A computer glitch in a Spanish betting shop triggered a chain of events that ended with the store manager being kidnapped and held for €50,000 ($58,000) in ransom, allegedly by one of the shop’s own employees. Spanish police said the shop manager was rescued unharmed just 90 minutes after two kidnappers grabbed them following a…
On Call Delivering excellent tech support can sometimes require heavy lifting, a feat The Register celebrates each Friday with a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of hoisting glitchy tech back to full function. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Harold” who told us he once…
The alien world of Saros feels like it has been touched by King Midas. The sky is golden after another impossibly frequent solar eclipse; rocks, specifically those of the precious resource Lucenite, radiate a shimmering amber. Even the body of our gruff hero Arjun Devraj (played by Rahul Kohli) is liable to turn deep, opulent…
Decoupled DiLoCo is not only more resilient to failures, but is also practical for executing production-level, fully distributed pre-training. We successfully trained a 12 billion parameter model across four separate U.S. regions using 2-5 Gbps of wide-area networking (a level relatively achievable using existing internet connectivity between datacenter facilities, rather than requiring new custom network…
Elon Musk used Tesla’s latest earnings call to reveal plans to build AI chips on Intel’s not-yet-finished 14A process – a bet on silicon that doesn’t exist. “Intel is excited to partner with us on some of the core manufacturing technologies,” Musk said, referring to Tesla’s planned “Terafab” chipmaking push, which he says is aimed at…
Black Hat Asia Israeli researchers found a series of flaws in Microsoft’s Windows Admin Center (WAC) and suggest this shows hybrid cloud management tools are a two-way attack surface that users don’t spend enough time worrying about. Speaking at the Black Hat Asia conference in Singapore today, Ilan Kalendarov and Ben Zamir of Cymulate delivered…
Updated Details of volunteers of UK-based Biobank, which describes itself as the custodian of the world’s most comprehensive biomedical dataset, are for sale on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba. The organization confirmed the data on roughly half a million volunteers was anonymized, but could not guarantee it would be impossible to identify individuals if it fell…
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is ready for launch ahead of schedule despite repeated attempts by both Donald Trump’s first and second administrations to cut funding. The space agency is now targeting early September to send forth the telescope, a full eight months ahead of schedule. The instrument boasts a field of view more…
Black Hat Asia Developers of rented internet of things infrastructure – stuff like public EV chargers and shared e-bikes – are prioritizing user convenience over security, and leaving themselves exposed to wide-scale denial of service attacks on their services. That frightening thesis was the subject of a Friday talk at the Black Hat Asia conference,…
The supply crunch gripping the storage market has pushed Everpure – the artist formerly known as Pure Storage – to reassure customers it won’t make things worse. In a letter to customers published on Thursday, the storage biz paints a picture of a market still under strain, with component shortages and AI-fueled demand continuing to…