Channel

• Philippines gov takes down passport application website amid privacy leak fears

  Google searches reportedly produce applicants' personal information
  Laura Dobberstein Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 23:52 UTC

  The Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has disabled its online passport application tracker, citing a "data privacy issue" and hinting that information could have leaked.

  "The DFA's IT Unit is currently investigating the circumstances surrounding this issue and is taking appropriate measures to secure the data that may have been exposed," states a notice on the DFA website. "An internal audit will also be conducted to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future."

  The Philippines requires citizens to use the site, which launched only a couple of months ago, to apply for a passport – walk-in applications are allowed only under exceptional circumstances. However, at time of writing, the tracker is returning a 404 error. Citizens therefore have no way knowing when or if passports will be approved and/or dispatched.

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• What, Uber charges disabled people fees for taking a while to get into their ride? Doesn't seem fair, says Uncle Sam

  Plus: Trips now more expensive in the UK to woo new drivers, tackle demand
  Katyanna Quach Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 23:00 UTC 4

  The US government sued Uber this week, claiming the ride-hailing app giant unfairly charges disabled riders waiting fees if they need extra time to get into vehicles.

  A surcharge is added on top of a ride fare if a passenger takes longer than two minutes to enter a vehicle after it arrives. Uber added wait time fees in some US cities in 2016 before expanding the policy across the country.

  These fees, however, discriminate against people with mobility or visibility issues, federal prosecutors argue. In one example in the government's lawsuit, [PDF], the DoJ refers to “Passenger A,” who has spinal cord injuries and needs a wheelchair to get around. When her Uber arrived, her wheelchair needed to be folded away into the vehicle, and a nursing assistant helped her into the car. The whole process took about five minutes.

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• Old Microsoft is back: If the latest Windows 11 really wants to use Edge, it will use Edge no matter what

  The days of redirecting microsoft-edge: links to a non-Redmond browser are, for now, over
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 21:38 UTC 23

  Microsoft Windows 11 build 22494 appears to prevent links associated with the Microsoft Edge browser from being handled by third-party applications, a change one developer argues is anticompetitive.

  Back in 2017, Daniel Aleksandersen created a free helper application called EdgeDeflector to counter behavioral changes Microsoft made in the way Windows handles mouse clicks on certain web links.

  Typically, https:// links get handled by whatever default browser is set for the system in question. But there are ways to register a custom protocol handler, for operating systems and web browsers, that defines the scheme to access a given resource (URI).

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• Dutch newspaper accuses US spy agencies of orchestrating 2016 Booking.com breach

  Journalists' book claims company was targeted for Middle Eastern data
  Gareth Corfield Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 20:07 UTC 3

  Jointly US-Dutch owned Booking.com was illegally accessed by an American attacker in 2016 – and the company failed to tell anyone when it became aware of what happened, according to explosive revelations.

  The alleged miscreant, named as "Andrew", is said to have stolen "details of thousands of hotel reservations in countries in the Middle East," according to a new book written by three Dutch journalists.

  Their employer, Dutch title NRC Handelsblad, reported the allegations this week, claiming that Booking.com had relied on legal advice from London-based law firm Hogan Lovells saying it wasn't obliged to inform anyone of the attack.

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• In the spirit of open government, France dumps 9,067 repos online to show off its FOSS credentials

  Have a gander at la République's open-source inner workings
  Liam Proven in Prague Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 19:05 UTC 3

  Le Gouvernement de la République française – the government of France for Anglophones – has published a website containing 9,067 repositories of FOSS software created by 1,022 organisations and groups in the French public sector.

  After two years of work, the site hit version 1.0 on Wednesday.

  Helpfully for non-Francophones, the homepage and much of the info is in English – although saying that, just to warn you, the same isn't true of all the background information and the various organisational pages we're about to link to.

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• Now here's HPE with the weather in Northern Europe

  Firm to build Cray supercomputer to better grapple with 'new, dynamic weather patterns caused by climate change'
  Paul Kunert Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 17:18 UTC

  Hewlett Packard Enterprise has bagged a contract to build a supercomputer for the United Weather Centres – West, the remit being to help improve the accuracy of forecasts in Northern Europe.

  UWC-West is a tie-up between the Danish Meteorological Institute, Icelandic Met Office, Ireland Met Éireann national weather service, and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

  The super is to be based on HPE Cray tech and will include Slingshot, an Ethernet fabric, HPE's ClusterStor E1000 storage unit, and Performance Customer Management, system management software. It will also use Cray's Programming Environment to optimise HPC and machine learning applications.

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• Palo Alto Networks patches 9.8 severity CVE in popular GlobalProtect product

  Arbitrary code execution by unauthenticated attacker? Big oops
  Gareth Corfield Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 16:40 UTC 4

  Updated Palo Alto Networks (PAN) has issued a patch for a CVSS 9.8-rated buffer overflow affecting a VPN component of its widely used firewall software, warning that the flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on unpatched appliances.

  While the current version, 10.1, and three before it are not affected, the vuln, tracked as CVE-2021-3064, still exists in version 8.1.17 and all previous versions of PAN-OS, PAN's firewall operating system.

  "A memory corruption vulnerability exists in Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect portal and gateway interfaces that enables an unauthenticated network-based attacker to disrupt system processes and potentially execute arbitrary code with root privileges," said the company in an advisory published this week.

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• Red Hat 8.5 released with SQL Server and .NET 6 ... this is Linux, right?

  Containerised Podman and OpenJDK 17 also highlights of minor release
  Tim Anderson Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 15:34 UTC 8

  Version 8.5 of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux operating system (RHEL) is out, with updates including .NET 6 and a system role for Microsoft SQL Server, as well as improved container support.

  "Red Hat and Microsoft have had a very successful collaboration," product manager Siddharth Nagar told The Register. "SQL Server is a strategic workload for us. We've done a lot of joint work. Microsoft has contributed to the Linux kernel in support of better performance. SQL Server runs very well on Linux and our customers see a lot of value in having the combination."

  The ability to run SQL Server on RHEL is not new; what is new is having it supported by a system role. What is a system role? "We are responding to the need for our customers to manage their environments in a standard way," said Nagar.

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• Still reeling from the Great Facebook Blackout of 2021? Turns out Zuck is not the worst offender

  Uswitch's survey may surprise you – or not. Depends how much you like Reddit
  Richard Speed Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 15:00 UTC 2

  UK-based price comparision and broadband swapping service Uswitch has totted up the figures and come up with a surprising candidate for most outage incidents in 2021.

  Outages are a tricky thing to quantify, and the metric used by Uswitch was a simple count of the most visited websites against a total number of incidents reported by DownDetector. The "visited website" metric ruled out the likes of Azure and AWS, although both services lurk behind the scenes. However, hotspots like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all qualified.

  At 180 incidents, according to Uswitch, Reddit was head and shoulders ahead of the pack. A whopping 60 per cent of issues were related to forum's app. Following, at 107 incidents, was Discord (server connection woes afflicted 73 per cent of blackouts), just snatching second place from Instagram. The food and lifestyle happy snapper accounted for 106 incidents (the app accounted for 55 per cent of problems).

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• MongoDB 5.1 for DBaaS arrives amid questions over on-prem release stability

  New features focused on times series and analytics fail to quell concerns over 5.0 bugs
  Lindsay Clark Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 14:02 UTC

  MongoDB, the company behind the document non-relational database of the same name, has released its 5.1 update but only as a managed service.

  While critics voice concerns that bugs from 5.0 have still not been fixed, the NoSQL poster child has pushed on with efforts to accommodate time series data and better support analytics on operational systems.

  The result could be good for users already requiring these features, but is unlikely to usurp rival databases with these performance specialisms.

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• Freshworks trains sights on startup market as it puzzles over enterprise conundrum

  Indian challenger looks to exploit common platform but could struggle to win bigger customers
  Lindsay Clark Thu 11 Nov 2021 // 13:15 UTC 1

  SaaS newcomer Freshworks – said to be challenging Salesforce and ServiceNow – has launched a package aimed at startups and new IT helpdesk tech but is still struggling to get to grips with the enterprise food chain in its IPO year.

  Consumer-like user experience, relatively cheap prices, and a modern tech stack notwithstanding, the India-based application interloper lacks key features, such as data dashboarding required by big companies.

  Freshworks was founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy as a "user-focused cloud-based customer service software" in 2010, around a decade after Saleforce.com, which for better or worse spearheaded the market. It offers products in CRM, IT ops and service desk, and some aspects of HR. Customers include tyre maker Stonebridge, publisher and education company Pearson, and the National Physical Laboratory, the UK's national measurement institute.

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