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1. You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?

2. Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

3. Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge

4. Debian devs decide best response to Richard Stallman controversy is … nothing

5. Foxconn and Wisconsin reach new deal to do something different at Donald Trump's favourite (flop of a) factory

• Japan accuses Chinese military of cyber-attacks on its space agency

  200 other companies also targeted, but no data lost
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 21 Apr 2021 // 03:30 UTC

  Japan has accused a member of the Chinese Communist Party of conducting cyber-attacks on its space agency and 200 other local entities.

  Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police yesterday said they’ve filed a case against a Chinese national who they said works for a state-owned telco and, while living in Japan, rented servers to attack the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2016. The individual, and another Chinese national believed to have visited Japan as an exchange student, are thought to have conducted up to 200 more attacks on Japanese companies over the following two years.

  Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato restated those claims in his Tuesday afternoon press briefing, and said the alleged attacker worked for Unit 61419 of China’s People’s Liberation Army, an outfit sometimes referred to as “Tick” and suspected of focusing on offensive cyber-ops.

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• Chinese officials declare intention to become network superpower, tout glorious 5G rollout that's smaller than local carriers' claims

  Great Leap Forward sees broadband speeds surge, 99 per cent of villages hooked up, all for $6/month
  Laura Dobberstein Wed 21 Apr 2021 // 02:17 UTC

  China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had a busy Monday as it declared the country's intention to be both a manufacturing and a network superpower, and claimed progress towards the latter goal is illustrated with some seemingly odd statistics.

  Liu Liehong, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told reporters that China's 13th Five-Year Plan, enacted in 2015, delivered a great leap forward in networking capabilities.

  The minister claimed the Middle Kingdom has already "built the world's largest information and communication network." Under the last plan, Liehong stated that China's fibre-optic broadband users increased from 56 per cent of connections to 94 per cent since 2015, while gigabit capable passive optical networks now cover more than 120 million households. The minister said the digital gap between rural and urban areas is significantly reduced, by an unspecified amount.

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• US Army develops natural-language voice-command AI for robots, tanks, etc. For search'n'rescue. For now

  Judge, JUDI, and executioner?
  Katyanna Quach Wed 21 Apr 2021 // 01:14 UTC

  The US Army is experimenting with machine-learning software that could be used to give tanks, trucks, and robots the ability to follow verbal orders from soldiers and communicate in natural language on the battlefield.

  Researchers at the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (aka DEVCOM) and the University of Southern California have been working on JUDI: a Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface. This is a conversational AI system for military machines.

  As you might expect, unlike chatty digital assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, JUDI isn’t designed for small talk about birthdays and the weather. It's trained to respond to spoken orders and handle situations military personnel are likely to find themselves in.

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• We seem to have materialized in a universe in which Barney the Purple Dinosaur is designing iPhones for Apple

  Is there a back button for reality?
  Katyanna Quach Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 23:56 UTC

  Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a bunch of colorful iThings on Tuesday, including iMac desktop computers in rainbow shades, its most powerful iPad yet, and – gasp – a purple iPhone.

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• China broke into govt, defense, finance networks via zero-day in Pulse Secure VPN gateways? No way

  Crucial flaw won't be fixed until next month
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 22:20 UTC

  Dozens of defense companies, government agencies, and financial organizations in America and abroad appear to have been compromised by China via vulnerabilities in their Pulse Connect Secure VPN appliances – including a zero-day flaw that won't be patched until next month.

  On Tuesday, IT software supplier Ivanti, the parent of Pulse Secure, issued a wake-up call to its customers by revealing it looks as though select clients were compromised via their encrypted gateways.

  "There is a new issue, discovered this month, that impacted a very limited number of customers," said Phil Richards, chief security officer at Pulse Secure, in a memo to the world. "The team worked quickly to provide mitigations directly to the limited number of impacted customers that remediates the risk to their system."

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• Node.js 16 released with Apple Silicon binaries, JavaScript V8 engine turned up to nine

  All supported releases will now support ECMAScript modules - but progress on moving away from CommonJS is slow
  Tim Anderson Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 20:42 UTC

  Node.js 16 has been released with prebuilt Apple Silicon binaries and version 9.0 of the V8 JavaScript engine.

  Node.js releases appear every six months or so. A new version becomes the current release, and odd numbered releases are supported for only six months, but even numbered releases become long-term support (LTS) releases. The last three LTS releases were therefore 10, 12 and 14 (or Dubnium, Erbium and Fermium), while version 16, once it has had six months to mature, will be known as Gallium.

  This release is based on version 9.0 of the V8 JavaScript engine, and therefore supports new language features added since version 8.6, used in Node.js 15. There is nothing dramatic in this respect, but developers can look forward to the Timers Promises API, RegExp Match indices and other goodies. Version 9.0 was released in mid-March and the details of what is new are documented here.

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• Would be so cool if everyone normalized these pesky data leaks, says data-leaking Facebook in leaked memo

  Blundering mouthpiece sent arrogant line to journalist by accident
  Gareth Corfield Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 19:51 UTC

  Facebook wants you to believe that the scraping of 533 million people’s personal data from its platform, and the dumping of that data online by nefarious people, is something to be “normalised.”

  A blundering Facebook public relations operative managed to send a journalist a copy an internal document detailing the antisocial network's strategy for containing the leaking of 533 million accounts – and what the memo contained was infuriating though unsurprising.

  Belgian tech journalist Pieterjan van Leemputten asked the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company some questions about the theft and dumping online of account data earlier this month.

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• Microsoft realises constant meetings stress people out, adds Office 365 settings to cut them short or start them late

  Where's the PowerShell command to ban all meetings forever?
  Tim Anderson Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 19:23 UTC

  Straight from Microsoft's Department of Stating the Bleeding Obvious come tweaks to its online productivity software based on research that found back-to-back meeting cause stress.

  As such, Microsoft has introduced settings in Office 365 that promote breaks by making these corporate congregations start late or finish early.

  Administrators can set three values in Microsoft Exchange Online which determine what happens when meetings are scheduled. The first, ShortenEventScopeDefault, sets whether meetings are ended early or started late, or the feature can be turned off.

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• With the cloud, letting your emotions run over may mean the costs do too

  Time to take things cool and slow
  Joseph Martins Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 18:00 UTC

  Sponsored It’s understandable that people get excited about the cloud. As well as the prospect of virtually unlimited compute and storage, it promises relief from the frustrations of maintaining legacy software and infrastructure.

  But frustration, excitement and relief are all emotions. And emotions may cloud your judgement about the true benefits – and costs – of moving to the cloud. Or about the fact that in many cases it might make far more sense to keep your workloads partly, if not entirely, on-premises.

  Although some organizations are truly completely cloud native – in that they were born in the cloud era and have always existed in the cloud – most organizations will have legacy infrastructure and software that cannot easily be discarded.

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• iPhone XR caught fire after getting trapped in airline passenger's seat

  Sulphorous stench was self-immolating Apple product
  Gareth Corfield Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 16:20 UTC

  An Apple iPhone XR caught fire aboard a British Airways Boeing 787 mid-flight after a clumsy passenger dropped it down the side of her seat.

  The Club World passenger, flying from Miami to Heathrow, had raised her seat from its lie-flat bed position back to the conventional one while a stewardess rearranged her bedding.

  Yet on removing the blankets the stewardess "smelt a strong odour" of sulphur. This wasn't caused by the in-flight curry, either: a charger cable led "down the side of the seat." Even as she called the purser over, the stewardess heard a "hissing" sound and saw an "orange glow" as a plume of thick smoke began issuing from the seat.

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• Do you expect me to talk? Yes, Mr Bond, I expect you to reply: 10k Brits targeted on LinkedIn by Chinese, Russian spies

  Campaign launched to alert public sector staff that not everyone on the internet is nice
  Gareth Corfield Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 15:48 UTC

  Ten thousand Britons have been targeted on LinkedIn by recruiters for the Chinese and Russian intelligence services, according to an awareness campaign launched by domestic spy agency MI5 this morning.

  Details were previewed in this morning's Times newspaper, which warned specifically of people with "access to classified or sensitive information" being targeted by Britain's enemies.

  The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), an MI5 offshoot, told the newspaper its figure of 10,000 compromise attempts over five years was a conservative one, with MI5 chief Ken McCallum saying in a prepared statement: "Malicious profiles on professional networking sites are being utilised on an industrial scale."

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