AlmaLinux comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

IBM offers real-time fraud detection in new z16 mainframe

Big iron also claimed to be ‘quantum-safe’ to protect against future hacks

IBM has lifted the covers off the z16, the newest member of its Z Series mainframe family which focuses on the financial services industry with a new processor that has built-in AI acceleration for real-time fraud detection.

The z16, generally available from May 31, is the successor to the Z15 that launched back in 2019, and Big Blue will be hoping that it can replicate the success of that system which was adopted by many banks. A new mainframe typically delivers a spike in revenue to IBM because plenty of such customers rely on them as a mission-critical part of their business and are keen to upgrade.

For the z16, the new capabilities come in the shape of the “Telum” processor, which adds on-chip AI inferencing capabilities that IBM claims can be used to run real-time fraud detection checks against a transaction, while that transaction is taking place.

Epic Games’ court dates with Apple and Google pushed into 2024

Judge ponders battle royale between all three to avoid unhelpful overlaps

Proceedings in the legal dispute between Epic Games and Apple have bogged down in Australia, and won’t reach a courtroom until 2024.

A Monday ruling of the nation’s Federal Court decided that, as Google and Epic are also fighting over essentially the same issues, it makes no sense for Epic and Apple to air their grievances separately, as was planned for November 2022.

Google now requires two staff to sign off each Go change

Move is supposed to be double-plus good for supply-chain security

Google is planning to tighten the security around its open source Go programming language by requiring two Google employees to be involved in code changes, where previously only one approver needed to be company-affiliated.

“For compliance and supply chain security reasons, Google recently revisited the code review requirements we use in all settings, both internal development and open source,” explained Russ Cox, distinguished engineer at Google, in a note to the golang mailing list on Monday.

“We are now required to have two Google employees review each change before it is shipped to users, which for most of our tools means submitted in [code review system] Gerrit.”

Xiaomi adds earthquake alert system to some smartphones

Customers in Indonesia promised warning of wobbles sooner than is otherwise possible

Xiaomi has added an earthquake alert system to some of its smartphones, starting with a trial in Indonesia, as a result of a collaboration between the smartphone maker and Indonesian and Chinese government-supported agencies.

Available on handsets running versions 12, 12.5 and 13 of Xiaomi’s “MIUI” Android fork, the Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) feature alerts users in Indonesia of nearby tremors – if they have data service and authorize the service.

The Chinese phone-maker claims the system “gives people seconds to tens of seconds warning time prior to the arrival of secondary waves, by leveraging the speed of electric waves that is naturally much faster than the speed of secondary waves.”

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Crooks used RAT to hijack superusers at India’s Mahesh Bank, stole millions

An Indian bank that did not have a valid firewall license, had not employed phishing protection, lacked an intrusion detection system and eschewed use of any intrusion prevention system has, shockingly, been compromised by criminals who made off with millions of rupees.

The unfortunate institution is called the Andra Pradesh Mahesh Co-Operative Urban Bank. Its 45 branches and just under $400 million of deposits make it one of India’s smaller banks.

It certainly thinks small about security – at least according to Hyderabad City Police, which last week detailed an attack on the Bank that started with over 200 phishing emails being sent across three days in November 2021. At least one of those mails succeeded in fooling staff, resulting in the installation of a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

Beijing bails out bankrupt Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup

This matters for China – and for HPE, Intel … and possibly Apple

A consortium led by Chinese government-backed Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co. Ltd (JAC Capital) has injected $9.4 billion into ailing Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup, in a deal that will be appreciated by many big tech industry players.

Tsinghua Unigroup is a vast conglomerate that was spun out of Tsinghua University in Beijing and in 2015 had sufficient muscle to make a $23 billion bid for Micron Technology (which failed). The organization now consists of five units:

Microsoft arms Azure VMs with Ampere Altra chips

‘Up to 50%’ better price-performance than x86 equivalents … Well, 2% is still up to 50%, we guess

Microsoft claims its latest Arm-powered Azure virtual machines can provide up to 50 percent better price-performance than similar instances using x86 processors. The keywords here are “up to” as it matters whether or not you’re relying on hyperthreading on the x86 systems.

The computing giant announced Monday that it is now previewing new D- and E-series VMs that use the Arm-compatible Altra server processors from chip startup Ampere Computing. The new Dpsv5 series is built for a variety of Linux enterprise application types, from web servers and .NET applications to open-source databases and application servers, while the new Epsv5 series is meant for memory-intensive Linux workloads, which includes data analytics, in-memory caching applications and gaming.

Evan Burness, principal program manager for Microsoft’s Azure HPC business, offered some important context to the 50 percent price-performance claim on Twitter. He said the Altra Arm-based VMs are capable of providing such an uplift when compared to similar x86 instances that have hyperthreading, or simultaneous multi-threading, turned on and in use. When hyperthreading is enabled on the x86 VMs, each physical processor core is represented by two virtual cores.

Mailchimp: Crook stole cryptocurrency clients’ mailing-list subscriber info

Staff socially engineered into handing over internal system credentials

Mailchimp has confirmed a miscreant gained access to one of its internal tools and used it to steal data belonging to 100-plus high-value customers.

The clients were all in cryptocurrency and finance-related industries, according to Mailchimp. “Our findings show that this was a targeted incident,” the mailing-list giant’s CISO Siobhan Smyth said in a statement to The Register on Monday.

Rumors of the intrusion surfaced on Twitter over the weekend: on Sunday, hardware cryptocurrency wallet maker Trezor, whose website is trezor.io, warned someone was sending out emails from noreply[at]trezor[dot]us containing a link to malware designed to harvest wallet owners’ information.

Wing launches drone deliveries in the US where people actually live

Everything’s bigger in Texas, even the flying package-slinging robots

Wing will this Thursday launch a commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area, a first for the Alphabet-owned startup.

The company was spun out of X, Google’s moonshot lab, in 2018 to build and operate a drone-delivery business. Since then, Wing has set up operations in Helsinki, Finland, and Canberra, Australia to bring shoppers all sorts of items, from biscuits to burgers, to their doors. It also operates in the US in Christiansburg, Virginia, and is expanding to its first urban area within the country this week: the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

If your internet megaphone lands you in enough trouble, might as well own part of it

Social media service Twitter saw its stock surge on Monday because tech thinkfluencer Elon Musk took a 9.2 percent stake in the company.

Musk acquired his share in the firm on March 14, and before the sale was disclosed to the public on Monday, April 4, in an SEC filing, he used Twitter – a free social media service – to freely impugn Twitter for exercising its constitutionally protected right to moderate speech on its platform. Twitter stock is up 27 percent right now.

“Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote to caption a Twitter poll. “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

Mandiant shareholder sues to block $5.4b Google deal

Investors given ‘materially incomplete and misleading’ info, it is claimed

A Mandiant shareholder has launched a legal challenge to block Google’s $5.4 billion takeover of the threat intelligence firm.

According to a lawsuit filed in a New York federal district court by shareholder Shiva Stein, Mandiant made “materially incomplete and misleading” statements to investors in financial documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the planned acquisition. 

On March 31, the cybersecurity company filed a proxy statement [PDF] with the SEC about the Google deal. Mandiant also distributed financial documents to shareholders and recommended they vote in favor of the transaction, under which Mandiant will become a wholly-owned Google subsidiary.

IBM offers real-time fraud detection in new z16 mainframe

Big iron also claimed to be ‘quantum-safe’ to protect against future hacks

IBM has lifted the covers off the z16, the newest member of its Z Series mainframe family which focuses on the financial services industry with a new processor that has built-in AI acceleration for real-time fraud detection.

The z16, generally available from May 31, is the successor to the Z15 that launched back in 2019, and Big Blue will be hoping that it can replicate the success of that system which was adopted by many banks. A new mainframe typically delivers a spike in revenue to IBM because plenty of such customers rely on them as a mission-critical part of their business and are keen to upgrade.

For the z16, the new capabilities come in the shape of the “Telum” processor, which adds on-chip AI inferencing capabilities that IBM claims can be used to run real-time fraud detection checks against a transaction, while that transaction is taking place.

Epic Games’ court dates with Apple and Google pushed into 2024

Judge ponders battle royale between all three to avoid unhelpful overlaps

Proceedings in the legal dispute between Epic Games and Apple have bogged down in Australia, and won’t reach a courtroom until 2024.

A Monday ruling of the nation’s Federal Court decided that, as Google and Epic are also fighting over essentially the same issues, it makes no sense for Epic and Apple to air their grievances separately, as was planned for November 2022.

Google now requires two staff to sign off each Go change

Move is supposed to be double-plus good for supply-chain security

Google is planning to tighten the security around its open source Go programming language by requiring two Google employees to be involved in code changes, where previously only one approver needed to be company-affiliated.

“For compliance and supply chain security reasons, Google recently revisited the code review requirements we use in all settings, both internal development and open source,” explained Russ Cox, distinguished engineer at Google, in a note to the golang mailing list on Monday.

“We are now required to have two Google employees review each change before it is shipped to users, which for most of our tools means submitted in [code review system] Gerrit.”

Xiaomi adds earthquake alert system to some smartphones

Customers in Indonesia promised warning of wobbles sooner than is otherwise possible

Xiaomi has added an earthquake alert system to some of its smartphones, starting with a trial in Indonesia, as a result of a collaboration between the smartphone maker and Indonesian and Chinese government-supported agencies.

Available on handsets running versions 12, 12.5 and 13 of Xiaomi’s “MIUI” Android fork, the Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) feature alerts users in Indonesia of nearby tremors – if they have data service and authorize the service.

The Chinese phone-maker claims the system “gives people seconds to tens of seconds warning time prior to the arrival of secondary waves, by leveraging the speed of electric waves that is naturally much faster than the speed of secondary waves.”

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Crooks used RAT to hijack superusers at India’s Mahesh Bank, stole millions

An Indian bank that did not have a valid firewall license, had not employed phishing protection, lacked an intrusion detection system and eschewed use of any intrusion prevention system has, shockingly, been compromised by criminals who made off with millions of rupees.

The unfortunate institution is called the Andra Pradesh Mahesh Co-Operative Urban Bank. Its 45 branches and just under $400 million of deposits make it one of India’s smaller banks.

It certainly thinks small about security – at least according to Hyderabad City Police, which last week detailed an attack on the Bank that started with over 200 phishing emails being sent across three days in November 2021. At least one of those mails succeeded in fooling staff, resulting in the installation of a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

Beijing bails out bankrupt Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup

This matters for China – and for HPE, Intel … and possibly Apple

A consortium led by Chinese government-backed Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co. Ltd (JAC Capital) has injected $9.4 billion into ailing Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup, in a deal that will be appreciated by many big tech industry players.

Tsinghua Unigroup is a vast conglomerate that was spun out of Tsinghua University in Beijing and in 2015 had sufficient muscle to make a $23 billion bid for Micron Technology (which failed). The organization now consists of five units:

Microsoft arms Azure VMs with Ampere Altra chips

‘Up to 50%’ better price-performance than x86 equivalents … Well, 2% is still up to 50%, we guess

Microsoft claims its latest Arm-powered Azure virtual machines can provide up to 50 percent better price-performance than similar instances using x86 processors. The keywords here are “up to” as it matters whether or not you’re relying on hyperthreading on the x86 systems.

The computing giant announced Monday that it is now previewing new D- and E-series VMs that use the Arm-compatible Altra server processors from chip startup Ampere Computing. The new Dpsv5 series is built for a variety of Linux enterprise application types, from web servers and .NET applications to open-source databases and application servers, while the new Epsv5 series is meant for memory-intensive Linux workloads, which includes data analytics, in-memory caching applications and gaming.

Evan Burness, principal program manager for Microsoft’s Azure HPC business, offered some important context to the 50 percent price-performance claim on Twitter. He said the Altra Arm-based VMs are capable of providing such an uplift when compared to similar x86 instances that have hyperthreading, or simultaneous multi-threading, turned on and in use. When hyperthreading is enabled on the x86 VMs, each physical processor core is represented by two virtual cores.

Mailchimp: Crook stole cryptocurrency clients’ mailing-list subscriber info

Staff socially engineered into handing over internal system credentials

Mailchimp has confirmed a miscreant gained access to one of its internal tools and used it to steal data belonging to 100-plus high-value customers.

The clients were all in cryptocurrency and finance-related industries, according to Mailchimp. “Our findings show that this was a targeted incident,” the mailing-list giant’s CISO Siobhan Smyth said in a statement to The Register on Monday.

Rumors of the intrusion surfaced on Twitter over the weekend: on Sunday, hardware cryptocurrency wallet maker Trezor, whose website is trezor.io, warned someone was sending out emails from noreply[at]trezor[dot]us containing a link to malware designed to harvest wallet owners’ information.

Wing launches drone deliveries in the US where people actually live

Everything’s bigger in Texas, even the flying package-slinging robots

Wing will this Thursday launch a commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area, a first for the Alphabet-owned startup.

The company was spun out of X, Google’s moonshot lab, in 2018 to build and operate a drone-delivery business. Since then, Wing has set up operations in Helsinki, Finland, and Canberra, Australia to bring shoppers all sorts of items, from biscuits to burgers, to their doors. It also operates in the US in Christiansburg, Virginia, and is expanding to its first urban area within the country this week: the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

If your internet megaphone lands you in enough trouble, might as well own part of it

Social media service Twitter saw its stock surge on Monday because tech thinkfluencer Elon Musk took a 9.2 percent stake in the company.

Musk acquired his share in the firm on March 14, and before the sale was disclosed to the public on Monday, April 4, in an SEC filing, he used Twitter – a free social media service – to freely impugn Twitter for exercising its constitutionally protected right to moderate speech on its platform. Twitter stock is up 27 percent right now.

“Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote to caption a Twitter poll. “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

Mandiant shareholder sues to block $5.4b Google deal

Investors given ‘materially incomplete and misleading’ info, it is claimed

A Mandiant shareholder has launched a legal challenge to block Google’s $5.4 billion takeover of the threat intelligence firm.

According to a lawsuit filed in a New York federal district court by shareholder Shiva Stein, Mandiant made “materially incomplete and misleading” statements to investors in financial documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the planned acquisition. 

On March 31, the cybersecurity company filed a proxy statement [PDF] with the SEC about the Google deal. Mandiant also distributed financial documents to shareholders and recommended they vote in favor of the transaction, under which Mandiant will become a wholly-owned Google subsidiary.

IBM offers real-time fraud detection in new z16 mainframe

Big iron also claimed to be ‘quantum-safe’ to protect against future hacks

IBM has lifted the covers off the z16, the newest member of its Z Series mainframe family which focuses on the financial services industry with a new processor that has built-in AI acceleration for real-time fraud detection.

The z16, generally available from May 31, is the successor to the Z15 that launched back in 2019, and Big Blue will be hoping that it can replicate the success of that system which was adopted by many banks. A new mainframe typically delivers a spike in revenue to IBM because plenty of such customers rely on them as a mission-critical part of their business and are keen to upgrade.

For the z16, the new capabilities come in the shape of the “Telum” processor, which adds on-chip AI inferencing capabilities that IBM claims can be used to run real-time fraud detection checks against a transaction, while that transaction is taking place.

Epic Games’ court dates with Apple and Google pushed into 2024

Judge ponders battle royale between all three to avoid unhelpful overlaps

Proceedings in the legal dispute between Epic Games and Apple have bogged down in Australia, and won’t reach a courtroom until 2024.

A Monday ruling of the nation’s Federal Court decided that, as Google and Epic are also fighting over essentially the same issues, it makes no sense for Epic and Apple to air their grievances separately, as was planned for November 2022.

Google now requires two staff to sign off each Go change

Move is supposed to be double-plus good for supply-chain security

Google is planning to tighten the security around its open source Go programming language by requiring two Google employees to be involved in code changes, where previously only one approver needed to be company-affiliated.

“For compliance and supply chain security reasons, Google recently revisited the code review requirements we use in all settings, both internal development and open source,” explained Russ Cox, distinguished engineer at Google, in a note to the golang mailing list on Monday.

“We are now required to have two Google employees review each change before it is shipped to users, which for most of our tools means submitted in [code review system] Gerrit.”

Xiaomi adds earthquake alert system to some smartphones

Customers in Indonesia promised warning of wobbles sooner than is otherwise possible

Xiaomi has added an earthquake alert system to some of its smartphones, starting with a trial in Indonesia, as a result of a collaboration between the smartphone maker and Indonesian and Chinese government-supported agencies.

Available on handsets running versions 12, 12.5 and 13 of Xiaomi’s “MIUI” Android fork, the Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) feature alerts users in Indonesia of nearby tremors – if they have data service and authorize the service.

The Chinese phone-maker claims the system “gives people seconds to tens of seconds warning time prior to the arrival of secondary waves, by leveraging the speed of electric waves that is naturally much faster than the speed of secondary waves.”

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Crooks used RAT to hijack superusers at India’s Mahesh Bank, stole millions

An Indian bank that did not have a valid firewall license, had not employed phishing protection, lacked an intrusion detection system and eschewed use of any intrusion prevention system has, shockingly, been compromised by criminals who made off with millions of rupees.

The unfortunate institution is called the Andra Pradesh Mahesh Co-Operative Urban Bank. Its 45 branches and just under $400 million of deposits make it one of India’s smaller banks.

It certainly thinks small about security – at least according to Hyderabad City Police, which last week detailed an attack on the Bank that started with over 200 phishing emails being sent across three days in November 2021. At least one of those mails succeeded in fooling staff, resulting in the installation of a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

Beijing bails out bankrupt Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup

This matters for China – and for HPE, Intel … and possibly Apple

A consortium led by Chinese government-backed Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co. Ltd (JAC Capital) has injected $9.4 billion into ailing Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup, in a deal that will be appreciated by many big tech industry players.

Tsinghua Unigroup is a vast conglomerate that was spun out of Tsinghua University in Beijing and in 2015 had sufficient muscle to make a $23 billion bid for Micron Technology (which failed). The organization now consists of five units:

Microsoft arms Azure VMs with Ampere Altra chips

‘Up to 50%’ better price-performance than x86 equivalents … Well, 2% is still up to 50%, we guess

Microsoft claims its latest Arm-powered Azure virtual machines can provide up to 50 percent better price-performance than similar instances using x86 processors. The keywords here are “up to” as it matters whether or not you’re relying on hyperthreading on the x86 systems.

The computing giant announced Monday that it is now previewing new D- and E-series VMs that use the Arm-compatible Altra server processors from chip startup Ampere Computing. The new Dpsv5 series is built for a variety of Linux enterprise application types, from web servers and .NET applications to open-source databases and application servers, while the new Epsv5 series is meant for memory-intensive Linux workloads, which includes data analytics, in-memory caching applications and gaming.

Evan Burness, principal program manager for Microsoft’s Azure HPC business, offered some important context to the 50 percent price-performance claim on Twitter. He said the Altra Arm-based VMs are capable of providing such an uplift when compared to similar x86 instances that have hyperthreading, or simultaneous multi-threading, turned on and in use. When hyperthreading is enabled on the x86 VMs, each physical processor core is represented by two virtual cores.

Mailchimp: Crook stole cryptocurrency clients’ mailing-list subscriber info

Staff socially engineered into handing over internal system credentials

Mailchimp has confirmed a miscreant gained access to one of its internal tools and used it to steal data belonging to 100-plus high-value customers.

The clients were all in cryptocurrency and finance-related industries, according to Mailchimp. “Our findings show that this was a targeted incident,” the mailing-list giant’s CISO Siobhan Smyth said in a statement to The Register on Monday.

Rumors of the intrusion surfaced on Twitter over the weekend: on Sunday, hardware cryptocurrency wallet maker Trezor, whose website is trezor.io, warned someone was sending out emails from noreply[at]trezor[dot]us containing a link to malware designed to harvest wallet owners’ information.

Wing launches drone deliveries in the US where people actually live

Everything’s bigger in Texas, even the flying package-slinging robots

Wing will this Thursday launch a commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area, a first for the Alphabet-owned startup.

The company was spun out of X, Google’s moonshot lab, in 2018 to build and operate a drone-delivery business. Since then, Wing has set up operations in Helsinki, Finland, and Canberra, Australia to bring shoppers all sorts of items, from biscuits to burgers, to their doors. It also operates in the US in Christiansburg, Virginia, and is expanding to its first urban area within the country this week: the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

If your internet megaphone lands you in enough trouble, might as well own part of it

Social media service Twitter saw its stock surge on Monday because tech thinkfluencer Elon Musk took a 9.2 percent stake in the company.

Musk acquired his share in the firm on March 14, and before the sale was disclosed to the public on Monday, April 4, in an SEC filing, he used Twitter – a free social media service – to freely impugn Twitter for exercising its constitutionally protected right to moderate speech on its platform. Twitter stock is up 27 percent right now.

“Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote to caption a Twitter poll. “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

Mandiant shareholder sues to block $5.4b Google deal

Investors given ‘materially incomplete and misleading’ info, it is claimed

A Mandiant shareholder has launched a legal challenge to block Google’s $5.4 billion takeover of the threat intelligence firm.

According to a lawsuit filed in a New York federal district court by shareholder Shiva Stein, Mandiant made “materially incomplete and misleading” statements to investors in financial documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the planned acquisition. 

On March 31, the cybersecurity company filed a proxy statement [PDF] with the SEC about the Google deal. Mandiant also distributed financial documents to shareholders and recommended they vote in favor of the transaction, under which Mandiant will become a wholly-owned Google subsidiary.

IBM offers real-time fraud detection in new z16 mainframe

Big iron also claimed to be ‘quantum-safe’ to protect against future hacks

IBM has lifted the covers off the z16, the newest member of its Z Series mainframe family which focuses on the financial services industry with a new processor that has built-in AI acceleration for real-time fraud detection.

The z16, generally available from May 31, is the successor to the Z15 that launched back in 2019, and Big Blue will be hoping that it can replicate the success of that system which was adopted by many banks. A new mainframe typically delivers a spike in revenue to IBM because plenty of such customers rely on them as a mission-critical part of their business and are keen to upgrade.

For the z16, the new capabilities come in the shape of the “Telum” processor, which adds on-chip AI inferencing capabilities that IBM claims can be used to run real-time fraud detection checks against a transaction, while that transaction is taking place.

Epic Games’ court dates with Apple and Google pushed into 2024

Judge ponders battle royale between all three to avoid unhelpful overlaps

Proceedings in the legal dispute between Epic Games and Apple have bogged down in Australia, and won’t reach a courtroom until 2024.

A Monday ruling of the nation’s Federal Court decided that, as Google and Epic are also fighting over essentially the same issues, it makes no sense for Epic and Apple to air their grievances separately, as was planned for November 2022.

Google now requires two staff to sign off each Go change

Move is supposed to be double-plus good for supply-chain security

Google is planning to tighten the security around its open source Go programming language by requiring two Google employees to be involved in code changes, where previously only one approver needed to be company-affiliated.

“For compliance and supply chain security reasons, Google recently revisited the code review requirements we use in all settings, both internal development and open source,” explained Russ Cox, distinguished engineer at Google, in a note to the golang mailing list on Monday.

“We are now required to have two Google employees review each change before it is shipped to users, which for most of our tools means submitted in [code review system] Gerrit.”

Xiaomi adds earthquake alert system to some smartphones

Customers in Indonesia promised warning of wobbles sooner than is otherwise possible

Xiaomi has added an earthquake alert system to some of its smartphones, starting with a trial in Indonesia, as a result of a collaboration between the smartphone maker and Indonesian and Chinese government-supported agencies.

Available on handsets running versions 12, 12.5 and 13 of Xiaomi’s “MIUI” Android fork, the Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) feature alerts users in Indonesia of nearby tremors – if they have data service and authorize the service.

The Chinese phone-maker claims the system “gives people seconds to tens of seconds warning time prior to the arrival of secondary waves, by leveraging the speed of electric waves that is naturally much faster than the speed of secondary waves.”

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Crooks used RAT to hijack superusers at India’s Mahesh Bank, stole millions

An Indian bank that did not have a valid firewall license, had not employed phishing protection, lacked an intrusion detection system and eschewed use of any intrusion prevention system has, shockingly, been compromised by criminals who made off with millions of rupees.

The unfortunate institution is called the Andra Pradesh Mahesh Co-Operative Urban Bank. Its 45 branches and just under $400 million of deposits make it one of India’s smaller banks.

It certainly thinks small about security – at least according to Hyderabad City Police, which last week detailed an attack on the Bank that started with over 200 phishing emails being sent across three days in November 2021. At least one of those mails succeeded in fooling staff, resulting in the installation of a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

Beijing bails out bankrupt Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup

This matters for China – and for HPE, Intel … and possibly Apple

A consortium led by Chinese government-backed Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co. Ltd (JAC Capital) has injected $9.4 billion into ailing Chinese chipmaker Tsinghua Unigroup, in a deal that will be appreciated by many big tech industry players.

Tsinghua Unigroup is a vast conglomerate that was spun out of Tsinghua University in Beijing and in 2015 had sufficient muscle to make a $23 billion bid for Micron Technology (which failed). The organization now consists of five units:

Microsoft arms Azure VMs with Ampere Altra chips

‘Up to 50%’ better price-performance than x86 equivalents … Well, 2% is still up to 50%, we guess

Microsoft claims its latest Arm-powered Azure virtual machines can provide up to 50 percent better price-performance than similar instances using x86 processors. The keywords here are “up to” as it matters whether or not you’re relying on hyperthreading on the x86 systems.

The computing giant announced Monday that it is now previewing new D- and E-series VMs that use the Arm-compatible Altra server processors from chip startup Ampere Computing. The new Dpsv5 series is built for a variety of Linux enterprise application types, from web servers and .NET applications to open-source databases and application servers, while the new Epsv5 series is meant for memory-intensive Linux workloads, which includes data analytics, in-memory caching applications and gaming.

Evan Burness, principal program manager for Microsoft’s Azure HPC business, offered some important context to the 50 percent price-performance claim on Twitter. He said the Altra Arm-based VMs are capable of providing such an uplift when compared to similar x86 instances that have hyperthreading, or simultaneous multi-threading, turned on and in use. When hyperthreading is enabled on the x86 VMs, each physical processor core is represented by two virtual cores.

Mailchimp: Crook stole cryptocurrency clients’ mailing-list subscriber info

Staff socially engineered into handing over internal system credentials

Mailchimp has confirmed a miscreant gained access to one of its internal tools and used it to steal data belonging to 100-plus high-value customers.

The clients were all in cryptocurrency and finance-related industries, according to Mailchimp. “Our findings show that this was a targeted incident,” the mailing-list giant’s CISO Siobhan Smyth said in a statement to The Register on Monday.

Rumors of the intrusion surfaced on Twitter over the weekend: on Sunday, hardware cryptocurrency wallet maker Trezor, whose website is trezor.io, warned someone was sending out emails from noreply[at]trezor[dot]us containing a link to malware designed to harvest wallet owners’ information.

Wing launches drone deliveries in the US where people actually live

Everything’s bigger in Texas, even the flying package-slinging robots

Wing will this Thursday launch a commercial drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area, a first for the Alphabet-owned startup.

The company was spun out of X, Google’s moonshot lab, in 2018 to build and operate a drone-delivery business. Since then, Wing has set up operations in Helsinki, Finland, and Canberra, Australia to bring shoppers all sorts of items, from biscuits to burgers, to their doors. It also operates in the US in Christiansburg, Virginia, and is expanding to its first urban area within the country this week: the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon

If your internet megaphone lands you in enough trouble, might as well own part of it

Social media service Twitter saw its stock surge on Monday because tech thinkfluencer Elon Musk took a 9.2 percent stake in the company.

Musk acquired his share in the firm on March 14, and before the sale was disclosed to the public on Monday, April 4, in an SEC filing, he used Twitter – a free social media service – to freely impugn Twitter for exercising its constitutionally protected right to moderate speech on its platform. Twitter stock is up 27 percent right now.

“Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote to caption a Twitter poll. “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

Mandiant shareholder sues to block $5.4b Google deal

Investors given ‘materially incomplete and misleading’ info, it is claimed

A Mandiant shareholder has launched a legal challenge to block Google’s $5.4 billion takeover of the threat intelligence firm.

According to a lawsuit filed in a New York federal district court by shareholder Shiva Stein, Mandiant made “materially incomplete and misleading” statements to investors in financial documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the planned acquisition. 

On March 31, the cybersecurity company filed a proxy statement [PDF] with the SEC about the Google deal. Mandiant also distributed financial documents to shareholders and recommended they vote in favor of the transaction, under which Mandiant will become a wholly-owned Google subsidiary.