TheRegister
Time for Britain's CMA to strike hard – or risk losing the cloud competition fight
Comment The UK's ambition to become a global AI superpower hinges on a vibrant and competitive cloud market. The next few days will show if its competition regulator really appreciates both the pace of change and the scale of remedies needed to achieve both of these things.…
The Smoot – How an MIT prank became a lasting unit of measurement
Interview On a chilly October evening in 1958, a group of MIT students shuffled onto the Harvard Bridge, which separates the university town of Cambridge from Boston proper. The shortest among them lay down on the sidewalk at the bridge's start, his friends marked his length, he got up, moved forward, and repeated the process.…
‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’
On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your terrifying tech support stories.…
EU cloud gang wins concessions from Microsoft on pricing, licensing
A trade group of European cloud providers has claimed a small victory in bringing lower prices and more flexibility in deploying Microsoft software on their infrastructure.…
VMware slows release cadence for flagship Cloud Foundation suite, but extends support
VMware on Wednesday announced it has extended the time between major releases from two years to three and extended support for those releases to six years.…
OpenAI deputizes ChatGPT to serve as an agent that uses your computer
OpenAI's ChatGPT has graduated from chatbot to agent, at least for paying subscribers.…
AWS sheds more jobs as Jassy's automation layoff prophecy comes true
Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy's predictions that automation would cost jobs at the company have proven accurate at Amazon Web Services.…
Google sues 25 alleged BadBox 2.0 botnet operators, all of whom are in China
Google has filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed individuals in China it accuses of breaking into more than 10 million devices worldwide and using them to build a botnet, called BadBox 2.0, and then to carry out other cybercrimes and fraud.…
AWS previews AgentCore to jumpstart enterprise AI agents
Video Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday previewed a service called Bedrock AgentCore to help organizations put AI agents into business-ready production.…
TSMC aims to make 30% of high-end chips in US with Arizona fab build out
TSMC says it will ramp up production at its second fab site in Arizona earlier than initially expected as it looks to shift nearly a third of its leading-edge wafer output stateside.…
Watch out, another max-severity, make-me-root Cisco bug on the loose
Cisco has issued a patch for a critical 10 out of 10 severity bug in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to run arbitrary code on the operating system with root-level privileges. …
FCC dives in to sink Chinese grip on undersea internet cables
Uncle Sam has decided it's time to free US-connected undersea cables from Chinese influence.…
PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle
Beware: the people behind PuTTY, the renowned FOSS SSH client for Windows, are not the same people as those behind the PUTTY.ORG website.…
Fujitsu sorry for Post Office horror – but still cashing big UK govt checks
Fujitsu has been awarded around £510 million ($682 million) in UK public sector contracts since a TV dramatization of the Horizon Post Office scandal – including a recent £220 million ($294 million) deal with the UK tax collector, awarded without competition.…
Quantum code breaking? You'd get further with an 8-bit computer, an abacus, and a dog
The US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has been pushing for the development of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms since 2016.…
Boffins detail new algorithms to losslessly boost AI perf by up to 2.8x
We all know that AI is expensive, but a new set of algorithms developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Intel Labs, and d-Matrix could significantly reduce the cost of serving up your favorite large language model (LLM) with just a few lines of code.…
Large Hadron Collider data hints at explanation for why everything exists
Scientists have analyzed data gathered from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to advance our understanding of why anything exists.…
Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian
The result of the pioneering joint Psion and Nokia smartphone effort is still out there on GitHub.…
Microsoft offers vintage Exchange and Skype server users six more months of security updates
Microsoft has extended its security update programs for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019, and Skype for Business 2015 and 2019.…
Meta used AI to concoct low-carbon concrete it poured for a datacenter floor
Social media giant Meta has created an AI model to come up with new forms of concrete and used one of the resulting recipes to underpin a new bit barn.…