The Register

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....

Who wants to make a TRACTOR pull request? To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle....

Automated price-fixing software screwing over tenants? Fog off! The San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week approved a ban on algorithmic price setting in the rental housing market, a measure targeting real estate management software from the likes of RealPage and Yardi that has been blamed in part for high rents....

It's starting to sink in for Chipzilla that it's losing some credibility Owners of Intel's 13th and 14th Gen Core desktop processors are set to get an extra two years of warranty coverage....

Perceptive turns its automated dental dynamo on humans, and Zuck's dad thinks it's great Those with a fear of the dentist's chair should probably look away now because one day a robot might be doing the job - at least if Perceptive has its way....

Remember that promise to be nice? You broke it, say prosecutors The US government is suing TikTok, claiming the mega-popular app broke the law by playing fast and loose with millions of kids' data and privacy....

Does the Windows giant's love of 365 add-ons spell doom for a super premium tier? Comment The guessing game over when and if Microsoft might add an E7 tier to its Microsoft 365 lineup continues following the company's latest results....

WeRedEvils alleges successful attack on infrastructure, including data theft Israel-based hacktivists are taking credit for an ongoing internet outage in Iran....

Perhaps those thrusters actually burn dollars after all Lurking in Boeing's woeful Q2 financials is an admission that while its Starliner spacecraft might be struggling when it comes to burning fuel, it has no problem whatsoever setting fire to dollar bills....

It's hard to track down individuals, so why not disrupt the underground market itself? Feature Some of the world's most notorious ransomware and malware-as-a-service (RaaS/MaaS) operators have shut up shop in the past 12 months thanks to international law enforcement efforts, but just because household names like Conti, LockBit, and ALPHV/BlackCat are on the ropes, it doesn't mean we're free from the threat of commodity malware....

Microsoft's distribution gets a new LTS kernel With impeccable timing considering recent Windows issues, Microsoft has made Azure Linux 3.0 generally available. It includes an update to the Linux kernel and new versions of various packages....

US regulator reportedly not happy about Run:ai buy... nor industry dominance The US Department of Justice has started an investigation into Nvidia's acquisition of Run:ai, a startup offering orchestration tools for AI workloads....

They say crime doesn't pay. They're right - it's the victims doing the paying An unnamed Fortune 50 corporation paid a stonking $75 million to a ransomware gang to stop it leaking terabytes of stolen data....

Work aims to build on the success of NCSC's 2016 initiative - and private sector will play a part The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says it's in the planning stages of bringing a new suite of services to its existing Active Cyber Defence (ACD) program....

In 1974, Gary Kildall got the first version working and changed the world of operating systems Late in the summer of 1974, CP/M first started running on hardware. It became one of the first cross-platform microcomputer OSes, and revolutionized the hardware and software industries....

CrowdStrike reminded the public that BSODs still exist. Their origins go back decades Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has taken to his Old New Thing blog to clear up an apparent mystery regarding the origins of the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)....

The minutes before a maintenance window closes are maybe not the best time to re-learn obscure router syntax On Call The instructions on what to do at 5:00PM Friday are clear: down tools and prepare to have fun for two days. But as many Register readers are required to remain available to fix things all weekend, our team is commanded to use Fridays for a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that describes dodging danger and disasters while performing tech support tasks....

Suspected devs behind Russian Coms cuffed - now to find the users of the nastyware The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has shut down an outfit called Russian Coms - a call-spoofing service believed to have swindled hundreds of thousands of victims....

First delays, then data leaks - now fraud detection needed at point of use The Japanese government has released details of of an app that verifies the legitimacy of its troubled My Number Card - a national identity document....

Reveals Kuiper broadband sats to fly later this year and solid Q2 sales Amazon.com has taken the unusual step of leading its quarterly results webcast with discussion of performance at Amazon Web Services....

iPhone cash is a little off, but AI might just turn that around Apple has posted its best-ever revenue for the June quarter, with help from first-time buyers of Macs and iPads....

SMS OTPs are overused, so bring on the tokens and biometrics India's central bank on Wednesday proposed a requirement for dynamically generated second authentication factors for most digital payments....

Judges wonder out loud: If Congress wanted this, it would have passed a law, no? The fate of net neutrality in the US still hangs in the balance, with a decision now unlikely before the November presidential election....

Techno-crooks greeted by grinning Putin after landing At least two Russian cybercriminals are among those being returned to their motherland as part of a multinational prisoner exchange deal announced Thursday....

After McDonald's puts chatbots on ice, TB decides to take a bite Yet another fast food franchise thinks it has what it takes to make the AI-powered drive-thru work....

Share price in meltdown as Pat hopes buyers, investors, board can wait for 2026 turnaround Analysis Intel plans to layoff more than 16,000 staff, or at least 15 percent of its workforce, with most cuts coming by the end of the year as the x86 giant scrambles to get its finances under control....

Hold that thought, citizen The government of President Javier Milei in Argentina last week announced the creation of an artificial intelligence group within the country's Cybercrime and Cyber Affairs Directorate that will use statistical software to predict crime....

2025 could be Peak Nvidia when reality finally kicks in Kettle The tech world has been banging on about the amazing benefits of generative artificial intelligence - so when are we going to see them?...

That horse has not just bolted, it's trampled all over kernel space CrowdStrike, after suggesting canary testing as a way to ensure it avoids future blunders leading to global computer outages, has been sued in federal court by investors for not using a phased approach in rolling out updates to customers in the first place....

Lobbyists would love for rumors of a monopoly probe into GPU goliath to become reality As the US Department of Justice continues mulling an antitrust probe into Nvidia, numerous advocacy groups are urging the Feds on....

If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with elevated voltage, you may be entitled to compensation A law firm is inviting owners of 13th and 14th Gen Intel Raptor Lake CPUs to join in on an upcoming class action lawsuit....

Either Sam and Satya are on the rocks, or this is just more maneuvering to avoid regulatory scrutiny The honeymoon phase of Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship appears to be at an end, with Redmond naming the recipient of billions of its dollars a competitor in its latest annual report....

PSA comes amid multiple IT services crises in recent days US law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies are reminding the public that the country's voting systems will remain unaffected by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as the next presidential election fast approaches....

No timeline yet, but drivers beware: Plans include collaboration on autonomous-capable vehicles Uber and BYD have struck a deal to bring 100,000 BYD electric vehicles onto the Uber platform, starting with Europe and Latin America....

Chip outfit boosted by Chinese market, but goals for smartphones, PCs are ambitious Qualcomm is confident its bet on AI in phones and Arm PCs will pay off, buoyed by more than 50 percent growth in revenue from Chinese handset makers and a promise of $700 Copilot+ PCs coming next year....

Compliance failures and unsatisfactory responses mount from the long-time certificate authority Mozilla is following in Google Chrome's footsteps in officially distrusting Entrust as a root certificate authority (CA) following what it says was a protracted period of compliance failures....

Upcoming spacewalk should help NICER see more nicely NASA is preparing to launch a repair kit to the International Space Station (ISS) for a telescope that was never designed to be tinkered with by astronauts....

Maybe time to play the cloud hokey pokey? You put your workload in. You take your workload out... Updated Microsoft Azure went down for customers in New Zealand earlier today, taking with it parts of Microsoft 365 and bite-sized chunks of the working day for employees still dealing with the effects of previous outages....

Deploying and folding wings without power might be useful in a tight spot The rhinoceros beetle turns out to be an unlikely source of engineering inspiration for tiny flying robots that can fold their wings when resting or after a collision....

Snapshots, failover, recovery, and uninstallation on a plate The big names mostly can't yet, but some lesser-known Linux distributions offer the ability to undo updates and recover from damage, even automatically....

Legal woes are still ongoing in Italy, France, and Germany The High Court of England and Wales has sided with Intel in a multinational patent dispute brought by R2 Semiconductor alleging the x86 giant infringed on its voltage regulation tech....