A US jury has found that Western Digital was not guilty of shipping faulty drives to Amstrad in 1989. Amstrad had wanted $140 million in compensation from WD, and had already received compensation from Seagate in an out of court settlement worth over $120 million. Western Digital had always maintained that its hard drives conformed to the specification demanded, and that problems were down to Amstrad designs. The PCs in question were part of Amstrad's ill-fated corporate range of PCs. ®
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You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?
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Linus Torvalds reluctantly issues one more release candidate for Linux kernel 5.12
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Debian devs decide best response to Richard Stallman controversy is … nothing
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Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge
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On a dusty red planet almost 290 million km away... NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flies
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'There was no one driving that vehicle': Texas cops suspect Autopilot involved after two men killed in Tesla crash
Model S took corner at high speed, left road, and smashed into a treeContinue readingAuthorities are investigating a Tesla crash in Texas in which two men were killed this weekend. The authorities are probing whether the vehicle was operating in its "Autopilot" mode, with neither occupant in control.
According to reports, the collision happened at 23:25 local time on 17 April in the Houston suburb of The Woodlands.
Neither of the two unnamed victims – born in 1962 and 1951 – were in the driver's seat at the time of the accident, according to Sgt Cynthia Umanzor of the Harris County Constable Precinct 4, who spoke to local TV station Khou-TV (geo-restricted).
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WordPress core contributor proposes treating Google FLoC as a security vulnerability
Let's opt every WordPress site out of FLoC. Nice idea, but security update? Really?Continue readingA proposal by a WordPress core contributor to treat Google's FLoC ad tech as a security vulnerability, and therefore backport an automatic opt-out to previous WordPress versions, shows the depth of community opposition to the technology.
FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) is Google’s scheme to replace third-party cookies with an ad personalisation system based on groups of users. It has run into wide opposition from privacy advocates and browser makers, but Google has nonetheless pressed ahead with trials in the current version of Chrome.
Now a WordPress Core contributor has proposed treating “FLoC as a security concern.”
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Brit Salesforce exec Gavin Patterson becomes transfer target for controversial European Super League
Ex-BT boss is familiar with the football lifestyle – being paid millions for doing very littleContinue readingGavin Patterson, former boss of BT, is in the frame to lead a proposed European football league at the centre of a storm of criticism.
According to Sky News, Patterson was approached informally several weeks ago about the role.
Proposals for the European Super League – which UK football clubs Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur have agreed to join – include a "new midweek competition" with teams continuing to "compete in their respective national leagues". AC Milan, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus and Real Madrid have also agreed to join the controversial league, which plans say will have 20 teams: the 12 founding members plus the three unnamed clubs they expect to join soon, and five teams who qualify annually according to their domestic achievements.
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Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook
Change the record, nobody's fooled by this nowContinue readingUK Home Secretary Priti Patel will badmouth Facebook's use of end-to-end encryption on Monday evening as she links the security technology with paedophilia, terrorism, organised crime, and so on.
The ever-popular politician will say at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) event: "Sadly, at a time when we need to be taking more action, Facebook are pursuing end-to-end encryption plans that place the good work and progress achieved so far [on fighting the issue of child abuse] in jeopardy."
Patel's speech is intended to kickstart a fresh round of government campaigning against end-to-end encryption, as previewed by Wired a few weeks ago.
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UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden starts national security probe into proposed Arm-Nvidia merger
Share price immediately dips for GPU-makerContinue readingThe proposed sale of Arm to NVIDIA looks a bit more tenuous today after UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden issued a Public Interest Intervention Notice (PIIN) indicating he may intervene in the sale on national security grounds.
The disptach of the PIIN has kicked-off a further degree of scrutiny, with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) instructed to include any potential national security concerns in its upcoming report on the merger. These would be obtained via consultation with relevant third parties, and come as an addition to its existing focus on jurisdictional and competition issues.
Depending on the outcome of the review, Dowden can choose to clear the transaction, impose certain conditions, or refer the it to a more intensive “phase two” investigation.
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Microsoft bows to the inevitable and takes Visual Studio 64-bit for 2022 version
When 4GB is just not quite enoughContinue readingMicrosoft is to drag veteran code wrangler Visual Studio kicking and screaming into the modern world with a 64-bit version.
It has been a while coming. Visual Studio dates back to the last century and started out life as Visual Studio 97 (replete with the likes of J++) before version 6.0 turned up to round out the 1990s. Microsoft stuck with naming by year thereafter (aside from a brief dalliance with slapping everything with the .NET moniker at the start of this century).
Which brings us to Visual Studio 2022 and one of the larger overhauls for the suite, not least of which is the long-awaited move to a 64-bit application.
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Codecov dev tool warns of stolen credentials from compromised script, undiscovered for two months
Environment variables full of secrets uploaded to attacker serverContinue readingCodecov, makers of a code coverage tool used by over 29,000 customers, has warned that a compromised script may have stolen credentials over a period of two months, before it was discovered a few weeks ago.
Code coverage measures how much of an application’s code is the subject of unit tests, the idea being that the higher the percentage, the more reliable the application is likely to be. It is a useful but imperfect metric, since it does not take into account the quality of the tests.
Codecov is a cloud-based tool which integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian Bitbucket, or any Git-based repository. Developers run tests using their own CI (Continuous Integration) tool and then upload the results to Codecov using a tool called Bash Uploader. Codecov then generates a report which is accessed on its site. Source code itself is not stored on Codecov’s site, but the tool does require read access to a repository in order to display code alongside reports on demand.
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More Linux love for Windows Insiders with a kernel update
Rounded corners are nice, but what you really want is Linux 5.10, right?Continue readingWindows Insiders have been given a bit of Linux love with the arrival of a freshly updated kernel and an all-important clock fix.
Having yanked the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 out of the usual Windows servicing cadence, Microsoft's engineers have been able to update WSL 2 without requiring a full-on OS patch.
The original 4.19 branch was updated to 5.4.72 in February. The kernel has now been brought considerably more up to date with the 5.10.16.3 version.
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Sysadmin for FIN7 criminal cracking group gets 10 years in US prison for managing card slurping malware scam
Plus Pwn2Own faces fire and update Chrome immediatelyContinue readingIn Brief The former systems administrator for the FIN7 card-slurping gang has been sentenced to 10 years in a US prison.
Fedir Hladyr, 35, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking last year, and on Friday was sentenced for his role in the theft and resale of over than 20 million customer card records from over 6,500 point-of-sale terminals across the US using the malware dubbed Carbanak.
Hladyr set up a front company, Combi Security, to cover his actions as he funneled the purloined data around the criminal underworld. He managed the encrypted comms network the gang used, ran the server farms used to spread and exploit malware, and coordinated individual attacks.
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Japanese auto chipmaker Renesas expects to resume full production next month following fab blaze
Glimmer of hope on the semiconductor front – for the car industry anywayContinue readingJapanese chipmaker Renesas has said it will restore full production capacity at its N3 Naka plant by the middle of next month following a blaze in March that destroyed equipment and contaminated the clean room.
Renesas, which accounts for a third of all automotive semiconductor sales globally, said it expects to be at half-capacity by the end of April. CEO Hidetoshi Shibata confirmed in a press conference the company plans to install new fire suppression equipment to prevent any future fires.
Operations at the Naka N3 clean room resumed on 9 April. According to a notice from Renesas, the company had to rely on over 1,600 workers each day (both internal and from third parties) to rebuild and decontaminate the clean room, illustrating both the scale of destruction and difficulty in restoration.
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Huawei could have snooped on the Dutch prime minister's phone calls thanks to KPN network core access
Nobody caught – er, held us responsible, says Chinese firmContinue readingHuawei was able to snoop on the Dutch prime minister's phone calls and track down Chinese dissidents because it was included in the core of the Netherlands' mobile networks, an explosive news report has claimed.
Dutch national daily Volkskrant (behind a pay wall) reported over the weekend that mobile operator KPN, which used Huawei-supplied equipment in the core of its network, discovered the full extent of the Chinese company's doings in 2010 after it commissioned Capgemini to write an outsourcing risk analysis report .
Not only could the prime minister be eavesdropped on by Huawei, along with millions of other customers, said KPN as it quoted the report, but it could also identify people being snooped on by the Dutch state as well.
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