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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....

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....