Dozens of Singaporean iTunes customers have been forced to seek assistance from their banks after their credit and debit cards were used for iTunes purchases, Channel News Asia reports. Apple has denied responsibility for the mass of unauthorized charges, but is "looking into" the issue.

You may have heard that the European Union punished Google with a record $5.1 billion fine on Wednesday for abusing its power in the mobile phone market. Specifically, the authorities dinged Google on its practices with Android, the mobile operating system that the company provides to makers of devices. The size of the fine and the remedies that regulators ordered Google to make were consequential, both symbolically and in how handset manufacturers may incorporate Android into mobile devices in Europe in the future.

An internal Apple document distributed to Apple Authorized Service Providers and obtained by MacG矇n矇ration and MacRumors confirms that there's a membrane under the keyboard to "prevent debris from entering the butterfly mechanism". This is the first time Apple acknowledges that the third generation butterfly keyboard tries to fix unreliability issues.

Intel Corporation today announced that its board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.30 per share ($1.20 per share on an annual basis) on the company's common stock. The dividend will be payable on Sept. 1, 2018, to stockholders of record on Aug. 7, 2018.

AMD is expected to release its next-generation of high-end desktop (HEDT) Threadripper processors sometime between now and September, though nothing official has been announced. We must be getting close to a launch, however, as AMD's existing Threadripper CPUs are selling well below their launch MSRPs.

Apple's Chinese iCloud partner, Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), has cut a deal with the state-run China Telecom to move user data to the latter's servers, according to a public-facing WeChat post from China Telecom. Though the iCloud data is end-to-end encrypted, the encryption keys are also stored in China, raising the possibility the Chinese government could gain access to it.

Google has announced a new Chromebook loaner program for businesses that's designed to get workers up and running with a temporary new machine within minutes.

South Korea's industry minister said Wednesday the government will step up support for large-scale research and development (R&D) projects to develop cutting-edge memory chips.

With the SSD and NAND flash memory markets booming, Western Digital has made the tough decision to shut down its HDD (hard disk drive) manufacturing factory in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia by the end of 2019.

On Wednesday, the European Union is expected to rule that Google illegally used the market dominance of its smartphone software, Android, to stifle competition, hitting the Alphabet-owned company with a hefty fine and aiming to change some of its business practices.

Last week, Apple announced new versions of its 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar. Perhaps most notable is the new power that is now available with the 15-inch, including the Intel Core i9 processor. A new video, however, raises concerns about whether or not the MacBook Pro can handle the heat of the i9 processor.

Intel's market leadership in the semiconductor industry may be at risk, according to Evercore ISI. The firm lowered its rating to in line from outperform for Intel shares, saying the search for the company's next CEO will add to investor uncertainty.

A 3% year-over-year increase in PC shipments is being pegged to renewed demand in the business market.

The five-year agreement will leverage the full range of Microsoft's cloud solutions, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.

Oracle joins IBM, SAP, and Microsoft in offering blockchain-as-a-service for companies hoping to deploy the distributed ledger technology without the expenses associated with embracing the technology in-house.

BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink on Monday said the world's largest asset manager has assembled a working group to look at blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, but cautioned he does not see massive investor demand.

Last month, Apple initiated a Keyboard Service Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro, after determining that a "small percentage" of the keyboards in 2015-2017 MacBook and 2016-2017 MacBook Pro models may experience keys that feel "sticky," repeat, or do not respond in a consistent manner.

After many false starts, the Maharashtra government and Foxconn are likely to sign a deal under which the world's biggest contract manufacturer of consumer electronics will finally set up a manufacturing hub in the state.

Moore's Law is dead, long live AI. That's the semiconductor industry's new rallying cry, sounded at a daylong symposium sponsored by Applied Materials at Semicon West.

Microsoft has called for facial recognition technology to be regulated by government, with for laws governing its acceptable uses.

South Korea has warned that the trade war between the US and China could hit its exports of "intermediary goods" used in Chinese home appliances, computers and telecoms devices, fuelling concerns over the economic impact on third countries.

The US and China are in the early innings of a trade war, and prominent economist Stephen Roach says it's the United States that's on track to lose.

Apple quietly fixed a bug in iOS 11 that caused some devices to crash when the word "Taiwan" was entered in a text field or the Taiwan emoji was used, according to a security researcher.

There are so many ironies in the hardware business that it is amazing that we aren't covered in rust. One irony is that after decades of socket compression in the datacenter, the time of the single socket server may have returned. And if it does, it will be largely AMD's doing with the Epyc line of X86 chips, which were created to give no-holds-barred performance sufficient to knock out a slew of two socket Xeon machinery in the datacenter.

Australia is preparing to ban Huawei Technologies from supplying equipment for its planned 5G broadband network after its intelligence agencies raised concerns that Beijing could force the Chinese telco to hand over sensitive data.

Uncle Sam has another beef with Silicon Valley. Months after hauling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Washington for questioning related to the company's data-sharing practices, Congress has told the heads of Google parent Alphabet and Apple that they need to provide answers about their privacy practices.

There is a rumor going around that Intel is getting ready to kill its "Extreme Edition" branding that it uses for certain high-end desktop (HEDT) processors. It was put out there by Francois Piednoel, a former Intel chip architect who worked at the company for two decades, who called the decision a "big mistake." Maybe it would be, but Intel is not axing the Extreme Edition brand.

While Intel has yet to detail its upcoming Cascade Lake processors for servers, some of the key characteristics are beginning to emerge. According to a new report from ServeTheHome, some of the new chips will support up to 3.84 TB of memory per socket, double the amount supported by contemporary Skylake-based Xeon Platinum M-series CPUs that support 1.5 TB of DDR4, due to combining 512 GB Optane DIMMs and 128GB DDR4 DIMMs. For a dual socket system, this rises to up to 7.68 TB per node.

Martin Ashton previously at Intel and Imagination Technologies now moves towards AMD where he has taken the position of corporate vice president for all Radeon Technologies.

The UK's data protection watchdog intends to fine Facebook 瞿500,000 for data breaches - the maximum allowed. The Information Commissioner's Office said Facebook had failed to ensure another company - Cambridge Analytica - had deleted users' data.

The US has ramped up its trade war with China, listing US$200 billion worth of additional products it plans to place tariffs on as soon as September. The move comes just days after the two countries imposed tit-for-tat tariffs of US$34 billion on each other's goods.

Thanks to a licensing deal with AMD and a complex joint-venture arrangement, the Chinese chip producer Chengdu Haiguang IC Design (Hygon) is now producing x86-based server processors that are largely indistinguishable from AMD's EPYC processors - so close in design that Linux kernel developers had to do little in the way of patching to support the new processor family, called "Dhyana." The server chips are being manufactured for domestic use only - part of an effort to break China's dependence on foreign technology companies.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise boss Antonio Neri told a San Francisco audience Tuesday that "70% of the data generated today is at 'the edge," a concept that refers to distributed networks of devices like sensors, power grids, cars or other devices that aren't continuously connected to the Internet.

Speaking from a blockchain conference in Morocco over the weekend, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the Internet giant missed its chance to be at the forefront of blockchain technology. Brin, who currently serves as president of Google parent company Alphabet, joined blockchain technology leaders and researchers on a panel at Richard Branson's exclusive Blockchain Summit.

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee want Google and Apple sent letters on Monday to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Larry Page, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, asking the tech giants to explain their data collection practices.

As reported by Forbes' Gordon Kelly, Apple is looking to introduce dual-SIM technology to the iPhone family this year. The technology, widely available on high- and mid-range Android handsets, will finally debut in the iPhone X Plus, Apple's most expensive handset.

Google could face a record penalty this month from European regulators for forcing its search and Web-browsing tools on the makers of Android-equipped smartphones and other devices, potentially resulting in major changes to the world's most widely deployed mobile operating system.

Qualcomm's veep of data centre technologies, Dileep Bhandarkar, has left the company, it appears.

Samsung Electronics has formally opened a new factory in India, which the South Korean tech group says is the world's biggest mobile phone manufacturing plant, part of its plans to expand production in the world's fastest growing major mobile phone market.

Seagate arguably got back into the SSD game earlier than Western Digital, but the storage company worked primarily in the enterprise space - but finally at long last it's introducing a BarraCuda SSD for PC enthusiasts.