The Register

And you're replacing Chromecast with TV Streamer? Great! That's a logical step for the evolving landscape of ... Google's Gemini AI is making its way to Nest cameras and Google Assistant, with the web goliath claiming the upgrade will make its smart devices smarter....

Devs invited to ROCm out with FP8 precision, quantize to their heart's delight AMD today released the latest version of ROCm, claiming the improved software will bring about strong performance boosts for its Instinct GPU family....

Registry happy to chat about caps, just don't consider it a commitment to actually do anything The US government's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has said it will renew its Cooperative Agreement with Verisign to oversee the .com domain registry and other responsibilities - while expressing some concern about price hikes....

And Qualcomm addresses 'permanent denial of service' flaw in its stuff Google released 46 fixes for Android in its August security patch batch, including one for a Linux kernel flaw in the mobile OS that can lead to remote code execution (RCE)....

Wiz infoseccers able to promote themselves from humble customer to full-blown admin Black Hat Flaws in SAP's Core AI service created a gateway to its customers' private data, including code and training materials, until they were patched earlier this year....

Misery loves company - all of its competitors were also negatively impacted One of the US's largest car dealerships says the IT outage caused by CDK Global's June ransomware attack cost it approximately $30 million....

Puts drive models into focus to assess how often they fall over in their lifetime Backblaze has issued the latest report detailing failure rates for the multitude of drives that power its storage and backup services, and is looking at recent trends in the figures as well as considering whether AI might lower those failure rates....

Windows SmartScreen and Smart App Control both have weaknesses of which to be wary Elastic Security Labs has lifted the lid on a slew of methods available to attackers who want to run malicious apps without triggering Windows' security warnings, including one in use for six years....

That's what Google calls its massively parallel data copy service operating on dozens of clusters Sigcomm 2024 Google has revealed technical details of its in-house data transfer tool, called Effingo, and bragged that it uses the project to move an average of 1.2 exabytes every day....

That one weird thing in Outlook that gives phishers and scammers an in to an inbox Users are urging Microsoft to rethink how it shows sender email addresses in Outlook because phishing criminals are taking advantage, using helpful, friendly names to serve up emails loaded with malicious intent....

$4,500 per GPU per year adds up pretty quick - even faster when you pay by the hour Comment In the wake of the AI boom, Nvidia has seen its revenues skyrocket to the point at which it briefly became the most valuable corporation in the world....

Hybrids snap at heels of battery-only vehicles in UK, but petrol is still king... for now The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) has published UK data showing that while sales of new electric vehicles are on the rise, private buyers are staying away....

The preferred tool of Arthur C Clarke, Anne Rice and George R R Martin Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans....

HR apparently overwhelmed by attempt to sack 12.5k people in one day Dell has made another round of layoffs, which The Register understands have cut deep and seen even company veterans let go....

Will you see the Lite? Back in June, Google's Chrome Web Store began alerting users of uBlock Origin who had developer-oriented versions of Chrome that the popular ad-filtering extension could soon stop working....

Chap named 'Roman Boss' accused of being just that at a cryptocash laundering outfit Users of Cryptonator - an online digital wallet and cryptocurrency exchange - received an unpleasant surprise last weekend after the service was shuttered in a combined operation run by the FBI, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and German police....

The smartphone strikes again! And so might the Reg Standards Bureau, with your help Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism has changed the way it measures crowding on trains, abandoning decades-old newspaper- and magazine-based metrics....

Singapore Ministry of Education orders software removed after string of snafus UK-based mobile device management vendor Mobile Guardian has admitted that on August 4 it suffered a security incident that involved unauthorized access to iOS and ChromeOS devices managed by its tools, which are currently unavailable. In Singapore, the incident resulted in 13,000 devices being remotely wiped and saw the nation's Education Ministry cut ties with the vendor....

Actions haven't stopped Chaebol from commencing mass production of new mobile memory Approximately four weeks after unionized Samsung workers in South Korea went on strike indefinitely - the first-ever walkout at the company - the union instructed members back to return to work from Monday....

Some scowl, some smile, as fines no longer apply every time your mugshot or fingerprint is shared The US state of Illinois has reduced penalties for breaches of its tough Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)....

Smile for the camera to get in, or buy a beer without lining up The National Football League and all 32 of its teams will use tech from facial recognition software vendor Wicket to verify the identity of thousands of staff, media and fans as part of its credentialing program....

These two are going through a really, really bad breakup Elon Musk has decided he wants to bring Sam Altman and OpenAI to court after all in a brand-new lawsuit over whether OpenAI is actually open and not-for-profit....

Web giant to seek second opinion after bench labels biz 'a monopolist' in DoJ win Google's payments to make its search engine the default for smartphone browsers and elsewhere violate US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday....

In the gold rush, be the one handing out the shovels Even as at least some investors begin to question the return on investment of AI infrastructure and services, venture capitalists appear to be doubling down. On Monday, AI chip startup Groq - not to be confused with xAI's Grok chatbot - announced it had scored $640 million in series-D funding to bolster its inference cloud....

It claimed to have one job and couldn't do it The Michigan Secretary of State's office has opened an investigation into America PAC, a political action committee backed by billionaire Elon Musk....

Meanwhile, a boutique PC builder says Intel didn't even need to chase high clock speeds Yet another law firm says it's investigating a potential class action lawsuit against Intel as Raptor Lake CPU owners increasingly complain about chip instability and failure....

They're doing you a favor, probably best not to look today As stock markets suffered a bit of a wobble today, share-trading apps and sites fell over as investors barreled in to see how badly their portfolios had been hit....

Plus: Oracle nudges to top of second tier providers Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services continues to grow, now nearing $80 billion per quarter, with the big three continuing to dominate and Oracle emerging as leader of the second tier providers....

Background check biz accused of negligence A lawsuit has accused a Florida data broker of carelessly failing to secure billions of records of people's private information, which was subsequently stolen from the biz and sold on an online criminal marketplace....

Badger, badger, badger your CIO to let you use this, perhaps Anaconda, the maker and distributor of data science tools, has unleashed a public beta of Anaconda Code that enables Python code to be run locally within Microsoft Excel....

Are the woes of the Calamity Capsule catching? NASA's latest cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has encountered problems on its way to the orbiting outpost....

Follows 15% job cuts from chip giant Intel, with CEO blaming weak economy Infineon has become another chipmaker to shed a chunk of the workforce to cut costs after reporting shrinking sales....

Malware logs users' keystrokes, pilfers credentials, exfiltrates data Criminals are preying on Windows users yet again, this time in an effort to hit them with a keylogger that can also steal credentials and take screenshots....

Backdrop of multi-billion dollar orders to support AI services, but unlikely to hurt NVDA long term Updated Nvidia is understood to be delaying shipments of its Blackwell GPUs until the first quarter of 2025, and it appears the problems may be due to the complexity of the chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging tech that TSMC is using to manufacture the next-gen hardware....

Vendor plans to aggressively defend its case before listing catalog of shortcomings at the airline CrowdStrike says it is "highly disappointed" and rejects the claims made by Delta and its lawyers that the vendor exhibited gross negligence in the events that led to the global IT outage a little over two weeks ago....

Almost half the electrodes are working... for now According to company boss Elon Musk, its Neuralink implant is now at work in a second patient, and this time, almost half of the device's electrodes are working....

A de-Googled Android phone with extra security - and a subscription Punkt adds a fondleslab to its lineup of minimalist tech kit, with a very unusual build of Android - and a hefty pricetag....

Shortsighted or a chance to refocus? Tech sector is not happy The UK's 1.3 billion ($1.66 billion) plan for AI and tech investment that included an 800 million ($1 billion) exascale supercomputer at Edinburgh University has gone up in smoke....

The technology remains highly controversial despite widespread rollout Responding to the riots across England over the past week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he's backing a wider rollout of facial recognition technology to track and prevent "thugs" from traveling to areas where they plan to cause unrest....

Malware is often described as biology. It should be the other way around Opinion In Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash, he invents malware that can leap species from silicon to the human brain. That's a great metaphor for so much of our online lives, but it raises one question of particular interest. If humans can be damaged by our own technology, should we protect not just our data but ourselves through cybersecurity?...

911 is no joke Who, Me? Greetings, gentle readerfolk, and welcome to Who Me? the section of The Reg in which we soften the crushing blow of the working week's return with tales of technical transgression....

MegaTE can arrange things so each endpoint gets just the network it needs Sigcomm 2024 Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed MegaTE", a traffic engineering (TE) system it uses on its own cloud and which it claims outperforms rivals by tailoring network configurations to the needs of individual flows generated by VMs or containers....

Eighty-one apps signed up to pilot facial recognition and real name ID system Chinese app developers have signed up to beta test a national cyberspace ID system that will use facial recognition technology and the real names of users, according to Chinese media....

Happy to have 'em go hybrid as it wises up to the enterprise Fresh from moving its smaller customers off its server-based products onto and into its cloud, Atlassian has softened its cloud-first approach after recognizing that its larger customers can't or won't go there in a hurry - if ever....

Plus: CISA's AI hire; and Canuck SIM swappers busted Infosec in brief Scammers have been using Google's own ad system to fool people into downloading a borked copy of the Chocolate Factory's Authenticator software....

Plus: Food poisoning hits ByteDance Singapore; Indonesia bans DuckDuckGo; and more ASIA IN BRIEF India's government has successfully migrated 25,904 Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) to a unified ERP system in just five months, as part of its broader initiative to modernize and streamline rural lending operations....

Red teamer finds they're easy to make, which is welcome to produce fodder for detection bots DEF CON Visitors to the AI Village at this year's DEF CON hacker conference will have the chance to star in their own deepfake video simply by standing in front of Brandon Kovacs' camera, and watching as he turns them into a digital likeness of a fellow attendee - for a good cause....

'They actually replaced me with a younger employee' Three years ago, Bruce Maule, worldwide president of channel marketing at IBM, was informed by bosses that his position was being eliminated....

Capex skyrockets as providers prioritize new shiny over traditional server upgrades Analysis Cloud infrastructure is undergoing an upheaval with service providers rushing to deploy servers configured for AI model training, often at the cost of postponing the usual refresh cycle for their standard server hardware....

And you thought you had range anxiety Feature Electric vehicles have generated plenty of discussion over the last decade or so. However, it was 53 years ago this week that one of the battery-powered machines first carried humans around the Moon....