Technology

Ten letters, starts with R, ends with E, three syllables

The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) in Scotland is fending off "an ongoing cyber incident" that has shut down its campuses.…

The iMac Pro is soon to be no more. First noted by 9to5Mac, TechCrunch has since confirmed with Apple that the company will stop selling the all-in-one once the current stock is depleted. From a report: One configuration of the desktop is still available through Apple's site, listed as "While Supplies Last" and priced at $5,000. Some other versions can also still be found from third-party retailers, as well, if you're so inclined.

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Metropolitan police hand keys to French outsourcer

Capgemini has won a £600m IT infrastructure deal from the UK's Metropolitan Police to run a service desk, data centres, and services management including the integration of other suppliers.…

The proliferation of cyberattacks by rivals is presenting a challenge to the Biden administration as it seeks to deter intrusions on government and corporate systems. From a report: Just as it plans to begin retaliating against Russia for the large-scale hacking of American government agencies and corporations discovered late last year, the Biden administration faces a new cyberattack that raises the question of whether it will have to strike back at another major adversary: China. Taken together, the responses will start to define how President Biden fashions his new administration's response to escalating cyberconflict and whether he can find a way to impose a steeper penalty on rivals who regularly exploit vulnerabilities in government and corporate defenses to spy, steal information and potentially damage critical components of the nation's infrastructure. The first major move is expected over the next three weeks, officials said, with a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks that are intended to be evident to President Vladimir V. Putin and his intelligence services and military but not to the wider world. The officials said the actions would be combined with some kind of economic sanctions -- though there are few truly effective sanctions left to impose -- and an executive order from Mr. Biden to accelerate the hardening of federal government networks after the Russian hacking, which went undetected for months until it was discovered by a private cybersecurity firm. The issue has taken on added urgency at the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in recent days after the public exposure of a major breach in Microsoft email systems used by small businesses, local governments and, by some accounts, key military contractors. Microsoft identified the intruders as a state-sponsored Chinese group and moved quickly to issue a patch to allow users of its software to close off the vulnerability. But that touched off a race between those responsible for patching the systems and a raft of new attackers -- including multiple other Chinese hacking groups, according to Microsoft -- who started using the same exploit this week.

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You're naming yourself wrong?

An iCloud customer says she spent more than six hours on the phone to Apple after being locked out of the service because her name is apparently incompatible with the application code.…

Plus: McAfee's in serious trouble over claimed cryptocurrency scam

In brief  Another form of malware installed in servers made vulnerable by flaws in SolarWinds' Orion management software has been spotted in the wild.…

IT pros from orgs large and small tell The Reg the tech delivered, mostly, but couriers and home Wi-Fi suddenly became your problem

Covid Logfile  Brianna Haley was given one day to be ready to roll out Zoom for 13,000 users at over 1,000 sites.…

"I am curious as to what other Slashdotters use for backing up of home machines," asks long-time Slashdot reader serviscope_minor: I moved away from the "bunch of disks with some off site" method. I found most of the methods generally had one or more of the following problems: poor Linux support, weak security (e.g. leaking file names), outrageously expensive, hard to set up, tied to a single storage supplier I don't fully trust, entirely proprietary (which makes me doubt long term stability), lack of file history, reputation for slowness, and so on. My current solution is Unixy: separate tools for separate jobs. Borg for backups to a local machine. Rclone for uploading to business cloud storage, versioned cloud storage to provide resistance against bitrot and other corruption. They're interested in "what other Slashdotters use," as well as "why and what your experience has been given more than superficial testing." So share you own thoughts in the comments. What do you use for backups at home?

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In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (as Windows crashes again)

BORK!BORK!BORK!  Getting astronauts to the Moon or Mars is the least of NASA's problems. Persuading Microsoft Windows not to fall over along the way is apparently a far greater challenge.…

Time to fix those legacy evils, though.... right?

Column  It is the monster which corrupts all it touches. It is an energy-sucking vampire that thrives on the pain it promotes. It cannot be killed, but grows afresh as each manifestation outdoes the last in awfulness and horror. It is Microsoft Exchange and its drooling minion, Outlook.…

Leads Works Ltd and Valca Vehicle and Life Cover Agency tried to exploit household finance fears in lockdown, says data watchdog

Two businesses that dispatched more than 2.6 million nuisance text messages seeking to exploit lower household incomes during Britain’s first lockdown are nursing a combined financial penalty of £330,000 from the UK’s data watchdog.…

"The new Google Pay app came out of beta this week, and it marks the first step in a major upheaval in the Google Pay service," writes Ars Technica, complaining "Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service." The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called "Google Pay...." The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the U.S. on April 5... - If you want to continue using New Google Pay, you'll have to go find and download a totally new app. - NFC tap-and-pay functionality won't really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won't use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You'll be required to make a new account. - You won't be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too. - On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the U.S. on April 5, and New Google Pay won't support doing anything from the web. You won't be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser. - In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has "a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card..." The worst part of it all is that, like the move from Google Music to YouTube Music, there is no reward at the end of this transition. Besides sending out an email, Google also created a support page and a notice at the top of pay.google.com, Ars Technica reports. But they call it "yet anothre annoying transition... an occurrence that's getting more frequent and more annoying in recent years, thanks to similar Google shutdowns of Google Play Music, Cloud Print, Inbox, Works with Nest, the ongoing Hangouts situation, and many others."

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Let us tell you a tale of the Mailman's Apprentice

Who, Me?  The weekend is over and Monday is here. Celebrate your IT prowess with another there-but-for-the-grace confession from the Who, Me? archives.…

Perseverance takes first drive around landing spot named in honor of seminal sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler

NASA’s Perseverance rover trekked across Mars for the first time last Thursday, March 4, 2021.…

Without Honor, or 5G silicon, there can be no victory

Oppo has become China’s top smartphone brand for the first time, according to analyst house Counterpoint.…

The Next Web tells the story of an AI researcher who discovered the results of a machine learning research paper couldn't be reproduced. But then they'd heard similar stories from Reddit's Machine Learning forum: "Easier to compile a list of reproducible ones...," one user responded. "Probably 50%-75% of all papers are unreproducible. It's sad, but it's true," another user wrote. "Think about it, most papers are 'optimized' to get into a conference. More often than not the authors know that a paper they're trying to get into a conference isn't very good! So they don't have to worry about reproducibility because nobody will try to reproduce them." A few other users posted links to machine learning papers they had failed to implement and voiced their frustration with code implementation not being a requirement in ML conferences. The next day, ContributionSecure14 created "Papers Without Code," a website that aims to create a centralized list of machine learning papers that are not implementable... Papers Without Code includes a submission page, where researchers can submit unreproducible machine learning papers along with the details of their efforts, such as how much time they spent trying to reproduce the results... If the authors do not reply in a timely fashion, the paper will be added to the list of unreproducible machine learning papers.

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Don't just patch, check for p0wnage, says top natsec team

The Biden administration has urged users of Microsoft's Exchange mail and messaging server to ensure they have not fallen victim to the recently-detected "Hafnium" attack on Exchange Server that Microsoft says originated in China.…

Will go live in 2022 and ‘effectively double’ capacity in the Middle Kingdom

Microsoft has revealed it plans to open a fifth Azure region in China.…

The Associated Press reports: After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday. The program in the Northern California city of Stockton was the highest-profile experiment in the U.S. of a universal basic income, where everyone gets a guaranteed amount per month for free... Stockton was an ideal place, given its proximity to Silicon Valley and the eagerness of the state's tech titans to fund the experiment as they grapple with how to prepare for job losses that could come with automation and artificial intelligence. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration launched in February 2019, selecting a group of 125 people who lived in census tracts at or below the city's median household income of $46,033. The program did not use tax dollars, but was financed by private donations, including a nonprofit led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. A pair of independent researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania reviewed data from the first year of the study, which did not overlap with the pandemic. A second study looking at year two is scheduled to be released next year. When the program started in February 2019, 28% of the people slated to get the free money had full-time jobs. One year later, 40% of those people had full-time jobs. A control group of people who did not get the money saw a 5 percentage point increase in full-time employment over that same time period. "These numbers were incredible. I hardly believed them myself," said Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who analyzed the data along with Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The Stockton mayor who'd started the program told reporters to "tell your friends, tell your cousins, that guaranteed income did not make people stop working."

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Side-channel ring race 'hard to mitigate with existing defenses'

Chip-busting boffins in America have devised yet another way to filch sensitive data by exploiting Intel's processor design choices.…