Technology

The Department of Energy today announced a partnership between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and AI chip startup, SambaNova to deliver  systems with acceleration for AI and HPC workloads. …

National Lab Supercomputing Sites Pick SambaNova for AI System Dance was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

After 10 years of OpenStack, 'a lot has changed and we are changing with it'

The OpenStack Foundation, home to the open source project for running a self-hosted cloud, is to become the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), with what it describes as an expanded mission, scope and community.…

Speaking very generally, investment in capability-class supercomputers by national governments tends to scale with gross domestic product. …

HPE And AMD Bag The Big Supercomputer Deal Down Under was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is launching a new product today -- the Compute Module 4. From a report: If you've been keeping an eye on the Raspberry Pi releases, you know that the flagship Raspberry Pi 4 was released in June 2019. The Compute Module 4 features the same processor, but packed in a compute module for industrial use cases. A traditional Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer with a ton of ports sticking out. Compute Modules are somewhat different. Those system-on-module variants are more compact single-board computers without any traditional port. It lets you create a prototype using a traditional Raspberry Pi, and then order a bunch of Compute Modules to embed in your commercial products. "Over half of the seven million Raspberry Pi units we sell each year go into industrial and commercial applications, from digital signage to thin clients to process automation," Eben Upton wrote on the Raspberry Pi blog. Some things are strictly similar between the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Compute Module 4, such as the 64-bit ARM-based processor with VideoCore VI graphics. This is going to represent a huge upgrade for previous Compute Module customers. In particular, you get much better video performance with 4Kp60 hardware decode for H.265 videos, 1080p60 hardware decode for H.264 videos, 1080p30 hardware encode of H.264 videos. You can also take advantage of the dual HDMI interfaces to connect up to two 4K displays at 60 frames per second.

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Find out to knock out those data silos in our upcoming show

Webcast  There’s many trendy and forward-looking ways to make DevOps processes easier, and while most people have heard of Kubernetes – an effective, open sourced system for orchestrating data containers – there’s various approaches and techniques to make it run as smoothly as possible.…

Google's $2.1 billion deal for Fitbit might go down as the only merger to qualify as both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. From a report: European Union antitrust regulators have again extended their decision deadline, this time to Jan. 8, 2021. And it could be further complicated by U.S. authorities, who are drawing up a broader antitrust case against Google and/or its parent company Alphabet. The deal was originally announced on Nov. 1, 2019. The delay is about data: Google has always said the acquisition is centered on devices, but that alone hasn't allayed regulator fears over what happens to the information those devices collect. Reuters reports that Google recently offered concessions to the European Commission: It would "restrict the use of Fitbit data for Google ads, facilitate rival makers of wearables seeking to connect to the Android platform and allow third parties' continued access to Fitbit users' data with their consent." These revisions appear to have satisfied the EC, but that could change once analyzed by outside critics. Plus, again, there are those pesky Americans.

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Mega-chain AMC has begun to offer the option through its site, with prices for renting out a theater starting at a surprisingly reasonable $99 (though not in New York, Alaska and Hawaii). Split among ten friends, and you're already paying less than a normal movie ticket. From a report: Attendees can invite as many as 20 people to a screening, which consists of classic titles like Jurassic Park and Halloween-centric fare like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Prices go up from there. New titles like Tenet and The New Mutants, cost up to $349 for a single screening. The former, helmed by blockbuster director Christopher Nolan, was set to be a kind of litmus test for moviegoers' willingness to return to theaters.

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Also: Teams goes native on Arm and Calculator pops up in Canonical's snap store

In Brief  Windows Insiders on the bleeding edge Windows 10 dev release channel that hoped to twiddle a knob or switch in the latest Windows 10X iteration had to settle for a drop-down menu for the refresh rate of a given display.…

Oh great. 'Police involvement' could deter testing, says doctors' union

As if things were not going badly enough for the UK's COVID-19 test and trace service, it now seems police will be able to access some test data, prompting fear that the disclosure could deter people who should have tests from coming forward.…

Japan will join forces with the United States and Europe to take on any market abuses by the four Big Tech companies, the new head of its antitrust watchdog said on Monday, a sign Tokyo will join global efforts to regulate digital platform operators. From a report: Kazuyuki Furuya, chairman of Japan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC), also said Tokyo could open a probe into any merger or business tie-up involving fitness tracker maker Fitbit if the size of such deals are big enough. "If the size of any merger or business-tie up is big, we can launch an anti-monopoly investigation into the buyer's process of acquiring a start-up (like Fitbit)," he told Reuters. "We're closely watching developments including in Europe." EU antitrust regulators in August launched an investigation into a $2.1 billion deal by Google's bid to buy Fitbit that aimed to take on Apple and Samsung in the wearable technology market. Japan is laying the groundwork to regulate platform operators. Among them are big tech giants dubbed "GAFA" - Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook -- that face various antitrust probes in western nations.

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Microsoft's flagship 2020 game Flight Simulator was supposed to showcase Bing Maps and Azure's streaming capabilities. There's just one small problem: gamers are overwriting Bing's in-game 3D photogrammetry with entire cities ripped from Google Earth. From a report: "When playing the game, you're essentially looking at an extremely high resolution image of the entire globe in 3D -- think Google Earth but of a much higher quality," gushed one Flight Simulator reviewer earlier this summer. It may come as a shock to him and Redmond alike that gamers are importing Google photogrammetry into the simulator to replace the default Bing 3D buildings. Microsoft made a big deal of how Flight Simulator's depiction of the entire world would be powered by Bing Maps and data extrapolated from Bing Maps to create reasonably accurate 3D buildings (stand fast, accidental skyscrapers) in the same places as their real-world counterparts.

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Plus: A warning to SharePoint operators

In brief  Just days after issuing fixes for scores of bugs in its products for this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has issued two more patches for security holes that can be exploited by maliciously crafted files to run malware on victims' computers.…

Farewell to the old form factor, hello to extra HDMI and speedier silicon

The Raspberry Pi team has stuck with tradition by following its Pi 4 a year or so later with the Compute Module 4. Those expecting another DDR2 SODIMM sized board are, however, in for a shock.…

They did EULA to a grape. A company put an end user license agreement (EULA) on a bag of grapes: "The recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of this produce, including 'but not limited to' seeds, stems, tissue, and fruit," read the EULA on a bag of Carnival brand grapes posted on Twitter by user Tube Time. From a report When you purchase a bag of delicious and sugary Carnival brand grapes, you enter into an agreement whereby you will consume the grapes and do nothing else with them. This kind of warning against reproduction is something we're used to with digital products like video games, but is jarring to see spread to the world of consumer produce. "It's always shocking and more than a little absurd to find these licenses on everyday consumer products, especially at the grocery store," Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and the co-author of The End of Ownership, told Motherboard in an email. In the broader world of agriculture, however, there's actually quite a lot of precedent for this. And patented seeds with specific restrictions is a constant sore point for farmers. Agriculture giant Monsanto has patented a whole host of proprietary seeds that are weed- and insect-resistant, and threatens to sue farmers who harvest and replant them from year-to-year. In fact, the Supreme Court has already ruled on this.

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Chips will power $34m machine doing Square Kilometre Array work and more

Australia’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has bet on unannounced AMD EPYC silicon to power a new 50-petaFLOP supercomputer.…

Pricey Data Center editions remain but customers complain that 'this is insane'

Atlassian is ending server licence sales and requiring customers to migrate either to its cloud services or to expensive Data Center editions.…

Tax doesn't have to be taxing, except when it does

A survey of independent contractors shows only 45 per cent plan to stay with their chosen mode of employment after the introduction of the IR35 tax legislation in the UK private sector come April 2021.…

"Singapore will become the world's first country to use facial verification in its national ID scheme, but privacy advocates are alarmed by what they say is an intrusive system vulnerable to abuse," reports AFP: Face scanning technology remains controversial despite its growing use and critics have raised ethical concerns about it in some countries — for instance, law enforcement agencies scanning crowds at large events to look for troublemakers. Singapore authorities are frequently accused of targeting government critics and taking a hard line on dissent, and activists are concerned about how the face scanning tech will be used. "There are no clear and explicit restraints on government power when it comes to things like surveillance and data gathering," said Kirsten Han, a freelance journalist from the city. "Will we one day discover that this data is in the hands of the police or in the hands of some other agency that we didn't specifically give consent for?" Those behind the Singapore scheme stress facial verification is different to recognition as it requires user consent, but privacy advocates remain sceptical. "The technology is still far from benign," Privacy International research officer Tom Fisher told AFP. He said systems like the one planned for Singapore left "opportunities for exploitation", such as use of data to track and profile people.

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Criminal court sets trial date as High Court continues pondering civil suit judgment

Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch will fight the US government's attempt to extradite him over HP's $11bn purchase of Autonomy Corporation in February next year.…

The Great Unicorn Prayer of security services: Stay secure, but - ya know - give us backdoors

In a move as predictable as it is wearisome, a bunch of government security agencies have got together and demanded we let them have our data. This latest spooky manifestation is a collection of the Five Eyes - the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - and for some reason Japan and India. Let’s call this coalition of the chilling, JIANUSCUK.…