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When it rains, it pours – and nobody packed an umbrella

Opinion  When your cabbie asks you what you do for a living, and you answer "tech journalist," you never get asked about cloud infrastructure in return. Bitcoin, mobile phones, AI, yes. Until last week: "What's this AWS thing, then?" You already knew a lot of people were having a very bad day in Bezosville, but if the news had reached an Edinburgh black cab driver, new adjectives were needed.…

Brazil recorded a mass methanol poisoning earlier this month, leaving three dead, and the UK FCDO has doubled a list of countries it says have reported cases of bootleg booze poisoning.

A LONG serving department store has officially closed in Braintree after more than 30 years.

The president gave advice on Tylenol and several childhood vaccinations in an all-caps post to Truth Social on Sunday.

Starmer and Reeves are doomed - distrusted by most Labour MPs and detested throughout the land. Sir Keir probably won't be PM this time next year and Rachel will no longer be Chancellor.

"Mozilla is introducing a new privacy framework for Firefox extensions that will require developers to disclose whether their add-ons collect or transmit user data..." reports the blog Linuxiac: The policy takes effect on November 3, 2025, and applies to all new Firefox extensions submitted to addons.mozilla.org. According to Mozilla's announcement, extension developers must now include a new key in their manifest.json files. This key specifies whether an extension gathers any personal data. Even extensions that collect nothing must explicitly state "none" in this field to confirm that no data is being collected or shared. This information will be visible to users at multiple points: during the installation prompt, on the extension's listing page on addons.mozilla.org, and in the Permissions and Data section of Firefox's about:addons page. In practice, this means users will be able to see at a glance whether a new extension collects any data before they install it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Swalwell demanded fellow Democrats considering running in the next election take a firm stand against the ballroom, which is already under construction.

Four back-to-back weekends of work – and disastrously bad documentation – will do that do a techie

Who, Me?  Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward.…

The 14-year-old victim of Hadush Kebatu, the sex offender and a former asylum seeker in Epping, has been left incredibly anxious after he was wrongly released from HMP Chelmsford, her dad has said.

Jennifer Lopez spent quality time with her teen child Emme as they visited the luxurious Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills over the weekend.

Sofia Richie proudly showed off her growing baby bump in a stylish look as she attended the star-studded 2025 Vogue World show in Los Angeles on Sunday. 

The revelation from a new book about Trump's cabinet feuds details the president and vice president's final argument before the events of January 6, 2021.

Freshly off the throne and at the tail end of the abdication crisis. King Edward VIII decided to start a brand new controversy when he took an unofficial visit to Nazi Germany in 1937.

Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau walk hand in hand into the singer's birthday celebration on Saturday night, officially confirming their budding romance.

A leading dementia expert has revealed ten questions to ask yourself if you believe you may have Alzheimer's disease.

Back in the antediluvian times, when I was in college, people still used floppy disks to work on their papers. This was a pretty untenable arrangement, because floppy disks lost data all the time, and few students had the wherewithal to make multiple copies. Half my time spent working helldesk was breaking out Norton Diskutils to try and rescue people's term papers. To avoid this, the IT department offered network shares where students could store documents. The network share was backed up, tracked versions, and could be accessed from any computer on campus, including the VAX system (in fact, it was stored on the VAX).

I bring this up because we have known for quite some time that companies and governments need to store documents in centrally accessible locations so that you're not reliant on end users correctly managing their files. And if you are a national government, you have to make a choice: either you contract out to a private sector company, or you do it yourself.

South Korea made the choice to do it themselves, with their G-Drive system (short for Government Drive, no relation to Google Drive), a government file store hosted primarily out of a datacenter in Daejeon. Unfortunately, "primarily" is a bit too apropos- last month, a fire in that datacenter destroyed data.

The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for external backups. This vulnerability ultimately left it unprotected.

Someone, somehow, designed a data storage system that was structurally incapable of doing backups? And then told 750,000 government employees that they should put all their files there?

Even outside of that backup failure, while other services had backups, they did not have a failover site, so when the datacenter went down, the government went down with it.

In total, it looks like about 858TB of data got torched. 647 distinct services were knocked out. At least 90 of them were reported to be unrecoverable (that last link is from a company selling Lithium Ion safety products, but is a good recap). A full recovery was, shortly after the accident, predicted to take a month, but as of October 22, only 60% of services had been restored.

Now, any kind of failure of this scale means heads must roll, and police investigations have gone down the path of illegal subcontracting. The claim is that the government hired a contractor broke the law by subcontracting the work, and that those subcontractors were unqualified for the work they were doing- that while they were qualified to install or remove a li-ion battery, they were not qualified to move one, which is what they were doing and resulted in the fire.

I know too little about Korean laws about government contracting and too little about li-ion battery management to weigh in on this. Certainly, high-storage batteries are basically bombs, and need to be handled with great care and protected well. Though, if one knows how to install and uninstall a battery, moving a battery seems covered in those steps.

But if I were doing a root cause analysis here, while that could be the root cause of the fire, it is not the root cause of the outage. If you build a giant datacenter but can't replicate services to another location, you haven't built a reliable cloud storage system- you've just built an expensive floppy disk that is one trip too close to a fridge magnet away from losing all of your work. In this case, the fridge magnet was made of fire, but the result is the same.

I'm not going to say this problem would have be easy to avoid; actually building resilient infrastructure that fails gracefully under extreme stress is hard. But while it's a hard problem, it's also a well-understood problem. There are best practices, and clearly not one of them was followed.

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It once had five stations

PLUS: China demotes tech self-sufficiency goal; Alibaba Cloud quietly quits VMware; India demands deepfake labels; and more!

Asia In Brief  Australia’s Competition & Consumer Commission on Monday commenced legal proceedings against Microsoft for allegedly misleading users of its Microsoft 365 bundle.…

Resident doctors across England, including those at Colchester Hospital, will walk out for five consecutive days next month.

Missed appointments have cost Essex NHS trusts more than £130million in five years.