PS3 will play PS2, PSone games. Official

in Brief It was a tsunami of DNS queries that ultimately took out a host of Microsoft services, from Xbox Live to Teams, for some netizens about an hour on April Fools' Day, Redmond has said.

Or as the Windows giant put it, the outage was the result of "an anomalous surge in DNS queries from across the globe targeting a set of domains hosted on Azure." In a postmortem examination of the downtime, Microsoft said the flood of requests triggered a programming flaw in its infrastructure that hampered its ability to cope with the demand:

LG Electronics' board has tired of its loss-making smartphone business and ordered its closure.

The South Korean electronics titan announced the decision on Monday, after enduring six years of operating losses totaling an estimated US$4.4bn.

"LG’s strategic decision to exit the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector will enable the company to focus resources in growth areas such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence and business-to-business solutions, as well as platforms and services," reads a canned statement.

Yahoo! Answers is shutting down in a month's time after nearly sixteen years online.

The corporate outfit once known as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web announced its decision on Monday by posting a note at the top of its now-doomed Q&A website.

Users have until April 20 to pose new questions and provide answers for queries. From May 4, Yahoo! Answers will officially disappear from the internet, though we wouldn't be surprised if someone tries to make an unofficial mirror of it all.

Reams of personal data – including phone numbers, email addresses, and birthdays – obtained from 533 million Facebook accounts was offered to all for free on a cyber-crime forum over the weekend.

The data dump was flagged up by Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of infosec startup Hudson Rock. The information – which also includes people’s names, marital status, occupation, and location – was siphoned from Facebook in 2019 via a vulnerability in the platform. The data was packaged up and sold online to miscreants in June 2020.

Now that same database is up for grabs to anyone who messages a particular Telegram account and asks nicely. The records were pilfered from hundreds of millions of Facebook profiles spread across 104 countries; that includes 32,315,282 accounts in the US, and 11,522,328 in the UK, according to a post on the underground forum viewed by The Register. All of the data amounts to over 70GB. It's reported the price tag on the database has been falling, and now it's free of charge.

The US Supreme Court on Monday ruled in a 6-2 decision that Google's limited copying of Oracle's Java APIs in its Android operating system constitutes fair use under US law.

The ruling puts an end to a case that troubled the software industry for more than a decade and narrows the scope of copyright law as it applies to software.

The court had two questions before it: whether software interfaces qualify for copyright protection and whether Google's use of Oracle's software interface code represents fair use, assuming the Java APIs can be copyrighted.

A US court has rejected Apple's request to throw out a potential class-action lawsuit accusing the iGiant of knowingly selling MacBook Pro laptops with defective display cables.

In an order [PDF] signed last week in San Jose, California, federal district judge Edward Davila essentially said he believed the case, brought by Mahan Taleshpour and others, has legs. The claim is that Apple broke consumer-protection laws by deliberately concealing a design defect that caused the lower portion of screens on its 2016-era MacBook Pro devices to have alternating light and dark patches.

A photo in the complaint, which dates back to 2018, shows an ugly on-screen effect allegedly caused by an internal cable being too short. This cable thus rubs against a circuit board and wears away over time as the computer's lid is opened and closed, it is said. We're told this results in the backlight failing, leading to inconsistent brightness across the screen, which all makes it rather difficult to use.

Who, Me? A blast from the past, and possibly the future, as a Register reader regales us with a tale of carnets in the pre-Maastrict Treaty era. Welcome back to Who, Me?

Our reader, Regomised as "Ralph", was working for a company specialising in price-reporting and dissemination systems for exchanges ("Commodity, Stock, Metal, Financial, and the like," he explained.)

The company had scored the contract to install a system at the Bourse du Commerce in the Les Halles district of Paris. Ralph, and a van full of kit, had been dispatched to oversee the installation by a small team of engineers.

Updated Some QNAP network attached storage devices are vulnerable to attack because of two critical vulnerabilities, one that enables unauthenticated remote code execution and another that provides the ability to write to arbitrary files.

The vulnerabilities were made known to the Taiwan-based company on October 12, 2020, and on November 29, 2020, by SAM Seamless Network, a connected home security firm. They were found in the QNAP TS-231's latest firmware, version 4.3.6.1446, which SAM claims was released on September 29, 2020, and QNAP's website list as October 7, 2020 – which may represent different build numbers.

"We reported both vulnerabilities to QNAP with a four-month grace period to fix them," said Yaniv Puyeski, an embedded software security researcher at SAM, in a blog post on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, as of the publishing of this article, the vulnerabilities have not yet been fixed."

Apple has begun warning iOS developers that it will reject apps containing advertising SDKs that use data from the device to create unique identifiers, or fingerprints, in preparation for the upcoming release of iOS 14.5.

Fingerprinting code of this sort is used by marketers for ad-related tracking, a practice Apple aims to curtail in its next iOS update.

iOS 14.5 is expected to implement Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, which has been delayed for months due to the objections of large advertisers like Facebook. ATT brings with it an App Store rule change that requires developers to implement an app-tracking authorization request to ask users to opt-in to being tracked and having their data collected. Facebook and Google have both warned that giving people this privacy choice will mean less ad revenue for publishers, not to mention their share of it.

Analysis Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., also known as TSMC, plans to spend $100bn over the next three years in response to chip demand and has advised its customers to expect to pay more.

Word of the firm's investment plan comes from Nikkei Asia, which claims to have seen a letter from TSMC CEO C.C. Wei outlining the investment plan. It follows closely on the heels of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger outlining Intel's foundry strategy and spending plans.

The demand for semiconductors reflects the lack of supply, which Falan Yinug, director of industry statistics and economic policy for the Semiconductor Industry Association, in February attributed to pandemic-related demand – IT purchases to support remote work – and the increased use of semiconductors in vehicles.

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.