Networks

• Miscreants make off with $150m of digital assets in BitMart security breach

  Or it might be nearer $200m. Even the amounts stolen seem to be volatile in the crypto world
  Richard Speed Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 17:01 UTC 1

  Cryptocurrency exchange BitMart has coughed to a large-scale security breach relating to ETH and BSC hot wallets. The company reckons that hackers made off with approximately $150m in assets.

  Security and analytics outfit PeckShield put the figure at closer to $200m.

  "We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets today. At this moment we are still concluding the possible methods used. Hackers were able to withdraw assets of the value of approximately 150 million USD," BitMart said.

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• MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

  PostgreSQL a better option for open source RDBMS, he claims
  Lindsay Clark Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 16:02 UTC 9

  You've collected your leaving card, novelty presents, and perhaps a bottle of wine – what's next on the list for the departing developer? For one, it's a blog rubbishing the technology he's been working on for five years.

  That was the choice of Steinar Gunderson, a former principal software engineer at Oracle and member of the MySQL optimiser team.

  In an online missive, the engineer, who has now taken up a role in Google's Chrome team, left no reader in doubt of his views on MySQL.

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• Uber's gig economy business model takes a blow from London legal double-whammy

  Free Now taxi app unlawfully registered by regulator – and Ts&Cs didn't comply with the law
  Gareth Corfield Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 15:43 UTC 3

  London taxi-hailing apps cannot dump their legal obligations on gig economy drivers, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales has ruled in a blow to Uber.

  The court said this morning [PDF] that Germany-based taxi app Free Now could not operate in the English capital without taking on legal liability for delivering the taxi journey, giving a rolled-up judgment on two separate but closely linked cases.

  In the first, Free Now's UK arm – aka Transopco UK Ltd – argued that as a middleman it was not contractually obliged to deliver taxi journeys, saying this was the legal responsibility of its drivers. Judges ruled there was "no material difference" between Free Now's business model and Uber's.

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• Helios-NG: An open-source cluster OS that links the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga

  Does anyone have the stones to revive this long-forgotten software?
  Liam Proven in Prague Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 13:46 UTC 3

  What is old is new again: linking open source Unix-alikes, native cluster OSes for massively parallel computers, and 1980s platform rivalries. You get all this in a somewhat dusty project hoping to "breathe new life" into Helios, a manycore OS from the '90s.

  Parallel computing is back in fashion. Just last week, The Reg covered an inexpensive Arm cluster in a box; and support in the next Linux kernel for 24-core Atom chips and 64-core ARM ones.

  Back in the 1980s, Intel couldn't build you a box with that many cores – but a small British outfit called Inmos could. While a remote descendant of Inmos provides one of the processors in relatively recent Amiga hardware, there's a much older connection.

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• Cuba ransomware gang scores almost $44m in ransom payments across 49 orgs, say Feds

  Hancitor is at play
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 13:02 UTC 2

  The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says 49 organisations, including some in government, were hit by Cuba ransomware as of early November this year.

  The attacks were spread across five "critical infrastructure", which, besides government, included the financial, healthcare, manufacturing, and – as you'd expect – IT sectors. The Feds said late last week the threat actors are demanding $76m in ransoms and have already received at least $43.9m in payments.

  The ransomware gang's loader of choice, Hancitor, was the culprit, distributed via phishing emails, or via exploit of Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, compromised credentials, or Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) tools. Hancitor – also known as Chanitor or Tordal –  enables a CobaltStrike beacon as a service on the victim's network using a legitimate Windows service like PowerShell.

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• Graviton 3: AWS attempts to gain silicon advantage with latest custom hardware

  Key to faster, more predictable cloud
  Tim Anderson Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 12:17 UTC 1

  RE:INVENT AWS had a conviction that "modern processors were not well optimized for modern workloads," the cloud corp's senior veep of Infrastructure, Peter DeSantis, claimed at its latest annual Re:invent gathering in Las Vegas.

  DeSantis was speaking last week about AWS's Graviton 3 Arm-based processor, providing a bit more meat around the bones, so to speak – and in his comment the word "modern" is doing a lot of work.

  The computing landscape looks different from the perspective of a hyperscale cloud provider; what counts is not flexibility but intensive optimization and predictable performance.

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• The Omicron dilemma: Google goes first on delaying office work

  Hurrah, employees can continue to work from home and take calls in pyjamas
  Katyanna Quach Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 11:32 UTC 36

  Googlers can continue working from home and will no longer be required to return to campuses on 10 January 2022 as previously expected.

  The decision marks another delay in getting more employees back to their desks. For Big Tech companies, setting a firm return date during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a nightmare. All attempts were pushed back so far due to rising numbers of cases or new variants of the respiratory disease spreading around the world, such as the new Omicron strain.

  Google's VP of global security, Chris Rackow, broke the news to staff in a company-wide email, first reported by CNBC. He said Google would wait until the New Year to figure out when campuses in the US can safely reopen for a mandatory return.

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• This House believes: A unified, agnostic software environment can be achieved

  How long will we keep reinventing software wheels?
  Nicole Hemsoth Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 10:45 UTC 8

  Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular.

  This week's motion is: A unified, agnostic software environment can be achieved. We debate the question: can the industry ever have a truly open, unified, agnostic software environment in HPC and AI that can span multiple kinds of compute engines?

  Our first contributor arguing FOR the motion is Nicole Hemsoth, co-editor of The Next Platform.

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• Sun sets: Oracle to close Scotland's Linlithgow datacentre

  Questions for tenants as Ellison's gang executes its OCI strategy
  Lindsay Clark Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 10:00 UTC 13

  Oracle's datacentre in Linlithgow, Scotland is set to close over the next few months, leaving clients faced with a cloud migration or a move to an alternative hosted datacentre.

  According to multiple insiders speaking to The Register, Oracle has been trying to move its datacentre clients to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – with mixed results.

  The Linlithgow facility dates back to the days of Sun Microsystems, which opened a manufacturing plant there in 1990.

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• The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

  Put crypto back in the crypt
  Rupert Goodwins Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 09:15 UTC 58

  Opinion In 1960, Theodore H Maiman made the first laser.

  Famously described at birth as a solution in search of a problem, it delivered a Nobel prize four years later, was in barcode scanners in shops 10 years after that, and in 1979 gave birth to the compact disc.

  Not content with enabling digital audio, revolutionising many sciences and much else besides, it has since become the glowing heart of the global internet. Yay lasers.

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• How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

  Fidgety fingers and boredom = trouble
  Richard Speed Mon 6 Dec 2021 // 08:30 UTC 28

  Who, Me? All aboard for a nautical installment of Who, Me? where the words "Don't Touch That Button!" have an altogether damper meaning.

  Today's tale comes from a reader Regomised as "Trev" and has a slightly naval tinge to it.

  "I was involved in installing a system in a corvette for a Middle Eastern navy," he told us. "Our customer was equal parts naive, hopeful, and bloody difficult."

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