Personal Tech

• Of course a Bluetooth-using home COVID test was cracked to fake results

  The Ellume COVID-19 Home Test was connected to the internet of woefully insecure things for a while
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 22 Dec 2021 // 03:58 UTC

  Security vendor F-Secure has faked a COVID test result on a Bluetooth-equipped home COVID Test. Thankfully the vendor’s since fixed the device.

  The firm tested the Ellume COVID-19 Home Test, a device selected specifically because it uses a “Bluetooth connected analyzer for use with an app on your phone.”

  As F-Secure probed the device and its companion app, its researchers spotted an un-exported activity called com.ellumehealth.homecovid.android/com.gsk.itreat.activities.BluetoothDebugActivity Users with root level access to an Android machine can launch that activity to “help interact with the analyzer over Bluetooth”, F-Secure found.

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• Think small, score big: India details subsidies for chipmakers

  More advanced manufacturing processes will attract the big rupees, but scheme seems unlikely to make India a major player
  By Agam Shah in New Jersey Wed 22 Dec 2021 // 01:58 UTC

  India’s government has revealed more details about its plans to become a major chip manufacturing hub .

  The nation yesterday published a document [PDF] that reveals its government will cover up to 50 to per cent of the set-up cost for manufacturers looking to establish 28-nm or more advanced nodes, up to 40 per cent for 28-nm to 45-nm nodes and up to 30 per cent for 45-nm to 65-nm nodes.

  India’s plan requires companies to establish 300-mm wafer factories, and to start work on at least 40,000 wafers per month. Companies need to show at a minimum competency to produce on the 28-nm process. The government will support companies for up to six years.

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• New submarine cable to link Japan, Europe, through famed Northwest Passage

  Alternative route will skip the Suez Canal and other tricky spots
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 23:30 UTC 4

  In the 15th century, European traders that hoped to reach Asia had problems: a round trip by land or sea risked took years and involved many lethal dangers. Navigators of the day therefore imagined sailing the “Northwest Passage,” a route across the Atlantic, then over the top of North America, before sliding south to Japan.

  Sadly, ice is seldom absent at the far northern latitudes the Passage occupies. Nor is there a simple route through the glacier-carved archipelago atop Canada. Navigating the Passage therefore proved impossible for four hundred years, failed attempts like the Franklin Expedition became maritime lore^*, and the route turned out to be so finnicky it’s not commercially viable.

  In the 21st century, Europeans have a similar problem: network latency between northern Europe and Asia is uncomfortably long.

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• It's your Loki day: The Reg takes Elementary OS Jólnir for a quick test drive

  Just four months on, 6.1 is Odin with a facelift
  Liam Proven in Prague Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 16:01 UTC 7

  Review A new minor version of Elementary OS, a rather modernist and minimalist Ubuntu derivative, fixes a lot of small details. The Register took it for a quick spin.

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• UK's Defra and Ministry of Justice facing £120m IR35 tax bills thanks to inaccuracies in assessing contractors' status

  Central government still struggling with its own off-payroll tax rules
  Lindsay Clark Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 14:44 UTC 18

  Updated The UK government's own employment checker tool and guidance has led to wrong calls on the tax status of freelance workers, costing £120m across two Whitehall departments.

  According to recently published financial reports, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [PDF] are facing combined additional tax bills of at least £121m due to incorrectly determining the status of their contractors, despite following Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs' "accompanying guidance" and using HMRC's Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool.

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• Belgian defence ministry admits attackers accessed its computer network by exploiting Log4j vulnerability

  Perpetrators' ID unknown, however
  Gareth Corfield Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 12:33 UTC 19

  The Belgian Ministry of Defence has suffered a cyber attack after miscreants exploited one of the vulnerabilities in Log4j. The attack marks the first occasion that a NATO country's defence ministry has fallen victim to the flaws.

  The attack took place last week, as reported by Flemish-language TV news station VRT, which said "some of the ministry's activities were paralysed for several days."

  Belgian MoD spokesman Olivier Severin said in a prepared statement seen by The Register: "Defence discovered an attack on its computer network with internet access on Thursday. Quarantine measures were quickly taken to isolate the affected parts. The priority is to keep the defence network operational."

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• Nottingham University awards cloud finance and HR deal in £29.75m deal 2.5 years after Unit4 upgrade

  Meanwhile, search for service partner stalls after early engagement over possible £80m contract
  Lindsay Clark Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 09:42 UTC 6

  Updated Just two and a half years after upgrading its Unit4 HR and finance system, the University of Nottingham has awarded a £29.75m deal to Oracle partner Evolutionary Systems.

  In a contract award notice, the institution, which has around 45,500 students on its books, said it was replacing its existing HR, finance, payroll, and procurement systems with "modern technology that will enable [it] to make a step-change in the way it manages its human and financial resources, with knock-on benefits for teaching and research."

  According to an earlier procurement notice published in December 2020, the system is expected to support approximately 250 users for HR and finance, 100 professional users for procurement and approximately 5,700 full-time and 2,300 part-time other staff.

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• UK National Crime Agency finds 225 million previously unexposed passwords

  Shares them with Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned after sweeping them up from ‘compromised cloud storage’
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 07:10 UTC 32

  The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and National Cyber Crime Unit have uncovered a colossal trove of stolen passwords.

  We know this because Troy Hunt, of Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) fame, yesterday announced the agency has handed them over to his service, which lets anyone conduct a secure search of stolen passwords to check if their credentials have been exposed.

  The NCA shared 585,570,857 with HIBP, and Hunt said 225,665,425 were passwords that he hasn’t seen before in the 613 million credentials HIBP already stored before the NCA handed over this new batch.

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• Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

  Open source, offers fast, lossless compression, and has a very charming name
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 06:15 UTC 135

  A developer named Dominic Szablewski has given the world a new file format with a splendid name: the Quite OK Image Format (QOI).

  The file format might be better than that. Szablewski explained that he decided the world needed a new image format because the likes of PNG, JPEG, MPEG, MOV and MP4 “burst with complexity at the seams.”

  “Every tiny aspect screams ‘design by consortium’,” he added, going on to lament the fact that most common codecs are old, closed, and “require huge libraries, are compute hungry and difficult to work with.”

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• Diagnosis confirmed: Oracle has a case of healthcare cravings, bought Cerner for $28.3bn as the cure

  Deal will see Cerner's systems shifted to the Big Red Cloud and medicos given hands-free voice interface
  Laura Dobberstein Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 05:01 UTC 9

  Rumours that Oracle planned to buy healthcare software concern Cerner have proven correct.

  A joint statement from the two companies today announced the deal and valued it at $28.3B through an all-cash tender offer for $95.00 per share, immediately accreditive to Oracle’s earnings as a non-GAAP earning.

  Oracle’s executive veep Mike Sicilia said his company plans to modernize Cerner’s systems and move them to the Gen2 Cloud, which he reckons can be done quickly as some of Cerner’s most prized systems already run on the Oracle Database.

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• TikTok tops Google to win Cloudflare’s 2021 traffic ratings

  Other Chinese properties also doing very well
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 21 Dec 2021 // 02:31 UTC 6

  TikTok became the world’s most popular web site during 2021, according to Cloudflare’s Radar service.

  Cloudflare’s explanation for how Radar calculates site popularity says its assessment is “derived from aggregated data from the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver” and “a range of data that Cloudflare has about global Internet traffic patterns.”

  But just how Cloudflare decides its rankings unknown, while the fact that Radar launched in September 2020 means its assessments for that year were based on less data.

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