Immersion cooling has long been the domain of larger datacenter operators but with increasing density and therefore smaller datacenter facilities, there is a need for shops of all sizes to get around heavy-duty AC and air cooling.

This is the target for German server maker RNT Rausch, which has teamed up with cooling specialist Submer to provide immersion cooling for RNT's server and storage systems

The partnership means businesses of any size can deploy liquid cooling in their datacenter. A relatively small space is required for this as it eliminates the need for air-conditioning units to cool servers, or for expensive and sophisticated fire extinguisher systems, the companies said.

Submer's technology provides active single-phase immersion cooling for servers and storage, and the partnership sees this being applied to RNT's Tormenta Varioscaler server portfolio and BigFoot Storage Systems.

Single-phase immersion cooling means that the coolant never changes state (ie, it does not evaporate into a gas) and is simply pumped through a heat exchange to transfer the heat to a water-cooling circuit. The coolant is a dielectric liquid that conducts heat but not electricity, meaning that all or part of the server can operate while submerged in it.

According to RNT and Submer, traditional cooling methods carry high costs in energy consumption and water. For many organizations this means wasting money on these resources, which also take up a lot of space. The pair claims that an air-cooled environment needs up to 10 times more space than environments built with immersion cooling.

"This partnership allows RNT Rausch and Submer to offer a complete and sustainable HPC turnkey solution that is specifically designed to the client's needs," said Submer CEO and co-founder Daniel Pope. "Partnerships like this are vital for the industry going forward."

It isn't just HPC deployments that may be needing liquid cooling soon. According to Cisco, the next generation of processors from AMD and Intel are likely to hit 400W of power consumption, while high-end GPUs are already there and show no signs of stopping.

Speaking to our sister site The Next Platform, Dattatri Mattur, Cisco's senior director of engineering for its Cloud and Compute Business, said this means that air cooling will soon be insufficient for even mainstream servers, and that many datacenters will need to use some form of liquid cooling.

RNT said that it offers tailor-made products and services for customers, with the Tormenta Varioscaler providing rack-mount servers from 1U to 3U with a choice of AMD or Intel CPUs and configurable SSD and HDD options. The BigFoot storage systems go up to BigFoot XXLarge, a 4U chassis for up to 48 drives, 8 x Sata SSDs and 4 x U.2 SSDs. ®

Australia's federal police and Monash University are asking netizens to send in snaps of their younger selves to train a machine-learning algorithm to spot child abuse in photographs.

Researchers are looking to collect images of people aged 17 and under in safe scenarios; they don't want any nudity, even if it's a relatively innocuous picture like a child taking a bath. The crowdsourcing campaign, dubbed My Pictures Matter, is open to those aged 18 and above, who can consent to having their photographs be used for research purposes.

All the images will be amassed into a dataset in an attempt to train an AI model to tell the difference between a minor in a normal environment and an exploitative, unsafe situation. The software could, in theory, help law enforcement better automatically and rapidly pinpoint child sex abuse material (aka CSAM) in among thousands upon thousands of photographs under investigation, avoiding having human analysts inspect every single snap.

Rick Smith, founder and CEO of body camera and Taser maker Axon, believes he has a way to reduce the risk of school children being shot by people with guns.

No, it doesn't involve reducing access to guns, which Smith dismisses as politically unworkable in the US. Nor does it involve relocating to any of the many countries where school shootings seldom, if ever, occur and – coincidentally – where there are laws that limit access to guns.

Here's a hint – his answer involves Axon.

A critical flaw in the LTE firmware of the fourth-largest smartphone chip biz in the world could be exploited over the air to block people's communications and deny services.

The vulnerability in the baseband – or radio modem – of UNISOC's chipset was found by folks at Check Point Research who were looking for ways the silicon could be used to remotely attack devices. It turns out the flaw doesn't just apply to lower-end smartphones but some smart TVs, too.

Check Point found attackers could transmit a specially designed radio packet to a nearby device to crash the firmware, ending that equipment's cellular connectivity, at least, presumably until it's rebooted. This would be achieved by broadcasting non-access stratum (NAS) messages over the air that when picked up and processed by UNISOC's firmware would end in a heap memory overwrite.

A crew using malware that performs cryptomining and clipboard-hacking operations have made off with at least $1.7 million in stolen cryptocurrency.

The malware, dubbed Trojan.Clipminer, leverages the compute power of compromised systems to mine for cryptocurrency as well as identify crypto-wallet addresses in clipboard text and replace it to redirect transactions, according to researchers with Symantec's Threat Intelligence Team.

The first samples of the Windows malware appeared in January 2021 and began to accelerate in their spread the following month, the Symantec researchers wrote in a blog post this week. They also observed that there are several design similarities between Clipminer and KryptoCibule – another cryptomining trojan that, a few months before Clipminer hit the scene, was detected and written about by ESET analysts.

Healthcare organizations, already an attractive target for ransomware given the highly sensitive data they hold, saw such attacks almost double between 2020 and 2021, according to a survey released this week by Sophos.

The outfit's team also found that while polled healthcare orgs are quite likely to pay ransoms, they rarely get all of their data returned if they do so. In addition, 78 percent of organizations are signing up for cyber insurance in hopes of reducing their financial risks, and 97 percent of the time the insurance company paid some or all of the ransomware-related costs.

However, while insurance companies pay out in almost every case and are fueling an improvement in cyber defenses, healthcare organizations – as with other industries – are finding it increasingly difficult to get insured in the first place.

Something for the Weekend We're standing still. The suspense is unbearable. One of us is going to crack.

On the large projector screen is a message: "The application is not responding." Facing the large projector screen is a roomful of startup dudes. Staring back at them, and situated just underneath the projector screen, is the flailing, forlorn presenter himself: me.

"It's never done that before," I lie as I eventually give up frantically tapping the keyboard and jabbing the trackpad as if I was playing whack-a-mole.

On Call Welcome back to On Call wherein a Register reader accidentally improved an airline's productivity by the simple virtue of knowing their stuff.

"Eric" (for that is not his name) spent much of his career working on systems in the airline industry. "Since airlines were the first commercial organisations to use large-scale transaction processing systems, many of their features date back to the late 1950s," he said.

"Some of them were surprisingly sophisticated for the period. In the IBM mainframe world, each user terminal could support up to five simultaneous sessions which were designated by the letters A through E."

Disgraced tech giant Toshiba has revealed it has received ten buyout proposals, and devised a plan to grow its digital businesses.

"As of today, the Company has received eight initial proposals for privatization, as well as two initial proposals for a strategic capital and business alliance with the Company remaining listed from Potential Partners," the Japanese conglomerate stated in a canned statement [PDF] dated June 2.

Toshiba didn't say who submitted the buyout proposals, but Bain Capital is known to have expressed an interest. Reports have indicated CVC Capital Partners and KKR might be in the running too. It's worth noting that CVC has sought this opportunity before.

Amazon.com has decided to end its Kindle digital book business in China.

A statement posted to the Kindle China WeChat account states that Amazon has already stopped sending new Kindle devices to resellers and will cease operations of the Kindle China e-bookstore on June 30, 2023. The Kindle app will last another year, allowing users to download previously purchased e-books. But after June 30, 2024, Kindle devices in China won’t be able to access content.

An accompanying FAQ doesn’t offer a reason for the decision, but an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters “We periodically evaluate our offerings and make adjustments, wherever we operate.”

On March 23, 1976, a vote of the United Nations General Assembly brought into force the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – an international agreement that at Article 22 states "Everyone shall have the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests."

And on June 2, 2022, Microsoft president and vice-chair Brad Smith blogged that the company has adopted four "principles for employee organizing and engagement with labor organizations", one of which is "We recognize that employees have a legal right to choose whether to form or join a union."

Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975 so has had 16,872 days to consider the Covenant.

Lobby group The Software Alliance (BSA)* has written to India's government, pointing out impractical requirements, inconsistencies, and flaws in the nation's recently announced infosec reporting rules. The organization says the problems can only be addressed with extensive consultations and a delay to implementation.

The BSA has already co-signed another letter that eleven tech and finance lobby groups sent to India's government, which requests changes to requirements such as extensive logging of user activities and reporting of even trivial infosec incidents within six hours of detection. That multi-party letter states that these rules will harm the nation's economy by discouraging foreign investment.

The Alliance's own document [PDF] raises issues not addressed in the multi-party letter – such as an argument that requiring cloud providers to supply logs of customers' activities is futile as clouds don't log what goes on inside resources rented by their customers.

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