Posts by ssharwood 191 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2012
Reg hack Simon here - I co-wrote this piece, edited it, and decided on the timing of publication.
FWIW the timing of this story was entirely down to the fact we don't work weekends. I arrived at my desk on Monday down here in Australia and one of the things in my edit queue was a short version of the story that mentioned only the EU outages. I was already aware of the US situation, and decided that as the EU angle was already widely known, a piece on both incidents would be more valuable.
When we are around and in a position to deliver very timely coverage, we pounce on news. For example, I was on duty down here in Oz when the substation fire took out Heathrow back in March. Our story was up at 04:39 UTC https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/21/heathrow_closure_datacenter_resilience/ - we were among the first to cover it, and almost certainly the first to advise on the datacenter impact.
When CrowdStrike's massive fail hit last year, we had the story at 06:46 UTC.
We also break stories almost every day. Stick around. You'll see lots of stuff here before it appears elsewhere.
Coupla things here.
The! Apostrophe! Gag! is pretty old now, and also makes for pretty lousy readability IMHO. I like to nod to it, but not overdo it.
Also, Yahoo Japan is not Yahoo! and has tenuous lineage to the purple palace. The back story is complicated, but applying the apostrophe gag is therefore not entirely accurate.
And FWIW I try to slip in some linguistic delights to most of what I write, and to the headlines and subheads I edit.
S.
Late to report? No. We reported the divestment plan DURING Broadcom's earnings call. If we weren't first, we were among the first handful to report this.
We then CHOSE to offer commentary on that decision at a later date. And did so without reading the TechTarget piece.
Commentary doesn't always need to follow events closely.
Aaaah Clapham Junction ... I pased through in the first few days of my time living in London. Having previously only seen touristy and nice residential bits it was quite a revelation ... I later learned that the district was gentrifying. All the 20-somethings I worked with referred to it as 'Claaahm' to denote its upmarket shift.
I once set my alarm to get up at 0500 to get a flight from LHR-BKK. But I had forgotten to change my alarm clock from French time so it went off at 0400. Then I had a middle seat and didn't get a wink.
Next, the 12 hour layover in BKK, which I spent being driven around in a TukTuk to see the sights.
On the BKK-SYD leg I fell asleep the minute I sat down, and woke up when the wheels hit the ground.
Best flight ever.
So here's the thing. When a public figure says "Russia, if you're listening", later tries to induce a foreign power to interfere in domestic politics, tells a zillion lies about an election, and refuses to assist in retrieval of classified documents, I don't see investigations as attacks - I see them as necessary and appropriate. And just the sort of thing that a mature democracy with a strong rule of law encourages and can tolerate.
S.
OK I'll bite. I'll regret it, but here goes.
I just don't get the logic behind the "lawfare" argument. The defendant literally asked Georgia's governor to find him some votes, and has failed to produce any evidence that the election was "rigged". The Georgia indictment points out that his associates tried to mess with voting machines. How is that stuff NOT worthy of investigation? Or condemnation?
I gather another strand of the "lawfare" argument is that the timing of the cases is suspicious given campaigning season has commenced. Yet I suspect that if the indictments had been made earlier, critics would have dismissed them as the result of rushed investigations ... seems there's no way to win against this argument.
I say from a distance and without a vote to cast - but as an increasingly stunned observer of US politics which from down here looks to be dominated by ideology rather than a genuine interest in governance.
Nope: We were first to cover this - https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/13/nasa_software_oracle_overpayment/ - and this - https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/13/microsoft_gdap_double_byte_delays/ - and this - https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/teams_premium_more_expensive/ ... and those are just the stories I know we were first with last week.
I could go on. But this Twitter story was written over the MLK day long weekend, and long weekends are always terrible times for news.
And FWIW I think this is real news: Twitter made losses for years and the fact it bought $4000 USB-charging bicycles might tell us why ...
China doesn't need a backdoor. It needs someone who can describe networks to it and identify a weak point, or someone who "forgets" to patch a single server. That someone could be at a customer or a partner. Or a lucky vendor staffer posted overseas who is also a CCP member. The info they provide makes and attack, or seeking intelligence, far easier. Proper spooks know this. See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/opinion/international-world/china-espionage.html for examples.
