Monitor Nutanix from System Center? What strange magic is this?

With Intel poised to enter the datacenter GPU market, the chipmaker this week showed off a software platform mean to simplify management of these devices at scale at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The open-source software, dubbed Intel XPU Manager, is an in-band remote management service for upgrading firmware, monitoring system utilization, and administering GPUs at the individual node level. The code is an important step as Intel prepares to compete against Nvidia, which has a mature software stack for GPUs with AMD working hard to get its software straight for GPU and CPU.

XPU Manager is a low-level management interface that runs in Kubernetes and is designed to be integrated into existing cluster management and schedulers using RESTful APIs. It also supports local management via the CLI and is validated for use on Ubuntu 20.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4.

The top-down approach to the procurement of a £360 million data platform for NHS England is said to favor incumbent supplier Palantir as fears grow the project could be making the same mistakes that led to the failure of the country's infamous £10 billion National Programme for IT.

Reports emerged recently showing that the secretive spy-tech business was making the competition, launched in April this year, a "must-win deal" following its recruitment of Indra Joshi and Harjeet Dhaliwal, key figures in NHS England's data science and AI teams.

Apple's M1 chip has been found to contain a hardware vulnerability that can be abused to disable one of its defense mechanisms against memory corruption exploits, giving such attacks a greater chance of success.

MIT CSAIL computer scientists on Friday said they have identified a way to bypass the M1 chip's pointer authentication, a security mechanism that tries to prevent an attacker from modifying memory references without being detected.

In a paper titled "PACMAN: Attacking Arm Pointer Authentication with Speculative Execution," Joseph Ravichandran, ​​Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan describe how they were able to use speculative execution – the way in which modern processors perform calculations before they may or may not be needed, to accelerate execution – to discern the pointer authentication code that allows pointer modification on a protected system.

On December 15, Microsoft's GitHub plans to turn out the lights on Atom, its open-source text editor that has inspired and influenced widely used commercial apps, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, and GitHub Desktop.

The social code biz said it's doing so to focus on cloud-based software.

"While that goal of growing the software creator community remains, we’ve decided to retire Atom in order to further our commitment to bringing fast and reliable software development to the cloud via Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces," GitHub explained on Wednesday.

Travis CI stands for "Continuous Integration" but might just as well represent "Consciously Insecure" if, as security researchers claim, the company's automation software exposes secrets by design.

Aqua Security Software on Monday said its researchers had reported a data disclosure vulnerability with the Travis CI API. The response they said they received is that everything is working as intended.

In a blog post security researchers Yakir Kadkoda, Ilay Goldman, Assaf Morag, and Ofek Itach said they had found tens of thousands of user tokens were accessible through the Travis CI API, which provides a way to fetch clear-text log files.

WWDC Apple this week at its Worldwide Developer Conference delivered software development kits (SDKs) for beta versions of its iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9 platforms.

For developers sold on seeking permission from Apple to distribute their software and paying a portion of revenue for the privilege, it's a time to celebrate and harken to the message from the mothership.

While the consumer-facing features in the company's various operating systems consist largely of incremental improvements like aesthetic and workflow enhancements, the developer APIs in the underlying code should prove more significant because they will allow programmers to build apps and functions that weren't previously possible. Many of the new capabilities are touched on in Apple's Platforms State of the Union presentation.

The next major version of Windows 11 is drawing near with the code hitting the Insider Release Preview Channel.

Build 22621, which has been floating around the Beta Channel since May 11, arrived last night.

Back in May, Microsoft noted that the disappearance of the watermark from the desktop "doesn't mean we're done." However, its arrival in the Release Preview Channel means that, fixes aside, it is pretty much feature-complete and ready to roll.

While Apple has, temporarily at least, backed away from last year's plan to run client-side scanning (CSS) software on customers' iPhones to detect and report child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to authorities, European officials in May proposed rules to protect children that involve the same highly criticized approach.

The European Commission has suggested several ways to deal with child abuse imagery, including scanning online private communication and breaking encryption. It has done so undeterred by a paper penned last October by 14 prominent computer scientists and security experts dismissing CSS as a source of serious security and privacy risks.

In response, a trio of academics aims to convey just how ineffective and rights-violating CSS would be to those who missed the memo the first time around. And the last time, and the time before that.

A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.

Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.

This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.

Fresh versions of three of the bigger open-source application suites just landed for those seeking to break free from proprietary office apps.

LibreOffice is the highest profile of them, and the project recently put out version 7.3.4, the latest release in the Community version of the suite.

The Document Foundation maintains two versions of LibreOffice; the other is the Enterprise branch.