after deciding that policy settings from 2018 don't need to be revisited.
DaaS is SaaS, so expect constant change that makes numbers moot - Microsoft has offered guidance for those trying to benchmark cloud PCs: don't bother.
And Nvidia's having none of Big G's claims of superiority - Google on Wednesday revealed more details of its fourth-generation Tensor Processing Unit chip (TPU v4), claiming that its silicon is faster and uses less power than Nvidia's A100 Tensor Core GPU.
Chatbot's overseers accused of collecting, using, disclosing personal info without consent - The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating OpenAI's generative language app ChatGPT after the watchdog received a complaint claiming the software was collecting, using, and disclosing personal information without consent.
Metaverse was plan A, is this plan B or C, or what? - Meta is building a generative AI system capable of churning out online ads to order and will charge businesses to use it, according to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.
How much, you ask? The answer to everything is $0.42 - Boffins at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have enlisted ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot that responds to written instructions, to repair software bugs without breaking the bank.
Fewer newly funded startups too, according to report - Global private investment and the number of AI startups decreased in 2022, while the industry's adoption of the technology has plateaued compared to previous years, according to new data.
German-speaking heartlands fear they'll be paying again for features they've already built - SAP is angering users in its German-speaking heartland as its push to migrate vital ERP systems to the cloud is hampered by confusion over the tools used to develop and manage systems in the new environment.
China's tech giants show, yet again, they're as much a slave to silicon valley fashion as anyone - Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Huawei are reportedly ready to satisfy local demand for generative AI chatbots in coming weeks.
98% accuracy, but tests suggest a human touch will beat the teachers - Academic plagiarism-detecting software vendor Turnitin demoed an AI-writing detection tool on Tuesday, with a claim of 98 percent accuracy at spotting machine-generated cheating.
Redmond claims service is (partially) restored, some users still stuck - If you're wondering why Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center isn't working, it's not just you: The service's login portal went down yesterday a little before 2200 UTC, and as of writing - nearly 18 hours on - Microsoft says the issue still hasn't been fully resolved.
That means next version of the most popular Linux distro is getting close - Ubuntu "Lunar Lobster" is the middle release between the 2022 and 2024 long-term support releases so this is when Canonical tries out some new stuff.
Block complies with Indian policy, but boost may violate avian network's state-sponsored media policy - Twitter has followed Indian government policy and geo-blocked an account from neighboring Pakistan, while seemingly violating its own policies by elevating the accounts of Chinese state-controlled media.
Germany may follow, France and Ireland look for guidance from Rome - As Italy suspends use of ChatGPT, other European Union countries are said to be interested in following suit over data privacy concerns.
Crikey! Get those banknotes to an ATM, mate! - The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ Bank) has stopped handling cash over the counter at some branches.
Reports suggest Beijing may speed past rivals with supersonic helper for its air superiority weapon - China may be aiming to match the USA's efforts to operate pilotless aircraft alongside crewed fighter jets, by creating a so-called “loyal wingman” drone to fly with the nation's J-20 supersonic stealth fighter.
OpenAI tech outperforms digital serfs toiling away on Amazon's estate - Machine learning models can do content processing and data sanitation work better and more affordably than people participating in crowdsourcing platforms, according to a trio of researchers.
Researchers hope their code will be used for images taken with the upcoming Vera C Rubin Observatory - An AI algorithm can help astronomers deblur images snapped by ground-based telescopes more accurately and more quickly than traditional methods, according to the latest research.
The only winning move is not to play - “Discoveries of which the people of the United States are not aware may affect the welfare of this nation in the near future.”
Oz upstart promised jira.domain.com, now offers something.jira.domain.com - Atlassian customers' eleven-year quest for custom domains continues, with the Australian upstart's proposed solution failing to satisfy.
ALSO: Synopsys releases AI tools for faster chip design, and Cerebras open sources family of language models - A Google engineer reportedly quit after warning CEO Sundar Pichai that the company was wrong to train its AI search chatbot Bard on text generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Microsoft's cloudy pal 21Vianet upgrades to M365 - China somehow, unbelievably, made it through the COVID-19 pandemic without a local version of Microsoft's Teams collaborationware app, but thankfully it won't have to face the next crisis similarly unarmed. On Saturday Microsoft 365 made its debut behind the Great Firewall.
Fresh installation image for the rolling-release edition of OpenMandriva - The project known as OpenMandriva has released new installation images for its rolling-release edition, with the latest kernel and the latest KDE Plasma – among many other choices.
A new version of very old software for a very old, but very important, computer - The LM-3 project has announced version 100, the last ever release of the system software for the MIT CADR Lisp Machine. So, both a new release and a very old one all at once.
Perché siamo il Garante, e tu sei pazzo - Italian privacy enforcers have opened an investigation into OpenAI's ChatGPT for allegedly violating EU and Italian privacy laws by collecting personal data of the country's citizens without "a suitable legal basis".
How AI demands a new navigation - Data has never been more valuable, and AI is the tool we use to mine its wealth. To the point where there isn't a business or government organization which doesn't seek to increase the information it holds, whether in health, medicine, financial services, energy, or manufacturing for example.
AI policy wonks slam chatty hallucination-prone model in formal complaint - The Center for AI and Digital Policy, a non-profit research organization, has urged America's Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI, claiming the upstart violated commerce laws by releasing GPT-4, a product the center believes deceives and puts folks at risk.
Hint: Hundreds of malicious npm and PyPI packages spotted - Machine learning models are unreliable but that doesn't prevent them from also being useful at times.
And it looks like educational flavor Edubuntu is returning, too - Ubuntu's Technical Board has voted and passed the motion: as of Ubuntu 23.04, Ubuntu Cinnamon will become the ninth official flavor.
All it needs to do is detect ■■■■■■■■■■ in the ■■■■■ at ■■■■■■ when the ■■■■■■■■ - Researchers at America's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are developing machine learning techniques to help the Feds crack down on rogue nuclear weapons.
Unmasking also in store for anyone who's 'posted, uploaded, downloaded or modified' tweet biz code - A California court has granted Twitter's request to unmask the GitHub user who uploaded its source code – along with anyone who "posted, uploaded, downloaded or modified" said code.
First version built on 20.04 hits smartphones and tablets of UBPorts fans - The UBPorts project has just released the fruit of a lot of labor, especially for a volunteer group, emitting a fresh version of its smartphone OS – which includes the Lomiri UI, formerly known as Unity 8.
Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk find something to agree on - The UK has proposed a light touch approach to regulating AI, coinciding with the first reports of a suicide that is alleged to have followed a week's intensive conversation with a chatbot.
Competition regulators in Britain opt for Phase II discovery over worries about prices and rival tech access - UK government will proceed with an in-depth investigation into the proposed buyout of VMware by Broadcom, dashing the companies' hopes the merger might be waved through quickly by regulatory bodies.
Please, let's not go all Skynet on this: Baidu has previously said ERNIE just isn't that impressive up close - Baidu's ERNIE chatbot, launched with great fanfare two weeks ago, has gone missing.
Replit after me - Google has tapped up IDE developer Replit to bake the startup's AI-powered code-suggestion tools into its cloud platform so that it can attempt to challenge Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.
It starts with chat bots inventing D&D campaigns and ends with AI all over your Excel and network logs - Microsoft's sprint to push generative AI into all parts of its broad portfolio is reaching the cybersecurity realm with the introduction today of Security Copilot, a GPT-4-based service that might assist security teams pushing back against modern threats.
Meanwhile technology-driven job creation is possible, Goldman Sachs says - Research from global investment bank Goldman Sachs claims that as many as 300 million jobs could be at risk from automation powered by generative AI.
Crimes Clearview has helped solve include murder and the devastating scourge of ... shoplifting - US police have used Clearview AI facial recognition tech to conduct nearly one million searches since the company launched in 2017 – but its founder and CEO said he's still unwilling to testify to its accuracy.
Could have something to do with Ubuntu kicking Flatpak. Meanwhile, SUSE may be pulling up closer to rival Red Hat - openSUSE is doing well: downloads are increasing, and a new version of the stable-release-cycle openSUSE, Leap 15.5, is coming soon.
Microsoft's attention has moved on, but flame still alive - If you miss the simplicity of putting an app together with drag-and-drop in VB, there are some alternatives that might tickle your tastebuds.
Aimed to make it twice as fast, more consistent and more compatible - Microsoft has released preview versions of an improved Teams desktop client for Windows that it aimed to make "twice as fast while using half the system resources" while also reducing user confusion and improving interface consistency.
Planes are taking off before check in time, healthcare and finance sectors also in a mess - On Thursday, March 23rd, 2023, the government of Lebanon postponed the start of Daylight Savings Time (DST) just two days before the time change was scheduled to occur.
Offering wisdom on AI signals the Alibaba boss is in Beijing's good books again - Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma has appeared in his homeland after over a year away, visiting a school and sharing commentary on the state of AI.
There is no honor among chatbots - Criminals are already using ChatGPT to commit crimes, Europol said in a Monday report that details how AI language models can fuel fraud, cybercrime, and terrorism.
Sounds like some IT teams are due for some training - Amtrak trains across the US are back on schedule after a server breakdown forced the rail service to cancel dozens of routes across the American Midwest and parts of California.
Essential knowledge for developers - Nothing stays still in the digital world and the evolution of secrets management is no exception.
Nature probes published research as it emerges journal paper allegedly used to entice $120m cloud deal - A Google-led research paper published in Nature, claiming machine-learning software can design better chips faster than humans, has been called into question after a new study disputed its results.
ALSO: Web traffic to Microsoft Bing up 15.8 per cent since launch of GPT-4 bot, and more - Google did not train its internet web search chatbot Bard on text from private Gmail accounts, a spokesperson confirmed to The Register.
ALSO: Indian space agency completes OneWeb constellation; Singapore warns on AI weapons; AUKUS tech pact advances - Although Chinese smartwatch shipments declined in 2022, Huawei, Apple and Oppo saw growth. Meanwhile Huawei's smartwatch designed for parents to keep tabs on their kids took the lead as the year's bestseller.
Search aspired to the the command line to the world, but ML models may get there first - OpenAI this week introduced ChatGPT plugins, a way to extend the scope of its chatbot language model beyond the slurry of internet training data to bespoke business information.
All your previously Snipping Tool cropped images aren't, basically - Microsoft is said to be preparing to fix the high-profile "aCropalypse" privacy bug in its Snipping Tool for Windows 11.
Beijing's Made in China drive fueled by Washington's export crackdowns - Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes.
The impact of AI on enterprise IT - There are endless anecdotes about the uses and abuses of information which suggest its acquisition awards power. And perhaps nowhere is this more relevant than in the field of enterprise IT, where artificial intelligence (AI) is already turbo-charging the value of data.
Without publicly accessible code, there would be no AI chatbot - When OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in late November 2022, no one expected much from the new release. It was just a "research preview," explained Sandhini Agarwal, an AI Policy researcher at OpenAI. "We didn't want to oversell it as a big fundamental advance," added Liam Fedus, a scientist at the org.
Five developers named Bob were not good at their jobs - Welcome once again, dear reader, to On-Call, The Register's Friday feature in which we share readers' tales of being asked to address avoidable annoyances.
It’s the only game in town for extreme ultraviolet lithography, and that makes it every chip shop’s new best friend - Dutch semiconductor equipment vendor ASML is likely to benefit heavily from the rapid adoption of generative AI and machine learning technologies.
Delayed mea culpa isn't a good look for a biz with 'open' in the name - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman feels "awful" about ChatGPT leaking some users' chat histories on Monday, and blamed an open source library bug for the snafu.
In the meantime, the CFO is also interim CEO - Out with the SAPper, in with a Hatter: Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen will take over at SUSE May 1st. Chief financial officer Andy Myers is interim CEO until the end of April.
A highly opinionated little live USB/DVD/VM image for the paranoid - The latest version of TAILS has improved memory management, which means it should work a little better on memory-constrained computers. It's the go-to option for secure private internet access.
This is that rare announcement that's far more significant than it sounds - Which of these appeals more: a new, free, Javascript framework for writing network-enabled 3D games, complete with integrated physics modelling and spatial audio… or, a complete, mature, dynamic programming platform that can implement the metaverse?
We each grab a mic and take apart the Bard stewards responsible for this hype - AI-powered chatbots are 2023's hot tech topic, although users report the results they produce are mixed. At best.
Alerts telling folks their 'device may be vulnerable' triggered by KB5007651 - A recent security update to Windows 11 has put the scare on some users by warning that Microsoft's Local Security Authority (LSA) feature is turned off and their system is vulnerable to attack.
Fears of server price hikes and locking rival hardware makers out of virtualization biz - Britain’s competition watchdog fears Broadcom’s proposed $61 billion purchase of VMware may lead to higher prices for servers and damage potential innovation.
Armed with GPT-4, Microsoft's AI 'pair programmer' can tag pull requests, parrot documentation, talk about code - Microsoft GitHub has trained its Copilot programming model to perform new tasks, making the already widely adopted AI assistant all the more unavoidable for developers.
And it's not the only hybrid synthetic biomaterial scientists are targeting - Scientists are using AI algorithms to design new materials, including synthetic proteins to make fake blood plasma and biological liquids found inside of cells.
Meanwhile, Bing can now output images, Adobe touts shiny art platform Firefly - Google is offering Bard – its chat-driven rival to ChatGPT – to netizens in the US and UK who ask nicely.
This article was not written by a computer, not that you could tell for sure either way - The popularity of word salad prepared by large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Meta's LLaMa has prompted academics to look for ways to detect machine-generated text.
The war in Ukraine is bad and wrong… but does blocking these contributions help Ukraine? - Code is being refused if it comes from developers in sanctioned Russian companies… but it's not clear if this is an effective move. Cui bono?
The hope? Reducing piles of admin for clinicians freeing them up for medical work - The University of Kansas Health System is set to trial software designed to help doctors automatically generate notes from conversations with patients, a move billed as "the most significant rollout to date of generative AI in healthcare" yet.
Utility began as a personal project, found its way into billions of devices - Daniel Stenberg has observed the 25th anniversary of the curl open source project with the publication of curl 8.0.0, the 215th release of the command line tool, and a modest tele-celebration.
Bot also botches some requests, but is about to be baked into cloud services anyway - Fresh from the launch of its large language model-based chatbot, ERNIE, Chinese web giant Baidu is rolling out of a cloud service integrated with the AI tool.
Meta-made small language model can produce misinformation, toxic text - The web demo of Alpaca, a small AI language model based on Meta's LLaMA system, has been taken down offline by researchers at Stanford University due to safety and cost concerns.
Concerns over consistent dialog boxes, pinning, default apps mulled - Microsoft appears to be heeding the various criticisms of Windows 11's desktop, Start menu, and taskbar, promising to give users and developers more control over what they see and use on the screen.
Hopes for predictive insights and automation, but no word on what it'll pay for that - HPE is looking to buy IT management specialist OpsRamp and fold it into its Greenlake IT-as-a-service platform to smooth out the creases businesses can face when dealing with multi-vendor and multi-cloud estates.
ALSO: Discord quietly edited its privacy policy after rolling out new generative AI features, and more - OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman admitted in a television interview that he's "a little bit scared" of the power and risks language models pose to society.
NHS could also be hit with higher prices as a result of the merger, CMA argues in initial investigation - The UK's market watchdog has warned that US health insurer UnitedHealth's £1.24 billion ($1.5 billion) bid to buy UK health records software supplier EMIS could lead to worse outcomes for the NHS.
Margins in software are enough to let you heat house, eat and buy a car - Adobe CEO and chairman Shantanu Narayen received a total compensation pack of more than $31 million in 2022, the company has confirmed ahead of an Annual Meeting of Shareholders scheduled for next month.
2023 is only one more than 2022, right? - Amazon Web Services (AWS) has delivered a major release of its home-spun Linux distribution – albeit rather later than it first promised.
Attackers exploiting the vulnerability could access encrypted data - Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) for Windows 10 and 11 systems that could allow access to encrypted data in storage devices.
Farmers need a right to repair - The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has called upon farm equipment maker John Deere to comply with its obligations under the General Public License (GPL), which requires users of such software to share source code.
Botched data deletion threat roils open source worlds - Container biz Docker on Thursday scrambled to bandage a self-inflicted marketing mishap, its ham-handed discontinuation of Docker Free Teams accounts.
Tough to see how this model can be released in good conscience - Prompt: Describe GPT-4 as if it were a medicine advertised on television, with appropriate warnings about side effects.
Spoiler: It's looking much better than 37 did at this stage - The Fedora project has released the beta version of Fedora 38. The Reg took it for a spin, and it handles well.
Some non-artificial intelligence has to have been involved - The US Copyright Office will consider an AI-generated work copyrightable if a human can prove they themselves put a meaningful amount of creative effort into the final content, according to a policy published on Thursday.
GitHub's JavaScript failings are someone else's opportunity - Socket has found a way to protect developers from npm, GitHub's insufficiently safe JavaScript package manager, by wrapping it in a security blanket.
Mmmm yes, we can't wait to 'reconnect with the soul of our work' ... just don't mention that lawsuit - Microsoft's 365 productivity suite is the latest to get an injection of AI, with Redmond using an hours-long webcast to say Copilot AI will soon be available across the entire suite.
Ups financial forecasts on back of 'healthy' Q1, as more and more of world goes digital - Not everything is going its way, what with the proposed purchase of Figma held up by regulatory hurdles, yet Adobe is bucking the trend across much of tech by upping its financial targets for this year.
Here’s how to spot the difference - If you're under pressure to improve your users' digital experiences, from ecommerce to delivering public services, you're probably painfully aware that legacy approaches to delivering software applications and features just don't cut it.
How MongoDB provides capabilities which help you do more with less - Welcome to the new development team. It's a lot like the old development team, but with two main differences: managers are asking devs to work in more joined-up ways. They finally understand that they must unlock the data across disparate systems in their organization so that they can use it to whip up new digital services for customers and increase internal efficiencies.
We're headed for models-as-a-service, apparently, and the OS doesn't matter - Chinese web giant Baidu has launched ERNIEbot, its chatbot based on a large language model, and claimed it represents not just a fine chatbot but also a reinvention of computing.
In case of apathy, break Glass - Google has halted sales of its business-grade augmented reality specs, the Glass Enterprise Edition.
Machine-learning safety and controls now everyone's problem - Microsoft has eliminated its entire team responsible for ensuring the ethical use of AI software at a time when the Windows giant is ramping up its use of machine learning technology.
Oh gosh. Looks like that bot just spilled that you plan to fire 20k staffers in Q4 - The UK government's spy agency is warning corporations of the risks of feeding sensitive data into public large language models, including ChatGPT, saying they are opening themselves up for a world of potential pain unless correctly managed.
It's also 17… and 18… and actually rather cool - The developers of specialized security-testing distro Kali Linux have released the first version of 2023, which marks the project's tenth anniversary… but only in this incarnation.
Poor interface, lousy lyrics, and bland answers mean this won't be the tool that makes Edge mainstream - I've taken Microsoft's OpenAI-powered Bing search engine for a spin, and quite enjoyed its attempt at providing context to a list of links – but was frustrated by the low quality of its sources, suggestions, and user interface.
HCI upstart adds a hybrid option that could be of interest to nervous VMware customers - Nutanix's ambition to bring its stack to all major clouds has taken an important step forward with news its Cloud Clusters (NC2) are now generally available in Microsoft’s Azure.
Weirdly coy about the AI model's size and what went into making it, tho - OpenAI on Tuesday announced the qualified arrival of GPT-4, its latest milestone in the making of call-and-response deep learning models and one that can seemingly outperform its fleshy creators in important exams.
PaLM springs forth - Google has promised to offer API-level access to its large language model PaLM so that developers can build it into their apps and workflows, and thus make the ChatGPT-like text-emitting tech available to world-plus-dog.
Investors nervous in same week that Silicon Valley Bank failed - In the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, this week is not the best time to spook jittery stock markets with weaker than expected financial forecasts, yet that's what GitLab has done.
The primary desktop in Ubuntu 23.04 and Fedora 38 is getting there - GNOME 44 is reaching readiness, just in time for inclusion in the next versions of the two big distro daddies, Ubuntu "Lunar Lobster" and Fedora 38.
Someone's still got some cash jangling about after the Silicon Valley Bank mess - Qualtrics, the experience management company briefly owned SAP, will be acquired by Silver Lake and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).
As Alphabet's Wing wants to fly millions of small packages by 2024 - Japan Post is closer to realizing its ambition of delivering letters – like actual, physical letters – by drone. It's futuristic and retro all at once.
'We're looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus' – which increasingly means staving off TikTok - Meta has decided non-fungible tokens (NFTs) don't have a future, and will wind down its efforts to support them.
The protocol is simple, unreliable, insecure, and on its way out - Microsoft recently outlined several new features it is building into Windows 11, from file recommendations and one-keystroke shortcuts for the XAML context menu in File Explorer to Local Security Authority (LSA) protection against secrets and credential thefts.
Human lawyers: 'DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm' - "Robot lawyer" DoNotPay is headed back to court – and not to prove its merits as a legally inclined chatbot. It's being sued for practicing law in California without a license.
Standards that cut across technology could help avoid confusing industry, MPs hear - The UK government should create laws common to autonomous vehicles to avoid a patchwork approach to specific technologies, according to industry figures speaking to MPs.
Plus: DuckDuckGo launches its own AI web search chatbot, and more - GPT-4, the long-awaited successor to OpenAI's generative models will be unveiled next week, according to Microsoft.
PLUS: Singapore tests AWS quantum network; Honda bulks autonomous truck; India tightens crypto laws; and more - The president of Indian tech services giant Infosys has left to join rival Tech Mahindra as CEO.
Caveats apply, your mileage may vary - Python is among the one of the most popular programming languages, yet it's generally not the first choice when speed is required.
Why do experiments and all that work when a model could just invent convincing data for you? - Generative AI poses interesting challenges for academic publishers tackling fraud in science papers as the technology shows the potential to fool human peer review.
Stormy clouds ahead? - Microsoft is bringing ChatGPT, with all its promises and shortcomings, to world-plus-dog as a cloud service in Azure.
That's equivalent to 271 Big Blue workers - IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna's 2022 financial package was a healthy $16.58 million – equivalent to the median pay for 271 of his employees.
Like so many of his promises, it's probably one he can't keep - On February 21, Twitter god-king Elon Musk proclaimed "our algorithm is made open source next week." He added it wouldn't work well at first, "but it will improve rapidly!" That hasn't happened.
Inclusion is good business - Microsoft offers an enormous portfolio of software and services, used by billions of people – a substantial proportion of the world's population. As a substantial number of people have accessibility needs, so too do Microsoft's customers. That's the impetus behind the software behemoth's Ability Summit – held this week for its 13th year.
Engineers who contribute to public projects told to enroll - Microsoft's GitHub code hosting biz plans to begin requiring developers who contribute to public projects secure their accounts using two-factor authentication (2FA) by Monday, March 13.
In theory, this should reduce the number of servers needed to package apps - VMware has turned to containerization to improve the performance of virtual desktops and apps.
Piggybacking on the hwcaps tunable in glibc, it's shipping platform-optimized libraries - SUSE, and the openSUSE project it sponsors, has a way around the issue of optimizing its distro for specific versions of the x86-64 architecture.
Island nation reworks digital infrastructure found to have slowed down pandemic response - The Singapore prime minister's office admitted on Wednesday that it should have "been clearer" on plans to use data collected by its COVID tracking program from the onset, and that allowing the data to be used in police investigations had affected public trust.
Remote PowerShell Protocol users must shift into PowerShell v3 module - Microsoft shutting down RPS connections for new Exchange Online subscribers on April 1 as part of its ongoing push for more secure modern authentication methods.
Like 'Bookworm' itself, software manager will have improved handling of non-free packages - The forthcoming "Bookworm" release of Debian, version 12, will include a new version of the APT packaging tools, with better handling of non-free software.
You want our jobs? Hey, welcome to the real world, pal - In January, at a Mark's apparel store outside Vancouver, Canada, a Sanctuary AI robot successfully performed assorted retail tasks that would normally be done by human workers.
If you want to use the diagram tool for the long haul, it's going to take a subscription - Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.
Ensuring latency doesn’t slow your cache - We've all streamed a film which buffered every thirty seconds and caused us to give up ten minutes in with raised blood pressure. And the problem's not just limited to streaming.
Imagine humans … watching humans …watching TikTok … forever - "I finally had enough," a friend recently confessed. "Lying in bed very late at night, watching one video after another on Instagram. Suddenly: midnight. How did that happen? I put the phone down, turned off the light. And couldn't sleep. Mind still whizzing after all those videos. Finally, I got up, turned on the light, reached for my phone … and deleted Instagram."
That's a bit of a Reach - Reach, the owner of the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues.
Minister wants to release 'one of the largest datasets in the world' - India's ebullient tech minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, has teased the release of guardrails for AI, plus publication of "one of the largest publicly assembled datasets in the world" as part of a forthcoming IndiaAI program that will explain how the nation puts artificial intelligence to work.
Don't worry... 'The good will outweigh the bad, by at least tenfold. Probably closer to 100x' - LLaMA, Meta's latest large language model, has leaked online and is available for download, despite attempts to limit access for research purposes only.
Second time before Congress a charm? - A group of 16 US lawmakers today reintroduced a bill that would ban the nation's federal agencies from using facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technologies.
Does it have in-app purchases? You betcha - Working on a Mac but preference or necessity driving you to Microsoft's Outlook? In an unexpected move, the software giant is making its native MacOS mail client free to use, meaning you won't need a subscription to Microsoft 365 or an Office license to fire it up.
DBs aren't just about theory – they are complex systems designed to perform demanding tasks - Welcome back to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument.
Microsoft doesn't even want you to use these unstable releases, will migrate you to them anyway - Microsoft has created a fourth channel for test versions of its Windows operating system and recommended Windows Insiders don't use it – even though they'll be migrated to it by default.
Software scans to give rovers a clue - AI-infused algorithms developed to find signs of life in extreme terrestrial environments could help robotic rovers sent to other planets search for signs of alien life, scientists suggested in new research published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.
Collaboration upstart previously said it would 'moderate' hiring and use layoffs elsewhere to boost its talent pool - Atlassian has announced a five percent reduction in its workforce as part of an effort it founders described as a "rebalancing" that will allow the collaboration upstart to focus on its changing priorities.
Aims to cut out rote work, and possibly rote workers - Microsoft has dosed its Dynamics 365 business apps with "AI capabilities" to help human workers delegate tedious tasks to machines.
Yay for investors, eek for customers? - Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff promised he had received expert advice in tackling the company's problems – ones that have seen it resort to cutting around 10 percent of its workforce – by committing to following the Oracle playbook.
And a choice of ways to get the latest KDE too, if that's your thing - For significant subcomponents of Ubuntu – and its derivatives – you don't need to wait for the next release to appear. You can upgrade major parts on the fly.
How to optimize IT investment with Nutanix - The only certainly these days is perhaps uncertainty. The combination of static budgets and economic pressure means it's even more important that businesses prepare themselves for the future by driving their digital transformation, but they must also simultaneously maintain business critical IT services.
When you need something reliable that won't drop out of support, open is the way to go - Energy grid operators could increase the reliability of their networks by adopting software designed to manage nuclear fusion experiments, claims the UK's Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Two experts go head-to-head – then you decide - Welcome to the latest in our series of Register Debates, in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favor or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.
Wake up and smell the cortex - In Hollywood, brains in jars mean three things. Mad scientists at work, we are tampering with forces we cannot control, and something monstrous is coming. We are now making brains in jars for real: the mad scientists are at Johns Hopkins University and the forces they are tampering with include video gaming. Yes, there will be new monsters, but some old ones will be slain along the way.
Plus: OpenAI says it won't train on customer data, and Microsoft rolls out new Bing AI modes - Elon Musk is reportedly trying to recruit developers to build a large language model that will be less restrictive and politically correct than OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Know the ingredients before mixing the code. Oh and pay open source maintainers for goodness' sake... - The common analogy when talking about software bills of materials (SBOMs) is the list of ingredients found on food packages that lets consumers know what is in the potato chips they're about to eat.
Security features in AMD Epyc chips push confidential computing effort - Microsoft is taking advantage of hardware-based security features in AMD's Epyc processors for its confidential containers running in Azure, as part of its push into confidential computing.
Intros 'universal licenses' that can be deployed anywhere and include extra support sweeteners - Citrix has announced a licensing scheme that's bad news for holders of so-called perpetual licenses because the vendor will stop maintaining products sold to "larger customers" under that scheme.
It not only told everyone I died but tried to fake my obit. Are we ready for this machine-driven future? - “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
No new cars, unanswered questions, and FSD goals still looming in distance may be why stock is tanking - Yesterday's four-hour Tesla PR marathon, rather than exciting investors as it was supposed to, ended up a snoozefest.
Along with better integration for all three editions - Linux Mint project lead Clement Lefebvre has shared some more details about the forthcoming version 21.2, including new versions of both Cinnamon and Xfce.
Oi! Organoid Intelligence could be more data- and power-efficient than AI - A new field of research dubbed "organoid intelligence" is emerging as scientists look to build computers from lumps of brain cells grown in a petri dish.
Hear how Nutanix enables digital transformation and keeps business critical IT services at optimal performance strength - We're all feeling the pinch. The impact of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine has done little for consumer wallets while businesses face shrinking budgets and increasing costs. Yet no one can afford to skimp on critical IT services.
Opera founder's outfit continues to push the browser functionality envelope - There are plenty of Chromium-based browsers out there, but few of them fit in as many new features as Vivaldi manages to, or run on as many devices… including cars.
'Continuous innovation' means it's time to refine your WSUS skills unless you want users doing all sorts of weird stuff - Microsoft has quietly announced a change to the feature release cadence for Windows 11: it will add features every month, if it wants to.
Buys GK Software and intends to put 1,600 new people on staff – some of them oldies - Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu announced on Wednesday that not only does it plan to hire 1,600 employees, it is also acquiring German software-for-retailers provider GK Software to grow its cloud and software-as-a-service business.
But Carnegie Endowment worries a handful are real, and that the ITU is 'susceptible to manipulation' - China's attempts to influence technical standards groups have mostly been uncoordinated, unsophisticated and unsuccessful – but the US needs to keep watch on Beijing's activities, especially at the International Telecommunications Union.
'This has to be a loss-leader to lock out competitors' - After a limited trial OpenAI has unleashed its ChatGPT and Whisper models on developers, who can now integrate chatbot interaction and speech-to-text conversion into their own applications through API calls.
It works! Now let's cut staff by 8% - Alphabet's Waymo subsidiary says its driverless cars have driven more than one million miles on public roads with no human at the wheel.
If you're using ExplorerPatcher or StartAllBack, this is why your computer won't start - The massive update to Windows 11 rolled out this week is proving to be a headache for users who are running some third-party UI customization applications on their devices.
Celebrated, unhinged search tool pushed in latest OS update - Microsoft is continuing its efforts to foist upon us its controversial OpenAI-powered chat-driven Bing search bot.
Next version of Red Hat's bleeding-edge distro won't drop all the older tech it had hoped to - The shape of Fedora 38 continues to get clearer as next month's planned release approaches. The latest meeting of the Steering Committee (FESCo) has decided some stuff just isn't ready to remove yet.
Acting on data as it is created is the key to exploiting the oncoming information tsunami - Data volumes globally are ramping up at an insane rate. According to market intelligence company IDC, the world's data will grow to 175 zettabytes in 2025 – a volume of data that, if copied onto BluRay media, would create a pile of discs that spans the distance between the earth and the moon 23 times.
We're not just your grandmother's data warehouse, CEO tells El Reg - Cloud ambitions came with a plan to pull out of on-prem consultancy and services at Teradata, the data warehousing specialist whose userbase includes some of the world's largest banks and retailers.
Alleviate stress by migrating database management to the cloud, says OVHcloud - It's a tough job being a database administrator, trusted with information which is critical to the success or failure of the organization you work for and simultaneously saddled with all the stress that comes with managing it and keeping it safe.
32 virtual qubits are yours to manipulate with classical C or Python code - Intel has released a Quantum software development kit (SDK) that simulates a complete quantum computer using conventional hardware.
Exaggerated claims? About unproven technology? Ask your chat bot if it knows what fraud means - The US Federal Trade Commission has re-upped its admonition to businesses that they should not exaggerate the role or capabilities of artificial intelligence in their products.
This is starting to become a common theme - Tesla and Elon Musk are establishing a pattern. Less than a month after defeating one shareholder-led class action securities fraud lawsuit, another has begun.
Code update will remove the need for translation layer in Linux distros - With WINE 8 out, the team is merging in the code changes to add support for the Wayland display server protocol.
Battery usage optimization comes to Apple MacBooks - Google's code gremlins have been tweaking the company's Chrome browser under the hood to help Apple's MacBooks consume less power.
Companies say they want to see that the health service 'stays in control' in face of fierce competition from Palantir - The contentious procurement of the UK health service's £480 million ($580 million) Federated Data Platform (FDP) – which US spy-tech firm Palantir is tipped to win – has seen a new competitor enter the fray in the form of a UK consortium of vendors.
Another option for devs burned by VMware snubbing Apple platforms - Apple developers can now access macOS instances orchestrated by Kubernetes on AWS with MacStadium's Orka platform.
Board chairman Hasso Plattner lines up successor to take ERP giant into uncharted territory - SAP has begun the succession process which will see the replacement of co-founder Hasso Plattner as chairman of the German software giant's supervisory board amid a seismic change in technology landscapes.
Updating the nation through the power of games. And ads. Lots of ads - Ten Japanese companies, including IT services giant Fujitsu and automobile manufacturer Mitsubishi, have embarked on a collaboration to create an advertiser-friendly immersive gaming environment they've grandly named the "Japan Metaverse Economic Zone."
While we're here, what do you think of Zuck announcing a vague catchup plan to build 'AI personas'? - ChatGPT, the buggy generative AI chatbot that is apparently going to change every industry forever by responding to written prompts with slabs of stilted, shabby and sometimes entirely fictional prose, is unable to explain why it experienced an outage on Monday.
Those that signed up for the $15,000 package told to queue behind those waiting for safety upgrade - Tesla has hit the brakes on the rollout of its Full Self-Driving Beta software to new customers, while it delivers an update to faulty code in existing at least 362,758 cars already using the software in North America.
Elites won't accept anything that takes away power, we're not dazzled by fake predictable intelligence - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said his upstart is preparing for the coming of artificial general intelligence – though there's disagreement about what AGI actually means and skepticism about his claim that OpenAI's mission is to ensure that AGI "benefits all humanity."
When AI gives you lemons, you make orangeade - Microsoft is aggressively pushing OpenAI's artificial intelligence technology into seemingly every nook and cranny of its universe.
Latest twist in long saga of trying to monetize desktop penguinistas - The GNOME and KDE organizations are working on a proposal to crowdsource a big change in Flathub: to make it an app store for Linux – including for paid software.
Add-on package manager for macOS (and Linux if you need it) - Homebrew is a handy tool if you work in a terminal window on a Mac, which lets you quickly and easily install a wide variety of familiar tools from the wider FOSS world.
Softening requirements to spur hardware sales? Nope, it was an error - Microsoft says it has dispatched a fix for a glitch that saw it offer an "inaccurate upgrade" to Windows 11 for some users running Windows 10 on computers that were ineligible to receive it.
Converged environment formerly known as Unity 8 breaks free from Ubuntu – and indeed, from tablets - Some significant news about what was Canonical's next-gen desktop: it now works well enough on Debian to be its developer's "daily driver."
Plus: Lensa AI app maker sued for wacky app photo collection, Supreme Court debates chatbots - Meta released its Large Language Model Meta AI, torturously dubbed LLaMA, which promises to perform just as well if not better than similar systems containing billions of more parameters.
Twin cities? There’s an app for that - Technologists have been attempting to create digital worlds since the dawn of computing. The industry has been entranced then left feeling deflated by digital environments ranging from The Sims™ to Second Life™, to virtual reality headsets, and arguably, the initial variants of the Metaverse.
Some investors and creative pros may cheer, but Adobe's not done yet - Some investors felt Adobe’s purchase of Figma was overvalued, creative types that used the web-first design collaboration startup's wares were nervous about its takeover, and it seems the US Department of Justice is too.
How to support multiple customer touchpoints in a single view - There's no other industry where change is quite so constant as retail. It has always been a challenging environment where buyers and sellers alike expect to be able to conduct transactions from any location – the deck of a cruise ship, on a mountain in New Zealand, or in a basement in New York - using any device to hand. But this can be a problem for retailers who offer just a single customer touchpoint.
Representative even given opportunity to pitch tech to government during science committee hearing - Microsoft chose a UK parliamentary hearing as the venue to slam the EU's efforts to regulate the development and introduction of AI.
Developers and, more to the point, the companies that employ them - Even now, I run into those who think Linux and open source software is made by people living in their parents' basement and writing the code out of the goodness of their hearts. Wrong. So, so wrong.
Comic sans Midjourney images would be eligible for IP protections - Images generated by Midjourney and other AI text-to-image tools are not protected by US copyright law since they "are not the product of human authorship", according to the nation's Copyright Office.
Software allegedly rejects applicants based on 'race, age, and/or disability' - Workday stands accused of building algorithms that have resulted in bias against Black applicants in their 40s, according to a lawsuit.
You can add Snap's rival cross-distro packaging format back in yourself - Canonical has issued an official edict: the approved Ubuntu remixes must remove Flatpak support as of the next release.
Monopoly giant can't stand it when anyone else has a monopoly - Microsoft Edge has been spotted inserting a banner into the Chrome download page on Google.com begging people to stick with the Windows giant's browser.
Meanwhile Baidu plans to add its Ernie generative AI to search in March - China's reaction to ChatGPT fever has seen a university-developed version crash within hours of launch, even more new regulations from Beijing, and an accelerated timeline to deploy the tech from local AI giant Baidu.
Cap on daily interactions also lifted slightly – to 60 questions per day - Microsoft is integrating its Bing chatbot into iOS and Android apps, allowing users to access AI-powered search features on mobile devices.
$20k Pwn2Own prize for the humans, zero for the AI - It was bound to happen sooner or later. For what looks like the first time ever, bug hunters used ChatGPT in a successful Pwn2Own exploit, helping researchers hijack software used in industrial applications and win $20,000.
Pay no attention to that Supreme Court case about Twitter's algorithmic liability - If Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk is to be believed, the social media platform's algorithm is finally going open source, and it's happening "next week."
Doesn't the world have enough problems? - Microsoft, having committed to a "multi-year, multi-billion dollar" investment in OpenAI, is so besotted with large language models like ChatGPT that it sees such savvy software simplifying how we communicate with robots.
The Unified Payments Interface takes an important stride forward – as does India's soft power tech push - India's use of government-created tech to expand its sphere of influence advanced yesterday, when Singapore agreed to link the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to its own PayNow scheme – enabling real-time cross-border payments between the two nations.
Any sufficiently advanced chatbot is indistinguishable from spam - Science fiction and fantasy periodical Clarkesworld Magazine has temporarily paused submissions from authors after being inundated with AI-generated stories.
Maybe one day war will just be machines fighting machines - The US Navy has just taken delivery of a ship designed to operate autonomously at sea for up to 30 days.
iGiant shuts dev beta loophole - Sorry, early adopters, cash-strapped developers or anyone else that wants to test developer builds of iOS and iPadOS before public betas are available – the latest beta is doing away with configuration profiles that allow any device to download dev-only builds.
If the Ribbon is your sort of thing, penguin-flavored options include this and WPS Office - There are new versions of both OnlyOffice and the Chinese WPS Office. If LibreOffice looks and feels clunky and old-fashioned to you, there are other options.
4 million contract migration went as planned, spokesperson insists - Despite declaring the problems resolved, German financial institution Postbank is receiving complaints about poor service following its migration to a new technology platform.
System back online with money still there, thanks to Japanese regulations - FTX's Japan outpost announced on Monday it would once again allow withdraw of both fiat and crypto assets, beginning at noon local time on Tuesday.
Amateur fleshbag defeats synthetic in 14 of 15 games - Think that puny humans don't stand a chance when playing strategy games against an AI? You may have to think again. One person in the US beat an AI at the ancient game of Go by simply distracting it from the attack he was making, a tactic that would be unlikely to work on another meatbag.
Big Red 'has a history of changing offerings' without allowing renewals of legacy products - Gartner is warning that Oracle "actively targets organizations" on Java compliance following the introduction of new contractual terms for the code.
Depending on tier you use, rises of between 257% and 900% scheduled for May 1 - Microsoft is implementing massive price hikes for developers that use the Bing Search API, with some of the tiers scheduled to see rises up to nine times their current level.
Don't rush in if you don't need it – there may be more cons than pros - Canonical has made a Real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 available on x86 and Arm… but only to Ubuntu Pro customers, and there are some potential issues you should know about.
Creating a single view of multiple customer touchpoints - The retail Industry has seen has seen enormous structural change over the last decade, driven by technology, new entrants and changing demands.
The sysadmin who made this mistake just barely survived the NSFW backlash - Once again, gentle reader, it is time to dive into the treacherous waters of Who, Me? in which readers tell us tales of days when things did not go quite right.
90-day stretch comes after Euro-probe paused for production of paperwork - VMware and Broadcom have given themselves more time to conclude the acquisition of the former by the latter.
Also: Google asks staff to rewrite Bard's responses; EU's AI bill may stall; Endangered architects - Microsoft will start limiting the length of conversations with its AI-driven Bing chatbot to 50 turns per day, in a bid to prevent it generating unhinged responses to user queries.
Intel has as much to celebrate as anyone thanks the arc of progress catching up to its GPUs - Linus Torvalds has, as foreshadowed, released version 6.2 of the Linux Kernel.
War, it turns out, changes regularly and we have a chance to be proactive, say signatories - A group of government, academic and military leaders from around the world spent the past few days talking about the need to address the use of artificial intelligence in warfare.
The init system many love to hate intros tool to create Unified Kernel Image files - The first systemd release of 2023 is here, and it introduces a brand spanking new tool for building Unified Kernel Image (UKI) files.
Dislike those messages about Ubuntu Pro? Then you won't like this - Ubuntu and its various remixes remain free distros, but it's getting harder to remove the messages about the paid Ubuntu Pro offering… which is by design, and it's not going away.
Those billions just may have dissuaded iPhone giant from building rival search, beefing up Safari - Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using Google Chrome on iOS, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Elon Musk takes issue with the word 'recall' given this will be an over-the-air update - The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has sent Tesla a letter [PDF] in which it acknowledges Tesla will conduct a recall of the Full Self Driving Beta (FSD Beta) software in up to 362,758 cars, as the software is unsafe.
VMware approves even if it's not yet on the approved list - Microsoft has started to officially support Windows 11 on Arm running as a virtual machine on Macs powered by Apple's own M1 and M2 CPUs.
Ask it more than 15 questions in a single conversation and Redmond admits the responses get ropey - Microsoft has confirmed its AI-powered Bing search chatbot will go off the rails during long conversations after users reported it becoming emotionally manipulative, aggressive, and even hostile.
New versions of the two dominant desktops for Linux and other FOSS Unix-a-likes - Version 5.27, the latest LTS release of the KDE Plasma desktop, is out, and a beta of the latest GNOME, version 44, is here too.
Software will be free to download by anyone wanting to protect their work - Researchers have developed a technique aimed at protecting artists from AI models replicating their styles after having been trained to generate images from their artwork.
Cerberus data analytics system to give us a new reason to sweat at the landing gate - UK aerospace and defence company BAE Systems has won a £38 million ($45.7 million) contract for "an advanced, highly capable analytics and targeting system" for intelligence officers at the nation's borders.
What the big players and an outlier are doing, and why - This is the second half of a feature about work undertaken to harden and improve Linux, beginning with part 1 here.
Software behemoth makes Windows updates smaller, faster … how about less buggy and more tested? - Developers and other users of Microsoft's .NET Framework will soon be noticing changes to the company's Unified Update Platform (UUP).
Charlie Munger also thinks semiconductors are a terrible business, Taiwan's safe from China, Elon Musk is 'peculiar' - When a 99-year-old man says that "cryptocrapo" is for "idiots" and banning it is not a bad idea, many might think it's an "Old man yells at cloud" moment.
First public word on 'new' direction reveals focus on core technologies and 'a ton of hiring' to modernize them a bit - Citrix has broken its silence on future plans with a presentation by vice president for product management Calvin Hsu to its user group. He revealed the business unit of the Cloud Software Group plans to spend 2023 modernizing its core applications for hybrid clouds and hybrid work, licenses that span multiple environments, and "a ton of hiring" to make that happen.
If you could come this way and answer a few questions, say 16 countries - Adobe's proposed $20 billion buy of web-first collaboration design startup Figma has hit a potential stumbling block, after the European Commission confirmed members states raised worries about competition.
Another of the self-proclaimed BTC inventor's lawsuits rumbles onward - A company owned by the man who claims to have invented Bitcoin is suing the developers of a fork of Bitcoin. Although the case was dismissed once already, it is being reopened, and a UK court will hear the Seychelles company's version of events next month.
Being in Russia and going to jail might have something to do with it, tho - Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the core-js library used by millions of websites, says he's ready to give up open source development because so few people pay for the software upon which they depend.
Elon Musk has already said he likes the idea of less human input into the data labelling process these folks drive - A group of workers employed to label data at Tesla's Autopilot division in Buffalo, New York, launched a campaign to form an official union on Tuesday.
You can be my Bing man anytime - Pentagon boffins have for the first time used AI algorithms to automatically control a real F-16 fighter jet mid-flight. Well, OK, at least for the first time they can talk about.
Browser finally gone, but its memory, engine, wails of user and dev torment live on until at least 2029 - This Valentine's day, Microsoft is quietly giving users the final gift of no more Internet Explorer by rolling out an Edge patch to most versions of Windows 10, finally killing the browser in all but IE mode.
Aurora needs a break to get users off 11.x, says cloud giant - AWS database downtime necessary to execute a migration has been described as "an embarrassingly low bar" for a managed service after the cloud giant announced plans for getting off PostgreSQL 11.x.
The OS family isn't broken – so why are so many companies trying to fix it? - Some Linux veterans are irritated by some of the new tech: Snap, Flatpak, Btrfs, ZFS, and so forth. Doesn't the old stuff work? Well, yes, it does – but not well enough.
Microsoft's Bing and Google's Bard just as bad as each other - Microsoft's new AI-powered Bing search engine generated false information on products, places, and could not accurately summarize financial documents, according to the company's promo video used to launch the product last week.
Google's finest via the what now? Plus: RISC-V-powered Chromebook isn't out of the question - You probably knew Google's ChromeOS is a Linux distribution. But, now, it's running on more than Linux under the hood. I didn't, and I've been covering Chrome OS like paint since the day it arrived. Today, your newer Chromebook also depends on the open-source Zephyr Project Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). Here's Chrome OS's history and where Zephyr comes in.
Amazon-owned biz puts its staff first - Amazon’s robo-taxi division Zoox will be using employees as guinea pigs after the company completed the first trials of its driverless vehicle on public roads.
Bootleg ChatGPT mini-apps are already testing the limits of OpenAI's policies - Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology said on Monday it will support enterprises in building large AI models that compare to ChatGPT, as China's tech giants rush to deliver their own generative AI chatbots.
Lazarus Group’s favorite digi-dollar launderer may have risen again - Notorious cryptocurrency anonymization service Blender, which the US Department of the Treasury last year sanctioned for helping to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets stolen by the North Korean-linked gang Lazarus Group, appears to have relaunched..
As 13,000 officers managed their inboxes, a certain Chinese balloon floated across Montana … - Thirteen thousand members of the United States Army were reportedly caught up in a Reply-All email storm in early February.
Supernova will prove open source project is not dead – just pining for a complete overhaul - The Thunderbird email client – once Mozilla's most prominent project other than the Firefox browser – is being completely overhauled ahead of a major July release 115, dubbed "Supernova".
A beefy 10GB one-time download that arrives in March - Next month Microsoft will start offering on-prem Unified Update Platform (UUP), which promises to deliver smaller and faster uploads of Windows updates.
Already decimated staff in September - Twilio on Monday said it plans to cut 17 percent of its workforce and close additional office locations, having previously shed office staff in 2022.
Or their parts, at least, which look decidedly skeletal for satellite struts - When NASA's balloon-borne exoplanet-observing telescope EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE) takes to the skies this fall it'll be doing so with a scaffold and support struts with a unique feature: they were designed by an artificial intelligence algorithm.
Kickstarter backers left empty-handed - Mycroft AI, creator of a Linux-based virtual assistant, announced on Friday it would not be able to fulfill rewards for its Mark II Kickstarter campaign.
It's not yet reached alpha, but it's already breaking new ground - Chimera Linux is a new distro under construction that is not only systemd-free, it's GNU-free as well. Its creator hopes to reach alpha testing this spring.
Bad AI is bad, bad search is worse - "The pleasure is fleeting, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable." Famously about sex but more probably about golf, this quote is now most accurately ascribable to AI-enhanced search engines.
Atlassian wants it used more widely … but probably not for reporting misinformation to social networks - Atlassian's Jira tool last Friday received significant upgrades aimed at encouraging its use beyond development teams, a day after it was cast in a sinister role in the USA's culture wars.
Emperor Penguin promised a relaxed seasonal development cycle and has delivered - Work on version 6.2 of the Linux kernel will stretch into an eighth release candidate, despite emperor penguin Linus Torvalds now saying it isn't really necessary.
Plus: Publisher using AI tools generated false health advice for men; how ChatGPT widens economic inequalities - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been waiting for the chance to challenge Google's dominance of internet search, and just might have finally pulled it off this week with the launch of AI-powered Bing.
PLUS: Toshiba acknowledges buyout bid; BTS member Jungkook's hat lands online seller in strife; and more - India's minister for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has insisted that the nation does not target Chinese apps for law enforcement action or bans.
Neo4j v PureThink rumbles on - Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, claims a California federal court has misinterpreted version 3 of GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3) by allowing it to be combined with the Common Clause software license.
Valentine's Day is the moment to fall a little bit out of love with chatbots - Valentine's Day could sour our romance with AI chatbots.
Brit AI video tech caught up in pro-PRC disinformation campaign - Deepfake videos online featuring AI-generated news anchors spouting pro-Chinese government propaganda are likely the creations of a prolific disinformation crew dubbed Spamouflage.
And yes, sure, totally secure - Microsoft's Edge browser will be getting a significant facelift in the coming months, thanks to Adobe.
Some devs object because they don't trust Mountain View - Russ Cox, a Google software engineer steering the development of the open source Go programming language, has presented a possible plan to implement telemetry in the Go toolchain.
Sumo Logic attracts private equity investor while InfluxData and Onehouse raise VC cash - Log management and analytics biz Sumo Logic has agreed to a private equity buyout valuing the firm at around $1.7 billion.
After a long wait and some company problems, the latest member of the Pantheon appears - Elementary OS 7, codenamed "Horus" and based on Ubuntu 22.04.1, is here at last after a longer than usual delay.
Beat Microsoft. Set agendas. Became essential. Hiked prices. Now we wait for Broadcom's reign - In a decade of watching VMware, I've encountered two unverified but irresistible legends about the company.
Cloud-native Vela specializes in developing and training large-scale AI models – in-house only, though - IBM is the latest tech giant to unveil its own "AI supercomputer," this one composed of a bunch of virtual machines running within IBM Cloud.
Regulator wants to bust the oligopoly in mobile OS and app markets - Japan's competition regulator has recommended big changes to local laws to reform the "oligopoly" it's assessed Google and Apple enjoy in the markets for mobile operating systems and the apps that run on them.
For those relying on this cloud-based security thing - It's difficult for security teams to quickly respond to potential threats if the data coming in and the detection rules around it are off.
Plus: Microsoft's nu-Bing can't answer question on exoplanets correctly either - Web content automatically generated by AI will be ranked according to its quality by Google Search, the internet titan confirmed this week, after previously suggesting it would blanket down-rank computer-created pages.
If you're having trouble with your games, this may be why - Windows users who installed an update from November 2022 may run into problems rendering content and running their games if their systems are using particular versions of Intel graphics drivers.
Move means possibility of new WebKit-free iPhone browsers is even more likely - The UK competition watchdog's proposed iOS remedies in a probe of its "substantial and entrenched market power" in the mobile ecosystem "would effectively turn Apple into a clone of Android," the iPhone maker told the CMA.
Who even buys their children an Apple Watch? - There comes a time when every parent will glance up from their mobile device or busy work schedule and take a moment to ask: "Where are my kids?"
Tells residents to turn in dongles and uninstall apps, but keeps registration system alive – just in case - Singapore's Ministry of Health (MOH) announced on Thursday that it was finally pulling the plug on its COVID tracking program.
Sometimes it takes a war to make people pay attention - The Open Source Policy Summit is an annual event which attempts to explain the importance of software freedom to governments and policy makers.
Far from ready, but developer thinks it's helping the whole Xen codebase - If the open source RISC-V CPU architecture is to become a viable option for servers, its software ecosystem will need a solid hypervisor.
NIST weighs up algorithms for small devices – and an architecture for massive systems - The US National Institute of Standards and Technology wants to protect all devices great and small, and is getting closer to settling on next-gen cryptographic algorithms suitable for those systems.
'This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process' says Choc Fact. No sh%t... - About 10 percent of Alphabet's market value – some $120 billion – was wiped out this week after Google proudly presented Bard, its answer to Microsoft's next-gen AI offerings, and the system bungled a simple question.
If you were hoping for more info about the ChatGPT competitor, keep hoping - Not to be outdone by Microsoft's announcement of new AI-powered search features coming to Bing, Google held an event today to show off some of its own moves to embed AI into search.
Torrenting is still a thing, it still works, and if streaming vendors get mean, it's still an option - Version 4 of the most widely used FOSS BitTorrent client is here, and it's worth a look if you have any difficulties with streaming media services.
Facebook parent could then offer that data to other advertising clients, complaint alleges - Patients of Cedars-Sinai did not want third parties to target them with advertising that may be related to their medical conditions, a would-be class action lawsuit against the Los Angeles teaching hospital says.
As Google and Microsoft make us all AI consumers, remember that to err is human, but to really mess things up at scale takes a computer - There is an old saying: when giants fight, it is the grass that suffers. For us little people watching, there is little to do but run for cover and grab the popcorn.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should - Stripping down operating systems to run on old, forgotten, or low-end hardware is nothing new, and has spawned a whole community of Linux aficionados. But what about full-fat Windows 11?
Technical paper says blockchain probably isn't up to the job - The Bank of England and HM Treasury have declared the UK will probably need a digital version of the pound at some point, and commenced a consultation process to advance plans for the currency so the nation is prepared if a decision is taken to greenlight what's jokingly been called "Britcoin".
CEO admits hyper-growth during pandemic was careless - Video chat outfit Zoom has "made the tough but necessary decision to reduce our team by approximately 15 percent and say goodbye to around 1,300 hardworking, talented colleagues" – and communicated it in an email.
Maker of voice changing software says it has removed GPLv3 code "to alleviate any doubt" - Voice.ai, maker of a voice-changing SDK and similar apps on several platforms, proclaims its commitment to ethics on its website.
Redmond thinks OpenAI can be secret sauce to beat Google - Microsoft has announced new AI chatbot-powered search features supporting its search engine Bing and the browser Edge on Tuesday, promising to revamp the way netizens surf information on the internet.
When grep isn't good enough, try Blackbird - GitHub has a lot of code to search – more than 200 million repositories – and says last November's beta version of a search engine optimized for source code that has caused a "flurry of innovation."
NOTAM chance in hell this stuff is getting sorted soon despite outage - The aging computer system that was behind the grounding of flights across the US last month will need until 2030 to be fully upgraded, the Federal Aviation Administration said, leaving US government leaders questioning why.
You're a high-risk worker who wants access to that file? Computer says no - Microsoft is adding a machine learning-based technology to its Purview data governance tool, hoping to appeal to customers who are worried about insider security risks.
Lawmakers said to be trying to align on the basics by 'early March' - The EU's upcoming artificial intelligence legislation will define how the world regulates AI, warned GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who thinks open source developers should be exempted from the AI Act.
We're down to Microsoft 364 again by first week of February - If you sat down to work this morning and attempted to do something as routine as check your emails with Outlook, you'd be bang out of luck.
You may have already known this... but did you know you'll lose data migration unless you switch to paid? - Microsoft will officially kill its legacy free Teams app for business, Teams Free (classic), on April 12, with all chats, files and other data lost unless you switch to a paid version.
Work on a Gecko-based version of Firefox for iOS is underway, again - Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS.
Probably bilingual bot will be called ERNIE Bot outside China, Wenxin Yiyan within, - Chinese web giant Baidu, which has “AI” in its name and has made AI the focus of its hyperscale cloud, has revealed it will launch a generative AI chatbot later this year.
Best to revisit that plan to bring home a cheap OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, or Realme handset from your holiday - Don't buy an Android phone in China, boffins have warned, as they come crammed with preinstalled apps transmitting privacy-sensitive data to third-party domains without consent or notice.
'The text we generated was a mistake, we are super embarrassed' - The Seinfeld spoof Nothing, Forever - a sitcom developed using generative AI - has been temporarily banned on Twitch after one of the characters accidentally spewed transphobic profanities.
Competition for AI-powered search between Microsoft and Google heats up - On Monday, Google unveiled an AI chatbot, Bard, that will be integrated into its search engine soon in the face of rising competition from Microsoft's Bing and OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Tools like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have memories after all - Generative AI models can memorize images from their training data, possibly allowing users to extract private copyrighted data, according to research.
Account posting pics of pet returning home convinces Musk to chill about access rules - File the decision to withdraw free access to its API under "Twitter doing dumb things" because owner Elon Musk has partially walked back on it mere days later.
Suppliers competing for lucrative prize will rely on 'interoperability' of existing work from US spy-tech firm - The UK's health service has confirmed it will require winners of the procurement for a Federated Data Platform (FDP) to migrate existing dashboards from the current platform by US spy-tech firm Palantir.
Turns out the single brand ‘Uvance’ plan needs two groups to pull it off - Japanese IT services giant Fujitsu last week announced a re-org, and The Register has mostly figured out what's afoot.
Plus: Cruise and Waymo's driverless cars have caused 92 reported incidents in San Francisco; China's Baidu reportedly set to launch ChatGPT rival - Google has hinted it will unveil AI-powered products and features in a live event next week.
Chocolate Factory insists project is an internal testing tool, isn't extending middle finger at Cupertino - Google's Chromium developers have begun work on an experimental web browser for Apple's iOS using the search giant's Blink engine.
Don't mind us, we'll just have a quick look for unsupported installs and then disappear, we pwoooomise - Microsoft wants everyone to know that it isn't looking to invade their privacy while looking through their Windows PCs to find out-of-date versions of Office software.
Boffins find Dunning-Kruger effect makes us think we know better - Human psychology may prevent people from realizing the benefits of artificial intelligence, according to a trio of boffins based in the Netherlands.
Decent upgrade from older versions, essential if you're still on OpenOffice - The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.5 with a host of improvements. Windows and Mac users can just download it, and for Linux types the new version is already up on Flathub.
It's... actually kind of funny, though - When plague winds howl across the surface of cadaver world Earth, humanity long dead by its own hand, imperial archaeologists picking through the remnants will excavate a bunker. Inside they will find a primitive computer. The computer broadcasts AI-generated spoof Seinfeld episodes for eternity.
Along with DXVK 2.1, more and better compatibility comes to Linux – we'll drink to that - The WINE Project has reached version 8.0 and DXVK version 2.1 of its Vulkan-based DirectX translation layer. If you'd give Linux a go except for one or two pesky but necessary apps, it's worth a try.
Two months to reach 100 million active monthly users, but how many will stay? - Last November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a free web interface and took the internet by storm. Data compiled in a study by UBS reported the chatbot had managed to reach 100 million monthly active users by January, which would make it the fastest-growing consumer app in internet history.
Third party widgets are on the march in latest Windows Preview, which fixes some Arm64 FAILs too - Microsoft's latest Windows 11 preview build has added a Spotify widget, more evidence of the software giant's increasing openness to third-party presences in its flagship OS.
As for actually doing anything about it - that'll have to wait - The US Commerce Department is putting an official stamp on what many have saying for years: the iOS and Android app store model "is harmful to consumers and developers."
Plus: ChatGPT Plus now available for $20 a month in the US - Microsoft will reportedly integrate OpenAI's upcoming large language model GPT-4 into the Bing search engine over the next few weeks, as Google scrambles to test rival AI products, fearing it could lose its dominant position in online search.
Surely this is the trick to profitability - Twitter is eliminating access to its API, but the once-free comms integration will still be available to those who want it – for a price.
Meanwhile, Xfce takes its first steps toward Wayland support - News is emerging regarding the future of two popular Linux desktops: System76's Pop!_OS and COSMIC, as well as a future version of Xfce.
System identified a candidate that appears more effective than FDA-approved drugs - AI is helping scientists discover new antibodies that could trigger our own immune systems into destroying cancer cells.
Also cuts import duties to attract EV-battery makers and keep smartphone factories humming - India has sidelined Big Tech in its pursuit of a cloud for its agricultural industry.
But the code creator has revived the abandoned code for OpenTelemetry - After a delay of over a year, an open source code contribution to enable the export of data from Datadog's Application Performance Monitoring (APM) platform finally got merged on Tuesday into a collection of OpenTelemetry components.
OK Google, whatever you're doing, please don't - Git-based code host SourceHut will not have to block the Go Module Mirror as planned, after Google took notice of its complaints.
Here's your new desk, phone, security card, and an unpleasant missive for some - OpenText marked the completion of its $6bn purchase of Micro Focus by setting out plans to shed 8 percent of the combined workforce, equating to circa 2,000 people joining the dole queue.
Vendor lock-in: savings of up to $750m a year possible if Uncle Sam didn't predetermine the victor - Oracle and Microsoft – two companies receiving most of the US government's off-the-shelf software spending over the last decade – get at least 25 percent and 30 percent of their respective government revenue through purchase processes which are not competitive.
Yes, we may end up being criminally charged, but we haven't been yet - Tesla has confirmed the Department of Justice asked it to hand over documents related to Autopilot and Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD), as the US government's criminal probe into hype surrounding the software continues.
Plus Xfce flavor desktop based on latest version 4.18 - The latest blog post from the Linux Mint project announces new features coming in 21.2 – and some of them are surprisingly big changes for a point release.
Big Red 'will always start with a large number and negotiate down' - The best time to prepare for exiting an Oracle Unlimited License Agreement is the day after the user organization signs up to one, according to software asset management experts.
As for privacy concerns about the Topics API? We'll get back to you - Google's delayed disposal of third-party cookies – data stored in web browsers for advertising and analytics, among other things – will kick off the third quarter of 2024.
As 17 percent of customers see Virtzilla's short term strategic significance shrinking - Broadcom has signalled its intention to take on hyperscale datacenter operators once its acquisition of VMware concludes.
Dashboard your DevOps data and see where your team has been slacking - Boston-based software biz Jellyfish believes it can help devs write better code by focusing on the adjacent processes to avoid software slowdowns.
ChatGPT: Please explain the difference between 'token efforts' and 'putting the genie back in the bottle' - OpenAI has released a free online tool designed to predict whether a passage of text was generated by AI or written by a human.
Let customers opt-out, or start adding zeros to compliance fines - California's attorney general has put mobile app developers on notice: comply with the state's privacy laws and consumer opt-out requests, or get ready to paybig time.
So much for being 'Unbreakable' say developers - Oracle may offer its own Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compatible operating system, but clearly not all public cloud developers are happy with the company's "Unbreakable" kernel and would prefer the real thing.
Not complete yet, but getting closer to welcoming Mac migrants and systemd scorners - After almost a year, version 0.8 of the helloSystem is here: an easy-to-use graphical distribution based on FreeBSD 13.1 aiming to offer a different way forward for people looking to leave Apple's macOS – or contemporary Linux.
The AWS open-source database commitment - Each year, AWS cooks up something appealing for its AWS database customers at its re:Invent conference. This year is no exception. The company rolled out four new features for its Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) designed to make life easier for its managed database customers.
We're not the bad guys in this, Azure empire says with a straight face - Attorneys representing Microsoft, its GitHub subsidiary, and OpenAI have asked a judge to throw out a copyright case against GitHub's programming assistant Copilot, on the grounds the challenge against them lacks standing.
Model developed using TensorFlow and Keras sifts through data for 'technosignatures' from alien worlds - Scientists have developed a machine learning method they think could help filter out interference and more efficiently spot unusual radio signals from space, contributing to the ongoing search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Plus: Google builds text-to-music model but won't release it, and more - Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay, made headlines for claiming an AI chatbot was due to defend a man in an upcoming court hearing, but has pulled out of the stunt.
Don't throw the open source baby out with the bathwater - The European Union has a commendable love for the safety of its citizens. Armed with the keys to a market of 300 million of the world's richest consumers, the EU has merely to scent danger to bravely regulate. Food, consumer goods, financial markets and data processing: if it can bite the punter, the EU has a legal muzzle to hand.
Did Pathfinder get lost in Intel's sea of red ink? Or is Chipzilla becoming RISC averse? - Intel has shut down its RISC-V Pathfinder – an initiative it launched less than six months ago to encourage use of the open source RISC-V CPU designs.
Who said workforce development was just for humans? - The lucid ramblings and art synthesized by ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion have captured imaginations and prompted no shortage of controversy over the role generative AI will play in our futures.
'I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that' - Those using Chrome on Windows and other platforms may have trouble storing files over a network.
Remote Desktop, domain controllers giving you gyp? Gamble on these fixes - Microsoft has fixed a problem caused by the Windows 11 version 22H2 update that crashed the Remote Desktop application on some systems.
As per employee model replaces old subscription, user bills could soar - Oracle stands accused of "predatory" licensing tactics after making changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model that could force businesses to pay tens of thousands of dollars more each month for running the same software.
Unveiling Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift and much more - AWS has kept up a furious pace of innovation across its services. Amidst the pipeline of new features at its re:Invent conference in December, AWS is also increasingly focused on helping customers work across its products, by offering increased levels of automation and easy integration.
Nothing good – the recent layoffs hit its best and brightest leaders hard - Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be Evil"? I do. Even though Google dumped that phrase from its code of conduct in 2018, many of us still thought Google was a bit better than other companies.
Even with instructions staring them in the face, this genius couldn't get it right - In last week's edition of On Call, The Register's weekly column dedicated to readers' days being damaged by demands to deflect needless disaster, we wondered if the inevitabilities of death and taxes should be joined by meaningless managerial interventions. This week, we have a new candidate to join lists of iconic inevitabilities: users ignoring instructions and then complaining when their own actions create complications.
Welcome to the real world, kids. And for the rest of us, a future at which Meta is gulp! – better at large-scale analytics - Here’s one from the “welcome to the real world, kids, we have no sympathy for your plight” files: social media giant Meta’s engineering team has bemoaned the complexity of migrating from legacy technology.
The irony, it burns - On Tuesday, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) failed to open properly, disrupting and invalidating auction trading for more than 250 securities.
Calls to avoid C/C++ and embrace Rust grow louder - Memory safety, a longstanding concern among serious software developers, has finally met with mainstream stardom.
'Targeted restructuring' could have been worse, analyst points out - SAP is targeting its CRM business with 3,000 job cuts despite full year 2022 revenue of €30.9 billion, up 11 percent.
Unveiling Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift and much more - AWS has kept up a furious pace of innovation across its services. Alongside the pipeline of new features introduced at its re:Invent conference in December, the company showed it is increasingly focused on helping customers work across its products by offering increased levels of automation and easy integration.
No, it's not install Fedora Linux, sadly - Microsoft has offered a workaround of sorts for Windows 10 and 11 users who've noticed their Start menu is suddenly unresponsive and that some applications won't open or work correctly.
Life in the fast lane, surely make you lose your mind - Tesla's Autopilot "self driving" technology has slipped to the middle of the active driver assist (ADA) software pack, says the nonprofit Consumer Reports, as companies like Ford and General Motors have overtaken the Musketeers in the automotive code lane.
Reports suggest Don Johnson left after 6 months in charge of strategic unit - The head of Oracle Health engineering has abruptly left the business, according to reports.
Atlassian thinks it’s made that possible by extending automation from Jira to Confluence - Atlassian has extended the automation it acquired from Code Barrel in 2019, and has run in Jira for most of the time since, to its Confluence collaboration environment.
So is AI artwork copyrightable? Not quite as case remains up in the air - A glitch in the record-keeping software being piloted by the US Copyright Office (USCO) accidentally revoked the copyright registration of an AI-generated graphic novel.
Version 3.7 shows Google's cross-platform, Dart-based UI framework maturing - Flutter developers gathered on Wednesday in Nairobi, Kenya, and at stream-fed screens elsewhere in the world to learn about the alpha release of Dart 3 and Flutter 3.7, the next iteration of Google's open source Dart-based UI toolkit.
Q2 results include modest revenue increase, steep consumer and net income decrease - Microsoft has posted modest growth for the quarter ended December 31, 2022, with its consumer-centric products recording marked revenue dips.
BharOS is based on the Linux kernel and is apparently incapable of running malware. Right - A mere week after an Indian government official teased the possibility the nation could create its own mobile OS to challenge the dominance of Google and Apple, minister for education and minister of skill development & entrepreneurship Dharmendra Pradhan has demonstrated just such an OS at work and endorsed it as the sort of the India should be doing.
Brian Birmingham claims he walked after refusing to give team member a 'low' rating - Former Blizzard World of Warcraft co-lead dev Brian Birmingham took to Twitter this morning to confirm that when given a choice between stack ranking his employees – obeying a mandate to give a poor "developing" rank to an employee – or leaving the company, he decided to walk.
Successfully using serverless SaaS to reap the value of transactional data - As Charles Darwin formed his theory of evolution, he noted that whether animal or human, 'those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively prevailed.' The partnership between Bud and Datastax could be a perfect illustration of that observation.
Microsoft pulls the plug as of January 31, alternatives are easy to find - Microsoft has named the day on which it will end paid downloads of Windows 10 Home and Pro from its website: January 31, 2023.
This perhaps says more about the tests than the artificial intelligence on display - OpenAI's chat software ChatGPT, if let loose on the world, would score between a B and a B- on Wharton business school's Operations Management exam, and would approach or exceed the score needed to pass the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE).
Embrace, extend ... extinguish, but whom or what this time? - Microsoft announced its latest "multi-year, multi-billion dollar" investment into OpenAI on Monday, cementing its position as the startup's exclusive cloud provider.
Teachers hopefully get their hands on the tool within months - Turnitin, best known for its anti-plagiarism software used by tens of thousands of universities and schools around the world, is building a tool to detect text generated by AI.
Finnish open source biz joins elite in correcting pandemic hiring frenzy - The boss of European database-as-a-service upstart Aiven is the latest tech exec to apologize to his workforce for making one in five redundant after recruiting too ambitiously in the past 12 months.
You know where they eat, where they sleep, where they live... then figure out how to whack them - One of the applications science fiction has found for AI is pest control – sometimes cute, sometimes extremely violent – and the direction of travel suggests we are moving into the realms of science fact.
Yeah, we know: cost alone won't lead to success. But it may be hiring, unlike certain other tech giants - The server virtualization market has a new/old player that wants to make waves with keen pricing and a plan to improve its tech: XenServer.
This is what happens when database field names are changed without proper documentation - Ah, gentle readerfolk, welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers much like yourselves regale us weekly with tales of technical disasters of their own making narrowly averted – and sometimes not averted at all.
You will soon know more about what your PC lockscreen is showing you - Microsoft is working on new looks for the Windows Spotlight feature and redesigns for the graphics settings page as part of its latest Windows 11 Preview build.
Vast and unpleasant – for Google – changes to the Android ecosystem remain a possibility - Google has lost a court bid to avoid payment of fines levied on it by India's Competition Commission, and massive changes to the way it does business in India.
Plus: Academics debate citing ChatGPT as research co-author; Getty Images sues Stability AI - Consumer tech publisher CNET will pause publishing stories written with the help of AI software, after it was criticized for failing to catch errors in copy generated by machines.
Please, sir. I don't want a 365 subscription - Microsoft wants to know how many out-of-support copies of Office are installed on Windows PCs, and it intends to find out by pushing a patch through Microsoft Update that it swears is safe, not that you asked.
Setting fire to an ecosystem like it's a spliff on a credulous podcast - After leaving third-party developers of Twitter apps with no information about why their software had stopped working last week, Twitter this week offered an explanation of sorts.
Our lives are in your hands, and you have butterfingers? - The US Federal Aviation Administration says its preliminary investigation of last week's system outage that caused the first nationwide grounding of flights since September 11, 2001, has uncovered the cause: contractors accidentally deleted some essential files.
Tis the extended season for layoffs - The same day Google is allowing staffers to work from home while they process the news that it's firing 12,000 of them, fintech biz Capital One has cut over 1,000 roles in its Technology segment.
Spare a thought for the workers who read the worst content scraped from the internet to keep you safe - OpenAI reportedly hired workers in Kenya – screening tens of thousands of text samples for sexist, racist, violent and pornographic content – to help make its ChatGPT model less toxic.
Build new revenue streams and enhance customer value with Amazon QuickSight Embedded - Squeezing more value from your applications can benefit both you and your customers, and one way to help your product stand out in a crowded market is to offer in-app analytics.
No principles or virtues, people accepting everything it says – this bot is perfect for political life - OpenAI's conversational language model ChatGPT has a lot to say, but is likely to lead you astray if you ask it for moral guidance.
Lewis Rosenthal talks about why some companies still need to run OS/2 today – including on UEFI and GPT hardware - Although the creator of OS/2 now owns Red Hat and has other fish to try, OS/2 lives on. The Reg spoke with Arca Noae's Lewis Rosenthal about the issues of updating OS/2 Warp for modern PCs in 2023 – and beyond.
Bunfight over support for proprietary Unix operating system ends with a confidential whimper - HPE and Oracle have settled their long-running legal case over alleged copyright infringement regarding Solaris software updates for HPE customers, but it looks like the nature of the settlement is going to remain under wraps.
Controversial policy change forces chief product officer to speak out - Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky has responded to criticism of the company's content analysis policies by saying it has never used customers' creations to train generative AI models.
History tells us it will flop. But success might not be the real goal, so much as poking Big Tech - India's government has reportedly teamed with academia and startups to create its own mobile operating system dubbed IndOS, in the name of competition.
Worse still, human editors appear not to have caught the mistakes - Consumer tech outlet CNET is reviewing all articles it published that were written with the help of AI, after it was found some contained incorrect information.
Kerberos support in WAC and a host of other goodies also added - Microsoft upgraded its Windows Admin Center, with a focus on protecting the vendor's Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) service from outside threats.
Want to access Office tools? Don’t try to go back in time - Users running the latest versions of Windows 11 are losing some Microsoft apps after running System Restore.
Elon should stick to throwing rocks at his truck windows - Allegations that Tesla staged a 2016 video demonstrating full self driving have resurfaced, and this time it's not an anonymous source making the claims – it's testimony from Tesla's own director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy.
What is dead may never die, and it's all thanks to Jim Hall - The last mainstream DOS-based OS was Windows ME, which went out of support 20 years ago. And yet, thanks to free software, DOS lives on. We spoke to FreeDOS founder Jim Hall about how the project started and how it's progressing.
Remaining employees told they need to ‘raise the bar’ - Microsoft will cut the jobs of 10,000 employees by September. The move follows smaller rounds of layoffs at the software company last year as cloud growth slows due to the worsening economic situation.
There's still a place in the world for good old-fashioned human intelligence - The rise of large language models (LLMs) built on huge stores of data and driven by artificial intelligence may seem frightening. Paradoxically, it may be the best thing in decades for the progress of human intelligence.
And if so, what are we gonna do about it? - Foreign adversaries are expected to use AI algorithms to create increasingly realistic deepfakes and sow disinformation as part of military and intelligence operations as the technology improves.
Steve Revill of RISC OS Open chats to us about taking the project into the future - The mid-1980s codebase for RISC OS, the original native OS for the Arm processor, is still run on present-day hardware and actively maintained and developed. We spoke to RISC OS Open MD Steve Revill about its 26-bit origins, working to bring it to newer 32-bit Arm chips, and efforts to update its BSD-based network stack.
Wordtune Spices is more like an AI-powered Grammarly - Language model startup AI21 Labs launched Wordtune Spices on Tuesday – a generative AI tool that aims to enhance human writing rather than replace it with machine-churned text.
Don't expect to see any more big AIX news. This means the last Unix left is… Linux - It's the end of an era. As The Reg covered last week, IBM has transferred development of AIX to India. Why should IBM pay for an expensive US-based team to maintain its own proprietary flavor of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its own FOSS flavor in Red Hat?
Tens of millions up for grabs as institution needs to dump legacy code - The UK's University of Leeds is looking for a systems integrator to help move its ERP system from an ageing SAP installation dating back to 1999 onto the German vendor's latest S/4HANA platform.
Addition of the chatbot everyone's talking about, and to, comes as Azure OpenAI goes GA - Microsoft has promised it will "soon" offer the ChatGPT AI chatbot as a service from its Azure cloud.
After eighteen month exile, it's allowed to recruit new customers - Chinese ride-share provider DiDi Chuxing announced on Monday that after a year and a half of being banned from registering new riders, the Cybersecurity Review Office has allowed it to resume recruitment of customers.
They're not the meal deal they might seem to be, claims audit expert - The quickest way to save money on Oracle licences is to get off its Unlimited Licensing Agreements, a well placed Big Red audit expert claims.
Techies forced to mop up after update caused ASR rules to detect false positives, wiping icons and apps shortcuts - Techies are fearing the worst in efforts to recover from Microsoft's bug laden Defender for Endpoint pre-weekend rollout after updates removed icons and applications shortcuts from Windows 11 and 10 desktop, Taskbar and Start Menu.
Lawyer known for GitHub Copilot case to argue artists' legal struggle - On Friday three artists filed a proposed a class action suit against major AI image generating companies – Stability AI, Deviant Art and Midjourney – alleging they infringed on copyright laws through the use of collage tool Stability Diffusion.
Plus: How much would you pay for ChatGPT? And British AI drug biz gets snapped up for half a billion - An AI language model is apparently going to be used during an upcoming legal hearing to defend someone in a real case. The goal is to demonstrate that AI can replace lawyers, according to the CEO of the consumer rights-focused startup DoNotPay.
PLUS ServiceNow makes Japan a discrete region; Alibaba Cloud’s Singapore hub; US snipes at Korean network policy; and more - Singapore-based superapp Grab has a client for its maps-as-a-service venture, GrabMaps: Amazon Web Services.
Sorry, when exactly are you going to sod off to Mars, mate? - Numerous third-party Twitter clients stopped working on Thursday evening, Pacific Time, and as of Friday morning, they remained non-functional.
DragonFly designed to land and taxi when the pilot is incapacitated, or just busy - UpNext, Airbus's future technology-focused subsidiary, reported on Thursday that it has entered the final three months of testing tech it hopes will automate the process of getting a plane from the air to the gate.
Houston, we have a problem: Millions wasted on license penalties - NASA is rubbish at software asset management, has not implemented federal government guidance on how to address it, and as a result is spending too much on code it doesn't use – including $15 million on unused Oracle software alone, under a twelve-year-old license the space agency was afraid to examine.
Mozilla-incubated systems language should make Chrome shine - Google plans to support the use of third-party Rust libraries in its open source browser project Chromium, a significant endorsement of the programming language and its security characteristics.
This may show a future direction for Linux desktops - Endless Computers is preparing a new version of its Endless OS distro, an easy-to-use OS for computing novices of all ages. It's a unique distro which shows how desktop OSes may evolve.
Incoming corporate policy may lead to stress and burnout for staff, reduced costs for Redmond - Microsoft is to allow US staff to take unlimited time off in a policy change that is supposed to give them more flexibility but, unsurprisingly, will also have a cost benefit to Redmond.
Worldwide expansion reliant on delayed Microsoft Dynamics project as Amazon deal beckons - UK tabletop wargames maker Games Workshop's seemingly neverending battle with its own ERP implementation has entered another chapter, as global projects are delayed owing to the difficulty integrating the new system.
Digital transformation is still a thing and Japanese giant wants to buy anyone that can do it - Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has revealed a plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions.
CEO of Citrix/TIBCO mashup says company has 'strong foundation' and rolls out the Broadcom playbook of focusing on 'top customers' - The Cloud Software Group, the mashup of Citrix and TIBCO, has confirmed it made at least one thousand staff redundant yesterday.
Around 80 positions moved to another continent, Big Blue stays silent - The Register has learned that IBM has shifted the roles of US IBM Systems employees developing AIX over to the Indian office.
Study warns tool could be used to create fake research papers for paper mills - Academics can be fooled into believing bogus scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT are from real medical papers published in top research journals, according to the latest research.
Open source org called out for ignoring own code of conduct - Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct.
New Budgie and Sway spins, Xfce 4.18, and initial support for Unified Kernel Images - A Fedora Project meeting this week is starting to set the shape of the next release, Fedora 38, due in April.
References to Palantir use cases, 'unique tools' litter the tender docs as critics mull legal action - NHS England has kicked off the formal competition for its Federated Data Platform, giving suppliers just one month to bid for the increased contract value of up to £480 million ($581 million) over seven years, as rights groups threaten legal action.
Part of a settlement with US Department of Justice after ads discrimination case - Meta is rolling out a more open-minded AI-powered system that promises to reduce discrimination after it was sued by the Department of Justice for preventing Facebook users from seeing housing ads based on personal characteristics like their ethnicity, sex, and marital status.
Open source reimplementation could be even better than the original in its prime - Haiku is an open source OS with a few differences. The big one is that it's not a Unix. The next is that it's pretty close to being a realistic, usable alternative OS for ordinary, everyday use.
Complex software packages need ever gruntier specs... and Koomey’s Law awaits - A few months back, I wrote that buying software is a big lie. All lies have consequences, of course. The worst kind of consequences are the ones you didn't see coming. So let's look at some of those, and some other lies they conceal.
International Monetary Fund report suggests 'diffusion' - a kind of tech trickle-down - might sort things out - Asia is the biggest user of industrial robots, its residents account for nearly 60 percent of the world's online retail sales, and the region's researchers created the same proportion of patents in digital tech before the pandemic. Yet a report published this week by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) asserts that the region is not digitizing fast enough to avoid a slowdown in productivity growth, and attendant economic unpleasantness.
Wants around $10 a month for stuff you get free today, plus plenty more new features - Microsoft has revealed that a Premium cut of its Teams cloudy collaborationware suite will debut in early February, and some features that are currently included in Microsoft 365 will move to the new – more costly – product.
Future is cloudy at the Cloud Software Group - After months of speculation, job cuts appear to have commenced at the Cloud Software Group (CSG) – the company formed by the odd couple merger of Citrix and Tibco.
Could ChatGPT be Google's nemesis? - Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 billion into OpenAI as it looks towards integrating ChatGPT into its web search engine Bing and Office products.
Meanwhile, the regime is angling to pocket the money owed to rightsholders - Life just got a whole lot better in Belarus – apparently piracy is now legal as long as the media being stolen is from a country that has been mean to the Eastern European utopia.
Synthetic media undermine's national security, says internet regulator - China's new rules banning the creation of AI deepfakes used to spread fake news and impersonate people without consent will take effect on Tuesday.
BMW i4, i7 and iX drivers need a fix - BMW is starting off 2023 with a recall of 90 percent of the EVs it sold in the United States in 2022 thanks to battery software that could cause loss of power while driving.
British developer uses homegrown scanning tool to check for risks - The Python Package Index, or PyPI, continues to surprise and not in a good way.
Time has run out for users of legacy operating systems: will you upgrade or buy a new PC? - Changes are imminent for users running legacy versions of Windows operating systems on their machines.
Plus: Apple using fake AI voices to help indie publishers release audiobooks - OpenAI is building software capable of detecting whether text was generated by its ChatGPT model after New York City education officials announced it was blocking students from accessing the tool in public schools.
Content analysis system scans data stored on its Creative Cloud services - Adobe automatically analyzes user content stored on its Creative Cloud services to train AI algorithms unless people opt-out of the service.
Slowing demand and economic pressures are a drag, but AI waits at the end of the rainbow - The next two years are going to be tough on a tech industry that is seeing demand ginned up by the COVID-19 pandemic leveling off and an increasingly volatile global economy, according to Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.
Chatbot might let unskilled criminals launch attacks, if the code works - Cybercriminals are beginning to use OpenAI's wildly popular ChatGPT technology to quickly and easily develop code for malicious purposes.
We buzz around new version of the other-other-other FOSS-xNix-that-isn't-Linux - Dragonfly BSD 6.4 is here, with various updates and new features, including a better hypervisor, improved support for AMD GPUs, and more.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear - Mobileye, Intel's autonomous driving unit, offered a rather rosy outlook on the company's advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), with CEO Amnon Shashua claiming more than $17 billion in bookings through 2030 during his CES keynote this week.
German automaker gets deeper into the GPU giant's hardware and software ecosystem - Mercedes-Benz thinks it can create accurate digital twin simulations using Nvidia's Omniverse software to streamline automotive manufacturing operations.
Asking us to 'submit a receipt for consideration' just doesn't cut it, claims would-be class action - The nationwide systems meltdown at Southwest Airlines should have prompted a quick return of funds to ticketed customers after thousands of flights were cancelled between December 24 to January 2, according to a freshly filed lawsuit.
Because it's all going so well for Tesla and co - Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 million in autonomous vehicle startup Gatik, a move in line with its strategy of supporting companies in the industry rather than launching its own competing product set from scratch.
If only there were some way to avoid...oh, there is? RTFM - Security researchers at have identified multiple vulnerabilities arising from careless use of the Rust Hyper package, a very popular library for handling HTTP requests.
Is machine text plagiarism? - Officials chairing this year's International Conference on Machine Learning event have banned academics from submitting papers containing text generated by large language models and tools like ChatGPT, and they aren't alone in banning such material.
An ounce of prediction is worth a pound of cure - Machine learning techniques, such as deep learning, have proven surprisingly effective at identifying diseases like breast cancer. However, when it comes to identifying mutations at the genetic level, these models have come up short, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).
Accensure and L'Oreal among biz users, yet general adoption still well behind predecessor - Large corporations are starting to run Windows 11 pilot programs in anger, potentially helping to boost adoption of Microsoft’s latest operating system – whose popularity remains way behind its predecessor.
UK study pours cold water on claims after government already spent money trying to build an app - Machine learning algorithms cannot accurately predict whether someone has COVID-19 by analyzing the sound of their coughs, according to a study led by the UK's Alan Turing Institute.
Where you want to be for the latest and greatest, but not for the faint of heart - The latest release of siduction – a Debian "sid" based meta-distro – sneaked in before the end of the year, but while it dropped some features, it gained some important new ones too.
Using PHP automation tools for project deployments can help web developers create cleaner, more standardized code - In terms of web development dominance, PHP continues to smash it out of the park. It's the preferred server-side programming language for over three-quarters of global sites, including big guns such as Facebook.com, Wikipedia.org, Whatsapp.com, and Wordpress.org.
Software behemoth infusing search engine with AI machines that go Bing! - Microsoft reportedly is integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT technology into Bing as it looks to boost its search engine's capabilities to challenge Google.
Russian distro transforms source-based rolling release into stable, versioned product… theoretically - Linux distros come and go all the time, which tends to imply that anything that continues for years has something going for it. Calculate Linux isn't well known in the West but this is the 13th major release.
US spy-tech firm's controversial work with patient data pushed out 6 months due to delayed data platform procurement - NHS England has extended its contract with US spy-tech biz Palantir for the system built at the height of the pandemic to give it time to resolve the twice-delayed procurement of a data platform to support health service reorganization and tackle the massive care backlog.
Happy New year mum... no I'm calling from the landline - An issue with payments and credits for Skype subscribers remains ongoing, days after The Register was first informed by readers that it was broken.
IONOS blog reveals how GitHub Actions can help software engineers streamline development - There's nothing quite like GitHub, so no surprise that it's one of the most popular resources available currently for hosting source code.
Freeze, Muskhole! - A Tesla driver was fast asleep at the wheel with Autopilot engaged during a 15-minute pursuit by police, the cops claim.
House always wins - India's Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has released draft rules for public consultation on its gaming industry that include a proposed self-regulating system for select registered online gaming companies.
Suspected hangbag snatcher snatched 'in error' - A US man was arrested and thrown in jail for nearly a week due to an alleged false facial-recognition match.
Despite its name and looks, this is quite the radical departure for a Linux distro - The first release of Vanilla OS is based on Ubuntu 22.10, but a slightly different desktop conceals much more dramatic changes under the hood.
Wildly popular Call of Duty game at the center of the antitrust tussle - The battle over Microsoft's controversial $69 billion bid for game-maker Activision Blizzard is due to shift to the courtroom Tuesday for the first pre-trial hearing in the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit to block the deal.
After 10 month’s deliberation, abandons current competition as ERP support deadline looms - City, University of London has abandoned procurement of a new £17 million ($20 million) ERP system following a 10-month-long competition exercise after it initially failed to understand the complexity of its own requirements.
Adopted by Snowflake, Google and Cloudera, we look at why the Netflix-developed table format is important - By 2015, Netflix had completed its move from an on-premises data warehouse and analytics stack to one based around AWS S3 object storage. But the environment soon began to hit some snags.
Can it even do that? And does FOSS deserve an exemption to sanctions? - In 2022, information technology collided with geopolitics like never before. After Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, many nations decided that Vladimir Putin's regime and populace should be denied access to technology and even to services from the companies that make and wield it.
ActivityPub isn't just what we've been doing over the Christmas break - Toward the end of 2022, we joined the masses of people leaving Twitter for Mastodon. The fact that Mastodon, building on some earlier ideas for federated social networking, is a decentralized approach, has renewed our interest in, and hope for, the decentralization of the internet.
Teachers need to work harder to get students to write and think for themselves - As word of students using AI to automatically complete essays continues to spread, some lecturers are beginning to rethink how they should teach their pupils to write.
Plus ArtStation cracks down on rebellious creators and lame-duck AI laws in the US on the cards - Sundar Pichai is apparently all in a pickle over OpenAI's ChatGPT engine, and is gearing up Google to meet the perceived threat.
Some terms and condition may apply - Hot off the heels of the US Department of Energy's (DoE) sort-of nuclear fusion breakthrough, the agency is offering up $33 million for researchers that can wrangle artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other data resources to the cause.
Ideal if you're looking for something to play with over the holidays - As the end of the year and the holiday season both approach, so do new previews of both SUSE's new enterprise Linux distro, ALP, and the NetBSD OS.
US investigators probe Bay Bridge multi-car smash - A serious accident on San Francisco's Bay Bridge has been blamed on Tesla's "full-self-driving" software by the driver, and the US government is investigating.
No Girl Scout cookies for you - A Girl Scout troop trip to see the Rockettes in New York City didn't go as planned for mom Kelly Conlon, who was turned away at the door of Radio City Music Hall because a facial recognition system pinned her as a prohibited person.
Designers' jobs to crash or GLIDE - OpenAI has extended the capabilities of its text-to-image software from two dimensions into three with the release of Point•E, an open source project that produces 3D images from text prompts.
Tech IPOs down 85 percent on last year, research finds - MariaDB has celebrated going public a few weeks before the end of a year which has seen a dramatic shift in the fortunes of tech companies raising money on the world's stock exchanges.
A last-minute dose of festive FOSS freshness - The latest Linux Mint, version 21, has had its first point release. If you were holding off upgrading from Mint 20, now is a good time. And it's not the only new distro for Yule.
At the same time, tools like Github Copilot and Facebook InCoder make developers believe their code is sound - Computer scientists from Stanford University have found that programmers who accept help from AI tools like Github Copilot produce less secure code than those who fly solo.
Suggests VMware might not allow NICs and HBAs other than Broadcom’s, which would be a bizarre act - The European Commission has opened what it describes as an “an in-depth investigation” into Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
It also boasts MemTest86+ 6, which now can boot and run on UEFI machines - SystemRescue 9.06 may only be a point release, but it has some good stuff including the newly released Xfce, MemTest86+ version 6, and a new USB-key-writing tool.
Meanwhile the next-gen Linux filesystems are going nowhere fast - The forthcoming Linux kernel 6.2 should see improved filesystem handling, including performance gains for SD cards and USB keys, as well as FUSE. As for the next-gen storage subsystems… not so much.
Collab obviously goes deep – accessing DigiLocker requires use of national identity service - Google has integrated the Indian government's cloud storage service into Android – a feat that weaves the national ID system and government documents deeply into the search giant's OS.
The lions shall lie down with the lamb on 'cross-industry' Speedometer v.3 - Apple, Google and Mozilla are teaming up to develop a new version of the Speedometer browser benchmark that they say will score web browser performance in a novel way: one that reflects user journeys, not under-the-hood streamlining.
Existing hold ups already cost millions as UK authority fails to put a price on latest setback - Surrey County Council has suffered another delay to the implementation of its protracted and accident prone £30 million ERP project that will, at some point, see it switch systems from SAP to Unit4.
Plus: Suomi security warnings and artists rebel against AI on Artstation - The squishy brains behind OpenAI's artificial ones are predicting developments like the ChatGPT system will see money flooding in – with a forecast of earning around $1 billion by 2024.
Helps if you're teetering on the edge - Some AI chip startups are managing to raise capital from investors despite operating in a crowded market of competitors where venture capital funding has plummeted in the past year.
Tumbleweed hits some turbulence, but there's no reason to be alarmed… 'By the way, does anyone know how to fly a plane?' - Tumbleweed is changing course once again, but it's due to popular demand, and it means broader compatibility for more people. Saying that, it's looking for someone to help maintain its 32-bit support.
Niklaus Wirth's lesser known programming language still kicking around - Incoming support for Modula-2 in GCC, and a new Gitlab repository for its descendant Oberon, shows that the Wirthian family of programming languages remains livelier than you might think.
More ways to boot, with less overhead – just what's needed in the embedded market - Version 4.17 of the Xen project's eponymous hypervisor has debuted, bringing with it the first look at Hyperlaunch capabilities that allow the creation of multipole VMs on startup.
Cross-platform so you can run it on a Windows box, too - Two of the leading open source video editing programs got new versions in the same week… and they're both cross-platform, so you don't need to be a penguin-botherer to try them.
When putting software on trial is a good thing - An AI application that aids early stage breast cancer screening has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for commercialization, software developer MedCognetics announced this week.
But don't get too excited. It's as preliminary as the kernel support - Preliminary support for compiling the Rust language has been merged into the codebase for GCC 13, which will be the next version of the GNU compiler collection.
After four years of talks, competition goes to incumbent supplier - NHS England has awarded a £108 million ($139 million) ERP contract – without competition – to the incumbent supplier, a joint venture between the NHS and French outsourcer Sopra Steria.
Witness the awesome power of this somewhat operational bug-buster - Google this week released OSV-Scanner – an open source vulnerability scanner linked to the OSV.dev database that debuted last year.
Why, when standard version costs a mere $1,349? Cloudy multi-premises management, perhaps - VMware has created a subscription service based on vSphere Standard, an edition of its flagship that's mostly aimed at server consolidation.
Beijing cracks down on undeletable pre-installed bloatware and dodgy apps - This week the kings of the Middle Kingdom issued directives to address some of the biggest annoyances associated with smartphones applications: copycat apps and bloatware.
Don't worry, there are some other improvements thrown in too - The last new version of Firefox for 2022 is out on Mozilla's FTP server, with a more widespread release to follow soon.
Stand up and be counted, ye ancient code wizards - The Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Working Group is seeking to discover just how much the venerable programming language is still being used in the industry, and it would like your help.
Siri? Google? Alexa? Could ChatGPT save us from this data harvesting nightmare? - We were promised an age of wonders. By 2022 we'd have self-driving cars, robo-maids, even voice-activated "friends" – digital companions to keep us well-informed. What went wrong?
Despite dire predictions about sideloading, iGiant said to be ready to comply with EU law - Apple is said to be preparing to end its exclusive control over iOS app distribution – but only in Europe – by allowing third-party app stores as required under European law.
The 'good old days' were sometimes ugly, but please let us experience their good bits - When the market for proprietary UNIX workstations collapsed, few vendors survived… and those that did seemed not to learn much from it.
Oh joy. Effect on software development inevitable, but it's clearly not devs' replacement, says analyst - The global market for low-code development technologies is set to grow nearly 20 percent from 2022, to reach $26.9 billion in 2023, according to a forecast from Gartner.
Another Linux OS – but this time it's all about the software packaging - NixOS is a distro built with a new sort of software build tool. You can install it and it works, but oddly that isn't really the point.
German software giant unlikely to repeat 2020's concession to users pressure - SAP is likely to hold firm on the 2027 support deadline for ECC, its earlier-generation ERP solution used by thousands of businesses worldwide, making a repeat of 2020's concession unlikely, according to one user group leader.
Tracked location and kept records of phone calls, and determined ability to travel. Which China will keep doing with other tech, for other reasons - China discontinued operation of its COVID tracking app on Monday as part of the Middle Kingdom's transition away from a dynamic zero-COVID strategy.
Enhancements around HTTP, QUIC, and WebSocket are on the list - A month after unveiling the production release of .NET 7, Microsoft has introduced several networking enhancements that touch on issues including security, the HTTP transport layer, and APIs.
'Time of transition' – cough, Broadcom – offered as reason cloud, security, and networking bosses bailed - VMware has revealed that three senior executives have chosen to leave the company.
Indictment imminent on criminal charges, extradition likely. Grab some popcorn - Bahamian authorities have arrested Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, after he was indicted on criminal charges.
Plus: ChatGPT behaving like a virtual machine, Cohere launches multi-lingual large language model - Apple's plans for an autonomous vehicle are being pushed back at least one year to 2026 after Cupertino reportedly scraped its previous designs.
Our v3 prediction comes true - In September, when Google delayed its Chrome extension platform makeover, we predicted, "This may not be the last time Google revises its transition timeline."
Company still insists takeover of virtualization giant is going through by November '23 - Broadcom may be facing an in-depth investigation into its $61 billion takeover of VMware by EU competition watchdogs, dashing the corporation's earlier hopes that its buyout would not meet any major regulatory hurdles.
If you are concerned about browsing discreetly, this makes it easier - The latest Tor Browser is a specially packaged version of Firefox 102 ESR which does all the hard work of setting up a TOR connection.
It’s very good, and that's very bad - There’s a new chatbot in town, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is a robot researcher with good communication skills; you can ask it to answer questions about various areas of knowledge and it will write short documents in various formats and in excellent English. Or write bad poetry, incomprehensible jokes, and obey a command like “Write Tetris in C.” What comes out looks like it could be, too.
'Deep synthesis service providers' otherwise free to create AI-generated humans in line with socialist values - China's Cyberspace Administration has issued guidelines on how to do deepfakes the right way.
Kernel boss won't consider code that's late, or hasn't already appeared in Linux-next, for version 6.2 - Linux kernel overseer Linus Torvalds has released version 6.1 of the project, and warned that "the merge window from Hell" has now opened.
TIOBE or not TIOBE, that is the question - Java is no longer among the top three most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Index, one of several not particularly definitive yardsticks by which such things are measured.
Ah, the enterprise way - GitHub has launched a business version of its assistive programming service Copilot that provides administrators with a way to prevent suggestions using public source code.
Apache project focused on stability following previous major upgrade - More than a year after its 4.0 major upgrade, Apache Cassandra is set to release its 4.1 iteration next week, promising pluggable schema management and new guardrails to help ops professionals keep those devs in line.
The 'Infinite Mac' is an astonishing demonstration of emulation and integration between some of the best tech of the '90s and the '20s - Emulators make it easy to run vintage software in a window on a modern machine, but without specialist knowledge of obsolete systems, it can be hard to do much with them. It turns out, unexpectedly, that a good answer to this is… run them in a browser.
Don't sob into your battered copy of K&R though, the shift will move slowly - Linus Torvalds is happy to tell you that Linux release numbers aren't a big deal.
Unavoidable variable safety coming in version 3 - When the third major release of the Dart programming language debuts in mid-2023, null values will no longer be allowed where they're not expected.
CentOS tossed - AlmaLinux, a somewhat popular free Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), received a vote of confidence on Thursday from the European and American science communities.
4.18 the first update of lightweight, minimalist UNIX gear since 2020 - Xfce is the slow-moving, sensible Linux desktop option, and new versions only appear every year or two. Version 4.18 is coming soon, and you can try it in the early test builds of Xubuntu 23.04.
Blocking us would be a big mistake. Huuuuge - Microsoft execs are making an all-out push this week to convince US regulators to support its proposed $69 billion bid for game maker Activision Blizzard, even getting a boost from a labor union that claims the deal would be good for workers.
SQL sequel needed for ODBC apps - Applications using the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface may fail to connect after installing the November Patch Tuesday Windows updates, according to Microsoft.
German financial giant aids GPU maker's vision of vertical integration - German financial giant Deutsche Bank is backing Nvidia's ambitions to someday make hundreds of billions from software that enables a variety of services and applications running on its GPUs.
Trojan horse could bring more users to Teams, grow advertising, because Windows users just looooove MS ads - Microsoft officials have reportedly batted about the idea of a smartphone "super app" that would combine a range of mobile consumer services to fuel advertising and drive users to products including Bing and Teams.
Good news, everyone! Er, someone. Anyone? Bueller? - Linux kernel 6.2 should contain fixes for some problems handling floppy disks, a move which shows that someone somewhere is still using them.
If only Albert Einstein had been able to harness operational and analytics data in real time … - Albert Einstein famously said the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. But when it comes to real time applications that's often exactly what is required.
Latest offshoot of Illumos project continues development of FOSS version of Solaris - The OpenIndiana project has opened the gates on "Hipster", its latest release and the first this year, and it includes MATE 1.26, LibreOffice, and more.
Tim still wants his third, natch - Apple on Tuesday announced the "biggest upgrade to App Store pricing," where "upgrade" means concession agreed to as part of a legal settlement.
Meanwhile, Samsung appoints its first female president - Korean electronics-maker Samsung is teaming up with domestic internet search giant Naver to develop AI chips for hyperscale computing, the duo said today.
The race to the bottom is on and the IoS is about to get S'ier - To see where this dumptruck is heading, let's first follow the trail of debris.
Latest platform software has not been licensed by two-thirds of legacy users, despite strong growth - New data from Gartner suggests that SAP is continuing to struggle to get users from its legacy ERP platform ECC onto the latest version: S/4HANA, launched in 2015.
'Acute and justifiable fear' in the way patient data is set to be processed, campaigners warn - An NHS pilot to upload patient data in a data analytics system based on tech from Palantir is the subject of a legal threat from campaign groups who claim it appears to circumvent data protection and procurement laws.
5,000 redirectable beams in each bird - Boeing has delivered a pair of O3b mPOWER satellites to telecom network provider SES – and had a dig at rival space broadband technologies along the way.
Add a busted tech platform to the list of the company's sins - FTX's Japanese outpost has teased good news for investors in the collapsed and disgraced trading platform – then dashed their hopes.
Contributors will have to disclose whether their work was made using AI, and are not allowed rip off artists - Adobe will sell AI-generated images on its stock image platform, despite concerns the technology raises potential copyright issues, the company announced on Monday.
High error rates mean thousands of AI answers need checking by humans - OpenAI's question-answering bot, ChatGPT, isn't smart enough for the team at Stack Overflow, who today announced a temporary ban on answers generated by the AI bot because of how frequently it's wrong.
If you like the flavor of Cinnamon, good news: you'll get a new version - The first beta version of Mint 21.1 is now available for download, and the flagship Cinnamon desktop edition contains the biggest change, with a new version of the desktop.
Microsoft releases out of box experience update to simplify and speed up migrations - Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to nudge laggards toward Windows 11 amid a migration pace that company executives would undoubtedly prefer is rather faster.
No crypto needed, just a project with a tough deadline that nobody minded missing - Ah, dear readers, welcome once again to Who, Me? in which Reg readers confess the times their reach exceeded their grasp, technology-wise-speaking.
Kernel devs offer emperor penguin early gifts of code for version 6.2 - Linus Torvalds has announced an eighth release candidate for version 6.1 of the Linux kernel.
PLUS: Eight million more outsourced jobs for India; Australia warns on IoT shoe risks; Equinix enters Malaysia - Microsoft has quietly announced big price rises for its software and services in India.
Plus: DeepMind beats humans at Stratego - OpenAI has released a new language model named ChatGPT this week, which is designed to mimic human conversations.
Banishing memory safety bugs cuts critical vulnerabilities - Google has been integrating code written in the Rust programming language into its Android operating system since 2019 and its efforts have paid off in the form of fewer vulnerabilities.
Yep. The very same JPEG-XL that's just been axed from Chromium - A new application of machine learning looks both clever and handy, as opposed to the more normal properties of being somewhere between privacy-, copyright-, or life-endangering. But before you get too excited, you can't have it.
As for Twitter, politicians need to grow thick skins and stop mistaking it for advertisement - Former British prime minister BoJo has used one of his first speaking engagements since losing that job to appear at a blockchain conference in Singapore, where his expert opinion on the subject boiled down to a belief the public needs to be convinced there's a reason for it to exist.
Record keeping rules might need a tweak to ensure content is preserved - The United States Department of Justice is considering new guidelines for how businesses use messaging apps, so that they're not employed as a back channel to hide corrupt behavior.
Intel's 'Ice Lake' and AMD's 'Milan' chips bump up speeds and feeds - Microsoft is bulking up its Azure SQL database services on the back of Intel's "Ice Lake" Xeon and AMD's "Milan" Epyc server chipsets.
Amazon web arm investing in Microsoft's platform to help customers escape Windows - "We found that .NET open source is heavily under-funded," said Saikat Banerjee, an AWS software development manager, at a re:Invent session this week.
And you can deploy them across cloud and edge environments using Kubernetes - Long gone are the days of a single application slowly picking its way like a pony and trap on a rutted track across a single network. Modern equivalents are on a super highway of multiple lanes in convoys of turbo-charged chariots which head in many different directions.
Coders are safe, too, despite AI writing one line in ten - Analyst firm Forrester predicts that despite recent mass layoffs across the tech sector, the jobs market will continue to favor IT professionals in 2023.
Is it too late to enter for Understatement of the Year? - The former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman Fried (SBF), has defied the advice of his lawyers and given an interview in which he admitted "I made a lot of mistakes" that led to the collapse of his company and left investors with little prospect of recovering billions of dollars.
Hock Tan says hiring engineers is his strategy … but still won't explain plan for massive rapid profit increase - Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan has again felt the need to state that his company's acquisition of VMware won't lead to price rises.
New Amazon DocumentDB feature promises higher storage capacity and support for applications at massive scale - Recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the latest feature for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) that allows organizations to use Amazon DocumentDB for document workloads of virtually any scale and size. Elastic Clusters allows elastic scaling of document databases to handle millions of reads and writes per second with petabytes of storage capacity.
'Tis the season for plugging holes and bolstering security - Microsoft is parcelling out new features and functions this week in updates to Windows and Defender.
Orbiting sat suite includes machine learning models, cloud-managed edge runtime - Amazon Web Services (AWS) claims to have delivered a first in operating a suite of machine learning software running on a satellite in orbit, as a testbed for others to collect and analyze data directly on orbiting satellites using its cloud.
Tumbleweed rolling-release distro to need v2 of x86-64 – and drop x86-32 edition - The future direction of openSUSE distros is firming up and has ramifications for its business-focused offspring SLE and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP).
Project with shipping giant was once floated as ideal blockchain use case – but industry didn't buy in - IBM and shipping giant Maersk have confirmed they are shutting down their blockchain-based trading platform, saying that its aim of full global industry collaboration had not been achieved.
Four participating banks, four cities, expansion to come - The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced its first retail digital Rupee pilot will commence on December 1, 2022.
'Experimental operating system' it may be, but it's still Unix/Linux-like - If the words "experimental operating system" don't scare you off, Redox OS is an impressive demonstration of both homegrown OS development and the Rust language itself.
It's about small teams, microservices, bias towards serverless, and having the creator of Java on standby - How does AWS develop software? It is all about small teams, according to a low-key but revealing session at the re:Invent conference under way in Las Vegas.
Make a big FOSS for Ubuntu Touch OTA-24, Mir 2.10, and the return of Unity on Arch Linux - Various parts of Ubuntu's cancelled desktop/fondleslab convergence project are all still ticking away – some officially and some thanks to user communities.
Decision is unrelated to recent crypto crashes, presages pivot to some kind of tokenised chat - Popular Japanese messaging app Line on Monday announced the closure of its US cryptocurrency exchange business, Bitfront, citing an increased focus on blockchain-related business.
iCAD will have five years to bring a product to market - Google has licensed its AI breast cancer screening model to a commercial medical technology company, paving the way for the system developed by researchers to be tested in real clinical settings for the first time.
Like Clippy, but for snacks, booze, and cigarettes - Lawson, a Japan-based chain of convenience stores with 17,600 outlets – 14,000 of them in the land of the Rising Sun – has opened its first store staffed almost entirely by avatars.
Company accused of allowing landlords to collude and artificially inflate rental prices - AI rent-pricing software biz, RealPage, is reportedly being investigated by the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division over claims its algorithms allow landlords to collude with another to inflate prices.
Turing Award winner who helped spread the eight-bit byte - Dr Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr, leader of IBM's OS/360 project and the man chiefly responsible for the prevalence of the eight-bit byte, has died at the age of 91.
QC: Still not actually useful, but it's increasingly intriguing - The UK's national broadcaster, the BBC, its R&D team and its entire 100-year, 15 million item archive are part of a new consortium investigating QNLP, Quantum Natural Language Processing, with the ultimate aim of automating the extraction of meaning from humanity's babble.
Predicts version 6.1 will need an eighth release candidate - Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has warned contributors that the rhythm of the project's development cycle will clash with Christmas, so developers need to make sure they ready their work before the holiday season.
Says sanctions could even accelerate China's drive for silicon self-sufficiency - Chinese AI and search giant Baidu has shrugged off the impact of the United States' ban on export of certain semiconductor technologies to the Middle Kingdom, saying it will not have any noteworthy effect on its AI business or autonomous driving operations, and may indeed accelerate China's drive for silicon self-sufficiency.
Takes over presidency of global AI group, and uses G20 leadership to flex manufacturing muscle - India's IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has called for development of global standards to ensure that artificial intelligence does not harm humanity.
CISA updates security framework, tech industry calls it 'confusing' - Federal agencies are continuing to put in place their cybersecurity strategies 18 months after the Biden Administration issued its executive order to strengthen the government's defenses.
US aviation advisory addresses concerns raised follow 2013 Asiana Airlines crash - The US Federal Aviation Administration has issued new guidance calling for flight procedures and training to ensure that pilots can operate aircraft manually, without being too dependent on automated systems.
The reason your morning drive sucks is because of you, the impulsive human behind the wheel - A multi-university research team has discovered the solution to traffic jams plaguing everyone's commutes: AI traffic managers that, rather than driving like impulsive humans, react to their surroundings to make traffic flow more smoothly.
Case claims collecting personal data breaches UK GDPR, but implications could be wider - A lawsuit filed in the High Court of England and Wales has demanded that Meta's Facebook social media platform stops harvesting personal data for the purposes of advertising and marketing.
Microsoft playing chicken with regulators, making it cheaper on Azure - Microsoft last week made SQL Server 2022 generally available, and this week started to advise of price hikes for the database.
Apple doesn't want to bite - The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a market investigation into cloud gaming and mobile browsers after its study found Apple and Google constitute a duopoly that controls the mobile ecosystem.
Korea's antitrust org to develop a platform to respond to Big Tech’s sneaky ways - According to South Korea's Fair Trade Commission, Apple said it will correct an oddity that sees local developers charged even more than the usual 30 percent Cupertino demands for sales of software in its App Store.
Nothing says 'We love open source and want it to be available in Windows' like only delivering updates from a closed digital tat bazaar - Microsoft has made its Store the home of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WLS).
AI agent proves better than most people in classic game of trust and betrayal - Meta researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system called Cicero that can play the classic strategy game Diplomacy at a level comparable to most human players.
EFLOW makes the open source OS a full partner of Windows at the far reaches of the cloud - Microsoft is rolling out the latest iteration of a tool that lets anyone using a Windows IoT device in Azure to also run containerized Linux workloads.
Got the boot from Musk or Zuck? Automaker has 800 techie vacancies to fill - Jaguar Land Rover, the famed UK-based automaker, is looking to fill a long list of tech and engineering vacancies by appealing to victims of the recent round of Silicon Valley layoffs.
Hey, teacher, leave those apps alone - The French minister of national education and youth has said that free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workplace should not be used in schools – a position that reflects ongoing European concerns about cloud data sovereignty, competition, and privacy rules.
Hard to see multi-cloud management, hypervisors, or enterprise security triggering public interest test to can the deal - The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority has opened a preliminary probe into Broadcom's planned acquisition of VMware.
Remember that one time the Linux kernel couldn't cope for a moment? That sort of thing should be behind us now - The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) has made a decision, and declared that the world can do without leap seconds.
Microsoft moves IP Protection into public preview - An new Azure service aimed at protecting smaller businesses from the growing threat of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is now in public preview, according to Microsoft.
Does spy-tech supplier have a head start in bidding for the controversial deal it considers a 'must win'? - Documents from NHS England show services provided by Palantir – which began in the COVID-19 emergency – will become part of the controversial £360 million ($429 million) Federated Data Platform, a move critics argue gives the US spy-tech biz an unfair advantage in the competition.
OVHcloud maintains and manages your open source DBaaS so you don’t have to - There was a time in the not too distant past when the database would be the last thing that an enterprise IT department would consider migrating into the cloud. For many, persistent concerns around performance, availability and security were just too entrenched to overcome.
Partial VM encryption enables the virtual TPMs Windows 11 guests can't live without - VMware has refreshed its desktop hypervisors, adding native support for Apple's Arm-based CPUs as well as Windows 11.
Antitrust scrutiny into one of the biggest deals for a private software developer - The Department of Justice is closely inspecting Adobe's eye-wateringly expensive purchase of web-first collaboration design startup Figma after making a second request for information from the pair.
Solitaire and Minesweeper coming to Windows giant's software - When a movie or TV director wants to show people wasting time at work, it invariably has them playing computer games. See Peter Gibbons in "Office Space" or the Dunder Mifflin employees in "The Office."
Class-action lawsuit seeks $1 in nominal damages - The Massachusetts Department of Public Health conspired with Google to secretly install a COVID-19 tracing app onto more than 1 million Android users' devices without their knowledge and without obtaining warrants, according to a class-action lawsuit filed this week by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
If your device is becoming unresponsive, there's a workaround - Microsoft has fixed yet another problem in some versions of Windows 10, a bug that makes the taskbar and desktop temporarily vanish or causes the system to ignore you.
But users still need to wait years for business benefits of migration from older systems - Global ERP slinger SAP has relaunched its developer platform with a new name, and bundled it with its S/4HANA, its current generation in-memory application platform.
Nightly and Developer Edition Firefox users will be able to test the new cruelty - Mozilla plans to add support for Manifest v3 browser extensions to its online store – addons.mozilla.org – so developers can have them cryptographically signed for distribution.
Merging operational and analytical data in real time - Imagine needing to make critical business decisions at warp speed but lacking the information you need to set the right coordinates. You could end up in a black hole facing an army of hostile Klingons.
Former BigQuery tech lead tells Reg about data-warehouse-on-your-laptop DuckDB - In analytical database systems, the story of the last ten years or more has been about building out. Only databases distributed over multiple nodes could cope with the scale required by so-called Big Data. Web and mobile data were driving demand for systems which scale out, rather than rely on more and more powerful single instances.
Frustrate enough users and your product will fall. Hint, hint, Elon - Note-taking app Evernote, once a darling of busy tech aficionados, announced the end of its 14-year run as an independent company today with its sale to Italian mobile app company Bending Spoons.
Distributed ledger design slowed transactions, smart contracts were not so smart - The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has paused its multi-year effort to replace its core trading systems with a blockchain-powered platform, written off up to AU$255 million ($171m) of work, and been advised to reconsider whether distributed ledger technology has a role in the project.
Linux Foundation presents IT and help to key volunteers – and some wonder if this is a deal with the Devil - The free and open source software (FOSS) community is caught in a love triangle of sorts.
Not a great look for the electric car company as drivers urged to remain alert - Tesla's automated driver assistance system (ADAS) is coming under fire again, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reporting two new fatal Tesla accidents in its monthly ADAS crash report.
If antitrust regulators aren't happy, the deal won't go through - Broadcom has begun the process of getting European Union approval for its proposed $61 billion takeover of cloud and virtualization biz VMware, which the company hopes to close within its current fiscal year.
An efficient GPU compute management platform is critical to furthering AI experimentation, says Run:ai - A steady stream of revolutionary technologies and discoveries – fire, agriculture, the wheel, the printing press and the internet, to name but a few - have profoundly shaped human development and civilization. And that cycle of innovation is continuing with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Why you might want to use a static site generator to create your blog - When it comes to creating a blog, there are many different options out there. You can use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, or you can use a static site generator. So, which one should you choose? In this article, we will compare the two options and discuss the pros and cons of each. We will also give some tips on how to choose the right option for you.
Securing their deployment in multiple environments doesn’t have to be a fairy tale - It might be time for a pair of mythical Seven-League Boots to keep on top of modern application deployments which span multiple edge and cloud hosting locations. If only IT managers could take such giant strides to tackle the challenge of tracking microservices which communicate through so many different APIs.
Claims to be able to spot imposters in live video feeds within milliseconds - Intel claims it has developed an AI model that can detect in real time whether a video is using deepfake technology by looking for subtle changes in color that would be evident if the subject were a live human being.
Maybe now San Francisco will allow it to operate in the fog and rain? - Self-driving taxi operator Waymo might have a way of getting around its vehicles' problems operating in foggy San Francisco: by turning each into a roving weather station that can adapt to the conditions.
Following AppGyver and Ruum, Build potentially takes pressure off devs’ create-this-feature-now list - SAP has launched another initiative aimed at helping so-called citizen developers build applications on its enterprise software platforms.
Buggy update will be pulled in next 24 hours - Microsoft continues to fix problems that pop up after users have installed the latest updates to Windows 10 and 11 – including one that causes problems with the Direct Access remote connectivity feature.
Russia and strong dollar weigh heavy on 2022, but OpenText is ready for COBOL expert - Unaudited fiscal 2022 financial results for Micro Focus indicate that potential new owner OpenText still has some work to do to convert the app and infrastructure management software house into a growth engine.
The story behind the serverless database built to support the largest ecommerce company in the world - This year, one of Amazon's most innovative creations turned ten years old. In January 2012, the company released DynamoDB, a serverless NoSQL databased designed to be fast, highly reliable, and cost effective. This key-value store now powers many of the company's largest services, including Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa.
Edinburgh Uni says it interrupted its financial processes in summer to test new system - The UK’s University of Edinburgh continues to struggle to pay staff, students and suppliers months after the introduction of a new Oracle Fusion-based accounting and HR system.
Plus: Amazon debuts AI warehouse robot, Midjourney releases latest ML art generator - GitHub is testing a new feature that will allow developers to instruct its AI-powered programming assistant Copilot to generate code using voice commands.
Narrowing permissions could be difference between mildly pwned and totally pwned corporate network - Microsoft is bringing a granular personal access token (PAT) to its Azure DevOps REST APIs to try to reduce the damage that can happen when credentials are leaked or stolen.
It won't be the last - GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's AI-driven, pair-programming service, is already wildly popular. Microsoft broke out GitHub's revenue and subscription numbers in its latest quarterly report for the first time.
Canonical is working on a new way to prove to employers you know your stuff - Canonical is working on a new training and skills-testing scheme, currently codenamed CUE, to help people without formal certifications to show that they've got what it takes.
Difficult decision did not end with RISE with SAP, analyst tells The Reg - SAP’s plans for moving customers to S/4HANA in the cloud – the assumed destination for the majority of SAP's ERP users – belies the complexity of decision in terms of software licensing, infrastructure and business processes, according to Gartner.
Or, how to make an unsupported printer work on Windows 11 with Ubuntu and WSL2 - The OpenPrinting project – together with Windows Subsystem for Linux – enables printers that Windows no longer supports to work on Windows 11.
More support for multiple platforms, Arm architecture, and the cloud in release 7 - Microsoft's unveiling this week of the production release of .NET 7 advances the company's efforts over the past few years to unify the open source development runtime to support multiple architectures and platforms.
Addressing social media's baked-in flaws starts with users realizing its true worth - I've decided to sign up for Twitter's subscription-based service for a simple reason: to put my money where my mouth is.
Veep still says 'technology will eventually be very successful' - A startup that bet on the old concept of analog chips to provide energy-efficient AI computing has run out of capital.
Sensible use of CPUs and GPUs is the answer to scaling up accelerated compute, says Intel - It's a decade and a half since researchers dazzled the tech world by demonstrating that graphical processing units could be used to dramatically accelerate key AI operations.
Reg FOSS desk chats with one of the core architects - Canonical remains committed to its Snap format as the coverage at its first public gathering in a few years shows.
Also teams up with cinema chain AMC to let you Zoom at the movies - Zoom has decided to take on the software world's most dangerous mission: attempting to offer productivity tools that rival those bundled into Microsoft Office 365.
Frankly, it's the least of Musk's problems right now - Tesla has initiated a voluntary recall of more than 40,000 Model S and Model X vehicles thanks to a bad firmware update that could cause the cars to lose power steering "due to forces from external road dynamics," also known as bumps.
Advertising? 'Anything for that sweet sweet KPI' - Windows appears to be testing ads in the user session flyout menu (where you sign out, lock, or change settings) of Windows 11 preview builds, with clearly annoyed Windows Insider Albacore sharing screenshots on Twitter.
Reveals closer ties to Equinix and Wipro as Broadcom finds new ways to promise peace - VMware has used the European edition of its Explore conference to outline a plan to package software for consumption as SaaS while keeping it out of the reach of the extraterritorial jurisdiction enabled by the USA’s Cloud Act.
Pay is middling, hours are long, but millions of jobs are out there - Chinese employers have recently advertised for nearly a million employees with technical AI skills, according to an analysis from US think tank the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
Asking really good questions about what data can describe matters more than collecting more info - Data scientists are important, but what the world needs now is data artists, according to analysts at Gartner's Data and Analytics Summit in Sydney, Australia.
Plus: City of Edinburgh promises to scrap Chinese AI Hikvision cameras, and more - OpenAI, Microsoft, and GitHub have been named in a class-action lawsuit claiming its AI-code generating software Copilot violates copyright laws.
To quote the great philosopher Han Solo: Don't get cocky - Welcome, dear reader, to another installation of Who, Me? in which we recount for your schadenfreude indulgence tales of Regizens who create havoc – either by their own design or others – but mostly emerge unscathed.
PLUS: Tencent's edgy JV; US/China space spat; Facebook's India boss bails to join Snap; and more - Microsoft has informed its channel it will revise corporate licenses and service prices in Japan and South Korea.
Desktop app buckles up for faster switching between chats or channels or join a meeting - Microsoft has rolled out an upgrade for its Teams desktop app, and is claiming a more than 30 percent speed jump when switching between chat and channel threads.
An unexpected move, but we suspect that Carl Sagan might have approved - Mozilla has announced the successor to the Mozilla Builders incubator: Mozilla Ventures.
To carry it off, make sure you have a database with the right tools for the right job - It is nearly 2023, and the microservices architecture revolution has been well underway. This approach to application development offers benefits ranging from performance to scalability, but it also means rethinking how we access our data. Traditional database access patterns are becoming less appropriate in these new environments.
'You'll be hearing from us,' say privacy campaigners who previously forced the government to back down - The UK government is set to extract patient-identifiable data from NHS hospital systems and share this with its data platform based on technology from Palantir, a move that seems set to provoke another legal challenge.
Email to your personal account is bad news, email to your work account means you still work at Twitter - Twitter owner, sole director and – according to his Twitter profile, now also "Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator" – has reportedly informed company staff that layoffs begin tomorrow.
Monetary authority presses ahead with Ubin+ cross-border CBDC trial anyway - While central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are often advanced as a way to improve the world's creaking cross-border payments infrastructure, some financial experts believe the government-issued tokens may be usurped by stablecoins and other products.
Also one of the first distros we've seen with Kernel 6.0 - Nitrux OS is one of the most stylish and innovative distros we've seen so far: systemd-free, based on AppImages, and with a very unusual desktop.
Acquisition of Ukrainian startup to help broaden appeal beyond popular cache - Database provider Redis has acquired RESP.app, a popular developer tool used to ease developer experience on the popular key-value database.
Prepare to be confused - 9front is a fork and continuation of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, which is what the minds behind UNIX and the C programming language went on to do next. It is also rather strange.
Prepare to be confused - 9front is a fork and continuation of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, which is what the minds behind UNIX and the C programming language went on to do next. It is also rather strange.
Statcounter says Number 10 is still Number 1 in the Windows world - Much of the Windows world has yet to adopt Microsoft's latest desktop operating system more than a year after it launched, according to figures for October collated by Statcounter.
Statcounter says Number 10 is still Number 1 in the Windows world - Much of the Windows world has yet to adopt Microsoft's latest desktop operating system more than a year after it launched, according to figures for October collated by Statcounter.
Pining for Windows XP? Update to the last major release can do that - Zorin OS 16.2 is a friendlier and more feature-rich distro than its parent Ubuntu 20.04, with a lot of updates and bundled apps.
Pining for Windows XP? Update to the last major release can do that - Zorin OS 16.2 is a friendlier and more feature-rich distro than its parent Ubuntu 20.04, with a lot of updates and bundled apps.
Jury still out on whether any kind of metaverse is strictly necessary - Researchers at MIT and the IBM Watson AI Lab have created a machine learning model to predict what a listener would hear in a variety of locations within a 3D space.
Jury still out on whether any kind of metaverse is strictly necessary - Researchers at MIT and the IBM Watson AI Lab have created a machine learning model to predict what a listener would hear in a variety of locations within a 3D space.
Beijing nose best, wants VR to work in sport, tourism. industrial sims, at 8K with 60fps - China's government has published a plan for the nation's virtual reality industry and included a suggestion to promote research in "odor simulation" – suggesting Beijing has decided the time has come for the Internet of Smell.
Beijing nose best, wants VR to work in sport, tourism. industrial sims, at 8K with 60fps - China's government has published a plan for the nation's virtual reality industry and included a suggestion to promote research in "odor simulation" – suggesting Beijing has decided the time has come for the Internet of Smell.
Faster than the others, 600m structures now in a public DB - AI researchers at Meta say they have developed the largest protein-folding model of its kind to date, and that it is capable of predicting the structure of more than 600 million proteins.
Faster than the others, 600m structures now in a public DB - AI researchers at Meta say they have developed the largest protein-folding model of its kind to date, and that it is capable of predicting the structure of more than 600 million proteins.
Also testing digital cash tied to specific purposes – like only letting kids spend allowances on school supplies - Singapore aims to eliminate the use of checks, beginning with corporate checks, by the year 2025. The phase-out was announced by the city-state’s deputy prime minister Lawrence Wong at the Singapore FinTech Festival Wednesday.
Also testing digital cash tied to specific purposes – like only letting kids spend allowances on school supplies - Singapore aims to eliminate the use of checks, beginning with corporate checks, by the year 2025. The phase-out was announced by the city-state’s deputy prime minister Lawrence Wong at the Singapore FinTech Festival Wednesday.
$276 million in fines will do that to a monopolist - India’s Competition Commission last week fined Google a combined $276 million for monopolistic practices in the markets for app stores and mobile operating systems, and called for the company to open its Play store to third-party payment systems or risk further regulatory wrath.
$276 million in fines will do that to a monopolist - India’s Competition Commission last week fined Google a combined $276 million for monopolistic practices in the markets for app stores and mobile operating systems, and called for the company to open its Play store to third-party payment systems or risk further regulatory wrath.
Totally not about trying to keep customers in the ecosystem. Okay, maybe a lot about that - VMware says it will help pay for your enterprise to move workloads to the cloud.
Totally not about trying to keep customers in the ecosystem. Okay, maybe a lot about that - VMware says it will help pay for your enterprise to move workloads to the cloud.
Copying text now works without issue, so naturally pasting is getting iffy - Windows 11 and Firefox users who have experienced months of browser freezes when copying text, rejoice: there's finally a patch that eliminates the problem, which has been persistent since May.
Copying text now works without issue, so naturally pasting is getting iffy - Windows 11 and Firefox users who have experienced months of browser freezes when copying text, rejoice: there's finally a patch that eliminates the problem, which has been persistent since May.
One of the more popular Ubuntu-based flavors for new migrants from Windows - Linux Lite 6.2 is the latest version of this increasingly inaccurately named distro. In effect, it's a niftily customized remix of Xubuntu 22.04.1.
One of the more popular Ubuntu-based flavors for new migrants from Windows - Linux Lite 6.2 is the latest version of this increasingly inaccurately named distro. In effect, it's a niftily customized remix of Xubuntu 22.04.1.
Improvements to storage engine follow DataStax update to API gateway - NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has updated the storage engine for its managed service claiming a fourfold increase in speed while using a tenth of the memory.
Improvements to storage engine follow DataStax update to API gateway - NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has updated the storage engine for its managed service claiming a fourfold increase in speed while using a tenth of the memory.
Why Oracle's RDBMS is for every cloud, despite what its salespeople might say - Like lots of other IT companies in recent years, Oracle has done its best to direct customers onto its own cloud. But Nick Walter, CTO at consulting company House of Brick, says it may have been more aggressive than most in pursuing that goal.
Why Oracle's RDBMS is for every cloud, despite what its salespeople might say - Like lots of other IT companies in recent years, Oracle has done its best to direct customers onto its own cloud. But Nick Walter, CTO at consulting company House of Brick, says it may have been more aggressive than most in pursuing that goal.
FAT ain't dead, and the modern version can get big. Really big - In case you thought the FAT filesystem died out with Windows ME – and good riddance – we have bad news for you. Several versions of it are alive, well, and essential to modern PCs, cameras, phones, fondleslabs, and more. The good news is, you'll soon be able to fix the FS with Linux.
FAT ain't dead, and the modern version can get big. Really big - In case you thought the FAT filesystem died out with Windows ME – and good riddance – we have bad news for you. Several versions of it are alive, well, and essential to modern PCs, cameras, phones, fondleslabs, and more. The good news is, you'll soon be able to fix the FS with Linux.
This means personal info will be captured but not used – unless you're a suspected crim - The governor of the People's Bank of China, Yi Gang, has delivered a speech in which he outlined the concept of "controllable anonymity" for the nation's digital currency.
This means personal info will be captured but not used – unless you're a suspected crim - The governor of the People's Bank of China, Yi Gang, has delivered a speech in which he outlined the concept of "controllable anonymity" for the nation's digital currency.
Boss denies any wrongdoing as Feds reportedly stick a probe in, too - Self-driving truck biz TuSimple fired co-founder and CEO Xiaodi Hou on Monday amid what's reported to be US federal investigations into whether he inappropriately assisted and shared blueprints with Chinese startup Hydron.
Boss denies any wrongdoing as Feds reportedly stick a probe in, too - Self-driving truck biz TuSimple fired co-founder and CEO Xiaodi Hou on Monday amid what's reported to be US federal investigations into whether he inappropriately assisted and shared blueprints with Chinese startup Hydron.
NLRB told to crack down on tech that tramples right to organize - America's labor watchdog says it intends to crack down on the growing use of technology by bosses to closely monitor and measure staff, as it is feared this software may be used to thwart efforts to organize and unionize.
NLRB told to crack down on tech that tramples right to organize - America's labor watchdog says it intends to crack down on the growing use of technology by bosses to closely monitor and measure staff, as it is feared this software may be used to thwart efforts to organize and unionize.
And just for balance nixes version 2 of its own format, WebP, as well - A note on Google's bug tracker for the Chromium browser specifies that version 110 won't get JPEG XL support after all.
And just for balance nixes version 2 of its own format, WebP, as well - A note on Google's bug tracker for the Chromium browser specifies that version 110 won't get JPEG XL support after all.
Plus: Why some manga and anime fans hate AI-generated art, and ex-Google boss funds AI students - Bumble has open sourced an AI image classifier model designed to automatically blur nude pictures sent on its dating app.
Plus: Why some manga and anime fans hate AI-generated art, and ex-Google boss funds AI students - Bumble has open sourced an AI image classifier model designed to automatically blur nude pictures sent on its dating app.
Businesses that achieve full-scale deployment don't always get the outcomes they hoped for, says Deloitte - Many organizations are struggling with artificial intelligence deployments despite believing that AI will be critical to business success over the next five years, according to a report by Deloitte.
Businesses that achieve full-scale deployment don't always get the outcomes they hoped for, says Deloitte - Many organizations are struggling with artificial intelligence deployments despite believing that AI will be critical to business success over the next five years, according to a report by Deloitte.
Detachment from users' lived reality is how corporates shoot themselves in the foot - Last week, one fundamental problem for IT cropped up in three very different stories. One story was Google's parent Alphabet doing an internal audit of all its products on the back of falling profits. One was a highly critical look at Meta's efforts to put business into VR. And one was Linus Torvalds getting cranky that the i486 architecture was still in Linux's first-class lounge when it should be packed off to the Old Codes' Home.
Detachment from users' lived reality is how corporates shoot themselves in the foot - Last week, one fundamental problem for IT cropped up in three very different stories. One story was Google's parent Alphabet doing an internal audit of all its products on the back of falling profits. One was a highly critical look at Meta's efforts to put business into VR. And one was Linus Torvalds getting cranky that the i486 architecture was still in Linux's first-class lounge when it should be packed off to the Old Codes' Home.
Oh great. Now you get to be that person logging on to vid confs a couple of minutes late - Video conferencing outfit Zoom has revealed it will require users to update their client apps at least every ninety days and introduce a "minimum client version" requirement.
Oh great. Now you get to be that person logging on to vid confs a couple of minutes late - Video conferencing outfit Zoom has revealed it will require users to update their client apps at least every ninety days and introduce a "minimum client version" requirement.
Three million datasets to be thoroughly integrated in the name of efficiency, e-government, and surveillance - China's State Council has outlined a plan to create a National Integrated Government Affairs Big Data System that, by the year 2025, is expected to make millions of government data sets available from one place.
Three million datasets to be thoroughly integrated in the name of efficiency, e-government, and surveillance - China's State Council has outlined a plan to create a National Integrated Government Affairs Big Data System that, by the year 2025, is expected to make millions of government data sets available from one place.
'They may not work yet, or indeed ever,' says ICO's deputy commissioner - Companies should think twice before deploying AI-powered emotional analysis systems prone to systemic biases and other snafus, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) warned this week.
'They may not work yet, or indeed ever,' says ICO's deputy commissioner - Companies should think twice before deploying AI-powered emotional analysis systems prone to systemic biases and other snafus, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) warned this week.
Builder and programmer of the ARC and SEC turned 100 this year - Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.
Builder and programmer of the ARC and SEC turned 100 this year - Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.
Where's your spirit of Ventura? - Apple has opened up a bit about its product security, though the iGiant's slightly chattier demeanor, via a new security blog, may be appreciated less than its bug bounty upgrade.
Where's your spirit of Ventura? - Apple has opened up a bit about its product security, though the iGiant's slightly chattier demeanor, via a new security blog, may be appreciated less than its bug bounty upgrade.
We appreciate power but sometimes it's about getting up and running sooner - The fact that I like the Linux desktop will come as no surprise to anyone who reads my work. I mean, I was once the lead writer and editor for a long-gone publication called Linux Desktop. So why is it as I sit at Kubecon North America in Detroit that I'm writing this on an HP Chromebook x360?
We appreciate power but sometimes it's about getting up and running sooner - The fact that I like the Linux desktop will come as no surprise to anyone who reads my work. I mean, I was once the lead writer and editor for a long-gone publication called Linux Desktop. So why is it as I sit at Kubecon North America in Detroit that I'm writing this on an HP Chromebook x360?
It has a workaround. Plus: Software giant also has a round of tweaks to Windows 11 22H2 - Microsoft has cooked up a workaround for a newly disclosed problem: losing data when you try to reset virtual disks using the vendor's Server Manager console in some versions of Windows Server.
It has a workaround. Plus: Software giant also has a round of tweaks to Windows 11 22H2 - Microsoft has cooked up a workaround for a newly disclosed problem: losing data when you try to reset virtual disks using the vendor's Server Manager console in some versions of Windows Server.
It's worth it, though. And it's easy to install the latest KDE on the latest Kubuntu - KDE 5.26.2 is out with an emergency fix for a memory leak – so if you already have the new version, you should update. If you don't have 5.26, we're here to tell you how.
It's worth it, though. And it's easy to install the latest KDE on the latest Kubuntu - KDE 5.26.2 is out with an emergency fix for a memory leak – so if you already have the new version, you should update. If you don't have 5.26, we're here to tell you how.
One foot firmly in the mainframe for pre-loved system dating back to the 1970s - IBM plans to launch a database-as-a-service version of its Db2 database on hyperscaler clouds as it attempts to execute a "cloud-first" strategy with the relational behemoth.
One foot firmly in the mainframe for pre-loved system dating back to the 1970s - IBM plans to launch a database-as-a-service version of its Db2 database on hyperscaler clouds as it attempts to execute a "cloud-first" strategy with the relational behemoth.
Everyone has to join Discourse… although you can still participate via email - The GNOME Project is preparing to shut down its mailing lists due to problems maintaining the project's GNU Mailman instance - which relies on Python 2 - and a lack of moderators.
Everyone has to join Discourse… although you can still participate via email - The GNOME Project is preparing to shut down its mailing lists due to problems maintaining the project's GNU Mailman instance - which relies on Python 2 - and a lack of moderators.
Amazon Neptune expands serverless to deliver instant workload scaling - Amazon has spent the past few years creating databases that enable its customers to process and analyze their data in different ways. One of these is Neptune, its cloud-native graph database service.
Amazon Neptune expands serverless to deliver instant workload scaling - Amazon has spent the past few years creating databases that enable its customers to process and analyze their data in different ways. One of these is Neptune, its cloud-native graph database service.
Commits to containerized Tanzu portfolio too – perhaps heading off chatter it could be sold - Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan has penned a blog post in which he declares that increasing the prices of VMware products is not his strategy.
Commits to containerized Tanzu portfolio too – perhaps heading off chatter it could be sold - Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan has penned a blog post in which he declares that increasing the prices of VMware products is not his strategy.
Plus: Robo-car upstart Argo AI shuts down after automakers pull plug on funding - The US Department of Justice has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into Tesla and its boasts about its self-driving car technology.
Plus: Robo-car upstart Argo AI shuts down after automakers pull plug on funding - The US Department of Justice has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into Tesla and its boasts about its self-driving car technology.
Building your own initial RAMdisk? That's insecure! - Lennart Poettering's latest blog post proposes moving the Linux boot process into a "Brave New Trusted Boot World" of cryptographically signed Unified Kernel Images.
Building your own initial RAMdisk? That's insecure! - Lennart Poettering's latest blog post proposes moving the Linux boot process into a "Brave New Trusted Boot World" of cryptographically signed Unified Kernel Images.
Well, these distros are all about continual reinvention, after all - Rolling Rhino, a project that turned Ubuntu into a rolling-release distribution, is restarting development under a new name: Rhino Linux.
Well, these distros are all about continual reinvention, after all - Rolling Rhino, a project that turned Ubuntu into a rolling-release distribution, is restarting development under a new name: Rhino Linux.
Getty Images is collaborating with generative AI startup BRIA - Stock photo sites Shutterstock and Getty Images have both announced partnerships with generative AI startups to deploy new tools allowing users to create their own custom pictures using text-to-image models.
Getty Images is collaborating with generative AI startup BRIA - Stock photo sites Shutterstock and Getty Images have both announced partnerships with generative AI startups to deploy new tools allowing users to create their own custom pictures using text-to-image models.
Project two years in the making aims to improve public services... or what's left of them - It's pork barrel time again. The UK government has named a slew of tech organizations that made it onto a £2 billion framework agreement that allows them to compete for big data and analytics public sector contracts.
Project two years in the making aims to improve public services... or what's left of them - It's pork barrel time again. The UK government has named a slew of tech organizations that made it onto a £2 billion framework agreement that allows them to compete for big data and analytics public sector contracts.
Take your desktop rig out for a proper run, turning words into images, 3D models and videos – if it can - Until recently, personal computer hardware seemed to have leapt past any demands software could possibly place upon it. Even high-end games – traditionally the leading edge of user demands on performance – barely taxed the massively overpowered, top-end silicon available. Then AI art came along.
Take your desktop rig out for a proper run, turning words into images, 3D models and videos – if it can - Until recently, personal computer hardware seemed to have leapt past any demands software could possibly place upon it. Even high-end games – traditionally the leading edge of user demands on performance – barely taxed the massively overpowered, top-end silicon available. Then AI art came along.
AWS takes Amazon DocumentDB enterprise-ready capabilities to the next level - As the pace of innovation accelerates, many organizations are moving from traditional monolithic architectures to microservices-driven data management models that give developers the flexibility to work with a diverse set of data volumes and types.
AWS takes Amazon DocumentDB enterprise-ready capabilities to the next level - As the pace of innovation accelerates, many organizations are moving from traditional monolithic architectures to microservices-driven data management models that give developers the flexibility to work with a diverse set of data volumes and types.
Goggles giant on how it gave its Android apps a Kotlin makeover - Meta, parent of Facebook, is in the midst of migrating its Android app Java code to Kotlin, a younger programming language that also relies on the Java Virtual Machine, or JVM.
And get over here, NFT slingers, Cupertino wants a word, too - In a move antitrust watchdogs will surely have no problem with at all, Apple this week revised its App Store rules to limit NFTs, take a cut of paid-for "boosts" for social media posts, and crack down on developers in a few other ways.
Latest release brings better speed and more comprehensible error messages - Python 3.11.0, the latest iteration of the exceedingly popular programming language, debuted on Monday, to the delight of software developers who care about such things.
Datacenters, cloud services shut down but keep maintaining DBs for the nation's businesses - SAP has delayed its withdrawal from Russia after struggling to find a buyer for its operations in the region.
Only just installed? You may need another upgrade all the same - Linux kernel 5.19.17 is here, the last of the version 5 series, as used in the current release of Ubuntu.
Even better, upgrade to Windows 10 at the very least - Google has joined the funeral procession for Windows 7 and 8.1, announcing the last Chrome update for the aging OSes will come in early February.
Arcan sub-project reinvents command lines and GUIs at once - Lash#Cat9 is a new type of typing-driven UI, which moves beyond terminal emulators. Cat9's power comes from its close interaction with its display server, Arcan. This picks up some of the ideas from X11 and Wayland then goes much further.
Bet ya can't wait to slap that 22H2 on your machine - Microsoft is finally making good on its promise to address a printing problem holding back its latest Windows 11 upgrade.
RealPage's algorithm screwed tenants by inflating costs, it is claimed - The maker of an algorithm that calculates the optimum rent to charge for homes has been accused of causing an unfair and artificial hike in costs for tenants.
Yet more nagware to use the Edge browser, plus some usefully re-imagined tools liberated from the maze of the Settings menu - Something interesting has popped up in a Chinese language corner of Microsoft's website: a tool called PC Manager that provides easier access to utilities that dwell somewhere in Windows' Settings menus.
Plus: Meta builds speech-to-speech system to translate Hokkien, Waymo expands to LA, and more - Stability AI and Jasper – two startups that make AI software that auto-generates images, text, and other stuff – have each reached so-called unicorn status (valued at over $1 billion) after bagging $101 million and $125 million in funding, respectively.
Long live the King's English or something like that - The Register began life in London in 1994 and today has journalists and other staff all over the world, which is to say San Francisco, Sydney, Singapore, Berlin, and beyond.
Software giant is already in deep, giving the startup $1 billion in 2019 - Microsoft is reportedly in advanced talks with OpenAI to invest more in the seven-year-old research company.
Plus better support for some newer Intel wireless and graphics chipsets - OpenBSD 7.2 is here, spanning an impressive 14 different computer platforms, including FOSS fans who have the newest Apple Arm-based Mac models.
Works well, but selection of available apps is meagre - Microsoft has decided the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) – its offering that runs Android VMs which behave just like another application in Windows – is sufficiently stable that it can be designated version 1.0 and made available to all.
That's a whole six hours of revenue, but requirements to open the Android ecosystem will hit harder - India's Competition Commission has announced it will fine Google ₹1,337.76 crore (₹13,377,600,000 or $161.5 million) for abusing its dominant position in multiple markets in the Android Mobile device ecosystem and ordered the company to open the Android ecosystem to competition.
Linux wunderkind's project now an official flavor as 'Kinetic Kudu' brings nine months of updates - Ubuntu 22.10 is out, and the biggest change is a new official remix: Ubuntu Unity is now an official flavor.
Boffins say educators need to deal with opportunities and risks of GitHub Copilot and pals - While the legal and ethical implications of assistive AI models like GitHub's Copilot continue to be sorted out, computer scientists continue to find uses for large language models and urge educators to adapt.
DoJ cracks down on competing companies that share board members - Directors at tech firms SolarWinds, DynaTrace, Skillsoft, and Udemy have resigned after the US Department of Justice raised concerns about overlapping board membership it felt created antitrust problems.
What did you expect, HoloLens-ready Minesweeper and new skins for Calculator? - Microsoft is rolling out the only feature updates this year for Windows 10, with the IT giant describing it as a "scoped and streamlined" effort with a strong focus on security.
Did we say donate? We meant submit. Megacorp swiftly KOs former blog title - Google has offered its tool for pure Go Kubernetes containers to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ... and may have thought it was a done deal.
AI-driven coding tool might generate other people's code – who knew? Well, Redmond, for one - GitHub Copilot – a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet – has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim.
"Serverless" microVMs further blur the line between containers and virtual machines - The FreeBSD developer who brought FreeBSD to Amazon EC² has now got it working on the company's lightweight Firecracker hypervisor.
Identify best practices and benchmarks to show they’re working - While the wider economy may be facing some ferocious headwinds, professional tech services organizations are continuing to show growth.
COVID-19 pandemic made a bit of a dent, too - A reduction of sulfur in shipping fuel reduced air pollution levels at sea to the lowest levels this century in 2020, according to an AI model built by NASA. The COVID-19 pandemic also helped here, too, natch.
There goes Woke Big Tech again, downplaying traditional liberal views - YouTube's recommendation algorithm not only gently traps viewers in mild echo chambers, it is more likely to suggest conservative-leaning videos regardless of your political alignment.
LiDAR companies lead the pack, with valuations plummeting up to 99% since IPO - It's not a great time for self-driving tech startups. The ones that managed an IPO in the past two years have lost a combined 81 percent of their market value, dropping from a total of nearly $51 billion offering time to a mere $9 billion this month.
An open source rival to Ableton - Ardour, a free multi-platform digital audio workstation (DAW), has released version 7.
Sorry Adobe but we can let users type or even hand-write directly - Mozilla has released the latest version of the leading FOSS browser for Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD and mobile OSes.
Citrix can do this too. Hyperconverged infrastructure's salad days serving virtual PCs might be ending - Amazon Web Services is moving to bring desktop virtualization (VDI) into the age of desktop-as-a-service.
Thermonuclear warheads, so hot right now - America's Sandia National Labs this week said it will investigate using Cerebras' wafer-sized accelerator chips to determine that the nation's nuclear weapons will work as intended, should global annihilation ever be desired.
Chip giant flutters eyelashes at Europe in hope of early acqusition - Broadcom hopes to convince European antitrust regulators to greenlight its $61 billion takeover of VMware early – by claiming it will boost competition with public cloud giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Based on Rust, on top of seL4 – a big deal in the microkernel world - Google, one of very few tech companies willing to experiment with new operating systems, has unveiled KataOS for embedded machine learning devices.
Spare a thought for the techies hauling on-prem mega-platform of one of world's biggest mobile companies to the fluffy stuff - Vodafone has announced it is migrating its SAP S/4HANA ERP platform from an on-premises installation to Google Cloud.
Release candidate one for Linux 6.1 has appeared - Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for version 6.1 of the project and added an appeal for developers to make his life easier by adding code earlier in the development cycle.
This wasn't WarGames – it was far more serious - The working week is upon us again, so what better way to mark it than with another of The Reg's weekly tales of readers getting away with it after perhaps not having done their very best work.
Azure Stack HCI and Azure Kubernetes Service can be free for Windows Server customers. Microsoft hopes that price will encourage you to stick around - Microsoft last week extended its Azure Hybrid Benefit to some on-prem workloads.
Plus: Listen to Fake Joe Rogan interviewing Bogus Steve Jobs in bizarre podcast episode - A freaky-looking humanoid robot wearing dungarees and named Ai-Da became the first machine to speak at a House of Lords committee hearing on AI art this week.
How software can help some grieve, perturb others - Death is inescapable. Everyone experiences grief at some point in their lives, whether it's when a relative, friend, or pet passes away.
Nothing like medical orders routed into /dev/null and other problems to hold up a roll out - The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) this week announced it is delaying pending deployments of the Oracle Cerner electronic health record (EHR) system until June 2023 because of ongoing problems with the system.
But you get a super practical patch that prints CPU, core, and socket when you get a segfault - The merge window for contributions to Linux 6.1 is still open and incoming features include Wi-Fi security fixes and hardware tests.
But, it won't play out the way you think it will - It has become a running joke. "20xx will be the year of the Linux desktop." The punchline is, of course, it will never happen. But the real jape is that there will soon be a year of the Linux desktop. It's just not going to happen the way Linux fanboi have believed it will.
'Customers will not – at least not in the short term – move exclusively to cloud scenarios' - SAP couldn't be clearer with its customers about the challenges they face in application upgrades and cloud migration, but for one reason or another they struggle to get the message. Or perhaps hope it will go away.
Hope to combat misinformation with graph of observations that prove what you’re reading is reliable - Fujitsu and Japan's Keio University have proposed adding an "endorsement layer" to the internet, to verify information and prevent the flow of fake news and disinformation.
Impressive distro is somewhere between a tech demo and a power user's tool - While many Ubuntu remixes just switch the desktop or replace a few default apps, Zinc changes some of the fundamentals. The result is impressive.
Ubuntu once again courts controversy, but alternative commands are available - Some Ubuntu users are not happy at receiving a promotional message at the command line when upgrading their systems.
Go ahead, feel redundant: machines reduce maintenance time by 12 days and go places humans cannot - On Wednesday Toshiba launched its commercialized robot inspection services for power plant turbine generators.
HR diversity claims via software are rot, according to boffins - Claims that AI-powered recruitment software can boost diversity of new hires at a workplace were debunked in a study published this week.
Redmond hopes move will lure more to its PostgreSQL managed service - Microsoft is launching a database migration tool to help Oracle users shift to a PostgreSQL managed service on Azure.
We spin up Linux PC vendor's first public version of its in-house OS - Tuxedo OS 1 is Ubuntu 22.04, tweaked for the company's own kit, with KDE instead of GNOME, a natively packaged Firefox, and Flatpak instead of Snap.
Staff couldn't access patient records and paper stocks were running low - Hospitals in the UK are recovering from an outage in their vital electronic health records system from Oracle Cerner which left doctors unable to access vital patient information.
Intel’s Sapphire Rapids CPUs and Mount Evans SmartNICs pop their heads above ground, too - Cloud-based AI training got a little more diverse this week after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud announced the general availability of their latest custom AI accelerators.
Latest version of FOSS hypervisor boasts support for new 3D acceleration tech and encrypted virtual machines - VirtualBox 7.0 is the latest version of the FOSS hypervisor that Oracle acquired along with Sun Microsystems in 2009 – barely more than a year after Sun acquired VirtualBox's developer, Innovision.
Apache Spark comes to BigQuery while BigLake gets Iceberg support - Google is promoting updates to its cloud-based data management portfolio with the ambition of bringing analysis of structured and unstructured data closer together.
R&D Center focuses on autonomous AI, otherwise known as On-Device AI - Samsung's Ukraine headquarters were damaged during a Russian attack on Kyiv that began Monday morning and which killed at least 14, injuring others.
User group's views are at odds with the software giant's direction - SAP users are putting more emphasis on on-premises solutions than the cloud when it comes to future workloads, according to a survey among the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG), which represents users in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
This is despite a history of assistive software being involved in crashes - Despite years of headlines about driver assistance systems being involved in horrific car crashes, a study by the US-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) suggests motorists continue to use their vehicles as though they are fully self-driving.
First chunk of mega-frameworks go to market - The UK government has kicked off procurement to modernize aging legacy applications used by the national tax collector, HMRC.
Some of the hardest things in programming: Handling times and dates - The decision last month by Chilean leaders to delay a switch to Daylight Savings Time (DST) by a week could cause headaches for some Windows users if they don't implement the workaround outlined by Microsoft.
Hear how they should upgrade for success in our Career Development webinar - In theatre, it is commonly said that a director is only as good as his last play. You could say the same thing about software developers in that they are judged on the performance of their last application in an area of constant evolution.
Hear Intel’s take on the future of hardware in an open source landscape. - There is nothing quite like cooperation in any walk of life to make us feel better about the human species and foster progress. In our early hunter-gatherer days it was working together that ensured mammoth-hunting success and the very existence of the open source community is another example of an inspiring force for good.
Smartphone software set to link more services to patients despite privacy fears - NHS Digital has awarded IBM a £52.4 million ($60.2 million) contract for supporting and developing the NHS App, which the UK government plans to make the standard way for health services to communicate with patients.
16-year-old feature request to fix it judged so hard it doesn’t offer bang for buck – to Atlassian - After The Register covered the eleven years and counting wait for Atlassian to deliver custom domain names for its cloudy products, readers pointed out an even older open request: CONFCLOUD-7247 was filed on November 1st, 2006 and asks the software upstart to allow changes to the author of an existing page of its Confluence corporate Wiki.
Maybe it's putting the savings into discounts for Windows Server and M365 it's told the channel to sell? - Microsoft has told its north American partners they can't pay with checks starting from December 1.
We trawled through the licensing terms and spoke to the vendors so you don't have to - For developers, there is no debate. The future of the database is open source. A glance at the 2022 Stack Overflow survey of around 70,000 code-wranglers shows nearly all pros use one of the two leading open source RDBMSes, PostgreSQL (46.5 percent) or MySQL (45.7 percent), although they use other systems as well.
Just one big GUI mess - The sight of a former executive laying into their old company is rarely less than delicious. And when that company is Microsoft, the exec is head of user experience, and the complaint is about the solid slab of sadness that is the Windows 11 Start menu? This calls for not just regular salted popcorn, but truffle-oil popcorn on a silver platter carried in by a butler.
Pilot scheme running in Europe, APAC, sees ad giant still take its cut - Google has started a test of alternative payment systems in its Play store.
Plus: Use machine learning to understand your cat ... possibly - A man won an art competition with an AI-generated image crafted, and some people aren't best pleased about it.
Users will now be able to blur or replace their backgrounds during video meetings or calls - Microsoft is making it easier for Teams to work with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in a bid to grow the number of monthly active users on the collaboration platform.
vSphere users can start smaller without paying cluster-bucks - VMware has made a profound change to its partnership with AWS by removing the need to run its wares on dedicated clusters.
Stephen Thaler is fighting the law, and the law is winning - Stephen Thaler, founder of software biz Imagination Engines, has waged a years-long campaign fighting for machines to be legally recognized as inventors around the world. Now, it looks as though his struggle may have been for nothing.
Latest versions of the KDE Plasma and LXQt desktops now available - Kubuntu and Lubuntu desktops have been upgraded but you won't automatically get the new versions. Here's how to get the optional lifts.
Just weeks after milestone permit to charge for robotaxi rides using autonomous-driving tech - General Motors autonomous unit Cruise has issued a Safety Recall report, pulling software that governed how its AVs behave when making an unprotected left turn after one of the vehicles was involved in a crash.
Apple's web engine to take advantage of Git’s distributed nature, GitHub’s large community - Apple web rendering engine WebKit, the basis of its Safari browser, is migrating to Git.
Starting with Google Firebase and Apache Camel repos - Security researchers at Legit Security identified vulnerabilities in the GitHub automated workflows used by Google Firebase and Apache Camel that could have been abused to compromise those open-source projects through their GitHub CI/CD pipeline and insert malicious code.
You'll just have to learn to code instead – oh wait, computers can do that, too - By 2026 the call center industry could save up to $80 billion by replacing humans with AI chatbots, according to analysts at Gartner.
As vCEO Raghu Raghuram tells us Big B won’t treat VMware like its other slash and burn acquisitions - VMware customers are waiting to see what changes Broadcom will bring to the virtualization giant, with many optimistic the impact will be positive.
Original shows, games, the company's other apps, and more also being axed - Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has confirmed layoffs at the struggling social media biz, telling employees in a letter that 20 percent of them will lose their jobs, mostly from teams working on one of the variety of projects it also plans to ax.
Issues ranging from design to banner ads are justified criticisms of a button coming under heavy fire - The one-time director of user experience at Microsoft has added his voice to the ongoing chorus of Windows 11 users who are criticizing the design and usability of the latest operating system's Start menu.
We took our first official test drive and became a little infatuated - There are so many Debian derivatives out there that a few months ago, we did a roundup that compared some of the leading ones.
What the Linux Foundation’s Open Programmable Infrastructure project means for the future of hardware - Open Source development hasn't been around for as long as the Ark, but it has existed for as long as software development itself. Fundamentally a cooperative venture the open source community has seen Intel involved for decades - as a core member of the Linux Foundation, a community participant and strong contributor to open source projects.
And so is vSphere for Arm: CEO tells Reg he’s ‘beating up’ the exec responsible for the port - VMware is working to bring its flagship virtualization stack to all major processor architectures, CEO Raghu Raghuram said at his company’s Explore conference in San Francisco today.
Fears of human-rights abuses overshadow Project Nimbus - Ariel Koren, a Jewish Googler, claims the internet giant pressured her into resigning in retaliation for her speaking out about Google and Amazon's $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel's government and military.
Using an in-memory cache is the best option to boost your application performance while keeping costs low, says AWS - Speed matters. More than 63.1% of world's population access the internet on their smartphones, tablets, or other mobile devices, an increase of 178 million or 3.7%, since 2021 according to statistics compiled in July this year. The UK has one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world at 98%, where 90.2% of UK mobile users depend on fast, consistent Wifi or cellular connections. The prevalence of users using mobile devices has led to a massive proliferation of real-time applications, driving the urgency for databases to meet the demand of ultra-fast content delivery. In-memory data caches can take an application from fast to ultra-fast, giving users the desired instant response time for any application.
Automaker accused of hiding malfunctioning tech from drivers - A lawsuit filed against Tesla this month accuses the automaker of covering up an alleged malfunction that makes vehicles stop for nonexistent objects, sometimes in the middle of traffic, while in Autopilot mode.
Reworked use of object storage changes footing with competitors but will need to convince devs - Teradata has launched analytics and data lake platforms as it strives to steal the march on so-call cloud-native enterprise data warehouse companies.
Re-composes automation and management tools as ‘Aria’, reduces cloud hardware requirements, tries to reinvent security ... again - VMware has delivered on its promise to brings its flagship vSphere compute virtualization suite to SmartNICs that embed a small computer on a network interface controller and run network-centric workloads there to free servers’ CPUs from scutwork.
City-state can’t beat them, so plans to regulate them, starting with consumer suitability tests - The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said on Monday it is taking measures to reduce the harms caused by cryptocurrency, including conducting "customer suitability tests" as part of its ongoing slow-motion crackdown on the alternative tender.
Investigating the world of Chinese Linux - Ubuntu's special distro for the Chinese market has a widening edge over the company's more conventional flavors.
You might find copying data over a network goes at least a little quicker - Microsoft this month fixed what one of its staffers called an "idiosyncrasy" in the end-to-end SMB compression functionality it began rolling out last year for Windows Server 2022 and Windows 11.
Aerial photo scanning tool to be expanded to catch out other unreported home improvements - AI software has detected more than 20,000 secret private swimming pools in aerial photography, helping French tax officials bag about €10 million (£ 8.6 million) in extra property levies.
Funnily enough, most of those hit were aged over 40, it is claimed - After announcing in January it was selling its Watson Health group to investment firm Francisco Partners, IBM assured staff left behind from the sale that they would be redeployed within Big Blue.
Yes, we're totally doing this as a favor for partners and not because we were being sued in Europe - Microsoft has announced a major overhaul to its Windows licensing regimes that make it rather easier to use its operating system in the cloud – without highlighting the reason for the change is to get the European Union off its back.
Plus: Changing call center workers' voices, why we need to do more to get women in ML, and more - A record label this week dropped an AI rapper after the biz was slammed for profiting from the virtual artist, said to be modeled on Black stereotypes.
Resting place of Novell – and one-time home to SUSE – finds new life in the Great White North - Canadian software biz OpenText has bought UK tech stalwart Micro Focus in a deal worth around $6 billion.
Move over, GitLab, this purge begins in October - Heroku, Saleforce's platform-as-a-service biz, on Thursday said it will discontinue its free container and database offerings, and will purge inactive accounts because of ongoing abuse.
Big changes are afoot in a forthcoming version, but they're not fully visible yet - A leading Chinese Linux vendor is polishing what may be its last Debian-based release, and preparing for the move to becoming a fully independent distro with its own new package format, Linglong.
Futurist Keynote: Imma Martinez talks business, policy and ethics - Hearing about the future of AI is one thing. Hearing about it from someone with deep experience of the technology and business world in general, and AI in particular, is quite another.
Human remains from millennia ago analyzed by the machines their descendants built - AI algorithms can be used to date ancient human remains by analyzing their DNA, just-published research has proposed.
Just how bad does existing AI hardware have to be to start from scratch? - To quench the thirst for ever larger AI and machine learning models, Tesla has revealed a wealth of details at Hot Chips 34 on their fully custom supercomputing architecture called Dojo.
Don't ask us how this is decided, it probably involved a lot of Perl - Once again, Python is at the top of the IEEE's annual survey of popular programming languages – seemingly decided by a grab bag of metrics – while SQL appears to be a crucial skill.
Sometimes you just want something dead simple that can maybe handle bold, italics, and a hyperlink or two - PanWriter isn't all that small, but it's simple, clean, and does the bare minimum over a plain text editor.
Cryptography prof tells Microsoft to get forked - Earlier this month, the US Treasury Department sanctioned cryptocurrency mixing service Tornado Cash, claiming it provided money laundering for entities deemed national threats to America.
That wasn't actually me on a Zoom call, it was a malicious AI clone built from TV interviews, claims PR - A Binance PR exec says crooks created a deep-fake "AI hologram" of him to scam cryptocurrency projects via Zoom video calls.
Why enterprises are choosing Amazon DocumentDB to power their mission critical applications - For decades, relational databases ruled the enterprise computing space. Their structured data storage models and strong ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated and durable) qualities made them a no-brainer for enterprise applications, especially when handling structured data.
Airbus's solar-powered Zephyr nosedives after more than 64 days aloft - An unmanned, solar-powered drone was hours from breaking the world record for the longest-duration flight before it suddenly crashed.
From original author Brian Kernighan, one of the original Unix team - In Unix terms, this news is akin to Moses appearing and announcing an amendment to the 10 commandments.