To the surprise of those who have no bills to pay in the UK, except for those who huddled in homes without electricity for several days, Blighty has the most expensive electricity in the world.

The survey results come from a study conducted by the comparison website cable.co.uk, which was derived from a six-month survey of 3,883 energy tariffs in 230 countries/regions. Alas, the UK ranks 190th. It also ranks 24th out of 28 Western European states (Germany is more expensive, while the average in France-making the country 12th-is cheaper.)

Dan Howdle, a consumer research analyst at Cable.co.uk, said: “Almost every European country is cheaper. Most African countries? Cheaper. There are even some island countries where energy production is particularly difficult and charges are lower than we are in the UK.”

For the United Kingdom, researchers studied 60 tariffs, averaging US$0.251 per kilowatt hour. As always, details determine success or failure. The cheapest kWh is $0.129, which is not so scary.

In contrast, the winning country was Libya, at $0.007 per kWh, although only three tariffs were measured, and the study did not consider the stability of supply or availability. Once again, after Storm Arwen, customers glumly watched the bulbs turn black, and they were forgiven for doubting the amount requested by the British power company.

The research also did not consider how energy is generated. The UK’s Energy Trends Report [PDF] (produced by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) shows the composition of electricity generation in the UK. Renewable energy will fall by 9.6% to 37.3% in 2021, mainly due to the decline in wind speed and fossil fuel power generation. The share jumped to 43.4%.

Nevertheless, UK energy prices have been the focus of controversy lately, and even giants including Bulb are in trouble, because as 2021 passes, bets on energy prices have proved to be catastrophically wrong.

The IT world is also feeling the pressure. Starting this month, the UK-based cloud service provider and hosting company M247's Manchester Sphere Green Data Center’s electricity lease and excess charges have increased by 161%, hitting customers. The company pointed out that the 550% increase in the European energy market was the reason, despite ignoring a dizzying source of numbers: Norwood Paper sales.

Other providers, such as UKCloud, said they regard electricity costs as an important part of the provision of services and have no plans for such increases.

Nevertheless, judging from a simple price list, the performance of British customers does not seem to be good compared to neighboring countries in Western Europe. Howdle told The Register: "Our goal is to provide a simple comparison of the electricity cost per kilowatt hour of an average household"-other factors, such as power generation breakdown, can be superimposed on it.

Howdle went on to tell us: "External entities such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum have used our tables in the past as a starting point for understanding deeper issues.

"Ours is simple: how much does it cost?"

As far as the UK is concerned, this is quite a lot. ®

Registration Debate Welcome to the latest registration debate, where authors discuss technical topics and readers choose the winning arguments. The format is simple: we propose a proposal, the arguments of the proposal will be carried out on Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against will be carried out on Tuesday and Thursday. Within a week, you can use the polls embedded below to vote for which party and choose whether you are for or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, and the arguments for pros or cons are the most popular.

This week’s proposal is: A unified and unknowable software environment can be realized. We discussed a question: Can the industry have a truly open, unified, and agnostic software environment in HPC and AI that can span multiple computing engines?

Defending the bill today is Rob Farber, a global technical consultant and writer with a broad background in HPC and developing machine learning technology, which he applies to national laboratories and commercial organizations. You can contact Rob at info@techenablement.com.

Maybe one day—maybe—zero trust will solve many of our network security problems. But now, if you want to ensure that there are no eavesdroppers on your network, you need a virtual private network (VPN).

Commercial VPNs have only one small problem: many of them are not trustworthy. So, what can you do? Well, running your own is of course the open source answer. And, today, the VPN you choose is the built-in VPN of Linux: WireGuard.

Why is WireGuard instead of OpenVPN or IKEv2? Because it is easier to implement while maintaining security and providing faster speeds. Moreover, when it comes to VPN, the most important thing is to balance speed and security.

Those of us who are afraid of being enslaved by the robot overlord in the future may have another reason not to sleep at night: The engineers have shown some legless, soft breeds and have made some major leaps.

Animated pancake-like robots have demonstrated their ability to perform a series of failures in a way that their creators-Chinese software robotics engineers-describe as "fast, continuous, and directional jumps".

"Jumping is an important motor function that can expand the navigation range, overcome obstacles, and adapt to unstructured environments," said Chen Rui of Chongqing University and Pu Huayan of Shanghai University.

Intel has updated what it says allows the implementation of "software-defined silicon" (SDSi) code.

Chipzilla put some of the SDSi code into the Linux kernel in September 2021, describing it as a technology that allows users to activate the sleep function in silicon. This code outlines the process of enabling new features by verifying a cryptographically signed license.

David E. Box, a Linux developer working at Intel, published a new article on the Linux kernel mailing list explaining the second version of the Intel SDSi code.

The Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology of Korea has provided some suggestions to large technology companies on how to make their services appropriately flexible, and has increased the obligation to notify users when they fail—in Korean.

This guide applies to Google, Meta (Facebook's parent company), Netflix, Naver, Kakao and Wavve. Everyone was told to improve response to failures by strengthening preemptive error detection and verification systems, and to create a backup storage system that supports fast content recovery.

The guide provides methods that Big Tech can use to measure user load and then plan accordingly to ensure that their services remain available. The uptime requirements are not specified.

Microsoft has extended its Secure-core concept applied to PCs in 2019 to include servers, Windows Server, and Azure Stack HCI.

Secured-core believes that Microsoft cooperates with hardware manufacturers to ensure that their products include TPM 2.0 modules, secure boot is enabled by default in the BIOS, and dynamic root of trust is used for measurement technology, allowing the use of Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and AMD's Secure Virtual Machine (SVM).

Once these elements are in place, Microsoft believes that hardware is more difficult to attack based on firmware and less prone to running unverified code.

Microsoft has released an update to its ancient Notepad text editor.

Dave Grochocki, lead project manager for Windows Inbox Apps, wrote that Microsoft's favorite feature is the new dark mode.

"This is a hot issue in the community, and we hope you like this gorgeous new theme as much as we do," Grochocki said with a smile, explaining that you can enable and fiddle with fonts on the new settings page. If you have done this elsewhere, Notepad will also record your favorite system themes and use a dark mode.

Alibaba's DAMO Academy has demonstrated a chip that stacks logic and memory in 3D, and Chinese media believe it represents an architecture that can break the bottleneck of von Neumann.

Dharma Academy is the blue sky research institution of Alibaba. Founder Jack Ma dedicated it to "discovery, adventure, motivation and prospects" when it was launched in 2017.

The Chinese media Pandaily and ScienceNet both reported on the chip-the former linked to the now-deleted post on the Weibo website Weibo as evidence.

NASA announced on Tuesday that, nearly two decades later, it has upgraded its near-Earth asteroid monitoring algorithm to more accurately simulate dangerous space rocks.

The new system called Sentry-II is more powerful than its predecessor Sentry. Astronomers working at the Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Research Center can now automatically calculate the thermal effects that propel the asteroid's orbit, which may rush the asteroid toward our parent star.

The so-called Yakovsky effect describes the subtle and gradual changes in the movement of an asteroid as it is heated by the sun. When the asteroid spins, the side of its surface exposed to the star will be heated. As it continues to spin, the hot zone enters the shade and cools down. Infrared energy radiates outward; photons carry momentum and generate tiny thrust on the asteroid. For a long time, these little kicks can change their path and knock them out of their original tracks.

Mehta was sued in a class action lawsuit on Tuesday for allegedly amplifying hate speech and helping the Myanmar military to genocide the Rohingya. The compensation amounted to US$150 billion.

The case was led by an anonymous Rohingya refugee living in the United States and accused the entity, formerly Facebook, of inciting hatred and causing actual harm to the main Muslim group for many years. Not only did the social media platform ignore hate speech posts, but the service’s algorithm allegedly actively promoted anti-Rohingya propaganda as hundreds of thousands of people fled Myanmar to escape persecution.

Facebook has already acknowledged its role in this movement, with an estimated 25,000 people killed and 700,000 forced to leave the country. The lawsuit also occurred after former employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked internal documents that showed how its algorithm puts participation above safety.

Trendforce said in a study this week that the shortage of power management chips is worsening and is preventing companies from manufacturing cars, personal computers, and items with batteries or switches.

The cost of a power management IC is only a few cents, and it is a cheap chip that contains display drivers and USB-C components that are in short supply. These chips are as important as CPU or memory for personal computers and other electronic products.

In the past 20-odd months, with the advent of electric vehicles and the growing demand for personal computers and consumer electronics, the demand for PMICs has reached its peak. Trendforce expects prices to rise by 10% to a six-year high of $0.23.

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