Personal Tech

• Why your external monitor looks awful on Arm-based Macs, the open source fix – and the guy who wrote it

  Q&A with the developer of BetterDummy: from macOS secrets to his motivations
  Fernando Cassia Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 19:36 UTC

  Interview Folks who use Apple Silicon-powered Macs with some third-party monitors are disappointed with the results: text and icons can appear too tiny or blurry, or the available resolutions are lower than what the displays are capable of.

  It took an open source programmer working in his spare time to come up with a workaround that doesn't involve purchasing a hardware dongle to fix what is a macOS limitation.

  István Tóth lives in Hungary, and called his fix BetterDummy. It works by creating a virtual display in software and then mirroring that virtual display to the real one, to coax macOS into playing ball. The latest version, 1.0.12, was released just a few days ago, and the code is free and MIT licensed.

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• Chill out to the sounds of an expert typing on a variety of mechanical keyboards

  A truly rare groove
  Liam Proven in Prague Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 18:45 UTC

  Discerning writers and programmers know that keyboards matter. It's mostly the feel, but the best feel tends to come from mechanical key switches and they make a noise as they activate.

  That feeling goes hand in hand with a chorus of soft clicks… and thanks to custom keyboard guru Taeha "Nathan" Kim and weirdo label Trunk Records, you can relax to 43 minutes and 24 seconds of soothing sounds from 13 rare and limited-edition mechanical keyboards.

  Your correspondent is a bit of a fan of devices like this (this piece was typed on a 1991 IBM Model M; accept no substitute) – but no such brash, commonplace kit features on the album. Instead you can luxuriate to the Alps switches of a 1987 Apple Standard (why, yes, I do happen to have one of those too, but the linear cursor keys hinder daily use), and an M0110A from a Mac Plus, as well as more exotic kit.

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• Netgear router flaws exploitable with authentication ... like the default creds on Netgear's website

  Don't just install the patch, change your router passwords too
  Gareth Corfield Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 17:30 UTC 2

  Two arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities affecting a number of Netgear routers aimed at small businesses have been patched following research by Immersive Labs.

  The vulns rely on authenticated access to affected devices so aren't an immediate threat. They do, however, allow someone with remote access to the router to pwn the device's underlying OS, threatening the security of data passing through the router.

  Helpfully, Netgear itself publishes default login credentials for "most" of its products on its website. If you haven't been into your Netgear router's admin panel and changed these default creds, you're at increased risk.

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• Not only was the UK Financial Ombudsman Service's Workday system months late, 38 IT workers' jobs are at risk

  Questions remain over data warehouse dependencies and redundancies
  Lindsay Clark Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 16:56 UTC 3

  The UK's Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has gone live on Workday finance and HR systems around three months later than planned, drawing questions over an interdependent data warehouse project.

  At the same time, the process has seen IT roles marked for redundancy and set to be transferred to a service supplier.

  The watchdog was set up by Parliament in 2001 to resolve complaints between financial businesses and their customers. This week, Workday published a statement boasting that the implementation of its software at the FOS had gone live.

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• AWS previews SDKs for Rust, Kotlin, Swift, and Amplify Studio for rapid web apps

  Plus: Why company foresees growth of Rust, already widely used internally
  Tim Anderson Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 15:43 UTC

  Re:invent AWS previewed new developer resources at its Re:invent conference, including new SDKs for Rust, Swift, and Kotlin, as well as Amplify Studio for rapid web applications, integrated with the Figma design tool.

  The SDKs provide a language wrapper for APIs to AWS services. Existing SDKs target JavaScript, Python, PHP, .NET (C#), Ruby, Java, Go, Node.js, and C++. Now three more were this week added. Kotlin is the official language for Android and runs primarily on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Swift is Apple's language for iOS and macOS, and can also be used on a server. Rust is the language developed by Mozilla to be nearly as fast as C but with memory safety and other modern features.

  "Rust has a lot of use internally as well, we've seen it become adopted quite rapidly within AWS and within Amazon," Ken Exner, GM for AWS Developer Tools, told The Register. "EC2 uses it, S3 uses it, CloudFront, DynamoDB."

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• One white cat and a volcano short of a Bond villain: Rocket Lab's Peter Beck shows off the 'Hungry Hippo'

  Neutron updated, but the Spectre of SpaceX looms
  Richard Speed Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 14:44 UTC 5

  Rocket Lab showed off progress on its Neutron rocket yesterday, with a "Hungry Hippo" fairing design more reminiscent of a '60s spy flick than a'70s table-top kid amuser.

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• When it comes to renting tech kit, things can get personal, very quickly

  Is hardware by subscription bad for customers? Readers have their say
  Joe Fay Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 14:02 UTC 4

  Register Debate There's a reason why it's called a personal computer, and boy did this week's debate remind us all of the fact. We'd thrown open the motion that Renting Hardware on a Subscription Basis is Bad for Customers.

  The results were close. After all, traditional leasing has always been part of the corporate (non) ownership arsenal while the cloud already accounts for a vast amount of enterprise infrastructure.

  This is how the readership voted:

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• Dev loses copyright appeal over forensic software after judges rule suite was owned by his employer

  Did it during work time and got paid for it, affirms Court of Appeal
  Gareth Corfield Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 13:15 UTC 10

  A Briton has lost an appeal bid to claim copyright over software he wrote for his employer while being handsomely paid for doing so – despite saying he wrote parts of it in his spare time.

  Michael Penhallurick had his case thrown out by Court of Appeal judges in London yesterday following his failed attempt to assert copyright over his Virtual Forensic Computing (VFC) suite in the High Court last year.

  The former South Yorkshire police worker had claimed VFC was licensed to MD5 Ltd and the company infringed that licence when it stopped paying him sums of money he described as licensing fees, two years after he left MD5.

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• Two Chinese companies leave US: China Telecom told it can't stay, DiDi gets out of Dodge

  Just being practical here, but maybe they can share a cab?
  Laura Dobberstein Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 12:26 UTC 5

  Two Chinese tech companies, China Telecom and DiDi Global, are packing their bags and moving out of the US, one under the ruling of Washington, the other under the thumb of Beijing.

  On Friday, DiDi Global announced it would delist from the New York Stock Exchange in favour of Hong Kong after a mere five-month presence.

  The mobility technology platform floated on the NYSE on 30 June, raising $4.4bn, making them the biggest IPO of a Chinese company on an American exchange since Alibaba in 2014.

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• NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

  As with packaging systems, lightweight efficient approaches look set to lose out
  Liam Proven in Prague Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 11:25 UTC 30

  Analysis A new version of Linux distro NixOS has been released, just one day after a contentious blogpost that asked "Will Nix overtake Docker?"

  For DevOps folk, this was tantamount to clickbait: Nix and Docker are different tools for different jobs, and anyway, it's possible to use Nix to build Docker images.

  The distro, which hit version 21.11 on the last day of November, was built around the purely functional Nix package manager.

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• A smarter alternative to password recognition could be right in front of us: Unique, invisible, maybe even deadly

  Take your breath awayyyyyyyy
  Alistair Dabbs Fri 3 Dec 2021 // 10:27 UTC 42

  Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Breathe into the tube, sir." Oh yes, dear reader, I am being breathalysed.

  I comply and watch the pretty LEDs dance back and forth in their traffic-light colours before settling on a crimson red. I win! I win!

  Actually, I am being économe avec la vérité (as nobody says down here) as it did not quite happen like that. For a start, I was not addressed as "sir". This is just as well as it's a vaguely sarcastic honorific of bland flattery that only leads to confusion when applied in my direction: I always assume they must be talking to someone behind me.

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