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Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Boffins devise five attacks to expose private files

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 20:58 UTC

Mega, the New Zealand-based file-sharing biz co-founded a decade ago by Kim Dotcom, promotes its "privacy by design" and user-controlled encryption keys to claim that data stored on Mega's servers can only be accessed by customers, even if its main system is taken over by law enforcement or others.
The design of the service, however, falls short of that promise thanks to poorly implemented encryption. Cryptography experts at ETH Zurich in Switzerland on Tuesday published a paper describing five possible attacks that can compromise the confidentiality of users' files.
The paper [PDF], titled "Mega: Malleable Encryption Goes Awry," by ETH cryptography researchers Matilda Backendal and Miro Haller, and computer science professor Kenneth Paterson, identifies "significant shortcomings in Mega’s cryptographic architecture" that allow Mega, or those able to mount a TLS MITM attack on Mega's client software, to access user files.

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Oracle shrinks on-prem cloud offering in both size and cost

Now we can squeeze required boxes into a smaller datacenter footprint, says Big Red

Lindsay Clark Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 15:48 UTC

Oracle has slimmed down its on-prem fully managed cloud offer to a smaller datacenter footprint for a sixth of the budget.
Snappily dubbed OCI Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the service was launched in 2020 and promised to run a private cloud inside a customer's datacenter, or one run by a third party. Paid for "as-a-service," the concept promised customers the flexibility of moving workloads seamlessly between the on-prem system and Oracle's public cloud for a $6 million annual fee and a minimum commitment of three years.
Big Red has now slashed the fee for a scaled-down version of its on-prem cloud to $1 million a year for a minimum period of four years.

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Micron aims 1.5TB microSD card at video surveillance market

Ideal for corporate fleet dash cameras, smart home security, police bodycams, VSaaS and more, says chip giant

Dan Robinson Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 12:30 UTC

Embedded World Chipmaker Micron is offering a microSD Card for embedded applications with an impressive 1.5TB capacity, enough to hold four months of continuously recorded security camera footage, according to the company.
Announced at the Embedded World 2022 conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Micron's new i400 [PDF] is claimed to be the highest-capacity microSD card yet and was designed with a focus on industrial-grade video security applications.
The device is sampling with potential customers now.

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End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

Firms accustomed to freebies miffed that web giant's largess doesn't last

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 06:27 UTC

After offering free G Suite apps for more than a decade, Google next week plans to discontinue its legacy service – which hasn't been offered to new customers since 2012 – and force business users to transition to a paid subscription for the service's successor, Google Workspace.
"For businesses, the G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available after June 27, 2022," Google explains in its support document. "Your account will be automatically transitioned to a paid Google Workspace subscription where we continue to deliver new capabilities to help businesses transform the way they work."
Small business owners who have relied on the G Suite legacy free edition aren't thrilled that they will have to pay for Workspace or migrate to a rival like Microsoft, which happens to be actively encouraging defectors. As noted by The New York Times on Monday, the approaching deadline has elicited complaints from small firms that bet on Google's cloud productivity apps in the 2006-2012 period and have enjoyed the lack of billing since then.

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Small in Japan: Hitachi creates its own (modest) cloud

VMware-powered sovereign cloud not going to challenge hyperscalers, and won't be repeated beyond Japan

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 06:27 UTC

Updated Hitachi has taken a modest step towards becoming a public cloud provider, with the launch of a VMware-powered cloud in Japan that The Register understands may not be its only such venture.
The Japanese giant has styled the service a "sovereign cloud" – a term that VMware introduced to distinguish some of its 4,000-plus partners that operate small clouds and can attest to their operations being subject to privacy laws and governance structures within the nation in which they operate.
Public cloud heavyweights AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba also offer VMware-powered clouds, at hyperscale. But some organizations worry that their US or Chinese roots make them vulnerable to laws that might allow Washington or Beijing to exercise extraterritorial oversight.

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ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

The catch: It hooks up to desktop-as-a-service and runs Android – so while it looks like a laptop ...

Laura Dobberstein Fri 24 Jun 2022 // 00:45 UTC

Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE has announced what it claims is the first "cloud laptop" – an Android-powered device that the consumes just five watts and links to its cloud desktop-as-a-service.
Announced this week at the partially state-owned company's 2022 Cloud Network Ecosystem Summit, the machine – model W600D – measures 325mm × 215mm × 14 mm, weighs 1.1kg and includes a 14-inch HD display, full-size keyboard, HD camera, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. An unspecified eight-core processors drives it, and a 40.42 watt-hour battery is claimed to last for eight hours.
It seems the primary purpose of this thing is to access a cloud-hosted remote desktop in which you do all or most of your work. ZTE claimed its home-grown RAP protocol ensures these remote desktops will be usable even on connections of a mere 128Kbit/sec, or with latency of 300ms and packet loss of six percent. That's quite a brag.

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Now Amazon debuts an AI programming assistant – CodeWhisperer

Did they get GitHub Copilot to write it?

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 22:34 UTC

Amazon at its re:Mars conference in Las Vegas on Thursday announced a preview of an automated programming assistance tool called CodeWhisperer.
Available to those who have obtained an invitation through the AWS IDE Toolkit, a plugin for code editors to assist with writing AWS applications, CodeWhisperer is Amazon's answer to GitHub Copilot, an AI (machine learning-based) code generation extension that entered general availability earlier this week.
In a blog post, Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, said the goal of CodeWhisperer is to make software developers more productive.

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PCIe 7.0 pegged to arrive in 2025 with speeds of 512 GBps

Although PCIe 5.0 is just coming to market, here's what we can expect in the years ahead

Dan Robinson Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 15:30 UTC

Early details of the specifications for PCIe 7.0 are out, and it's expected to deliver data rates of up to 512 GBps bi-directionally for data-intensive applications such as 800G Ethernet.
The announcement from the The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI SIG) was made to coincide with its Developers Conference 2022, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California this week. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the PCI-SIG itself.
While the completed specifications for PCIe 6.0 were only released this January, PCIe 7.0 looks to double the bandwidth of the high-speed interconnect yet again from a raw bit rate of 64 GTps to 128 GTps, and bi-directional speeds of up to 512 GBps in a x16 configuration.

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HashiCorp tool sniffs out configuration drift

OK, which of those engineers tweaked the settings? When infrastructure shifts away from state defined by original code

Richard Speed Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 14:30 UTC

HashiConf HashiCorp has kicked off its Amsterdam conference with a raft of product announcements, including a worthwhile look into infrastructure drift and a private beta for HCP Waypoint.
The first, currently in public beta, is called Drift Detection for Terraform Cloud, and is designed to keep an eye on the state of an organization's infrastructure and notify when changes occur.
Drift Detection is a useful thing, although an organization would be forgiven for thinking that buying into the infrastructure-as-code world of Terraform should mean everything should remain in the state it was when defined.

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India lets Mastercard issue new cards again

Compliance with onshore data storage laws took almost a year – far longer than India has given the rest of the tech world to comply with infosec changes

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 17 Jun 2022 // 06:57 UTC

India’s Reserve Bank has lifted its ban on Mastercard issuing new cards within the nation.
The ban was imposed in July 2021 when the Bank (RBI) found Mastercard to be “non-compliant with the directions on Storage of Payment System Data”.
Those directions were issued in April 2018 and gave banks and payment systems six months to store “full end-to-end transaction details / information collected / carried / processed as part of the message / payment instruction” on Indian soil. If a transaction involved a foreign entity, replication of data offshore was allowed.

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