Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
Like the unfortunate soul who finds himself being loaded onto a cart of plague victims in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a bloke from Forfar in Scotland has had to declare himself "still alive" after finding his name on a headstone in a local graveyard.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 10:45 am
Column Later this spring, the US Supreme Court will hear Google v Oracle. This is the final appeal of a decade-long case in which Oracle claims Google stole the Java application program interface (API) structure that defines how programs interact with Java's own libraries. That Google reproduced the API in Android is not in doubt; until Oracle kicked up a stink, it was also not in doubt that APIs could not be copyrighted.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 10:00 am
New tech-driven Six Nations stats will "show you which teams are really clinical" at making line breaks inside the opposition's 22, England rugby legend Will Carling has told The Register.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 9:15 am
French President Emmanuel Macron has confirmed his country will suspend its plan to slap a digital tax on tech giants after threats from US president Donald Trump to impose trade tariffs.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 7:55 am
Citrix and FireEye have released a new security tool to help admins find out if their servers have been hacked via the high-profile CVE-2019-19781 flaw that was disclosed in December but only patched on Monday.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 7:04 am
Pic Scientists studying minerals in the Yarrabubba crater in Western Australia have confirmed the giant pit was formed when an asteroid struck Earth 2.229 billion years ago, making it the oldest impact site yet found on our planet.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 5:52 am
To mark the arrival of the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, Microsoft software engineer Eric Lawrence, who helped shift Edge to its Google-driven open source foundation, issued a plea to Windows users to let go of Internet Explorer.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 1:44 am
A tech biz specializing in software for marijuana dispensaries inadvertently exposed to the public internet a database containing tens of thousands of mellow Americans' personal information.…
Posted on 23 January 2020 | 12:19 am
The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, has been officially fingered as the man responsible for hacking Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s iPhone X, causing a massive stir in diplomatic circles.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 11:13 pm
Google security researchers have published details about the flaws they identified last year in Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP), a privacy scheme developed by Apple's WebKit team for the company's Safari browser.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 9:53 pm
Users who install or update Office 365 Pro Plus, part of the Office 365 subscription for larger businesses, will find their browser search engine automatically set to Bing, according to Microsoft documentation.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 9:18 pm
An effort by tech companies to put the Trump Administration's tough new visa requirements on hold has been thrown out by a US federal judge in Arizona.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 8:38 pm
Only one half of SAP’s joint CEOs managed to travel to the World Economic Forum 2020 in Davos by relatively environmentally friendly means, the other opted to jump on a jet plane.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 7:27 pm
Obit Actor, writer and Python Terry Jones has died at the age of 77.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 5:00 pm
Britain's main anti-hacker law, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, is "confused", "outdated" and "ambiguous", according to a group of pro-reform academics.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 4:06 pm
In a long-running spat, British insurer Co-Op Insurance is suing IBM for £155m over what it claims is Big Blue's "deliberate" failure to deliver a new IT platform for the British financial services provider.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 3:00 pm
Five identical Elasticsearch databases containing 250 million records of Microsoft customer support incidents were exposed on the internet for all to see for at least two days right at the end of 2019.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 2:00 pm
Xerox is preparing to nominate up to 11 directors to HP's board to push through a $33.5bn takeover bid, according to the Wall Street Journal.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 1:29 pm
German authorities are waking up to a Windows 7 headache, with approximately €800,000 required in order to keep the elderly software supported a little longer.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 12:59 pm
Ubuntu daddy Canonical is aiming at the likes of Huawei and Google with its take on app streaming with Anbox Cloud.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 12:27 pm
NASA has announced the finalists for its Mars 2020 Rover naming and the options are as worthy as one might expect.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 11:46 am
AWS has lopped 80 per cent off the price of its CloudEndure disaster recovery service and 50 per cent off Kubernetes (K8s) clusters.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 11:10 am
Updated Capita Education Services had a bit of an oopsie yesterday as a new helpdesk system spurted potentially thousands of email addresses at unsuspecting users.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 10:30 am
Drug dealers and dodgy pharmacies illegally touting opioids online – think heroin, fentanyl, codeine, morphine, and so on – may have their collars felt by an AI cop soon. Ish. Maybe.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 10:00 am
Microsoft senior software engineer Michal Strehovský has run a small .NET Core application on Windows 3.11, a version of the OS released in 1993.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 9:16 am
More than 250 items belonging to super-Brit Alan Turing, including his OBE medal, that went missing decades ago were found hidden behind a bathroom wall in America, according to new court documents.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 8:04 am
Microsoft is secretly testing in-house ads in WordPad, the basic text editing app bundled into its desktop operating system since Windows 95.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 7:06 am
A tenth of a percent still counts, right?…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 5:48 am
Updated Candid pictures used to threaten Amazon boss Jeff Bezos were exposed not by his current paramour's brother, as some have suggested, but through a sophisticated hacking operation personally directed by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, The Guardian has asserted.…
Posted on 22 January 2020 | 12:31 am
An IT worker at a New York bank steered multi-million-dollar deals to a technology contractor in exchange for $900,000 in kickbacks, it is claimed.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 10:34 pm
Sonos is doubling down on its previously disclosed inclination to drop support for older products that aren't profitable to support.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 8:53 pm
Apple ditched plans to fully encrypt its iCloud backups two years ago after being pressured by the FBI, it is claimed.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 8:04 pm
Goldman Sachs-backed telco CityFibre has snapped up TalkTalk's fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network for £200m, two months after the deal was delayed during the general election.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 6:41 pm
Opera has responded to accusations that it offers predatory short-term loans to some of the world's most disadvantaged communities to shore up its financial results.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 4:45 pm
Eight South American governments have vowed to make life difficult for DNS overseer ICANN after it gave the .amazon top-level domain to the US tech giant headed by Jeff Bezos.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 4:07 pm
Just because you want something badly doesn't mean you can will it to happen. This is what Dixons found out today when it was forced to re-issue a trading statement, with the first one saying sales had grown. (Spoiler: they hadn't.)…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 3:27 pm
The World Economic Forum is pinning a sustainability badge on its 2020 conference, which, according to one estimate, will produce 18,090 metric tonnes of CO2 in private air travel alone.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 2:40 pm
The encryption technology Microsoft uses to protect Windows file systems can be exploited by ransomware.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 2:00 pm
Since Marty McFly swooped into pop culture on a hoverboard in 1985, the wheelless wonders have cemented their position as a litmus test for living in "The Future™" alongside other sci-fi paraphernalia like lightsabers, jetpacks and flying cars.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 1:38 pm
The maintainer of the Actix web framework, written in Rust, has quit the project after complaining of a toxic web community - although over 100 Actix users have since signed a letter of support for him.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 12:55 pm
Microsoft has given Windows 7 users a parting gift with its last update as some holdouts are reporting existing desktop wallpaper being replaced by a sombre black screen – presumably in mourning for the veteran OS.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 12:18 pm
Roundup Welcome back to The Register's weekly roundup of stories from the world of rockets and orbital shenanigans.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 11:23 am
After a third trip to thrash the router this morning, Brits might not be too surprised to learn that they're being ripped off for broadband compared to their pals across the Channel.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 10:20 am
Special report A Google-backed competition to develop machine-learning software to help abandoned animals find loving homes turned ugly – when it was revealed the winning team cheated.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 9:24 am
What goes up must come down, or so it seems for the PC market.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 8:30 am
Scientists at the European Space Agency are trying to extract oxygen from something very close to lunar soil.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 7:27 am
Analysis The Swift programming language has suffered some setbacks in its quest for ubiquity since Apple released it under an open-source license in 2015.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 6:28 am
The fastest spinning object on Earth – a pair of nanoparticles – can complete over five billion revolutions per second in the laboratory, according to a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology on Monday.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 5:36 am
Analysis A quick hypothetical for you: if your organization received a letter from six senior politicians urging you not to move forward with a controversial decision, and you looked out your windows to see dozens of protesters insisting on the same, would you……
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 1:13 am
DigitalOcean last week axed an undisclosed number of employees.…
Posted on 21 January 2020 | 12:15 am