Personal Tech

• A crypto-trading hamster is outperforming the S&P 500, Nasdaq, Bitcoin

  As much as I wanted to be Gordon Gekko, I'll always be Mr Goxx
  Matt Dupuy Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 14:15 UTC 2

  A cryptocurrency-trading hamster is sending shockwaves through the financial world by generating returns that outperform the S&P 500 index, the Nasdaq 100, and Bitcoin.

  Goxx Capital, fronted by Mr Goxx, a small brown hamster said by his colleague to be "nearly one year old", has been trading since June this year using a specially constructed "office" enclosure. It is claimed that he has been involved in hundreds of trades worth literally tens of Euros.

  His trading office, known as the Goxx Box, includes a number of special tools used to action his keen financial decisions. The largest of these is known as the "Intention Wheel", a hamster exercise wheel demarcated to determine which of around 30 different assets he will pick to trade. Then there are two "Decision Tunnels", one marked "Buy" and one marked "Sell", which determine which trade he will make with the chosen currency.

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• Typical. Crap weather halts work on subsea fibre-optic cable between UK and France

  Summer was good while it lasted
  Tim Richardson Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 13:30 UTC 3

  Strong winds and choppy seas have delayed the deployment of a new subsea fibre cable running under the English Channel connecting data centres in France and the UK.

  The cable – called CrossChannel Fibre – is due to link Equinix data centres in London and Paris via Brighton on the South Coast of England and Veules-les-Roses near Dieppe.

  Work was due to start this week, but the arrival of autumn storms has meant that cable laying has been put on hold until calmer weather is forecast.

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• The indie RPA dream is over for Blue Prism after being gobbled by private equity

  UK firm failed to make an impact against the market leaders
  Lindsay Clark Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 12:45 UTC

  Blue Prism, poster child of the UK's modest tech boom, has been bought by Vista Equity Partners (VEP) to be merged with Tibco, the integration and buiness intelligence vendor.

  Known for its robotic process automation (RPA) wares, Blue Prism is to be acquired for £1.1bn as interest in the RPA software segment hots up.

  According to Forrester, the market for RPA software will be worth $2.9bn in 2021, up from $125m in 2016. The two biggest independent players – those that don't also sell big chunks of the enterprise stack – are US-based Automation Anywhere and UiPath (founded in Romania, but now based in New York), which have a combined valuation of around $39.2bn

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• UK umbrella payroll firm GiantPay confirms it was hit by 'sophisticated' cyber-attack

  Tech contractors fume at lack of info as company says it will 'try' to get them paid by Friday
  Tim Richardson Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 12:01 UTC 7

  Giant Group, the umbrella company that has thousands of contractors on its books, has been targeted by a "sophisticated" cyber-attack that floored systems and left workers out in the cold, the biz has now confirmed.

  The attack happened last Wednesday (September 22) and forced the outfit – known to many as Giant Pay – to shut down its whole network, including its phone and email systems, as well as its IT infrastructure.

  It said last night it was still working on a "technical issue that is preventing us from getting the giant umbrella and giant accounts portals back up and running."

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• Chocgate: The fallout. Partially taxpayer-funded £6k+ staff luxury treats land ICO in lukewarm water

  But it's OK. What's it gonna do – fine itself?
  Paul Kunert Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 11:20 UTC 15

  "Sorry", much like a tooth-loosening toffee, can be one of the hardest words. That didn't stop the Information Commissioner’s Office from sentencing itself to saying it in the wake of the findings of an internal probe that confirm a rogue employee went a bit trigger happy with the corporate credit card in a luxury chocolate chain last Xmas.

  The regulator said it was very disappointed in itself after the unnamed staffer racked up a bill of £6,248.40 at Hotel Chocolat in spending £24.60 on 254 gifts for fellow colleagues - and taxpayers footed the bill, because who wouldn’t want to say thanks to the ICO for holding Big Tech’s feet to the fire.

  The UK’s data watchdog was tipped off about itself in February by Insider, which spotted the figure in the ICO’s list of corporate charge payments in excess of £500. The choc-shopping binge reportedly took place on 21 December.

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• Microsoft warns: Active Directory FoggyWeb malware being actively used by Nobelium gang

  Chief security adviser Roger Halbheer says best protection is to 'get off AD FS'
  Gareth Halfacree Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 10:44 UTC 4

  Microsoft has warned of a new tool designed to exfiltrate credentials and introduce a backdoor into Active Directory servers that is under active use by the Nobelium threat actor group.

  The FoggyWeb malware, Microsoft has declared, is designed to target Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) servers, exfiltrating credentials, configuration databases, decrypted token-signing and token-decryption certificates, and to download additional components to set up a permanent backdoor and attack the network more widely.

  "Because FoggyWeb is loaded into the same application domain as the AD FS managed code, it gains programmatical access to the legitimate AD FS classes, methods, properties, fields, objects, and components that are subsequently leveraged by FoggyWeb to facilitate its malicious operations," Ramin Nafisi, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Centre researcher, wrote in an analysis of the malware.

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• Take a look, and you'll see... Windows XP? Bit of Dairy Milk, Fruit and Bork at Cadbury World

  It's quite the show at the OTHER chocolate factory
  Richard Speed Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 10:01 UTC 5

  Bork!Bork!Bork! Some habits are hard to shake, and more than one tourist hotspot is having a heck of time leaving Windows XP behind, as today's confection of bork shows.

  Following last week's shame at 300 ft from an Emirates cable car travelling over the Thames, the latest installment comes from Reg reader Ben who was "enjoying" a trip to Cadbury World (a chocolate-themed attraction) over the weekend with a car-load of poppets in tow.

  His description of his visit carries the distinct whiff of a one star TripAdvisor review, but readers will be delighted to learn that an old friend was lurking within the walls of the "Bournville Experience".

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• UK government isn't keeping track of the risk posed by legacy systems, says Central Digital and Data Office

  New system hoped to launch next year that will help prioritise spending
  Lindsay Clark Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 09:15 UTC 10

  The UK government currently lacks a central, dynamic list of its legacy computing estate and the risks associated with ageing IT infrastructure and applications, Joanna Davinson, exec director at the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), has told MPs.

  But she said the Cabinet Office, which encompasses CDDO, was working on such a system, aimed at helping prioritise spending, which her team hopes to pilot this year and launch in January.

  "I acknowledge that it's not as systematic as it should be at the moment, but we've got an initiative in place," Davinson told Parliament's public spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee.

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• tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

  Handbags at 12 o'clock! Er, is that with or without daylight saving?
  Richard Speed Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 08:30 UTC 36

  The time zone database hosted at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has been updated following threats, earlier this year, of a fork over a proposal to merge time zones.

  The update, the 2021b release of the tz code and date, was published over the weekend and omits some, but not all, of the issues that have caused concern in the project's mailing list.

  The tz database is a hugely important resource that contains information on the world's time zones. It also attempts to keep track of historical changes since 1970. Its usage is relatively straightforward; a time zone has an offset from UTC and a set of rules governing daylight saving time (should it apply).

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• AWS US East region endures eight-hour wobble thanks to 'Stuck IO' in Elastic Block Store

  EC2 instances were impaired, Redshift hurt, and some of you may still struggle to access your data
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 07:57 UTC 9

  Amazon Web Services' largest region yesterday experienced an eight-hour disruption with the Elastic Block Store (EBS) service that impacted several notable web sites and services.

  The lack of fun started at 8:11pm PDT on Sunday, when EBS experienced "degraded performance" in one availability zone (USE1-AZ2) in the US-EAST-1 Region. A subsequent update described the issue as "Stuck IO" and warned that existing EC2 instances may "experience impairment" while new EC2 instances could fail.

  US East is the only AWS Region to offer six availability zones – a reflection of its status as the company's first location.

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• The classroom is a demanding environment. How do you ensure your tech is up to the challenge?

  An ABC of education technology
  Joseph Martins Tue 28 Sep 2021 // 07:30 UTC

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