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• Bug in WebKit's IndexedDB implementation makes Safari 15 leak Google account info... and more

  Glitch is spilling private data and there's not much Apple users can do about it
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 18:31 UTC

  An improperly implemented API that stores data on browsers has caused a vulnerability in Safari 15 that leaks user internet activity and personal identifiers.

  The vulnerability was discovered by fraud detection service Fingerprint JS, which has contacted the WebKit maintainers and provided a public source code repository.

  As of 28 November last year, the issue had not been fixed, so the team at Fingerprint JS decided to make the finding public to encourage the expedition of its repair.

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• Buy 'em by the punnet: Raspberry Pi offers RP2040 chips in bulk

  'Reel'-y cheap – like $0.70 a pop
  Liam Proven in Prague Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 17:28 UTC 2

  If you only need the smallest of Raspberry Pi chips, but you need a lot of them, you can now buy the gang's RP2040 microcontrollers directly from the farm supplier in lots of 500 or 3,400.

  Because the Raspberry Pi range is so cheap, people use lots of them – even in places where a complete Linux computer is arguably overkill. That's probably why, this time last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the Raspberry Pi Pico, a $4 device based around the RP2040 microcontroller – its first in-house CPU design.

  The end-user version of the Pi Pico is a tiny PCB containing the RP2040 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and 2 MB of flash memory. (The board is a hair over 2×5cm, so only slightly bigger than an old-style DIP chip such as a Z80.) The RP2040 is still an ARM, but a tiny one: a dual-core 133 MHz Cortex M0+, plus 264 kB of RAM.

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• Ukraine blames Belarus for PC-wiping 'ransomware' that has no recovery method and nukes target boxen

  And for last week's digital graffiti operations, too
  Gareth Corfield Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 16:24 UTC 4

  After last week's website defacements, Ukraine is now being targeted by boot record-wiping malware that looks like ransomware but with one crucial difference: there's no recovery method. Officials have pointed the finger at Belarus.

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• Move over exoplanets, exomoons are the next big thing

  Is that an extremely large moon we see outside the solar system, astro-boffins ask themselves
  Lindsay Clark Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 15:25 UTC 8

  Scientists have spotted a new candidate for a moon existing outside of our solar system, with only a 1 per cent chance the observation could be an anomaly.

  More than 4,000 exoplanets have been mapped since the first was found in 1992. Although the finding of worlds beyond the Earth's immediate star system generated much excitement at the time, exoplanets are not so rare a discovery in recent years: US space agency NASA once found 700 in a single haul.

  However, the existence of moons outside the solar system has yet to be confirmed. Going with the thinking that there's nothing particularly special about our own solar system, which is host to more than 200 moons, then we might assume they are also commonplace elsewhere.

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• Cloud spending back to business as usual at end of 2021: Slight slowdown was a blip due to overprovisioning

  IDC figures suggest providers had extra inventory to shift after pandemic panic
  Dan Robinson Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 14:29 UTC

  Spending on compute and storage infrastructure for the cloud rose by 6.6 per cent during the last quarter following a cooldown in the middle of 2021 due to overprovisioning by cloud providers in response to the pandemic.

  The figures come from IDC's latest worldwide quarterly enterprise infra tracker that traces buyer and cloud deployment. The report shows that spending on compute and storage infrastructure products increased to $18.6bn during the third quarter of fiscal 2021.

  This resumes the underlying trend of net positive year-on-year spending growth in each quarter, which, according to IDC, saw a dip in the second quarter of 2021 when spending actually decreased by 1.9 per cent.

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• Umbrella company Parasol Group confirms cyber attack as 'root cause' of prolonged network outage

  'Malicious activity on our network' spotted, says CEO, as some contractors say they've still not been paid
  Paul Kunert Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 13:28 UTC 9

  Umbrella company Parasol Group has confirmed why it shut down part of its IT last week: it found unauthorised activity from an intruder.

  As reported by us on Friday, the umbrella company's MyParasol portal, where timesheets are submitted, was not accessible due to a multi-day outage starting on 12 January, impacting the processing of payroll.

  Tech freelancers suspected a cyberattack was to blame for the blackout and sure enough the Group wrote to customers at the close of last working week to explain in more detail what had happened.

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• Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

  Sorry, that IP address is on the naughty step
  Richard Speed Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 12:24 UTC 29

  Microsoft appears to have delivered the unwanted Christmas gift of email blocklisting to Linode IP addresses, and two weeks into 2022 the company does not seem ready to relent.

  Problems started as large chunks of the world began packing up for the festive period. Complaints cropped up on Linode's support forums when customers began encountering problems sending email to Microsoft 365 accounts from their own email servers.

  On that thread, a Linode staffer acknowledged there was an issue and suggested a number of alternative third-party email services as a stopgap as well as saying: "Microsoft has acknowledge[d] the problem and looking into it [sic]."

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• Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

  Nobody expects the Linux malposition, do they, Michael Palin?
  Liam Proven in Prague Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 11:34 UTC 31

  Feeling old yet? Let the Reg ruin your day for you. We are now substantially closer to the 2038 problem (5,849 days) than it has been since the Year 2000 problem (yep, 8,049 days since Y2K).

  Why do we mention it? Well, thanks to keen-eyed Reg reader Calum Morrison, we've spotted a bit of the former, and a hint of what lies beneath the Beeb's digital presence, when he sent in a snapshot that implies Old Auntie might be using a 32-bit Linux in iPlayer, and something with a kernel older than Linux 5.10, too.

  That 2020 kernel release was the first able to serve as a base for a 32-bit system designed to run beyond 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

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• Edge computing set for growth – that is, when we can agree what it is

  Analyst predicts double-digit percentage uptick in '22
  Dan Robinson Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 10:28 UTC 9

  Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to see double-digit growth this year, according to new figures from analyst IDC.

  It also predicted investments in edge will reach $176bn in 2022, an increase of 14.8 per cent over last year.

  "Edge computing continues to gain momentum as digital-first organisations seek to innovate outside of the data centre," IDC research vice president Dave McCarthy said in a statement, adding that the diverse needs of edge deployments have created a market opportunity for technology suppliers, increasingly through partnerships and alliances.

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• Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

  Stop horsing around. Pony up
  Rupert Goodwins Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 09:30 UTC 48

  Opinion There's much talk of the Open Source Sustainability Problem. From individual developers to Google's White House lobbying, the issue seems simple but intractable. Is the willingness of volunteer coders a solid enough basis for the long-term health of essential infrastructure?

  This is, of course, balderdash. It's not an open source problem, it's a software problem. All software needs resources to adapt as the working environment changes, resources the changed environment may not provide. Look how many out-of-support versions of Windows still limp on like superannuated footy players in the Sunday leagues.

  According to StatCounter, as of December 2021, one in seven PCs still runs Windows 7. One in 200 is on XP. Try getting Microsoft to update either.

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• Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

  Please Mr Hitchcock, no more. The UPS can't take it
  Richard Speed Mon 17 Jan 2022 // 08:34 UTC 104

  Who, Me? "Expect the unexpected" is a cliché regularly trotted out during disaster planning. But how far should those plans go? Welcome to an episode of Who, Me? where a reader finds an entirely new failure mode.

  Today's tale comes from "Brian" (not his name) and is set during a period when the US state of California was facing rolling blackouts.

  Our reader was working for a struggling hardware vendor in the state, a once mighty power now reduced to a mere 1,400 employees thanks to that old favourite of the HR axe-wielder: "restructuring."

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