The top headlines happening today around the world of information systems, which we regularly monitor to keep abreast of new technologies, emerging trends, security threats, standards updates & best practices;
Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis The European Commission has launched formal proceedings against Meta, alleging failure to properly monitor distribution by "foreign actors" of political misinformation before June's European elections.… Xubuntu 24.04 is out, and offers a minimal installation option that is considerably more minimal than the other official flavors.… A recent study proposes that vitrimer could potentially be used for making printed circuit boards (PCBs) that are much more repairable and recyclable than the ones we use today.… 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.… Vantage Data Centers is joining the crowded Irish datacenter market with its first site in the Emerald Isle due to come online in 2024. In view of ongoing power constraints in the country, the project is to include on-site power generation.… Apple's grudging accommodation of European antitrust rules by allowing third-party app stores on iPhones has left users of its Safari browser exposed to potential web activity tracking.… China's space program will next week launch mission that aims to land on the Moon, take samples, and bring them back to Earth.… Video 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".… Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions unit reported on Tuesday a 68 percent year-on-year increase in sales for Q1 2024, largely thanks to its memory sales – a result that confirms what many had predicted: an AI and server boom has brought the chip shop out of the lows experienced in 2023.… Australian researchers pioneered the development of solar panels, but the nation now imports them in huge quantities – a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain.… When India's top four outsourcers – Wipro, HCL Tech, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – announce their results, they often mention plans to hire thousands of new workers to both grow headcount and replace departed workers. But across 2023 and into 2024, that changed.… The FCC on Monday fined four major US telcos almost $200 million for "illegally" selling subscribers' location information to data brokers.… Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules.… The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating an electric car maker whose self-driving-ish software was involved in a pair of fatal collisions. It's not Tesla this time, instead it's Ford's turn in the hot seat.… 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.… Tesla boss Elon Musk met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing to discuss electric vehicles and self-driving cars.… Updated Canadian pharmacy chain London Drugs closed all of its stores over the weekend until further notice following a "cybersecurity incident."… When regular people have disputes with neighbors, the more reasonable party will grit their teeth, bite their tongue, and try to avoid conflict as much as possible. When billionaires have disputes with millionaire neighbors, they'll see you in court.… Intel is reportedly telling motherboard manufacturers to use its recommended BIOS settings by default to stop CPU instability issues with 13th and 14th Generation chips.… 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. … Updated Google's latest round of layoffs have hit engineers working on its Flutter and Python teams.… The former CEO of web comms tools provider Twilio has bought The Onion, the US satirical magazine that saw its popularity boom in the early days of the web.… 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.… The French government has tabled an offer to buy key assets of ailing IT giant Atos after the company late last week almost doubled its estimate of the cash it will need to stay afloat in the near future.… The Hubble Space Telescope has celebrated the 34th anniversary of its launch in the traditional way: by entering safe mode due to an ongoing gyroscope issue.… Smart device manufacturers will have to play by new rules in the UK as of today, with laws coming into force to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to break into hardware such as phones and tablets.… FOSS round-up 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.… The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google's Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025.… The UK Cabinet Office has confirmed it is £17.5 million out of pocket after underwriting the official receiver of UKCloud, which went into liquidation in 2022.… Opinion It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it. Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU. Readers may have owned one in an 8-bit microcomputer or showered coins on one in an early arcade video game.… Who, Me? 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.… The homebrew Yitian 710 CPU developed in 2021 and deployed by Alibaba Cloud is the fastest Arm server processor for rent in hyperscale clouds when handling database-related tasks, according to research published this week in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal Transactions on Cloud Computing.… A teardown of Huawei's Pura 70 smartphone by an IC research firm revealed the Chinese tech giant is relying on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp's (SMIC) HiSilicon Kirin 9010 processor, likely because US sanctions mean the Chinese company can't buy from other sources.… The European Space Agency is ready to put together the first Ariane 6 rocket, and has declared the campaign to get it into orbit is under way.… Updated - Infosec in brief They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that appears to have been true in the case of Discord data harvesting site Spy.pet – as it was recently and swiftly dismantled after its existence and purpose became known.… Asia In Brief Japan's effort to start a business disposing of space junk is off to a promising start, after the ADRAS-J satellite spotted its first target and sent back images.… Interview There's a lot of momentum behind the right-to-repair movement, and if anyone should know, it'd be Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association and longtime repairability advocate.… New memory variants were this week launched for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module family. Customers can now specify a 4S with 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB, as well as the original 1GB version.… Opinion 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.… SaaS biz application vendor Workday has pulled out of a new-build development in Dublin as it rethinks plans to expand EMEA HQ.… NASA's optical communications demonstration has hit 25 Mbps in a test transmitting engineering data back to Earth from 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away.… Kettle 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.… Former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale has posted a correction to NASA's history of STS-109, which he claims "is a lie" - although that may be a slight exaggeration.… Leaders of the world's most prominent AI companies are being recruited for the Homeland Security Department's new advisory group.… Under US pressure, Dutch photolithography giant ASML will no longer service certain chipmaking equipment purchased by Chinese customers.… In partnership with IBM, Microsoft has released the source code for MS-DOS 4.0, more than 35 years since the operating system made a muted appearance ahead of Windows 3.x.… Two Chinese nationals were this week accused by the US of attempting to illegally export chipmaking kit to a company back home, in another twist in the tech wars between the two nations.… Millions of Kaiser Permanente patients' data was likely handed over to Google, Microsoft Bing, X/Twitter, and other third-parties, according to the American healthcare giant.… Updated 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.… A group of Chinese semiconductor firms including Huawei are reportedly looking to get domestic production of high bandwidth memory (HBM) up and running by 2026.…
The Register
European Commission starts formal probe of Meta over election misinformation
Europe takes action after Facebook parent withdraws monitoring tool
Xubuntu 24.04: A minimal install that does what it says on the tin
This nearly Snap-free Ubuntu remix may be about about to win friends and influence people
Novel vitrimer plastics promise greener PCBs
Even the least recyclable part of the process could be recovered 91 percent of the time
Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace
No it's not Birmingham this time. West Sussex County Council ERP replacement price to hit £40M
Vantage enters crowded Irish datacenter market with new Dublin site
On-site generation plant aims to 'alleviate pressure on energy demand from the grid'
Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe
Infosec eggheads find iGiant left EU iOS 17 users open to being tracked around the web
China to launch sample return mission to the far side of the Moon – maybe next week
And hatches 2030 plan to beat US for Mars rock retrieval
Politicians call for ban on 'killer robots' and the curbing of AI weapons
'This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation'
Here’s another thing AI can do: Return Samsung’s memory biz to profit
HBM will help too. Foundry biz? On track for 2nm but bruised
Australia to fund $620M quantum computer claimed to be first at 'utility-scale'
PsiQuantum's coming home
The hiring frenzy is over at India's services giants
Headcounts are down for the first time in ages, margins are up, and CEOs are happy
AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile US fined $200M for selling off people's location info
Carriers claim real culprits are getting away with it - the data brokers
Google blocked 2.3M apps from Play Store last year for breaking the G law
Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too
Ford's BlueCruise driving assistant probed by US watchdog after deaths
Electric Mustang tech active right up to moment of crashes
Open source Z80 clone seeks to help bring classic chip back from the dead
Whether the project will bear fruit is perhaps questionable
Musk schmoozes Chinese Premier as Tesla Full Self-Driving remains parked
Automaker could really do with the training data
London Drugs closes all of its pharmacies following 'cybersecurity incident'
Canadian stores shuttered 'until further notice'
Cloudflare CEO sues over free-roaming fidos at his ski resort paradise
Who let the dogs out?
Intel tells mobo makers to go easy on the BIOS settings amid CPU instability reports
Do not disable safeguards by default, says chipmaker
Apple's pleas ineffective: iPadOS on EU's gatekeeper list
iFought the law, but the law wasn't particularly interested in my line of reasoning
Python, Flutter teams latest on the Google chopping block
Never mind the record revenues, costs must be cut
Twilio cofounder buys The Onion
Satirical news site asks everyone for a buck
OpenAI slapped with GDPR complaint: How do you correct your work?
Irresistible magical tech runs headlong into immovable personal data regulations
France willing to buy key Atos assets to keep them French
Finance minister says government has interests in IT giant's 'sovereign activities'
Hubble Space Telescope has gyro problems again
At 34, things don't seem to work how they used to
UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords
New laws mean vendors need to make clear how long you'll get updates too
Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 40, EndeavourOS, and TrueNAS 24.04 all arrive at once
Sometimes Linux releases are like buses… frequently clustered together, and rarely as reliable as you might ideally want
Watchdog reveals lingering Google Privacy Sandbox worries
Ad tech rewrite to replace web cookies still not to regulatory taste
UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation
Cabinet Office letter also reveals department lost money on unfinished database project
The chip that changed my world – and yours
Zed 80 is dead baby, Zed 80 is dead.... vulture claws over the astounding tech
Software support chap survived breaking his customer
Sometimes there's more than enough blame to go around
Alibaba Yitian 710 rated fastest Arm server CPU in the cloud (for now)
Researcher finds it beats Intel's Xeons for speed on one database-related tests, joins AWS Gravitons in cost-efficiency win
Teardown confirms Huawei's Pura 70 contains SMIC 7nm process node
'Remarkably similar' to the Kirin 9000 processor that shocked many last year
First Ariane 6 rocket ready to assemble as Europe begins final countdown
Core and boosters are on the pad ahead of (maybe) June launch
Discord dismantles Spy.pet site that snooped on millions of users
ALSO: Infostealer spotted hiding in CDN cache, antivirus update hijacked to deliver virus, and some critical vulns
Japan's space junk cleaner prototype closes in on its target
PLUS: Huawei returns to top Chinese smartphone market; China's new IPv6 goals; Malaysia's golden VC Visa
State-by-state is the best approach for right to repair, says advocacy leader
Gay Gordon-Byrne of the Repair Association says US at least is nearing a tipping point
Raspberry Pi adds more memory to the Compute Module 4S
Compute Module 5 still on track for later this year
The hyper-clouds are open source's friends
No, really. Look at the evidence
Workday abandons new-build Dublin office project
Continues to expand EMEA HQ in existing buildings instead
NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix
Laser beam comms are fast, so long as the weather cooperates
Big Cloud is still making bank – Is this AI adoption, price rises, or what?
Shareholders are loving it. What are customers getting out of it all?
Ex-Space Shuttle boss corrects the record on Hubble upgrade mission
Under Flight Rules, the crew should have turned back to Earth
Jensen Huang and Sam Altman among tech chiefs invited to federal AI Safety Board
Stacking the deck – we've heard of it
ASML caves to US pressure to cease servicing some kit used by Chinese customers
Not even maintenance is OK in the eyes of the Uncle Sam
Microsoft dusts off ancient MS-DOS 4.0 code for release on GitHub
Nobody's favorite operating system is now available for inspection
Two indicted for 'illegally exporting' chip gear from US to China
One Chinese national arrested in Chicago while another suspect thought to be abroad
Kaiser Permanente handed over 13.4M people's data to Microsoft, Google, others
Ouch!
Amazon to ditch WorkDocs sharing service, support countdown begins
Cloud giant directs users to pack their bags for DropBox, gives them a year to get affairs in order
Huawei and pals reportedly plan to produce high bandwidth memory by 2026
Getting their hands on AI memory one Huawei or another...