The Week in Summary
Obama says USA has world's biggest and best cyber arsenal
United States president Barack Obama says the nation he leads has the world's foremost digital arsenal.
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Pokémon-loving VXer targets Linux with 'Umbreon' rootkit
A Pokemon fan has brewed up a stealthy rootkit targeting Linux.
Asteroid 'FreddieMercury'
Queen guitarist Brian May has announced that the International Astronomical Union has re-named an asteroid “FreddieMercury”, to mark what would have been the singer's 70th birthday.
98.1 million CLEARTEXT passwords pasted as Rambler.ru rumbled
An eye-watering 98.1 million accounts, and their cleartext passwords, have been stolen from Russia's biggest web portals Rambler.ru.
VMware's Virtual SAN to gain data-at-rest encryption
VMware's kicked off a new round of beta testing for its virtual storage area network (VSAN).
Adobe reverses decision to kill NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux
Adobe has reversed its decision to kill the NPAPI Flash plugin on Linux, instead deciding that penguinistas deserve some love after four years of neglect.
Second 'dimmer switch' star spotted
One curious case of “what's that?” in astronomy is a puzzle: two gets astrophysicists on the way to an answer. An oddly-dimming star called EPIC 204278916 (EPIC in this article) might help boffins understand the “Dyson sphere” (no, it's not) Tabby's star.
Airline safety spiel prohibits finding lost phones
PIC
Your correspondent noted something odd during his flight to VMworld 2016 aboard Australian airline QANTAS: during the pre-flight safety briefing passengers were told to ask the crew for help if they lost their phones aboard the A380 and not, repeat not, to try to find it themselves.
Samsung Australia waves white phlag in phlaming phablet recall
Samsung Australia recalled all of the Galaxy S7 Note phablets-come-firelighters sold in Australia.
Smut site forum IDs dumped
User IDs from the forums of grumble-flick site Brazzers have been dumped.
Debian plugs Linux 'TCP snoop' bug
Debian's maintainers have moved to plug the TCP snooping flaw that emerged in August 2016.
ACCC mulls regulating roaming charges
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has sparked a Telstra-Optus love-in by looking into whether mobile roaming should be a regulated service.
Equistone grabs stake in print services slinger Apogee
Private equity investor Equistone Partners Europe has slurped a stake in managed print and document services slinger Apogee Corporation.
International Space Station astros prepare to rejoin us Earthlings
Three astronauts from the International Space Station are expected to fly home tomorrow after spending 172 days floating in space.
Ad ransomware nixed
White hats have thwarted a global malvertising campaign that redirected surfers to the Neutrino Exploit Kit.
Hollywood offers Daniel Craig $150m to (slash wrists) play James Bond
Actor Daniel Craig has reportedly been offered a cool $150m to play James Bond for another two films, such is the uncertainty surrounding the suitability of his potential replacements.
HSBC: How will we verify business banking customers? Selfies!
UK bank HSBC will allow business customers to open new bank accounts using selfies as part of plans to simplify its application process.
These are not just job cuts, these are M&S job cuts
Marks & Spencer is to ship 400 IT and logistics roles out of London, part of a structural shake-up which will also see the retailer axe 525 roles.
Chubby Chinese students refused top bunk
The great war against the big-bellied is well under way in China, with certain uni students at a hall of residence told to bed down in the bottom bunks to avoid potential damage caused by falling fatties.
Nul points: PM May's post-Brexit EU immigration options
Comment
After a summer of vagueness, prime minister Theresa May is starting to define Brexit, with controlling immigration at the top of her list. That is likely to mean ending the freedom of European nationals* to work in Britain on the same basis as the locals – which will have a major impact on the many British IT employers who draw a significant proportion of their tech staff from elsewhere in Europe.
Tech-for-insurers biz out of action for 10 days now. Hope they had, er...
Hapless insurance tech biz SSP Worldwide is now on its tenth day of a services outage, which has had a huge impact its broker customers.
Japan's Brexit warning casts shadow over Softbank ARM promises
Japan fired a shot across Britain's bows at the G20 yesterday, publishing a “message to the United Kingdom” warning that Japanese companies might relocate their head offices out of the UK if Brexit trade negotiations with the EU don't favour them.
Sophos Windows users face black screens after false positive snafu
Users of Sophos’s security software were confronted with a black screen on starting up their Windows PC over the weekend as the resulted of a borked antivirus update.
O2: Float or flog. What's it going to be, Telefonica?
Spanish telco Telefonica has indicated it could soon hold an IPO of O2 in order to raise funds to pay off debt.
Parliament's back for Snoopers' Charter. Former head of GCHQ talks to El Reg
IPBill
Parliament has returned from recess (only for a fortnight before conference season begins) and the House of Lord’s committee stage examination of the Investigatory Powers Bill will resume this afternoon.
Red-faced VESK scratches '100% uptime' claim after 2-day outage
The swagger has gone from hosted desktop and cloud purveyor VESK after its outage seven days ago forced it to remove the 100 per cent uptime claims on its website.
Of supermarkets, Volkswagen and the future of Dell-EMC
Analysis
September 7 sees Dell Technologies absorb EMC and its VMware holding. Storage watchers are seeing lots of overlap between the Dell and EMC storage products and wondering if there is going to be a product cull.
Sysadmins: Poor capacity planning is not our fault
Our latest reader survey was a little different to usual. Normally we research new stuff like the latest hot technologies and ideas. On this occasion, though, we looked at a discipline that's been around for decades – capacity planning.
Next Mars landing scheduled for Monday, November 26th, 2018
We're going back to Mars, quite probably on Monday, November 26th, 2018.
Telstra wins AU$39 million for data retention costs as grants revealed
Australia's attorney-general The Hon Senator George Brandis has announcedAU$128m in grants to telcos to fund their data retention efforts.
Wikibon sticking to server SAN takeover idea
The August 2016 Wikibon report "Server SAN Readies for Enterprise and Cloud Domination" repeats the message of its Server SAN Research Project 2014 report, saying that "storage is moving inexorably from traditional storage arrays to Server SAN in a server rack."
Sundown exploit kit authors champions of copy-paste hacking
Authors of the Sundown exploit kit have proven themselves masters of copy and paste, stealing exploits from rivals and borking encryption when they opt for originality.
Brexit must not break the cloud, Japan tells UK and EU
Japan's foreign ministry has taken the unusual step of publishing a very public Message to the United Kingdom and the European Union (PDF) in which it outlines how it wants Brexit to happen in order to protect the substantial investments its businesses have made in Europe and especially in the United Kingdom.
HDMI hooks up with USB-C in cables that reverse, one way
HDMI Licensing, the administrator of the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) spec, has decided that the time has come to do away with dongles and given the thumb's up to USB-C.
'I'm sorry, your lift has had a problem and had to shut down'
It's not only size that matters: sometimes, the context of a BSOD also makes it fun.
Microsoft thought of the children and decided to ban some browsers
Microsoft has updated its family filters to block some rival browsers and says it's done so to think of the children.
Pixellation popped: AI can ID you, even after PhotoShop phuzzing
Pixellating images turns out to be a dodgy way of obfuscating identities, say researchers from the University of Texas and Cornell Tech who reckon computers can be trained to identify the “protected” people.
Extra Bacon? Yes please, even though the Cisco bug of this name is bad for you
Tens of thousands of Cisco ASA firewalls are vulnerable to an authentication bypass exploit thought to have been cooked up by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
McAfee-the-man wants McAfee-the-brand, Chipzilla says no
John McAfee wants to put his name on a business again, and that's got Intel hot under the collar, so it's off to court they go.
YouTube breaks Sony Bravias
Sony has announced the “Termination of YouTube service on 2012 BRAVIA TVs.”
4G hits 1.9Gbps
Finnish mobile carrier “Elisa” says it's achieved 1.9 gigabits per second speeds on 4G kit.
'Hey, Elon? You broke it, you bought it' says owner of SpaceX's satellite cinder
Battered by the loss of its satellite in last week's SpaceX earth-shattering kaboom, Israeli company Spacecom wants Elon Musk's launch company to part with cash or a free flight.
Google swats Nexus 5X vulnerable fastboot memory dump flaw
Google has patched a bypass hole in Nexus 5X devices that allowed attackers to dump memory from locked phones.
Australia's mobile black spot program was a partisan money hole
One in five new mobile phone towers built with Australian government money did more for telcos than for coverage-craving folk living in regional areas.
Australian telecoms regulator watching over Telstra HFC/NBN deal
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has flagged Telstra's deal to build and maintain plenty of the hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) parts of the National Broadband Network (NBN) as something it needs to watch.
Appliance-maker Liebherr chillin' with Microsoft, prototyping another Internet fridge
Microsoft has added another wrinkle to an idea that refuses to die: the 'net-connected refrigerator.
Intel bags FAA pass to fly 100-strong drone armadas over US soil
Intel says recently passed United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations on commercial drone flights are helping it extend the public performances of its Project 100 light show demonstration.
It's OK to fine someone for repeating a historical fact, says Russian Supreme Court
The Russian Supreme Court has upheld a conviction against a blogger who correctly noted that the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland with the Nazi government in 1939.
What the hex is up with Jupiter's North Pole?
Jupiter doesn't have a colossal hexagon at its North Pole, unlike it celestial cousin Saturn.
ABBA-solutely crapulous! Swedish router-maker won't patch gaping hole
European customer-premises equipment (CPE) kit-maker Inteno has said it isn't going to patch a hole that has been sitting in some of its routers for the last nine months, saying it's not the firm's problem.
IPv4 wealth redistributed
IANA has published its six-monthly review of IPv4 address recoveries and reallocations.
FBI Clinton email dossier
The FBI has published online a thorough report of its investigation into US presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Is it time to unplug frail OpenOffice's life support? Apache Project asked to mull it over
The Apache OpenOffice project has limited capacity for sustaining itself in an energetic manner. The retirement of the project is a serious possibility.
Bloke accused of Linux kernel.org hack nabbed during traffic stop
A man who allegedly hacked the Linux Kernel Organization's kernel.org and the Linux Foundation's servers has been collared by cops.
NBA's Golden State Warriors sued for 'mic snooping' mobile app
The Golden State Warriors have been sued by a bunch of fans who claim the basketball team's mobile app is eavesdropping on them.
When Irish eyes are filing: Ireland to appeal Europe's $15bn Apple tax claw-back
The Irish government formally decided to appeal the European Commission's $14.5 billion back-tax demand on Friday.
Hacking mobile login tokens tricky but doable, says reverse-engineer
Mobile apps that generate on-screen tokens for two-factor authentication can be examined and cloned by malware, a security researcher warns.
Don't touch that dial! Exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phablets recalled immediately
Samsung Electronics has recalled its exploding new phablet model after an increasing number of miniature blasts – and their internal investigation discovered a "battery cell issue".
EMC-Pure Storage patent sueball circus sent back to square one
EMC's $14m patent award against Pure Storage has been set aside by a judge who has ordered a new trial.
Childcare app bods wipe users' data – then discover backups had been borked for a year
It was with "great regret" that Orbit, makers of an app for professional childcare services, informed its customers that it lost all of their data during a weekend site upgrade – before discovering their backups hadn't been working for a year.
Dwarf planet Ceres has a watery secret: An 11 mile wide ice volcano
Ahuna Mons, the 13,000 foot high, 11 mile wide volcano on dwarf planet Ceres is made entirely out of ice – and provides evidence that water may have once existed beneath the planet's surface.
Anti-piracy site DDoSed
Swedish anti-piracy site Spridningskollen.se was taken offline on Friday by a suspected DDoS attack.
Google scraps its Project Ara modular smartphone wheeze
Google has suspended Project Ara, its plans to build a modular smartphone that allows users to customise their own mobile phones, Reuters reported today.
We want GCHQ-style spy powers to hack cybercrims, say police
Traditional law enforcement techniques are incapable of tackling the rise of cybercrime, according to a panel of experts gathered to discuss the issue at the Chartered Institute of IT.
Azerbaijani hacktivists leak Armenian security service docs
Azerbaijani hacktivists have leaked the passport details of foreign visitors to Armenia and more after breaking into Armenian government servers.
'Power equipment failure' borks EE's data services across England
EE's 2G and 3G data services are struggling this afternoon after what seems like a power equipment failure caused problems at the telco's switch sites.
Kaspersky 'terminates' deal with security reseller Quadsys
Kaspersky Lab is the first big vendor to publicly rip up its contract with disgraced security reseller Quadsys in the wake of the hacking scandal that the company’s bosses recently admitted to.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise in talks to offload software, asking for '$8bn to $10bn'
The breakup of Hewlett Packard Enterprise is set to continue with execs locked in talks to offload the software division to private equity biz Thomas Bravo. The asking price is said to be $8bn to $10bn.
Beautiful, efficient, data-sucking Smart Cities: Why do you give us the creeps?
Huawei Connect
“Smart Cities” have been heavily promoted by tech giants like IBM, and the idea excites the pulse of fad-chasing technocrats and wonks.
Lindsay Lohan's Grand Theft Auto V cartoon case kicked out of court
Hellraiser Lindsay Lohan has had her case against Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar Games, for allegedly basing a character on her image, thrown out by a New York court.
Behold this golden era of storage startups. It's coming to an end
Comment
We are living in one of the most fascinating storage times with a great and rewarding war of storage access latency, but the major gains have already been won – and the scope for future advances is narrowing.
Helpful airport robots
Japanese tech firm Hitachi has dispatched a humanoid robot to help foreign visitors in Tokyo's Haneda airport.
Brave idea: Ex Mozilla man punts Bitcoin adblocking browser
Browser upstart Brave is now letting you contribute Bitcoin to websites in return for ad-blocking.
Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 ... and Linux, BSD, OS X
Water cooler
I read an article this week headlined: "The latest Kaby Lake, Zen chips will support only Windows 10." It claimed Intel and AMD's new processors are "officially supported only by Microsoft’s Windows 10." This can't be true? What about Linux?
Feeling Locky, punk?
Ransomware slingers are attempting to trick British computer users into opening booby-trapped messages disguised as voicemail notifications.
Paint your wagon (with electric circuits) but leave my crotch alone
Something for the Weekend, Sir?
The contents of my pants are hot.
Ditch tape and fly into the public cloud with us, beams bullish Actifio
Comment
Actifio can store its virtualised copy data in the public cloud, calling its facility OnVault and saying it replaces tape and dedplicated disk data graveyards.
London's Francis Crick Institute will house 1,250 cancer-fighting boffins
The first scientists are moving into the Francis Crick Institute, the biggest biomedical research institute under one roof, costing £650m.
A plumber with a blowtorch is the enemy of data centre
On-Call
Welcome again to On-Call, our regular week-ender in which readers share their tales of possibly-career-ending errors.
Adobe ices ColdFusion server admin password, file hack hole
Adobe has patched a hole in ColdFusion that could have allowed hackers to gain access to files and passwords stored on servers.
Lightspeed PoS vendor breached, sensitive database tapped
Point of sales vendor Lightspeed has been breached with password, customer data, and API keys possibly exposed.
SETI searchers: We still haven't found what we're looking for
Stand down, one and all: there's not even cool new science in this week's “alien signal”, let alone a SETI success: the signal seems to have come from "terrestrial origins".
The survivors: Intel's Apollo Lake netbook CPUs stagger from Goldmont bloodbath
Amid the Kaby Lake noise this week, Intel slipped out six processors, codenamed Apollo Lake, for cheapo netbooks, tablet-laptop mutants and small PC boxes.
Google crushes 33 Chrome bugs, pays boffins more than $56k
Google has patched 33 Chrome vulnerabilities, including 13 rated high severity, with the release of verison 53 of the world's most popular web browser.
That Public Health study? No, it didn't say 'don't do chemo'
“Chemotherapy kills” was bound to pique our interest, especially since in the best traditions of modern research, its source was a badly-reported scientific study.
Baidu peddles PaddlesPaddles, floats open source AI tech
Since Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and World+Dog have one, it's no surprise that Chinese giant Baidu would pitch an artificial intelligence offering at the waiting world.
Windows 10 now rules the weekend, taking over from Windows 7
Windows 10's market share continues to grow a point or two a month, but it's also cracked the milestone of being the most-used version of Windows on weekends.
The ability to analyse live streams of mobile and sensor data is no longer optional
Promo
Business has long been able to gather performance data from many sources, but has often struggled to find the resources needed to identify context and meaning in the data it collects.
OpenBSD 6.0 lands
OpenBSD developers might be keen on the 1980s in their artwork, but not in their operating system: Version 6.0 has just landed, and the maintainers have killed off VAX support.
Patch now: Apple emits fix for Pegasus spyware bugs in OS X, Safari
Those vulnerabilities last week that let government snoops monitor iPhones, iPads and iPods? Turns out they're present in desktop Safari and OS X, too – and Apple has quietly pushed out patches for them.
Census fail to get Oz Senate probe; NDIS fix promised this year
Australia's Senate has voted to establish a committee to look into the Australian Bureau of Statistics' August Census IT collapse.
Surge pricing? How about surge fines: Pennsylvania orders Uber to cough up $11.4m
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has upheld an $11,364,736 fine, the largest in its history, against Uber for running an unlicensed taxi operation and obstructing attempts to investigate the firm.
How much does your kid hate exams? This lad hacked his government to skip them
A teenager from Sri Lanka is in hot water after he admitted to hacking the website of the nation's president in order to get his exams cancelled.
What do microservices do to data stores? Netflix is built on them and had no idea!
Microservices are the new black for developers, but even one of their world's biggest and most prominent users – Netflix – has said they're a bugger to manage.
Phytium's 64-core ARM chip
Our sister site The Next Platform has just published loads of interesting details on 64-bit ARMv8-compatible desktop, laptop and server processors designed by Chinese upstart Phytium.
Did you stay at any of these 60 Kimpton hotels? Whelp, hackers have your card details
Hotel chain Kimpton said that 61 of its hotels and restaurants have been compromised by a malware infection targeting customer payment cards.
Ice to see you! Windows 10 fix for freezing PCs finally flung at folks
Microsoft has finally patched its Windows 10 Anniversary Edition to hopefully stop it from freezing some PCs.
Cooky crumbles: Apple mulls yanking profits out of Europe and into US
Apple CEO Tim Cook may pull billions of dollars in profit out of Europe and bring them home to the US, less than a month after he vowed he wouldn't.
iOS abandonware purge
Apple is warning developers of a coming clean-out to rid the iOS App Store of abandoned apps.
George W Bush hacker Guccifer to spend 52 months in the big house
Notorious celebrity hacker Guccifer will spend at least four years in prison on charges of identity theft and unauthorized access to computer systems.
Hey, uh ICANN. US govt here. You know we said we'd give you the keys to the 'net? Yeaahhh...
The US government has admitted its plan to move control of the internet's naming and numbering functions to a California non-profit next month may not move forward.
InIn now in Genesys
Customer service tech specialist Genesys has acquired rival firm Interactive Intelligence for about US$1.4bn.
Watch SpaceX's rocket dramatically detonate, destroying a $200m Facebook satellite
Updated
Elon Musk has confirmed that today's SpaceX rocket explosion – which destroyed a $200m satellite – was caused by a cockup during fueling.
Baa NooBaa black sheep, have you any storage?
NooBaa sounds like a lamb in a child's fairy story or one of those wacky new-style web properties offering on-demand hair dressing, garden tool sharing or a cocktail recipe exchange. In fact, it's a scale-out object storage startup offering what it calls frictionless storage for unstructured data.
Crashing PC sales don't stop HP Inc releasing two new ones
HP Inc has announced two new PC desktops: the miniscule and modular Elite Slice, as well as the new Toblerone of IT, Pavilion Wave, as a domestic entertainment machine.
Transmission hijacked to broadcast Mac malware
Developers of the Transmission BitTorrent client have admitted that hackers replaced downloads of its file-sharing software with trojanised code.
Nutanix to kick off its IPO extravaganza on ... go on, take a guess
Nutanix, the darling of the hyper-converged infrastructure appliance industry, is, we're hearing, going to kick its IPO process into gear from September 6.
Mangstor, Mellanox flash rig crowned 'fastest in the lab'... for RAID-0
Trusty Storage Review has been at it again, testing a Mangstor-Mellanox NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeF) rig servicing a MySQL virtual cluster – and finding it 2.5x faster than any other flash array it's ever tested.
Want a Windows 10 update? Don't go to Microsoft ... please
Microsoft has slipped out an update to Windows 10 to early testers letting you slurp software updates from others across the internet.
Still got a floppy drive? Here's a solution for when 1.44MB isn't enough
Floppy disk sales have, well, flopped but there are still masses of PCs and old embedded PC-based systems out there with floppy disk slots and drives. Now this near-dead space can be made usable again, with a 32GB FLOPPYFlash drive from Solid State Disks Ltd.
SpaceX blast kills Zuck's sat
A launchpad explosion at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida during a SpaceX rocket test has just destroyed Facebook's $200m Amos-6 satellite.
Huawei hugs open-sourcey Alluxio: Thanks for the memories
Huawei has announced a Big Data analytics acceleration scheme using its FusionStorage product and Alluxio open source software; which seems to be the canine genitalia du jour for speeding up lethargic analytics queries.
Robot cars probably won't happen, sniffs US transport chief
Fully autonomous cars may never reach public roads, according to the chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board.
Backup's Amazon hook-up
Backup Exec 15 feature pack number 5 is adding more cloud and platform support.
A little bit of Cloudant love
Promo
We thought this might be just the time to remind developers amongst you of the call to sign up now for a free IBM Cloudant cloud services trial.
So Nutanix has fessed up to PernixData slurp. Now what?
So it appears the rumours were true as Nutanix finally announces the acquisition of both PernixData and calm.io, a startup focused on DevOps automation.
UK nuke warhead builders shift IT gear into public cloud
The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) is moving some of its internal tech to the public cloud, in a move to "embrace the opportunities that modern IT can bring".
Cash crunch at Tesla
Tesla is to raise cash via a debt or equity offering to fund production of the Model S Sedan and build a battery factory.
Deal delays and exchange rate woes batter Salesforce
Salesforce has blamed currency fluctuations and deferred deals in the US for hitting its business.
This is why Huawei's cloud is not like Amazuregoo
The jargon changes, and the rhetoric can get ecstatic, but Huawei’s Cloud adventure is really just a highly elaborate way of saying “please upgrade your network”.
Tim Cook: EU lied about Apple taxes. Watch out Ireland, this is a coup!
Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook has claimed that the European Commission made up its claims about the business’ tax payments in Ireland.
Healthcare and local gov are most likely UK bodies to suffer infosec breaches
The number of security incidents reported to UK data privacy watchdogs nearly doubled in the past year, with organisations increasingly becoming overwhelmed with security problems.
Suspicious DNS activity runs rife
Nearly half (40 per cent) of enterprise networks tested by security appliance firm Infoblox show evidence of DNS tunnelling.
Will the real builders of IoT please stand up?
CFP
If you’re really doing the Internet of Things, we’d really like to hear about it at Building IoT London next March.
TalkTalk's appeal against paltry ICO data breach fine thrown out
TalkTalk has lost its appeal against the Information Commissioner's Office decision to fine the company £1,000 for a data breach last year.
VMware content to run a small and beautiful cloud, with friendly help
VMWORLD 2016
VMware's own cloud is now profitable and spinning out innovations the rest of VMware can use, according to Ajay Patel, Virtzilla's exec responsible for all product development and operations for vCloud Air.
IBM swings axe through staff, humming contently about cloud and AI
More IBM staffers found out they are losing their jobs this week in another wave of layoffs at the IT giant.
Lenovo's tablet with a real pen, Acer's monster laptop, Samsung Galaxy S3 watch
IFA 2016
August 31st was press day one ahead of the IFA event in Berlin, which means vendors lining up to show off their latest efforts in (mainly) consumer electronics.
Nest developers become Oompa-Loompas in Google shake-up
Another month, another Alphabet attempt to restructure its Internet of Things businesses into something coherent and successful.
Now the Olympics is over, Theranos is withdrawing its Zika test application
Now that the Olympics is over, there's no apparent athlete-borne Zika pandemic, and the virus doesn't guarantee a headline, Theranos has withdrawn its emergency application to have the Food and Drug Administration approve its blood test for the virus.
Cisco SOHO switches patched for SOHOpeless vuln
This week's Cisco patch round includes a critical vuln in the kind of product least likely to get patched – a small business Ethernet switch.
Solidfire is 'for people who **CKING HATE storage' says NetApp Founder Dave Hitz
VMWORLD 2016
NetApp founder Dave Hitz has apologised to a VMworld 2016 audience for being slow to produce proper flash arrays.
Blackhat wannabes proffer probably bogus Linux scamsomware
A new purported ransomware variant is hitting Linux servers, deleting files and demanding payment for the return of lost data.
L0phtCrack's back! Crack hack app whacks Windows 10 trash hashes
Ancient famed Windows cracker L0phtCrack has been updated after seven years, with the release of the "fully revamped" version seven.
The Internet of Things can transform your business … once your networks are ready
Promo
The Internet of Things (IoT) creates possibilities to transform every industry, and some of those possibilities will emerge this week at Huawei Connect 2016, the company's flagship conference in Shanghai.
MedSec's 'hackable pacemaker' report autopsy: Bombshell crash claim in doubt
Researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) have poured doubt on one claim by MedSec that St Jude Medical's implanted pacemakers and defibrillators are remotely breakable.
Crash test dummy? Love the excitement of breaking an OS? Fedora 25 Alpha has landed
If you're a chronic complainer and nit-picker with a spare machine and a willingness to suffer multiple crashes, weird screen artefacts and possible data loss: Fedora 25's alpha has landed ahead of its anticipated November 2016 release.
US spectrum auction falls short by, oh, you know, $66bn thanks to tightwad mobile giants
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will have to change its plans for the 600MHz radio spectrum auction for mobile broadband – after the latest stage of bidding raised just $22.4bn of an $88bn goal.
VMware's vDare: Build more complexity and silos, or virtualize more
VMworld
VMware opened its VMworld 2016 conference asking its customers to “Be tomorrow,” a couplet that was introduced at the event's opening keynote with a performance of poetry that felt like the work of a slick self-help spruiker.
Good job, Oz feds: Conroy wants you investigated for privilege and contempt
As was inevitable, the fate of the “NBN documents” is off to the Australian Senate's privileges committee.
BT boils over, blows off Steam, accuses Valve of patent infringement
UK telecoms goliath BT is suing games developer and publisher Valve, alleging the Steam service infringes multiple patents.
FBI Director wants 'adult conversation' about backdooring encryption
FBI Director James Comey is gathering evidence so that in 2017 America can have an "adult" conversation about breaking encryption to make crimefighters' lives easier.
Fake Twitter accounts, coup plots ... Wacky Hyperloop One lawsuit turns it up to 11
The extraordinary legal fight at Hyperloop One has grown even crazier – with the company claiming former CTO Brogan BamBrogan planned a detailed coup of the business.
Drama in orbit: Brazen UFO attacks Earth's Sentinel-1A satellite
The European Space Agency's Sentinel-1A satellite has been hit by an unidentified flying object while in orbit. Panic not: the probe remains fully operational.
Life imitates satire: Facebook touts zlib killer just like Silicon Valley's Pied Piper
Facebook engineers today emitted a bunch of open-source compression and database tools during its @Scale conference.
US appeals court slaps down FTC, AT&T walks free, cats and dog living together, mass hysteria
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has thrown the issue of who can protect American consumers into confusion with a decision for AT&T and against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
AT&T trash talks Google over Fiber fiasco: Leave ISP stuff to the experts
With Google deciding to cut back on its Fiber workforce and reconsidering its plan to deliver broadband service, competing ISPs are cackling with glee at the Chocolate Factory's misfortunes.
Exploding phablet phears phorce Samsung Galaxy Note 7 delay
Reports of the new Galaxy Note 7 exploding while being charged has caused Samsung to halt shipment of the high-end "phablet."
Australian geoboffin discovers 3.7 billion year old fossils after ice melts
The world’s oldest fossils have been discovered in Greenland after a layer of snow on ancient rocks melted, revealing stromatolites embedded in the Isua supracrustal belt.
BBC vans are coming for you
Pinch, punch: The license change requiring you to have actually shelled out the £145.50 for colour television (only £49 for monochrome) to watch BBC programmes on demand comes into effect today.
VMware Vannounces Vlots Vof Very Vnew Vstuff Vat VMworld
VMworld saw EMC making a series of supportive announcements related to VMware. Panzura added cloud storage gateway facilities to all-flash arrays and hyper-converged products while QLogic focussed on links to NVMe drives and NVME over Fabrics technology.
EU 'net neutrality' may stop ISPs from blocking child abuse material
Analysis
A single paragraph slipped into yesterday's net neutrality guidelines suggests they don't quite deliver the consumer protections that many people think.
Got to dash out for some rubber johnnies? Amazon has a button for that
Running out of bog rolls or prophylactics and can’t be bothered to hot foot it to the local shops? Fear not lazy 21st century human, for Amazon has found a solution to a problem that - for most of us - doesn’t exist.
African Ring of Fire to show up at annular solar eclipse
Tomorrow’s morning sky will be temporarily blotted by an inky blackness as the Sun disappears behind the moon, leaving a dazzling ‘ring of fire’ in an annular solar eclipse over Africa.
Spectrum Protect speed-up
Bridgeworks’ PORTrockIT TCP/IP transmission parallelising software accelerates IBM’s Spectrum Protect WAN transfers up to 210 times.
Newest Royal Navy warship weighs as much as 120 London buses
The Royal Navy's newest offshore patrol vessel, HMS Forth, is now fitting out in Glasgow – and we're told she weighs as much as 120 London buses.
Is VMware starting to mean 'legacy'? Down and out in Las Vegas
VMworld
I love VMworld, as I do VMware. In the last few years VMworld has been “the IT show” if the infrastructure space is your thing. However, it is clear that something is changing and it is changing very quickly.
Cloudy biz Vesk suffers 2-day outage – then boasts of 100% uptime
A failed storage controller caused a protracted outage at hosted desktop and cloud slinger Vesk - not that this factoid has made its way onto the company’s website, where it boasts of 100 per cent uptime for the past 1,583 days.
Acronis beats Veeam
Independent research firm Network Testing Labs says Acronis Backup 2012 runs at twice the speed of Veeam Availability Suite 9.0.
Speaking in Tech: Fancy a 30 hour work week? Ask Amazon
Podcast
Podcast
This week Greg is in Japan while Ed drives the podcast along with Yadin Porter de Leon and his special guest, David Allen of “Getting Things Done”. This week the team talks extensively about the GTD methodology, VMworld, Uber and Amazon work hours.
Behold: Huawei evokes always-wise God Cloud – with Terminator users
Huawei Connect
Tech metaphors are getting ever more explicitly spiritual. Take Huawei, for example. Today Huawei waxed ontological as one of its time-sharing CEOs described a “digital brain… always wise, never aging ... evolving in real-time.” That sounds like a God-cloud.
ARM moneymen OK buyout
ARM's shareholders have approved Japanese tech company Softbank's deal to buy the company for £24.3bn.
Enterprise storage is a stagnant – and slightly smelly – pond
Opinion
Earlier this year I was at HPE Discover in Las Vegas and talking to Calvin Zito about the latest IDC Storage Tracker results.
Angler's obituary: Super exploit kit was the work of Russia's Lurk group
Ruslan Stoyanov was right: what could be history's most advanced financially-driven malware was the progeny of some 50 jailed hackers known as the Lurk group.
Astronauts sequence DNA in space for the first time
DNA has been sequenced in space for the first time during a series of experiments performed last weekend by biologist-turned-NASA astronaut, Kate Rubins.
Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it
A small asteroid made a rare, close pass between Earth and the moon on August 28.
Deep inside Nantero's non-volatile carbon nanotube RAM tech
Two Fujitsu semiconductor businesses are licensing Nantero NRAM technology with joint Nantero-Fujitsu development to produce chips in 2018. They will have several thousand times faster rewrites and many thousands of times more rewrite cycles than embedded flash memory.
Net neutrality activists claim victory in Europe
Net neutrality activists are claiming victory following the publication of final guidelines by European regulators.
Cisco is the new container for ContainerX
The container market just got a new 900-pound gorilla: Switchzilla has landed in the segment with its acquisition of eighteen-month-old ContainerX.
Google login URL phish 'bug'
A chap called Aiden Woods has found a way to potentially phish people for their Google login information.
Microsoft's beta language service gets C# dev kit
Microsoft has pushed out a C# software development kit (SDK) for its in-beta language parsing API, LUIS.
HPE yawns, stretches, and patches January OpenSSH bug in virtual access products
HPE customers have just been issued patches related to the lighttpd daemon and OpenSSH for remote access devices.
More banks plundered through SWIFT attacks
Criminals have hacked an unspecified number of new banks, using the SWIFT messaging system already implicated in one of the most lucrative breaches in history.
Lawyers! win! millions! in! bonkers! Yahoo! email! snooping! case!
A bunch of lawyers have persuaded Yahoo! to keep scanning e-mails for advertising and pay their fees.
Get ready for Cloud 3.0, the age of Platform-as-a-Service
Promo
Cloud computing is evolving rapidly, and new ideas about “Cloud 3.0” will be featured this week at Huawei Connect 2016, the company's flagship conference in Shanghai.
Dropbox: Leaked DB of 68 million account passwords is real
A leaked database purported to contain login information for 68 million Dropbox accounts is the real deal. The cloud biz confirmed the authenticity of the records to The Register, with independent verification from IT security guru Troy Hunt.
Waze to go, Google: New dial-a-ride Uber, Lyft rival 'won't vet drivers'... What could go wrong?
Google is apparently planning to launch a ride-sharing service to compete with Uber and Lyft.
USBee stings air-gapped PCs: Wirelessly leak secrets with a file write
Video
Mordechai Guri, the Israeli researcher who has something of a knack for extracting information from air-gapped PCs, has done it again – this time using radio frequency transmissions from USB 2 connections.
OneLogin breached, hacker finds cleartext credential notepads
Password attic OneLogin has been breached, and it's bad, because the service that suffered the breach is one often used by people to store credentials like admin password and software keys.
