Who, Me? The UK has bins, the US prefers trashcans, and computers like their /bin. How do you think today's episode of Who, Me? is going to go?

Our story takes us back to the early 1990s when our reader, Regomized as "Jeremy," was a young PhD student in a biology lab.

"Our supervisor was very fond of technology, and of looking good in the department," he told us, "and one year he found himself with some spare money from a grant."

We'll pause while academics wipe the tea they will have sprayed over their screen at the words "spare money from a grant" before Jeremy continues his story.

"He decided to buy a shiny new computer for our group," he said. Up until then the team made do with sharing a Mac Classic – good for playing Risk and printing PhD theses, but not much else. However, the supervisor was keen to splash some cash.

"The machine he bought was a Silicon Graphics Indy," said Jeremy, "which was a very funky and shiny machine for the time. It was one of the most powerful computers in the entire department and he rode the wave of prestige this brought."

"Funky" is one word for it. While ostensibly a low-end machine in comparison to its bigger Indigo siblings, the Indy had a ludicrous specification when put up against the average PC of the time. The base model featured a mighty 16MB of RAM with hard disk and video options to boggle the mind. It also had a suitably eye-popping price tag.

The version in Jeremy's lab had a colossal 1GB of hard disk storage, which was stuffed full of graphics demos to show off the computers' capabilities. Perhaps a bit too full, considering the real-world work that the lab needed to do.

"One of the postdocs took on the role of sysadmin for this machine," said Jeremy, "but he didn't appear to have much experience with Unix machines."

Hunting around the disk turned up a very bloated directory called '/bin'.

Bin? The Mac had a bin on the desktop that needed to be emptied. This must be the Indy equivalent, right? Full of stuff that just needed to be cleared. One swift tappity-tap later and /bin was a distant memory.

As was the ability of the very, very expensive box to do anything other than light a baleful power LED. Our postdoc had managed to transform Silicon Graphics' finest into a lump of redundant silicon.

"Cue much hair-pulling and despair," said Jeremy. "It didn't have an optical drive, and there was no easy way to restore all those lost files."

It was the team in the genetics lab that saved the day – they had an array of Indies burning CPU cycles on DNA sequencing. One was liberated and used to get Jeremy's machine up and running once more. Unsurprisingly, the postdoc responsible was swiftly relieved of his administration duties.

As for what became of the resurrected Indy, other than as a means of showing off, there wasn't a lot of use for it, as it turned out. It spent the next two years being used for browsing the web and creating the occasional poster.

Still, as a lesson in knowing difference between a bin and /bin, we'd argue it was invaluable.

Has anyone not accidentally deleted something very important that seemed irrelevant? How did you recover from the black screen of non-bootability? Tell all with an email to Who, Me? ®

Messaging app Telegram, which came to prominence for offering end-to-end encryption that irritated governments, has celebrated passing 700 million active monthly users with a pastel-hued announcement: a paid Premium tier of service.

A Sunday post celebrates the 700 million user milestone by announcing a $4.99/month tier. The Premium tier distinguishes itself from the freebie plebeian tier with the ability to upload 4GB files, unthrottled downloads that come as fast as users' carriers will allow, and the chance to follow up to 1000 channels, create up to 20 chat folders each containing up to 200 chats, and to run four accounts in the Telegram app.

Paying punters will also get exclusive stickers and reactions and won't see ads once they sign up to hand over coin each month.

The US arm of Chinese social video app TikTok has revealed that it has changed the default location used to store users' creations to Oracle Cloud's stateside operations – a day after being accused of allowing its Chinese parent company to access American users' personal data.

"Today, 100 percent of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure," the company stated in a post dated June 18.

"For more than a year, we've been working with Oracle on several measures as part of our commercial relationship to better safeguard our app, systems, and the security of US user data," the post continues. "We still use our US and Singapore datacenters for backup, but as we continue our work we expect to delete US users' private data from our own datacenters and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the US."

India's government last week issued confidential information security guidelines that calls on the 30 million plus workers it employs to adopt better work practices – and as if to prove a point, the document quickly leaked on a government website.

The document, and the measures it contains, suggest infosec could be somewhat loose across India's government sector.

"The increasing adoption and use of ICT has increased the attack surface and threat perception to government, due to lack of proper cyber security practices followed on the ground," the document opens.

The Cyberspace Administration of China has announced a policy requiring all comments made to websites to be approved before publication.

Outlined in a document published last Friday and titled "Provisions on the Administration of Internet Thread Commenting Services", the policy is aimed at making China's internet safer, and better represent citizens' interests. The Administration believes this can only happen if comments are reviewed so that only posts that promote socialist values and do not stir dissent make it online.

To stop the nasties being published, the policy outlines requirements for publishers to hire "a review and editing team suitable for the scale of services".

Science fiction is littered with fantastic visions of computing. One of the more pervasive is the idea that one day computers will run on light. After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?

But it turns out Star Trek’s glowing circuit boards might be closer to reality than you think, Ayar Labs CTO Mark Wade tells The Register. While fiber optic communications have been around for half a century, we’ve only recently started applying the technology at the board level. Despite this, Wade expects, within the next decade, optical waveguides will begin supplanting the copper traces on PCBs as shipments of optical I/O products take off.

Driving this transition are a number of factors and emerging technologies that demand ever-higher bandwidths across longer distances without sacrificing on latency or power.

QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.

The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.

The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.

A US task force aims to prevent online harassment and abuse, with a specific focus on protecting women, girls and LGBTQI+ individuals.

In the next 180 days, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse will, among other things, draft a blueprint on a "whole-of-government approach" to stopping "technology-facilitated, gender-based violence." 

A year after submitting the blueprint, the group will provide additional recommendations that federal and state agencies, service providers, technology companies, schools and other organisations should take to prevent online harassment, which VP Kamala Harris noted often spills over into physical violence, including self-harm and suicide for victims of cyberstalking as well mass shootings.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.

"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."

And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel today signed an order approving the extradition of Julian Assange to America, where he faces espionage charges for sharing secret government documents.

Assange led WikiLeaks, a website that released classified files including footage of US airstrikes and military documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war that detailed civilian casualties.

It also distributed secret files revealing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and sensitive communications from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, during the 2016 US presidential election. 

A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.

A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.

The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.

A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.

The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.

It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.

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