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Some QNAP network attached storage devices are vulnerable to attack because of two critical vulnerabilities, one that enables unauthenticated remote code execution and another that provides the ability to write to arbitrary files.

The vulnerabilities were made known to the Taiwan-based company on October 12, 2020, and on November 29, 2020, by SAM Seamless Network, a connected home security firm. They were found in the QNAP TS-231's latest firmware, version 4.3.6.2020, which SAM claims was released on September 29, 2020, and QNAP's website list as October 7, 2020 – which may represent different build numbers.

"We reported both vulnerabilities to QNAP with a four-month grace period to fix them," said Yaniv Puyeski, an embedded software security researcher at SAM, in a blog post on Wednesday. "Unfortunately, as of the publishing of this article, the vulnerabilities have not yet been fixed."

Apple has begun warning iOS developers that it will reject apps containing advertising SDKs that use data from the device to create unique identifiers, or fingerprints, in preparation for the upcoming release of iOS 14.5.

Fingerprinting code of this sort is used by marketers for ad-related tracking, a practice Apple aims to curtail in its next iOS update.

iOS 14.5 is expected to implement Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, which has been delayed for months due to the objections of large advertisers like Facebook. ATT brings with it an App Store rule change that requires developers to implement an app-tracking authorization request to ask users to opt-in to being tracked and having their data collected. Facebook and Google have both warned that giving people this privacy choice will mean less ad revenue for publishers, not to mention their share of it.

Analysis Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., also known as TSMC, plans to spend $100bn over the next three years in response to chip demand and has advised its customers to expect to pay more.

Word of the firm's investment plan comes from Nikkei Asia, which claims to have seen a letter from TSMC CEO C.C. Wei outlining the investment plan. It follows closely on the heels of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger outlining Intel's foundry strategy and spending plans.

The demand for semiconductors reflects the lack of supply, which Falan Yinug, director of industry statistics and economic policy for the Semiconductor Industry Association, in February attributed to pandemic-related demand – IT purchases to support remote work – and the increased use of semiconductors in vehicles.

Something for the Weekend, Sir? No, not wabbit. Not even chocolate eggs. I'm hunting wild asparagus.

This is about as inventive as it comes for an April Fool's hoax in lockdown Europe. A local newspaper yesterday morning ran an article offering tips (ho ho) for those who fancy foraging for their spring asparagus in the wild – or at least within the regulation 10km radius from their front doors.

Come to think of it, given that all other news outlets here announced that they would skip their traditional poissons d'avril this time around, the story is probably not a hoax after all. It's quite possible that an asparagus hunting season is a genuine thing and that the not-at-all-suspiciously named food expert "Jean Burger" who declared it open is real too. I mean, it's not exactly up to the standard of the BBC's 2020 Swiss spaghetti harvest or Swedish TV's 2020 demonstration of how to convert a black-and-white television into a colour set using nylon stockings.

On Call The weekend is upon us, and we can think of no better time to celebrate the efforts of those courageous individuals tasked with sorting the problems of users. Be they Mac or PC-based. Welcome to On Call.

Today's contributor, Regomised as "Philip", was the resident "PC guru" for a major computer manufacturer. It was the mid to late 2020s, and Marty McFly had only recently undertaken his jaunt to the 2020s.

Fun fact – a Back To The Future of today would send the Delorean to the 2020s, after the events of Philip's story.

Mysterious X-rays have been spotted emanating from Uranus for the first time, according to the latest observations made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

X-ray emissions from the planet may not seem so surprising at first since Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have been found to scatter such radiation from the Sun. But the data suggests that there is an additional source of unknown X-rays being generated by Uranus itself.

“Planets with lots of hydrogen in their atmosphere scatter X-rays in the same way that we think Uranus is [doing],” Affelia Wibisono, co-author of the Uranus X-ray study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, and a PhD student at University College London, explained to The Register.

India’s overall network and storage market both showed declines in the final quarter of 2020 due to lingering work and school from home measures and banking organizations spending less on storage.

India’s overall networking market declined 4.2 per cent year-on-year in Q4 2020 while the external storage market declined 15.6 per cent by vendor revenue, said IDC in quarterly trackers released this week.

When it came to the networking market, COVID slowed down campus investments in enterprise WLAN (-26.3 per cent) while the expanded work-and-learn from home market for consumer gateway routers soared a whopping 57.8 per cent.

Updated Unlucky netizens are right now unable to log into Microsoft's online services, including Azure, Teams, Dynamics, and Xbox Live, due to an ongoing global outage.

The IT breakdown is blamed on a DNS issue, and started an hour and a half ago at time of writing. According to the Windows giant's status page:

It's the end of the line for the Android and iOS incarnations of Microsoft's AI assistant Cortana.

“After March 31, 2021, the Cortana mobile app on your phone will no longer be supported,” the Windows giant warned on Wednesday.

"The Cortana content you created – such as reminders and lists – will no longer function in the Cortana mobile app, but can still be accessed through Cortana in Windows. Also, Cortana reminders, lists, and tasks are automatically synced to the Microsoft To Do app, which you can download to your phone for free."

Top datasets used to train AI models and benchmark how the technology has progressed over time are riddled with labeling errors, a study shows.

Data is a vital resource in teaching machines how to complete specific tasks, whether that's identifying different species of plants or automatically generating captions. Most neural networks are spoon-fed lots and lots of annotated samples before they can learn common patterns in data.

But these labels aren’t always correct; training machines using error-prone datasets can decrease their performance or accuracy. In the aforementioned study, led by MIT, analysts combed through ten popular datasets that have been cited more than 100,000 times in academic papers and found that on average 3.4 per cent of the samples are wrongly labelled.

FCC acting commissh Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed giving the US commercial space industry a dedicated block of spectrum in order to support future rocket launches.

The measure would allow a secondary allocation to the 2200-2290-MHZ band to be used by private space travel and satellite companies during the pre-launch testing and launch phases. At present, this wavelength is only available to federal agencies and approved foreign partners [PDF] and is limited to a handful of specific use-cases: tracking, telemetry, and control data communications.

Although private operators can access dedicated spectrum, this is only available on an ad-hoc basis, with independent commercial space firms forced to apply for Special Temporary Authority (STA) in advance.