Legal

• Apple grabs smartphone crown as iPhone 13 wakes up the fanbois, leaves Chinese rivals eating dust

  But smartphone shipments globally edge up just 1% for total market as demand outweighs supply
  Paul Kunert Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 18:48 UTC

  More than one in five phones shipped in Q4 carried a certain fruit brand as Apple leapt to the top of a barely growing global smartphone market.

  Preliminary estimates from tech analyst Canalys are obviously subject to change and only provide part of the picture, but as headlines go, Apple CEO Tim Cook will be pleased the iPhone was top dog over the company's vital winter sales season.

  Total smartphones sales edged up by just 1 per cent globally, the market watcher said, as vendors came up against supply chain woes and a resurgence of COVID-19 cases. The single-digit shipment rise equates to 363.3 million phones being sold in the quarter based on available data from Q4 2020.

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• Foxstuck: Firefox browser bug boots legions of users offline

  Outfoxed? Not if you read The Reg
  Liam Proven in Prague Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 18:02 UTC 7

  In a hard-to-beat demo of the perils of software telemetry, Mozilla accidentally kicked legions of users offline last week by an update to its telemetry servers that triggered an existing bug in Firefox. Internally, Mozilla is calling the bug "foxstuck".

  Firefox periodically reports back some fairly innocuous info, including how long your session lasted, how many tabs and windows you had open, what extensions you have and so on. You can see a list by entering about:telemetry in the address bar.

  It's all pretty harmless data. What isn't harmless is if your browser goes TITSUP* and stops you from accessing any website just because it can't phone home – especially if other browsers still work fine.

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• International police shut down 15 server infrastructures as part of VPNLab.net's takedown

  VPN service used by crims to support ransomware attacks and other illicit activity
  Paul Kunert Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 17:01 UTC 4

  Some 15 server infrastructures used by crims to prepare ransomware attacks were seized by cops yesterday as part of an international sting to take down VPNLab.net.

  The VPN provider's service gave users "shielded communications and internet access" that was used in "support of serious criminals acts such as ransomware deployment and other cybercrime activities," Europol said today.

  The raids were led by Central Criminal Office of the Hanover Police Department in Germany under the the EMPACT security framework objective of Cybercrime - Attacks Against Information Systems.

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• Microsoft seems intent on buying the gaming industry with $68.7bn purchase of troubled Activision Blizzard

  'Creative success and autonomy go hand-in-hand with treating every person with dignity and respect'
  Richard Speed Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 16:15 UTC 22

  Microsoft has cracked open its wallet once again with an acquisition of Activision Blizzard in an all-cash transaction valued at an eye-popping $68.7bn.

  The company also announced its Game Pass service had passed the 25 million subscribers mark.

  It's a huge transaction, considerably more than the $7.5bn spanked on Zenimax (the holding business for properties such as Doom and The Elder Scrolls) and the $26.2bn lavished on LinkedIn in 2016.

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• European Space Agency whittles wannabe astronauts down from 23,000 to 1,391

  Could there be a South Korean TV show somewhere in this?
  Richard Speed Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 15:29 UTC 4

  The European Space Agency (ESA) has completed stage one of its latest astronaut selection process, with 1,362 astronaut and 29 parastronaut applicants making the cut.

  The group, which started as 23,000 wannabes, will now be invited to participate in a battery of psychological, performance, and personality tests followed by psychological interviews and medical testing for the ones that make it that far.

  In December, ESA admitted it was still in the process of contacting applicants. But a delay is something that any would-be spacefarer will have to get used to.

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• More contractor pain: Parasol's sister firms, SJD Accountancy and Nixon Williams, confirm cyberattack

  Ransomware suspected but not confirmed
  Gareth Corfield Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 14:45 UTC 2

  SJD Accountancy and Nixon Williams – both contractor-focused beancounting firms owned by the same corporate parent as cyber-attack-struck UK umbrella company Parasol – have been hit by online attackers.

  The three firms are all nested under UK corporate parent Optionis Group, which describes itself as a "family" of "award-winning tax, umbrella and accountancy solutions" aimed at contractors. We have asked Optionis Group if its other brands, which include contractor accounting org ClearSky and tax rebate specialist Brian Alfred, are also affected.

  The firms share a company director in Doug Crawford, CEO at Parasol, who is also the CEO at SJD and overall parent Optionis.

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• Billionaires see wealth double during pandemic as tech bros lead the charge

  Now what – in the middle of a pandemic – is a useful thing we could do with that $800bn extra dosh, Oxfam wonders
  Lindsay Clark Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 14:00 UTC 34

  Self-proclaimed visionaries of our times like to explode myths about what can and cannot be done. Inhabiting mars? Let's get on it, electric car maker Elon Musk says.

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• Singapore monetary authority threatens action on bank over widespread phishing scam

  Scam has claimed 469 victims in December alone, of which OCBC has issued goodwill payments to 30
  Laura Dobberstein Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 13:04 UTC 3

  The Monetary Authority of Singapore says it is considering supervisory action against Southeast Asia's second largest bank, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), which was criticised for its incident response to a widespread phishing scheme across the island nation.

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• Indian IT services biz HCL sees boom in business – and staff attrition

  Company pauses bonus clawbacks amid controversies and drop in share price
  Laura Dobberstein Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 12:21 UTC 1

  HCL's latest quarter was packed with revenue growth and new deals – but also saw a near-doubling of attrition when compared to last year, affecting net profit and forcing the firm to get creative in preventing staff from jumping ship.

  The Indian IT service provider reported [PDF] year-on-year revenue growth of 13.8 per cent to $2.977bn for Q3 of its fiscal 2022 ended 31 December, saying this was the highest growth in the last 47 quarters.

  The IT and Business Services division brought in $2.103bn, up 15.3 per cent; Engineering and R&D Services generated $473m worth of sales and Products & Platforms turned over $402m, up 8.2 per cent.

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• Microsoft patches the patch that broke VPNs, Hyper-V, and left servers in boot loops

  Testing? Isn't that what users are for?
  Richard Speed Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 11:34 UTC 13

  Microsoft has patched the patch that broke chunks of Windows and emitted fixes for a Patch Tuesday cock-up that left servers rebooting and VPNs disconnected.

  There was a time when out-of-band updates from Microsoft were considered a rarity. Not so much these days. On the receiving end of the company's attention were Windows desktop and Windows Server installs left a little broken following Microsoft's latest demonstration of its legendary quality control.

  KB5010793, KB5010792, KB5010790 and KB5010789 were slung out for Windows 10 and Windows Server. Even Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 got some love with KB5010798 and KB5010799, such was the blast radius of last week's whoopsie.

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• Plumspace's Smart SFP TAP can monitor, capture or relay gigabit-speed comms – for legitimate business reasons

  Hardware hacker spots 'ghost in the ethernet optic'
  Liam Proven in Prague Tue 18 Jan 2022 // 10:27 UTC 8

  Hardware hacker Ben Cox has spotted an interesting bit of kit that we're sure has entirely reasonable uses other than network intrusion: Plumspace's Smart SFP TAP.

  You can't trust cables. We're not just talking about the well-established quantum nature of USB Type A connectors, where despite the fact that it occupies three macroscopic spatial dimensions, it nonetheless requires more than two rotations to fit into a socket, and therefore is a spin-½ object. USB plugs are fermions.

  But did you know that some of them can also spy on you? Way back in 2008, the US National Security Agency (NSA) had COTTONMOUTH, a bargain-priced $20,000 USB 2 cable that could wirelessly intercept or modify communications between a PC and USB peripherals.

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