A new flaw in Microsoft Azure's Cosmos DB called "Chaos DB" is being described as "the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine" by the security researchers that found it. Apparently "misconfiguration in the Jupyter feature opens up a privilege escalation exploit. That exploit could be abused to gain access to other Cosmos DB customers' primary keys (according to Wiz, any other Cosmos DB customer's primary key), along with other secrets". So not only does this fuck up your database, it fucks up the database of any other Cosmos DB customer too if they haven't followed Microsoft's advice and manually rotated any primary key. After spending the last few days mucking around with AWS, I can totally empathise with anyone misconfiguring Cosmos DB - this stuff is bloody complicated!
Apple is upset with Commonwealth Bank's CEO for telling a parliamentary inquiry that Apple has 80% market share in digital wallets (based on usage of CBA POS terminals) and saying that access to the NFC chip on iOS devices is a pain in the arse compared to Android. Apple argues that it's only 10% of all card usage in Australia and harps on again that closed access to NFC on iOS is a security feature. Meanwhile, the federal Treasurer has signaled he plans to overhaul the payment system in Australia, based on this just published review, saying that "the review showed the need for reform to account for disruptive technologies like digital wallets, cryptocurrencies and buy now pay later services". The recommendations are kinda boring, but there's a few in there relating to giving the RBA and the Treasurer more powers to regulate payment systems.
A little more info about the Windows 11 hardware compatibility situation has been revealed by The Verge. Apparently minimum hardware requirement of an 8th-gen Intel CPU or newer, is only applicable to upgrade scenarios. If you want to install fresh (i.e: download the ISO and install manually) it'll work on basically any relatively modern PC that runs Windows 10. The catch however, is that if the PC isn't 8th-gen Intel or newer, "it may not be entitled to get Windows Updates, even security ones". No security updates? That's bad. You do not want to be using your primary computer without security updates! It's also a shitty situation for people with perfectly good PCs but lack the technical skills or desire to do a clean install of Windows.
Cloudflare had a public whinge about the cost of Amazon Web Services' bandwidth for data sent outside of Amazon's network (e.g: punters at home or work accessing your service). They reckon Amazon pays sweet fuck all for bandwidth due to the sheer size of their operation, but charge an insane markup on it, far beyond what is reasonable. In the USA, Cloudfare estimate customers pay 80x the cost of bandwidth than what Amazon pays for it. In Sydney it's "only" 8x. Amazon also happens to be the only major cloud vendor not part of the Bandwidth Alliance, which waive or massively discount bandwidth charges for data passing between each other. I'm not 100% sure of Cloudflare's angle here (why do they give a fuck what AWS customers pay?) but they raise a good point.
📻 How I Could Just Kill a Man - Rage Against The Machine
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