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1. After years of dragging its feet, FCC finally starts tackling America's robocall scourge

2. Who'd have thought the US senator who fist pumped Jan 6 insurrectionists would propose totally unworkable anti-Big Tech law?

3. NSA helps out Microsoft with critical Exchange Server vulnerability disclosures in an April shower of patches

4. Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

5. Key Perl Core developer quits, says he was bullied for daring to suggest programming language contained 'cruft'

• Azure adds programmatic pricing API to help you sniff out global deals

  Seventeen currencies - not just the Greenback - are now just an API call away
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 15 Apr 2021 // 07:05 UTC

  Microsoft has tweaked its Retail Rates API to offer retail pricing information for all Azure services in currencies other than the US dollar.

  “Azure customers have been looking for a programmatic way to retrieve retail prices for all Azure services in different currencies,” because until now learning Azure prices has required either the Azure Pricing Calculator or use the Azure portal.

  Those tools are rather hands-on. Yet Azure has 54 regions and over 6,000 services.

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• Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

  PublicBenefit.uk campaign reports 97 per cent of its supporters behind effort
  Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco Thu 15 Apr 2021 // 06:32 UTC

  A second extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to fire the remainder of the board of directors of Nominet and replace them with people willing to make long-sought-after reforms now looks like a certainty.

  The results of a survey carried out by the PublicBenefit.uk campaign, which successfully removed Nominet’s CEO, chair and three other board members last month, has revealed that 97 per cent of its supporters now back a clean sweep of the .uk registry operator. The same survey gave Nominet’s board a confidence rating of just 1.3 out of 10.

  The campaign’s organised, CEO of Krystal Simon Blackler, confirmed that as a result of the almost unanimous response, he had “engaged legal counsel to provide a considered opinion in advance to accompany any EGM notice that if we removed the entire board we'd have the power to appoint replacement directors.”

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• OMG! New free speech social network won’t allow members to take the Lord’s name in vain

  ‘Frank’ reckons it won’t follow Parler’s path to plug-pulling because it has its own servers and ‘the best security’ . But it also uses Cloudflare …
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 15 Apr 2021 // 06:17 UTC

  A new social media network that promises its users untrammeled free speech won’t allow “The N-word, the C-word, the F-word or God’s name in vain.”

  The new network is called “Frank Speech” and is backed by Mike Lindell, who rose to fame as the CEO of My Pillow and has spent the last few years as a fervent supporter of former US president Donald Trump and a peddler of conspiracy theories.

  In a video launching Frank, Lindell described the service as “Kind-of like a YouTube Twitter combination”.

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• Windows comes to Apple M1 silicon as Parallels delivers native desktop hypervisor

  Meanwhile, ESXi on Arm spotted booting Windows
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 15 Apr 2021 // 04:04 UTC

  Two new Windows-on-Arm options have come into view.

  The easy option is a new version of Parallels desktop, the company’s desktop hypervisor for macOS. Version 16.5. released Wednesday, is now offered in a native version for Apple’s own M1 silicon.

  Parallels says the new offering is for Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview and “the most popular ARM-based Linux distributions.” The company doesn’t offer a list of supported Arm distros but mentions Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Debian, and Mint Linux as options for version 16, plus Android VMs.

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• Blue Origin sends Mannequin Skywalker aloft again, testing out comfier capsule for future space tourists

  One day you too can experience a few minutes of free fall with great visuals... if you can afford it
  Katyanna Quach Thu 15 Apr 2021 // 02:31 UTC

  Video Blue Origin has successfully completed a test launch and landing of its reuseable New Shepard rocket with an advanced capsule design, bringing the outfit one step closer to eventually sending up paying passengers.

  The test flight, codenamed NS-15 as it's the 15th to date, was conducted at 1651 UTC (1151 CDT) at a Blue Origin site near Van Horn, Texas, on Wednesday. Two Blue Origin employees climbed up the launch tower, entered the capsule, and were strapped into their seats, and followed final procedures to prepare for a fake take off. Just before the New Shepard was due to fly, however, they left the capsule, with just Mannequin Skywalker, the instrument-stuffed dummy Blue Origin uses, to make the short journey.

  The flight was the first test of the new capsule design that'll be more comfortable for people paying six-figure sums to go into space. New acoustic and temperature controls were tested, as well an improved radio and control systems. NASA wants to see all is right before putting humans on it.

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• Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years

  ‘Market does not appreciate hardware/software combo’ says Big Mike. So virty giant gets freedom, customers are promised no change
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 15 Apr 2021 // 01:28 UTC

  +Analysis Dell will spin out its stake in VMware, and the two companies will continue to operate without major changes for at least five years. Indeed, they said they plan to deepen their collaboration.

  The proposed transaction has been pitched as delivering value for shareholders, both in the short term and once the two corporations have less complicated structures that will let them compete more aggressively.

  On a conference call for investors, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell emphasized the short-term benefits to shareholders. “As much as we grew the revenues of VMware, the market does not appear to appreciate a hardware/software combination,” he said.

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• Is it still possible to run malware in a browser using JavaScript and Rowhammer? Yes, yes it is (slowly)

  Firefox 'fully compromised' in 15 minutes via SMASH attack
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 15 Apr 2021 // 00:18 UTC

  Boffins from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and ETH in Zurich have bypassed memory chip defenses to execute a successful browser-based Rowhammer side-channel attack dubbed SMASH.

  Rowhammer refers to a technique that computer security researchers began to explore around 2014: "hammering" RAM chips with a series of rapid write operations. This process abuses the electronics enough to flip stored bits, potentially introducing errors that can be exploited for further gain.

  Initially, Rowhammer attacks had to be conducted locally, though by 2016 [PDF], the technique had been refined to work remotely using JavaScript in, say, a web browser.

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• Nigerian email scammer sent down for 40 months in the US, ordered to pay back $2.7m to victims

  Among the victims: the United Nations
  Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco Wed 14 Apr 2021 // 22:32 UTC

  A Nigerian email scammer based in New York was on Tuesday sentenced to 40 months in prison, and ordered to pay back $2.7m in stolen money.

  Ifeanyi Eke, who also went by the name Luther Mulbah Doley, had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and will serve three years of supervised release following his stretch in the big house. He is also likely to be deported since he came to America from Nigeria in 2016 on a temporary work visa.

  As opposed to the infamous Nigerian email scams where people pretended to be heirs to fortunes and devised various ways to get victims to send them money to access their funds, the scam run by Eke and three other Nigerian conspirators was significantly more sophisticated, the indictment states [PDF].

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• Report: Aussie biz Azimuth cracked San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, ending Apple-FBI privacy standoff

  Mozilla-authored code in iOS exploited, since patched, it is claimed
  Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco Wed 14 Apr 2021 // 21:37 UTC

  Australian security firm Azimuth has been identified as the experts who managed to crack a mass shooter's iPhone that was at the center of an encryption standoff between the FBI and Apple.

  Until this week it had largely been assumed that Israeli outfit Cellebrite was hired to forcibly unlock an encrypted iPhone 5C used by Syed Farook – who in 2015 shot and killed colleagues at a work event in San Bernardino, California, claiming inspiration from ISIS.

  Efforts by law enforcement to unlock and pore over Farook’s phone were unsuccessful, leading to the FBI taking Apple to court to force it to crack its own software to reveal the device's contents. The Feds got an order from a judge instructing Apple to effectively break its own security to give agents access to the locked and encrypted handset.

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• Ice, ice maybe? Astrobotic will ride SpaceX's Falcon Heavy to the Moon in 2023 and drop off NASA's water-hunting rover

  Firm's Griffin lander to do the honours
  Richard Speed Wed 14 Apr 2021 // 20:34 UTC

  Astrobotic has provided an explanation for another of SpaceX boss Elon Musk's tweets with news that its Griffin lander lander will be riding a Falcon Heavy to the Moon in 2023.

  Musk last week sent fanbois into frothing excitement with an announcement that a trip to the Moon was on the cards.

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• What the FLoC? Browser makers queue up to decry Google's latest ad-targeting initiative as invasive tracking

  'Federated Learning of Cohorts' groups users together and is already being tested in Chrome
  Tim Anderson Wed 14 Apr 2021 // 19:33 UTC

  Updated Google's FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) mechanism for ad personalisation, currently being trialled in the Chrome browser, has been rejected as privacy-invasive tracking by other browser makers including Vivaldi and Brave.

  FLoC is part of what Google calls the Privacy Sandbox initiative, a proposal to "support business models that fund the open web in the absence of tracking mechanisms like third-party cookies," according to now-retired Chrome engineering director Justin Schuh and product manager Marshall Vale in January.

  Third-party cookies are widely used (or abused) for tracking users across the web, and are increasingly likely to be blocked. Google is determined to preserve its ability to target and personalise advertising and claims the Privacy Sandbox APIs "enable use cases such as ad selection and conversion measurement, without revealing individual private and personal information."

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