Prices are rising for customers of both Elon Musk's Starlink Internet service and his SpaceX rockets, with "excessive levels of inflation" to blame.

An email to users posted on Reddit showed a hike from $499 to $549 for Starlink deposit holders waiting for hardware, and a jump to $599 for new orders. The monthly service price will also jump from $99 to $110. The hardware rise is effective immediately, while the subscription increase will take place from May 9.

"The sole purpose of these adjustments is to keep pace with rising inflation," insisted the company, although customers still waiting for their hardware to actually arrive might find the increases a tad galling.

Still, there is a full refund available for customers who have received their kit in the first 30 days, as well as a partial refund of $200 within the first year of service.

A year ago, boss Elon Musk said that costs were "decreasing rapidly" when it came to the Starlink dish. However, earlier this month, Musk complained of "inflation pressure in raw materials & logistics" and so here we are.

Starlink is not the only Musk service to be hit by the inflation stick. The exec's rocket business, SpaceX, has also increased its prices [PDF], again citing "excessive levels of inflation."

A Falcon 9 launch has gone up from $62m earlier this year [PDF] to $67m while the Falcon Heavy rose from $90m to $97m. The company also warned that "Missions purchased in 2022 but flown beyond 2023 may be subject to additional adjustments due to inflation."

To be fair, inflation is being used to justify price hikes across the board. US inflation over 12 months hit 7.9 per cent in February [PDF] and analysts warned that climbing expenses coupled with existing pressures in the technology marketplace could well lead to rises.

Starlink is not the only game in town. OneWeb is also due to complete its own satellite constellation in the next year or so, although it is now dependent on SpaceX for a ride to orbit after having what could charitably be called a bit of a falling out with Russia over the use of the Soyuz. ®

The UK Ministry of Defence has suspended online application and support services for the British Army's Capita-run Defence Recruitment System and confirmed to us that digital intruders compromised some data held on would-be soldiers.

The army was informed of the break-in on March 14, and "that a group of hackers was going to release Army Application Data on the dark web," a source familiar with the matter told us.

Two days later, the Army shut down the career website and DRS as a precautionary measure.

Investment sentiment in S/4HANA, SAP's in-memory ERP platform, is falling for the first time among the software giant's German-speaking users.

According to a survey from DSAG, which counts users in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland among its members, the proportion of organizations to which S/4HANA was relevant to their SAP investments fell to 50 per cent in early 2022, down from 56 per cent the previous year.

A willingness among users to spend on the Business Suite platform – the earlier generation of technology based on the ERP Central Component or ECC – also fell slightly, from 25 per cent to 24 per cent over the same period.

Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University has entered a second week of woe following a vist by an infosec nasty.

The 200-year-old institution's IT team first referred to the crisis as a "security incident" but a spokesperson confirmed to The Register that it was a cyber attack.

A week on, things remain resolutely broken. VPN? Down. Oracle R12 Finance System? Down. Staff shared areas? Down. Even staff and student directories remain unavailable, hinting at some severe trouble within the university's on-premises infrastructure.

Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on Wednesday a ban on using cryptocurrencies and other digital assets as a means of making payments.

Trade in the digital currencies will continue to be permitted, but as assets only.

The ban goes into effect on April 1, but digital assets payment operators will be given a grace period through the end of the month.

Two important figures in computing industry have died.

Stephen E. Wilhite will be remembered as the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format – the ubiquitous GIF – and always insisted it be pronounced as "jif" with a soft "g".

Those who pointed out that his preferred pronunciation was inconsistent or illogical were met with a stern: "They are wrong".

GTC Check Point Software has put Nvidia GPUs and artificial intelligence techniques to work across its broad portfolio of security tools in order to address and adapt better to an increasingly sophisticated and rapidly changing threat environment.

"In the last one year and a half, the threat landscape has evolved very, very fast," Dorit Dor, chief product officer at Check Point, said during a session at Nvidia's GTC conference this week. "It's exceptionally dangerous these days. We see extreme attacks. APTs [advanced persistent threats] from nation-states. We see it coming through supply chain and leveraging ransomware. We see amazing software vulnerabilities across the board and we see attacks on [digital] wallets and cryptocurrency."

The escalation in threats started with the supply-chain attack on software maker SolarWinds in late 2020, Dor said. That attack saw the Russia-linked group Nobelium insert malicious code into the vendor's Orion monitoring platform, which users then unwittingly ran once they installed updates of the product. Dor pointed to another supply-chain hack – on developer tools maker Codecov early last year – and the flaw in the widely used Log4j open-source logging tool last year that has been exploited dozens of times.

Workflow specialist ServiceNow has announced a heavy emphasis on robotic process automation (RPA) in the next release of its platform, to get aging applications working with each other in a more user-friendly fashion.

One analyst said users already invested in workflow would welcome the release, but RPA specialists may have a technical edge.

ServiceNow has promised the "San Diego" release of its Now Platform will include more modern visual design as well as the RPA capabilities. The latter sits within the Automation Engine, which combines Integration Hub with a new RPA Hub that provides centralized command and a control center to monitor, manage, and deploy digital robots that automate repetitive manual tasks.

Toshiba's shareholders have rejected both the company's plan to split into two companies and a proposal to look for a private buyer.

The company today staged an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to consider both proposals. The plan to split the company into two listed entities was developed by management after a previous plan to split into three was not well-received by investors.

Both plans were a response to years of management and governance failures – plus serious financial and corruption scandals – that drew investor agitation for a turnaround plan.

Tencent has decided to stop spending whatever it takes to increase its cloud revenue.

"For IaaS and PaaS, we are repositioning our focus on revenue growth at all costs to customer value creation and quality of growth, which should benefit our customers and margins over the longer term," president Martin Lau told investors on the company's Q4 and FY2021 earnings call yesterday.

Chief strategy officer James Mitchell said Tencent, and other cloud companies, have tried to grow and scale to as many customers as possible.

Mainland China's cloud infrastructure services market – covering both infrastructure as-a-service and platform as-a-service – is expected to grow to $84.7 billion by 2026, according to market analyst firm Canalys.

That amount reflects a five-year CAGR of 25 per cent from the $27.4 billion market the analyst firm counted in 2021, a year in which the market grew by 45 per cent from 2020's $18.9 billion.

The growth from 2020 to 2021 was mainly pandemic-induced – the rush to handle work from home, learn from home, ecommerce and online entertainment.

F-Secure's enterprise-facing business will have a new brand – WithSecure – and a sharpened focus when the company splits into two independent operations.

The move comes a month after the security vendor's board of directors revealed that the 34-year-old Helsinki-based company would carve out the consumer security business from its enterprise unit. The consumer business will retain the F-Secure name.

The final break will come this summer after a general meeting in May. The split is scheduled to complete on June 30.

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