The Register

Games maker weakens iGiant's control over iOS, loses its antitrust claims Analysis Epic Games on Friday won a Pyrrhic victory against Apple in its antitrust lawsuit, with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruling that Apple must allow developers to tell customers about third-party payments systems.…

Org releases its top ten list of bad things software vendors do The Open Web App Security Project has released its Top Ten list of vulnerabilities in web software, as part of the general movement to make software less painfully insecure at the design stage.…

Old proverb: If Windows crashes on a Surface Pro X, will anyone see the bugcheck? Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 on Apple's M1 is not "a supported scenario" for the OS that stands to bring so much joy to OEMs.…

There's no council tax infringement a Brimstone missile can't punish The Royal Air Force is set to start testing its rebranded Reaper drones in UK skies over the next few weeks – and senior officers are planning to make them available to local councils.…

Home assistant little more than an expensive plastic brick for some owners Lenovo says it is still waiting on Google to fix a “firmware issue” that has left some owners of its Lenovo Smart Displays and Smart Clocks with blank screens, almost five months after the problem was first reported.…

Right not to be subjected to solely automated decisions might not be keeping pace with 'data-driven economy' says document The UK government has launched a consultation that suggests it could water down individuals' rights to challenge decisions made about them by artificial intelligence.…

Employment judge points finger at Northgate – trial to follow A pair of Unix sysadmins have claimed a botched TUPE job transfer left them stuck between three organisations which all denied responsibility for employing them.…

Sovereign according to Google's definition, that is Google Cloud and T-Systems are to create what the companies call a "sovereign cloud offering" for Germany, though details are sketchy and it may not be digital sovereignty as the term is normally understood.…

Stage fright? Or the knowledge that Windows is lurking behind you Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork goes backstage today as the revival of music festivals in the UK heralds the return of background borkage.…

Plans to send remote devices to work at 70-year-old decommissioned nuclear power station may not be so barking Tired of doing parkour on the internet, robots from Boston Dynamics have been deployed at UK nuclear facilities to carry out routine tasks in dangerous environments.…

No, not the title of an undiscovered Douglas Adams book, it's medical history in the UK Geek's Guide to Britain It looks like a bejewelled crown, spinning and sparkling as its surfaces catch the light. But what this glass sculpture in the entrance hall of Oxford's History of Science museum portrays is much more valuable. It is a model of the ChAdOx1 nCov-19 coronavirus vaccine, developed by Oxford University researchers in 2020, one million times its actual size.…

Please hold me back from the discount aisle in case I buy a USB desk fan Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am standing in the middle of a supermarket, holding my tool. It's important that the security cameras see that I am waving my tool around. This is to avoid any embarrassment.…

Those knobs can be sensitive On Call Friday has arrived, and the promise of the weekend stretches out before us. Spare a thought, then, for those cursed to keep users happy, whatever the time of day. Welcome to On Call.…

IDC says AsiaPac market growing, rest of world isn't, Dell wins on volume, and IBM on sale price The global market for servers was mostly steady in the second quarter of 2021, according to analyst firm IDC, as the market recovers from 2020's unusual demands.…

Promises to offer App Store as an option, but needs its developer account to be reinstated to do that Epic Games has decided to put South Korea's new law requiring Apple and Google to offer third-party payment options in their app stores to the test.…

German-Australian outfit Quantum Brilliance thinks it can deliver product that runs on your desk in five years, for DBAs and boffins alike IBM's Quantum Ambassador for EMEA and Asia-Pacific – a business development role – has jumped to a little-known startup called Quantum Brilliance that believes it can bring diamond-powered quantum accelerators into conventional computers within five years.…

Meet Amazon OpenSearch Service, more or less the same code, without the trademark infringement Amazon Web Services on Thursday fulfilled its commitment to rename Amazon Elasticsearch Service with its expected new identity, Amazon OpenSearch Service.…

Devices were supposed to arrive Friday, November is new target Google and giant Indian telco Jio have announced the jointly developed budget 4G smartphone, and the accompanying made-for-India cut of Android, have been delayed.…

Plus: President Biden wants businesses with 100+ staff to get vaccinated or test weekly Microsoft will let its employees in the US continue working from home until further notice as the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread through the country. The Windows giant had planned to recall staff to their offices next month.…

* Terms and conditions apply. See in store for caveats. No purchase necessary Amazon on Thursday said more than 750,000 of its US-based operations employees will be eligible to receive at least some funding to cover college tuition costs though only at schools that partner with the internet giant.…

Time to hit the road Orolia – the Resilient Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) outfit with its European HQ in France – has won two contracts worth €70m to provide atomic clocks for the first 12 satellites of the Galileo Second Generation System (G2S).…

There’s room for you and your cowboy boots, we’ll even get you a rhinestone suit The State of Tennessee has agreed to pay Oracle $65m in incentives in order to relocate its headquarters from California to the state capital of Nashville.…

Maybe they were using, you know, Microsoft's collaboration service As the majority of the desk-based workers lurched to working from home during the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, communication between teams fell and working hours increased.…

Air purified, everyone back to bed, says Roscosmos, studiously ignoring smoke, burning smell Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station (ISS) had their preparations for an important spacewalk rudely interrupted early this morning when an emergency alarm woke them all up just before 2am UTC.…

Companion mode? We've got that too says Google Microsoft is adding features to Teams meetings to support hybrid office/remote meetings, including an AI-powered "speaker coach" that will notify users who interrupt others.…

Another way to run Kubernetes - though connector to AWS console still in preview, as are plenty of the AWS controllers Amazon Web Services has emitted EKS Anywhere, enabling users to create on-premises Kubernetes clusters with tooling consistent with that in the public cloud service – though currently only VMware is supported for production.…

'Fundamental errors' in CMA's findings, claims The Social Network Facebook has hit back at the UK's regulatory challenge to its decision to buy gif slinger Giphy, claiming the provisional findings by the competition watchdog are based on "fundamental errors."…

Finder tells El Reg of struggle to report snafu McDonald's customers who won a prize draw competition got more than they hoped for after the burger chain emailed them login credentials for development and production databases used to power the campaign.…

Customers pulling forward orders to mitigate mounting supply worries The mood music in tech land isn't so much about workspace projects - that's so 2020 - it's more about biz customers again investing in data centre hardware, when they can get hold of it.…

Ideally, will speed up biz's answer to the question: How much should we charge for that? Workday has paid an undisclosed price for pricing engine and guided selling firm Zimit, a software company specialising in helping companies quote for their services.…

Chuck that on top of £63m firm already has from related projects The UK Home Office has handed Fujitsu a £5m contract to support a border system beset with delays.…

For when it's time to kick that shadow IT habit Element, the commercial face of the Matrix messaging system, may have added to the woes of WhatsApp with the introduction of a bridge from the Facebook tentacle into the federated messaging world of Matrix.…

Yes, that Amazon. The one that's been fined for breaches of privacy and labor laws and accused of price-fixing, making life hell for unions … Amazon.com has written a very-colorfully-worded letter to the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), urging it to take a strong stance when considering SpaceX's satellite broadband business because Elon Musk is a cheat who messes things up – for those who need better internet connections, and totally not for Amazon itself.…

And names a new CTO VMware has kind-of announced a hypervisor for Arm processors, or at least one of them: Apple's M1 system-on-a-chip.…

This thing better not explode on the pad The long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is set to launch – surprise, surprise – a little later than expected. Space agencies in America, Europe, and Canada said on Wednesday they're now aiming for December 18, 2021 rather than October.…

It's hip to be competing with Square for space on retail counters PayPal has announced it will acquire Japanese internet payments outfit Paidy.…

Policies revealed after long battle for transparency and accountability Los Angeles police are instructed to collect social media details from people they stop and talk to, even if those civilians aren’t suspected of breaking the law, according to documents finally revealed after a lengthy legal battle.…

No data went awry, Cosmos DB had a similar bug just two weeks ago Microsoft today revealed it fixed a vulnerability in its Azure Container Instances services that could have been exploited by a malicious user "to access other customers' information."…

Her attorney argues she made mistakes ... like trusting her former partner and COO Sunny Balwani Attorneys representing Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the US Justice Department presented their opening arguments on Wednesday in a federal court in San Jose, outlining how they intend either to clear or convict Holmes of conspiracy and fraud charges.…

Devs also urged to ditch 'pedantic' lint rules Google on Wednesday updated Flutter and Dart, the Chocolate Factory's cross-platform app framework and its associated programming language, bringing performance and tooling improvements to devs.…

COVIDiot caught on film harassing others for following pandemic precautions Updated SAP says it is investigating after a video went viral allegedly featuring one of its employees coughing on fellow shoppers in a US store. And that's viral in the internet sense, at least.…

Good news for chap abused by online mob. Not so much for page admins Australia's High Court has ruled that companies running Facebook pages can be held liable for user comments on them, a ruling with severe consequences for any business with a presence on the Mark Zuckerberg-owned platform.…

Nobody from government will say a word about who's behind it Banks and post offices in New Zealand have been hit by a cyber offensive, according to reports, consisting of sustained DDoS attacks against a number of critical online services.…

'I am a firm supporter of privacy,' Sir Tim declares - even as the service is lambasted over IP logging Privacy-centric communications specialist Proton, best known for its ProtonMail encrypted email platform, has announced the appointment of web daddy Sir Tim Berners-Lee to its advisory board.…

What have we learned during that time? Quite a bit, it appears The OpenSSL team has released version 3.0 of its eponymous secure communications library after a lengthy gestation period.…

Nice if you want to store extra attributes with changing relational schema, but not a threat to NoSQL specialists Google Cloud has introduced support for JSON documents in its distributed RDBMS Spanner – a move the Chocolate Factory says offers advantages in adding new data attributes without changing the schema.…

Swale Borough Council faced with hefty bill for junior IT hero's whimsical afternoon's work A borough council in the English county of Kent is fuming after a software test on the council's website led to five nonsensical dummy planning application documents being mistakenly published as legally binding decisions.…

Like Windows Movie Maker on the web Microsoft has purchased Clipchamp, maker of browser-based video editing tools, and claimed it is "a natural fit to extend the cloud-powered productivity experiences in Microsoft 365."…

4 million holes dug in the UK each year... many in the wrong place The UK is pushing ahead with the next phase of a project to map the UK’s underground utility pipes and cables as part of its National Underground Asset Register (NUAR).…

You can't reduce such a vital issue to concern over paedophiles and terrorists Opinion The British government is preparing to launch a full-scale policy assault against Facebook as the company gears up to introduce end-to-end encryption across all of its services.…