Saturday January 4, 2025
08:30
Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in LegoBecause we're all still kids just richer The debate as to whether Lego is a toy or not largely depends on your willingness to accept revisiting childhood excitement as an adult, especially when it's now far more likely to be you footing the bill than your parents.
07:30Atos denies Space Bears' ransomware claims with a 'but'Points finger at third-party infrastructure being breached French tech giant Atos today denied that Space Bears criminals breached its systems - but noted that third-party infrastructure was compromised by the ransomware crew, and that files accessed by the crooks included 'data mentioning the Atos company name.'
00:30Amazon worker struck and shot in New Orleans terror attack ...Web giant now pledges full support A warehouse worker at an Amazon facility in Mobile, Alabama, who was struck by a truck and shot in the New Orleans New Year's Day deadly terror attack, was initially denied medical leave by the internet mega-giant, possibly due to an HR mix-up.
Friday January 3, 2025
20:00First Foxconn, now Microsoft: Wisconsin town dissed by big techRedmond's pause to redesign planned datacenters won't scuttle this project, say Mount Pleasant officials Count the residents of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin opposed to their town becoming a tech hub lucky: First, Foxconn abandoned its original $10 billion LCD factory plan in the town, and now Microsoft has reportedly paused construction on portions of its $3. ...
18:30Were paying for what we dont get: East D.C. ...Locals demand transparency - and a refund wouldn't hurt Feature When data scientist Andrew Breza learned that the Washington, D.C. attorney general was suing Amazon for excluding his zip code from its fastest delivery service, he immediately wanted to see the proof for himself - and he found it.
17:00With datacenter power crisis looming, US government looks to...Not just AWS, Microsoft et al that are betting on nuclear energy, 13 federal agencies get in on act too Constellation Energy has won contracts worth more than $1 billion from the US government to supply nuclear power to over 13 federal agencies, validating efforts by datacenter operators to secure their own atomic sources.
15:32US logic in question, but perhaps American memory can still prevailWith Intel's foundry future in doubt, Micron takes center stage in US Chips Act push Comment The US once led the world in the development and manufacturing of semiconductors and integrated circuits. And the $280 billion US CHIPS and Science Act sought to reestablish the country as a semiconductor manufacturing superpower and alleviate reliance on foreign fabs.
14:31How a good business deal made us underestimate BASICA somewhat savvy hardware move may have hurt street cred of an important language Feature A generation of gray-haired IT folks learned computing using BASIC on 1980s home computers. Every pro since then holds it in disdain. What happened?
13:00Tech titans hide in shadows awaiting Trump tariff threatsBeing more diplomatic than the politicians makes sense amid fear of upsetting the next US President A eerie quiet has descended upon elements in the tech exec community, and even the typically more vocal souls in the highest seats in corporations are scared to put the wrong foot forward ahead of a certain President Elect coming to power.
12:15CAPTCHAs now run Doom on nightmare modeAs if the bot defense measure wasn't obnoxious enough Though the same couldn't be said for most of us mere mortals, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch had a productive festive period, resulting in a CAPTCHA that requires the user to kill three monsters in Doom on nightmare mode.
11:33Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to RustMini-C is a subset of C that can be automatically turned to Rust without much fuss Computer scientists affiliated with France's Inria and Microsoft have devised a way to automatically turn a subset of C code into safe Rust code, in an effort to meet the growing demand for memory safety.
09:15ERP stumble racks up sales losses greater than budgetSouth African retailer struggles with SAP implementation, says it is making improvements Readers will be familiar with the concept of return on investment (ROI) when a tech project saves more than it costs but less well-known is the idea that, like in particle physics, there exists an anti-ROI.
07:34Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for...Homomorphic-based Enhanced Visual Search is so privacy-preserving, iPhone giant activated it without asking Apple last year deployed a mechanism for identifying landmarks and places of interest in images stored in the Photos application on its customers iOS and macOS devices and enabled it by default, seemingly without explicit consent.
06:33Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the officeSet aside the bat'leth to fix trivial problem for p'takh On Call Welcome to the year 2025, which just three days ago was in the future! Welcome, also, to a new instalment of On Call, The Register's Friday column whose ongoing mission is to take your kind contributions of tech support stories and share them with the world.
00:21LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCsSoCal plod resort to paper logs after system that top brass was warned would 'inevitably fail' did exactly that Software on the computers in America's largest sheriff's department's patrol cars broke down on New Year's Eve due to what appears to be a date-related glitch.
Thursday January 2, 2025
20:15Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly...Even the sound of a zip could be enough to start the recordings, according to claims Apple has filed a proposed settlement in California suggesting it will pay $95 million to settle claims that Siri recorded owners' conversations without consent and allowed contractors to listen in.
16:45Satellite phone services are coming, and Starlink will be firstPlus, unmodified devices set to dominate direct-to-cell services Analysis This year saw the launch of the first satellite constellations designed to provide commercial services to unmodified smartphones, which looks set to become the biggest satellite use case, with the US leading the way on adoption.
14:30Screwed by the cloud: Hardware vendors looking for that raison...40% of world's servers are 6 years +, drink 66% of DC energy, provide 7% of compute. Please refresh, says HPE Four in ten of the servers currently residing in datacenters across the globe are at least six years old. Meanwhile, not only does this 40 percent slice consume 66 percent of the energy used by all bit barns they also only provide 7 percent of the world's total compute.
13:45Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for MicrosoftThat strange time between Christmas and New Year perfect for changing production projects Microsoft left an unwelcome gift under the tree for.NET developers an 'unexpected' change to the distribution of installers and archives, which could hit production systems.
13:00Trump's tariff threats could bump PC prices by almost halfWarning of planned hikes limit forecasts to just 2% shipment growth for US market in 2025 Import tariffs proposed by the incoming Trump administration could cause PC prices in the US to jump 46 percent, stifling market growth in 2025 despite the looming Windows upgrade deadline and vendors eagerness to promote AI-based computers.
12:35Workday on lessons learned from Iowa and Maine project woesNine in ten of our implementations are a success, CEO Carl Eschenbach tells The Reg Interview Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach insists more than 90 percent of the SaaS HR and finance application vendor's rollouts are a success, putting aside the company's high profile difficulties in Maine and Iowa state-level projects.
12:27AWS follows Iceberg path to unite analytics platformBut other obstacles remain before developers get free choice of storage and analytics engines Analysis Last week, AWS jumped into Iceberg with both feet. S3 Buckets, the near-ubiquitous storage containers for developers, got another layer. ...
10:00Honored guest Bork visits Warsaw, PolandMicrosoft will stop at nothing to advertise its services BORK!BORK!BORK! A reminder today that bork the nickname The Register gives to IoT displays gone awry is truly international.
08:35Schneider Electric warns of future where datacenters eat the gridReport charts four scenarios from 'Sustainable AI' to 'Who Turned Out The Lights?' Policymakers need to carefully guide the future consumption of electricity by AI datacenters, according to a report that considers four potential scenarios and suggests a number of guiding principles to prevent it from spiraling out of control.
