FEATURE Spring has sprung and that means another wave of open weights AI models from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Nvidia. But this time feels a bit different. In the past, these models have felt a bit like toys: research projects and proofs of concept that, while impressive for their size or innovation,…
I love black-and-white photography. I also adore compact cameras you can always have by your side. So I’m a total mark for the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, a fixed-lens camera that can’t zoom and can’t record color — at all. It’s a formula that makes the average person ask, “Why?” I’ve tested the GR IV…
Exclusive Nutanix plans to support KubeVirt to allow its customers to run both containers and VMs on the edge. It’s common to run Kubernetes inside virtual machines because it is a workload that – like many others – can benefit from the logical isolation virtualization offers. Nutanix, VMware, and others have their roots in managing…
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded its annual Prize in Computing to Matei Zaharia for his work developing open source data and analytics software, including the widely used Apache Spark analytics engine. The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists whose work has had a broad and lasting impact. The award carries…
Agriculture manufacturing giant John Deere has agreed to a proposed $99 million settlement following a class action lawsuit in Illinois. One of several similar legal challenges underway across the US, the lawsuit brought against John Deere pertains to farmers’ longstanding concerns over the company’s rigid maintenance rules, which plaintiffs say prevent farmers from repairing their…
A new extortion crew has targeted “several dozen high-value” corporations through phishing and helpdesk social-engineering, according to Google. Google Threat Intelligence Group tracks the financially motivated group as UNC6783, and in a blog post, principal threat analyst Austin Larsen said that it may have ties to the “Raccoon” persona. “We are aware of several dozen…
A university student in the US is in data limbo after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard, preventing him from entering his iPhone passcode. Connor Byrne, 21, adopts the uncommon but security-minded approach to iPhone passcodes, using an alphanumeric string instead of the standard four-number passcode. He updated his iPhone 13 from iOS…
AI agents should not be secret agents, at least in corporate environments. But when companies deploy software automations, they don’t always have visibility into what their roboscripts are actually doing. Amazon Web Services aims to illuminate the enterprise agent ecosystem with its Agent Registry, which the infrastructure biz describes as “a single place to discover,…
It’s going to be hard holding back our tears. The C-suite lieutenants at Amazon didn’t exactly get the bumper payday that many El Reg readers would expect, particularly compared with prior years. Before anyone takes that to mean we’re playing violins for the big shots at Amazon, a company that is investing upwards of $100…
US, UK, and Canadian law enforcement Thursday said that they disrupted a $45 million global cryptocurrency scam, freezing $12 million in stolen funds and identifying more than 20,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to fraud victims across 30 countries. The week-long effort, dubbed Operation Atlantic, also identified an additional $33 million believed to be linked to…