The Register Kettle Chris Williams, The Register, Nicole Hemsoth Prickett, Tobias Mann, Iain Thomson, Brandon Vigliarolo, Tom Claburn

With the continuing fallout from Snowflake now hitting over 100 million AT&T customers we discuss quite what is to be done. Constant vigilance is a given, but there's always the himan factor that ensures even the best security systems can be rolled over due to a single slip up.

Then there's the promise of AI, or possibly the lack of promise. Machine learning was touted as a possible savior of the security industry, but - as with so much AI hype - the reality is looking somewhat less rosy. You can see the full discussion below.

On this week's show we have Tobias Mann, Brandon Vigliarolo, The Register's security editor Jessica Lyons and your host Iain Thomson.

It's been a busy week in space, with Boeing's test pilots still stuck on the International Space Station thanks to their faulty capsule, and then being forced to take shelter from space debris.
The debris came from RESURS-P1, a decommissioned Russian satellite launched in 2013, which broke up this week into over 100 observable pieces, all traveling at around 17,000mph. As the debris field approached the ISS astronauts were forced to take cover in a hardened safety chamber.
Not that the station has long left, as NASA awarded a contract this week to deorbit the platform in 2030. By then there may be a replacement, and there'll almost certainly be a rival in the form of China, which is building its own space station. It's also been a good week for the Middle Kingdom, with the Chang'e-6 re-entry capsule bringing back the first samples from the far side of the Moon. You can see the full discussion below.

On Thursday the US government effectively banned Kaspersky security software on US servers on national security grounds, or at least made it useless given the lack of updates come September.

Then, as we were filming this week's Kettle, 12 members of Kaspersky's C-suite were sanctioned as well - although not the Russian business' eponymous CEO Eugene. So what on earth is going on? Is this overreach by the US government or is there something more sinister going on?

Joining us on this week's Kettle is our security editor Jessica Lyons to give us the full story, along with Tom Claburn to add in wisdom on the software side. As ever The Register's editor Chris Williams has pithy comment and your host is Iain Thomson, with producer Nicole Hemsoth Prickett turning chat into gold.

The tech world has been gathering in Taipei for the annual extravaganza that is Computex and all the chip makers have been strutting their stuff - one in particular.

Nvidia didn't even book a spot at the show and instead host its own keynote where Jensen Huang, just crowned CEO of the world's second most valuable corporation, reflected on a stellar year and told us what's coming down the line. He then, rather bizarrely, wondered off to sign a young lady's chest.

Such shenanigans weren't seen from other CEO. A fired-up Pat Gelsinger touted Intel's return to form and bought a new chip along with him. AMD, Qualcomm and Arm were also showing off the fruits of their labor and what OEMs have done with them. You can see the full discussion below and the squid discussed is here - although the image may haunt your dreams.



On this week's show our man on the spot Simon Sharwood is joined by Joining us this week is Chris Williams and Tobias Mann, with your host Iain Thomson.

There's no avoiding AI and LLMs this year. The technology is being stuffed into everything, from office software to phone apps. Nvidia, Qualcomm, and others are happy to push the notion that this machine learning must be performed on an accelerator, be it a GPU or an NPU. Arm this week made the case that its CPU cores, used in smartphones and more throughout the world, are ideal for running AI software.

For this week's Kettle, our journalists discuss the merits of running AI workloads on CPUs, NPUs, and GPUs; the power and infrastructure needed to do so, from personal devices to massive datacenters; and how this artificial intelligence is being used – what with Palantir's AI targeting system being injected into the entire US military.

Microsoft has held its annual Build developer conference but frankly it felt like Built - as in this is what we're bringing in and suck up up peons.

Chief on the reader concern list was Redmond's Total Recall feature - taking a screenshot every few seconds for the AI engine (and anyone who hacks your machine) to note. Amazingly no one at Microsoft seems to have said in the planning meetings "Er, this could really backfire." And so it has.