Channel

• Teen bought Google ad for his scam website and made 48 Bitcoins duping UK online shoppers

  'If he was an adult he would be going inside' – judge
  Gareth Corfield Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 13:27 UTC 1

  A "sophisticated" teenager has had £2.1m ($2.88m) in cryptocurrency confiscated after he set up a phishing site and advertised it on Google, duping consumers into handing over gift voucher redemption codes.

  The schoolboy set up a website impersonating gift voucher site Love2Shop. Having done that he then bought Google ads which resulted in his fake site appearing above the real one in search results, Lincoln Crown Court was told.

  Crown prosecutor Sam Skinner told Her Honour Judge Catarina Sjölin Knight that the boy, whose identity is protected by a court order, harvested £6,500 worth of vouchers in the week his site was active. Love2shop began investigating in April 2020 after a customer complained, at which point the boy took down his fake site.

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• Microsoft: Cloud and Windows OEM sales up, but Surface? No, not even during WFH boom

  Water's wet, sky's blue, and Redmond's revenues grew in Q1 2022
  Richard Speed Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 12:30 UTC 3

  Even a "stronger than expected" PC market with unprecedented demand from homebound workers couldn't lift Surface revenues in Microsoft's first quarter for fiscal 2022 - in an otherwise stellar quarter for the firm.

  Windows OEM revenue increased by 10 per cent – driven, as CFO Amy Hood said in an analysts' call, "by a stronger than expected PC market."

  However, Surface revenue dropped by 19 per cent in constant currency (although Hood pointed to a strong prior year). Supply constraints will certainly have played a part in this, as well as a line-up due for a refresh. The recent product launch will make next quarter's results interesting reading. Hood reckoned the decline would likely run on, but only in single digits "as we continue to work through supply chain uncertainty, particularly in our premium devices."

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• Product release cycles are killing the environment, techies tell British Computer Society

  Running Linux on a vintage box is one answer, but someone has to hold big tech's feet to fire
  Paul Kunert Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 11:26 UTC 12

  Bringing an end to the relentless nature of annual product release cycles is something that should be top of the agenda for the soon-to-run 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26.

  Or so says the BCS, formerly known as the British Computer Society, which reckons cutting electronic waste is the most pressing concern for 30 per cent of the 1,100 plus members it surveyed recently.

  Alex Bardell, chair of the BCS Green IT Specialist Group, said reducing e-waste was already on the radar thanks to the chip shortage.

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• UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

  Horizons Europe carrot dangled amid protocol wrangling
  Richard Speed Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 10:30 UTC 23

  A report from the UK House of Commons' European Scrutiny Committee has blamed delays in Brussels for choking off revenue streams to British institutions and businesses.

  The UK departed the European Union following a 2016 referendum. One of the results was that UK businesses were no longer able to tender for lucrative contracts within the bloc.

  The Brexit Divorce Bill uncomfortably laid out the facts back in 2018. The satellite navigation system Galileo was one victim despite substantial involvement from the UK in its development. Another was the Copernicus Earth monitoring programme; the UK was infamously snubbed when the European Space Agency (ESA) handed out six juicy contracts to institutions from the Continent.

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• Warehouse belonging to Chinese payment terminal manufacturer raided by FBI

  PAX Technology devices allegedly infected with malware
  Laura Dobberstein Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 09:41 UTC 7

  US feds were spotted raiding a warehouse belonging to Chinese payment terminal manufacturer PAX Technology in Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday, with speculation abounding that the machines contained preinstalled malware.

  PAX Technology is headquartered in Shenzhen, China, and is one of the largest electronic payment providers in the world. It operates around 60 million point-of-sale (PoS) payment terminals in more than 120 countries.

  Local Jacksonville news anchor Courtney Cole tweeted photos of the scene.

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• Everything you wanted to know about modern network congestion control but were perhaps too afraid to ask

  In which a little unfairness can be quite beneficial
  Larry Peterson Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 08:28 UTC 2

  Systems Approach It’s hard not to be amazed by the amount of active research on congestion control over the past 30-plus years. From theory to practice, and with more than its fair share of flame wars, the question of how to manage congestion in the network is a technical challenge that resists an optimal solution while offering countless options for incremental improvement.

  This seems like a good time to take stock of where we are, and ask ourselves what might happen next.

  Congestion control is fundamentally an issue of resource allocation — trying to meet the competing demands that applications have for resources (in a network, these are primarily link bandwidth and router buffers), which ultimately reduces to deciding when to say no and to whom. The best framing of the problem I know traces back to a paper [PDF] by Frank Kelly in 1997, when he characterized congestion control as “a distributed algorithm to share network resources among competing sources, where the goal is to choose source rate so as to maximize aggregate source utility subject to capacity constraints.”

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• How business makes streaming faster and cheaper with CDN and HESP support

  Ensure a high video streaming transmission rate
  Alex Peterson, Head of G-Core Labs Streaming platform Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 07:30 UTC

  Paid Post Here is everything about how the HESP integration helps CDN and the streaming platform by G-Core Labs ensure a high video streaming transmission rate for e-sports and gaming, efficient scalability for e-learning and telemedicine and high quality and minimum latencies for online streams, media and TV broadcasters.

  HESP (High Efficiency Stream Protocol) is a brand new adaptive video streaming protocol. It allows delivery of content with latencies of up to 2 seconds without compromising video quality and broadcasting stability. Unlike comparable solutions, this protocol requires less bandwidth for streaming, which allows businesses to save a lot of money on delivery of content to a large audience.

  Since HESP is based on HTTP, it is suitable for video transmission over CDNs. G-Core Labs was among the world’s first companies to have embedded this protocol in its CDN. With 120 points of presence across 5 continents and over 6,000 peer-to-peer partners, this allows a service provider to deliver videos to millions of viewers, to any devices, anywhere in the world without compromising even 8K video quality. And all this comes at a minimum streaming cost.

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• Cisco deprecates Microsoft management integrations for UCS servers

  Working on Azure integration – but not there yet
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 07:08 UTC

  Cisco has deprecated support for some third-party management integrations for its UCS servers, and emerged unable to play nice with Microsoft's most recent offerings.

  Late last week the server contender slipped out an end-of-life notice [PDF] for integrations with Microsoft System Center's Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager. Support for plugins to VMware vCenter Orchestrator and vRealize Orchestrator have also been taken out behind an empty rack with a shotgun.

  The Register inquired about the deprecations, and has good news and bad news.

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• Protonmail celebrates Swiss court victory exempting it from telco data retention laws

  Doesn't stop local courts' surveillance orders, though
  Gareth Corfield Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 06:29 UTC 9

  Encrypted email provider Protonmail has hailed a recent Swiss legal ruling as a "victory for privacy," after winning a lawsuit that sees it exempted from data retention laws in the mountainous realm.

  Referring to a previous ruling that exempted instant messaging services from data capture and storage laws, the Protonmail team said this week: "Together, these two rulings are a victory for privacy in Switzerland as many Swiss companies are now exempted from handing over certain user information in response to Swiss legal orders."

  Switzerland's Federal Administrative Court ruled on October 22 that email providers in Switzerland are not considered telecommunications providers under Swiss law, thereby removing them from the scope of data retention requirements imposed on telcos.

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• Japan picks AWS and Google for first gov cloud push

  Local players passed over for Digital Agency’s first project
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 05:58 UTC

  Japan's Digital Agency has picked Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for its first big reform push.

  The Agency started operations in September 2021, years after efforts like the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) or Australia's Digital Transformation Agency (DTA). The body was a signature reform initiated by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who spent his year-long stint in the top job trying to curb Japan's reliance on paper documents, manual processes, and faxes. Japan's many government agencies also operated their websites independently of each other, most with their own design and interface.

  The new Agency therefore has a remit to "cut across all ministries" and "provide services that are driven not toward ministries, agency, laws, or systems, but toward users and to improve user-experience".

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• Singaporean minister touts internet 'kill switch' that finds kids reading net nasties and cuts 'em off ASAP

  Fancies a real-time crowdsourced content rating scheme too
  Team Register Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 05:15 UTC 13

  A Minister in the Singapore government has suggested the creation of an internet kill switch that would prevent minors from reading questionable material online – perhaps using ratings of content created in real time by crowdsourced contributors.

  "The post-COVID world will bring new challenges globally, including to us in the security arena," said Minister for Defence Dr Ng Eng Hen at a Tuesday ceremony to award the city-state's 2021 Defense Technology Prize.

  "For operations, the SAF (Singapore Armed Force) has to expand its capabilities in the digital domain. Whether for administrative or operational purposes, I think that we will need to leverage technology to the maximum," he declared.

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