Storage

• After eight years, SPEC delivers a new virtualisation benchmark

  Jumps from single-server tests to four hosts – but only for vSphere and RHV
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 17 Sep 2021 // 02:57 UTC

  The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) has released its first new virtualisation benchmark in eight years.

  The new SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark succeeds SPEC VIRT_SC 2013. The latter was designed to help users understand performance in the heady days of server consolidation, so required just one host. The new benchmark requires four hosts – a recognition of modern datacentre realities.

  The new tests are designed to test the combined performance of hypervisors and servers. For now, only two hypervisors are supported: VMware’s vSphere (versions 6.x and 7.x) and Red Hat Virtualisation (version 4.x). David Schmidt, chair of the SPEC Virtualization Committee, told The Register that Red Hat and VMware are paid up members of the committee, hence their inclusion. But the new benchmark can be used by other hypervisors if their vendors create an SDK. He opined that Microsoft, vendor of the Hyper-V hypervisor that has around 20 per cent market share, didn’t come to play because it’s busy working on other SPEC projects.

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• Forget that Loon's balloon burst, we just fired 700TB of laser broadband between two cities, says Google

  Up to 20Gbps link sustained over the Congo in comms experiment
  Katyanna Quach Fri 17 Sep 2021 // 00:22 UTC 1

  Engineers at Google’s technology moonshot lab X say they used lasers to beam 700TB of internet traffic between two cities separated by the Congo River.

  The capitals of the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazzaville and Kinshasa, respectively, are only 4.8 km (about three miles) apart. The denizens of Kinshasa have to pay five times more than their neighbors in Brazzaville for broadband connectivity, though. That's apparently because the fiber backbone to Kinshasa has to route more than 400 km (250 miles) around the river – no one wanted to put the cable through it.

  There's a shorter route for data to take between the cities. Instead of transmitting the information as light through networks of cables, it can be directly beamed over the river by laser.

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• Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege

  Latest laptops prone to cracking, distortions, owners complain
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 22:38 UTC 11

  Aggrieved MacBook owners in two separate lawsuits claim Apple's latest laptops with its M1 chips have defective screens that break easily and malfunction.

  The complaints, both filed on Wednesday in a federal district court in San Jose, California, are each seeking class certification in the hope that the law firms involved will get a judicial blessing to represent the presumed large group of affected customers and, if victorious, to share any settlement.

  Each of the filings contends Apple's 2020-2021 MacBook line – consisting of the M1-based MacBook Air and M1-based 13" MacBook Pro – have screens that frequently fail. They say Apple knew about the alleged defect or should have known, based on its own extensive internal testing, reports from technicians, and feedback from customers.

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• Microsoft's Azure Virtual Desktop now works without Active Directory – but there are caveats

  General availability of Azure AD-joined VMs
  Tim Anderson Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 22:16 UTC

  Microsoft has declared general availability for Azure Virtual Desktop with the VMs joined to Azure AD rather than Active Directory, but the initial release has many limitations.

  Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), once called Windows Virtual Desktop, is Microsoft's first-party VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solution.

  Although cloud-hosted, Azure Virtual Desktop is (or was) based on Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services tech which required domain-joined PCs and therefore a connection to full Windows Active Directory (AD), either in the form of on-premises AD over a VPN, or via Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AAD DS) which is a Microsoft-managed AD server automatically linked to Azure AD. In the case that on-premises AD is used, AD Connect is also required, introducing further complexity.

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• It's bizarre we're at a point where reports are written on how human rights trump AI rights

  But that's what UN group has done
  Tim Richardson Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 21:40 UTC 1

  The protection of human rights should be front and centre of any decision to implement AI-based systems regardless of whether they're used as corporate tools such as recruitment or in areas such as law enforcement.

  And unless sufficient safeguards are in place to protect human rights, there should be a moratorium on the sale of AI systems and those that fail to meet international human rights laws should be banned.

  Those are just some of the conclusions from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC) in a report for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet.

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• Aviation-themed phishing campaign pushed off-the-shelf RATs into inboxes for 5 years

  Not all promises of international flight itineraries are real, warns Cisco Talos
  Gareth Corfield Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 20:35 UTC 1

  A phishing campaign that mostly targeted the global aviation industry may be connected to Nigeria, according to Cisco Talos.

  The malicious campaigns centred around phishing emails linking to "off-the-shelf malware" being sent to people around the world – even those with a marginal interest in commercial aviation.

  Although Talos couldn't confirm the threat actor behind the campaign was actually based in Nigeria or associated with the Nigerian state, Cisco's infosec arm was able to say with confidence that the campaign had been running for at least three years.

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• RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

  From pocket calculators to ZX Spectrum and beyond
  Chris Williams, Editor in Chief Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 19:46 UTC 64

  Sir Clive Sinclair died on Thursday at home in London after a long illness, his family said today. He was 81.

  The British entrepreneur is perhaps best known for launching the ZX range of cheap microcomputers, which helped bring computing, games, and programming into UK homes in the 1980s, at least.

  This included the ZX80, said to be the UK's first mass-market home computer for under £100, the ZX81, and the trusty ZX Spectrum. And then there was the Sinclair QL, which was Sir Clive's big shot at business.

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• The age of the Service Pack is over. The time of the Modern Servicing Model has come

  It's CUs and GDRs here on out for Microsoft's SQL Server
  Richard Speed Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 19:01 UTC 3

  It's the end of an era. Microsoft has finally released its very last SQL Server service pack.

  Microsoft first warned the end was nigh some years ago, but the reality is here: SP3 for SQL Server 2016 is to be the last, the service pack beloved by administrators around the world killed off in favour of a "Modern Servicing Model."

  The successors to SQL Server 2016 have already moved on from service packs, according to Microsoft, with only Cumulative Updates (CU) and General Distribution Releases (GDR) filling the void.

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• CityFibre scores extra £1bn+ of funding to plumb in up to eight million British homes by 2025

  Ikea parent Interogo Holding among the investors
  Tim Richardson Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 18:30 UTC 3

  Full-fibre network operator CityFibre has grabbed £1.125bn in financing to help support its plan to wire up to eight million homes in the UK.

  The funding is made up of £825m of equity from new investors – Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Co, and Interogo Holding, a private equity investor best known for owning flat-packed furniture maker Ikea.

  CityFibre’s coffers are swelled still further with a £300 million extension to its banking facilities.

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• Hack yourself before someone else does it for you

  Breach and attack simulation tools help you raise your game, Keysight says
  John E Dunn Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 18:00 UTC

  Sponsored Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but something appears to be amiss with cybersecurity. The spectacular success of ransomware is only the latest and worst example, a phenomenon in which small groups of often barely technically literate attackers ransack some of the biggest and best resourced companies on earth for easy money.

  Tens of millions of dollars head out the door every day in this dystopia and yet it is becoming a quickly forgotten blur. Most industries would have folded with this record of failure and yet, on the contrary, cybersecurity is booming. Ironically, as the attack earlier in 2021 on FireEye shows, even security companies full of elite white hats can’t stop the bad people.

  Is it that the cybersecurity kit doesn’t work or that the people deploying it inside organizations don’t know how to use it? Either explanation is plausible but there’s a third possibility – networks are inherently complex, getting more so, and change so much every day that things that were working yesterday end up being fumbled.

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• Bepanted shovel-toting farmer wins privacy payout from France TV

  Unwitting star of #Slipgate viral images awarded reduced damages, tempts Streisand effect
  Matt Dupuy Thu 16 Sep 2021 // 17:10 UTC 9

  A French farmer who was filmed setting about bird conservationists with a shovel while in his underpants has won damages from a TV company that filmed the incident for violating his privacy.

  The set-to originally occurred back in 2015, when a French bird conservation group called the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO, or Bird Protection League in English) invited a group of journalists to accompany them as they investigated a farm in Audon in southwestern France for bird traps.

  Bird trapping, in which songbirds are trapped using various techniques and later eaten, is mostly forbidden in France, but it is still practised in many regions either illegally or via legal exemptions issued for supposed small-scale trapping.

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