All your data (and biz plans) are belong to Microsoft

Something for the Weekend, Sir? No, not wabbit. Not even chocolate eggs. I'm hunting wild asparagus.

This is about as inventive as it comes for an April Fool's hoax in lockdown Europe. A local newspaper yesterday morning ran an article offering tips (ho ho) for those who fancy foraging for their spring asparagus in the wild – or at least within the regulation 10km radius from their front doors.

Come to think of it, given that all other news outlets here announced that they would skip their traditional poissons d'avril this time around, the story is probably not a hoax after all. It's quite possible that an asparagus hunting season is a genuine thing and that the not-at-all-suspiciously named food expert "Jean Burger" who declared it open is real too. I mean, it's not exactly up to the standard of the BBC's 1957 Swiss spaghetti harvest or Swedish TV's 1962 demonstration of how to convert a black-and-white television into a colour set using nylon stockings.

On Call The weekend is upon us, and we can think of no better time to celebrate the efforts of those courageous individuals tasks with sorting the problems of users. Be they Mac or PC-based. Welcome to On Call.

Today's contributor, Regomised as "Philip", was the resident "PC guru" for a major computer manufacturer. It was the mid to late 1980s, and Marty McFly had only recently undertaken his jaunt to the 1950s.

Fun fact – a Back To The Future of today would send the Delorean to the 1990s, after the events of Philip's story.

X-rays are emanating from Uranus for the first time, according to the latest observations made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

It may not seem so surprising at first since Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune have been found to scatter X-rays from the Sun. But the data suggests that there is an additional source of unknown radiation being generated by Uranus itself.

“Planets with lots of hydrogen in their atmosphere scatter X-rays in the same way that we think Uranus is [doing],” Affelia Wibisono, co-author of the Uranus X-ray study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, and a PhD student at University College London, explained to The Register.

India’s overall network and storage market both showed declines in the final quarter of 2020 due to lingering work and school from home measures and banking organizations spending less on storage.

India’s overall networking market declined 4.2 per cent year-on-year in Q4 2020 while the external storage market declined 15.6 per cent by vendor revenue, said IDC in quarterly trackers released this week.

When it came to the networking market, COVID slowed down campus investments in enterprise WLAN (-26.3 per cent) while the expanded work-and-learn from home market for consumer gateway routers soared a whopping 57.8 per cent.

Updated Unlucky netizens are right now unable to log into Microsoft's online services, including Azure, Teams, Dynamics, and Xbox Live, due to an ongoing global outage.

The IT breakdown is blamed on a DNS issue, and started an hour and a half ago at time of writing. According to the Windows giant's status page:

It's the end of the line for the Android and iOS incarnations of Microsoft's AI assistant Cortana.

“After March 31, 2021, the Cortana mobile app on your phone will no longer be supported,” the Windows giant warned on Wednesday.

"The Cortana content you created – such as reminders and lists – will no longer function in the Cortana mobile app, but can still be accessed through Cortana in Windows. Also, Cortana reminders, lists, and tasks are automatically synced to the Microsoft To Do app, which you can download to your phone for free."

Top datasets used to train AI models and benchmark how the technology has progressed over time are riddled with labeling errors, a study shows.

Data is a vital resource in teaching machines how to complete specific tasks, whether that's identifying different species of plants or automatically generating captions. Most neural networks are spoon-fed lots and lots of annotated samples before they can learn common patterns in data.

But these labels aren’t always correct; training machines using error-prone datasets can decrease their performance or accuracy. In the aforementioned study, led by MIT, analysts combed through ten popular datasets that have been cited more than 100,000 times in academic papers and found that on average 3.4 per cent of the samples are wrongly labelled.

FCC acting commissh Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed giving the US commercial space industry a dedicated block of spectrum in order to support future rocket launches.

The measure would allow a secondary allocation to the 2200-2290-MHZ band to be used by private space travel and satellite companies during the pre-launch testing and launch phases. At present, this wavelength is only available to federal agencies and approved foreign partners [PDF] and is limited to a handful of specific use-cases: tracking, telemetry, and control data communications.

Although private operators can access dedicated spectrum, this is only available on an ad-hoc basis, with independent commercial space firms forced to apply for Special Temporary Authority (STA) in advance.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has warned about a "severe shortage" of supply in the DRAM memory market, with the situation expected to worsen as the year progresses.

Speaking at an earnings conference call talking investors through the company's Q2 results, Mehrotra said: "As a result of the strong demand and limited supply, the DRAM market is currently facing a severe undersupply, which is causing DRAM prices to increase rapidly. We see the DRAM market tightening further through the year."

Micron's chief financial officer, David Zisner, added: "While demand is strong across both the DRAM and NAND markets, our supply is now constrained as our inventories are very lean, particularly in DRAM."

AWS has introduced the "interactive EC2 Serial Console", enabling troubleshooting of virtual machines when normal SSH access is not working, with one user gushing: "I have been waiting 10 years for this moment."

The purpose of serial console access is to enable troubleshooting when an SSH connection is impossible, for example, because of an out-of-memory condition. "It provides a one-click, text-based access to an instances' serial port as though a monitor and keyboard were attached to it," said the AWS post. Previously, admins could see serial console logs, using the command get-console-output, but not enter any commands.

Back in January 2011, a user reported on the AWS forum (login required) about a case where the console output was "Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery."

The Netherlands Data Protection Authority has fined Booking.com €475,000 for notifying it too late that criminals had accessed the data of 4,109 people who booked a hotel room via the website.

The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) said criminals managed to extract the login credentials to their Booking.com accounts from employees of 40 hotels in the United Arab Emirates using social engineering techniques.

They then gained access to data including users' names, addresses, telephone numbers, and details about their booking. It added (translated from the Dutch):