The Register

Nearly 8 years of extra fees after it 'initially identified issues' with billing in 2011... but nothing came of it Britain's comms regulator has dished out a £10.5m fine to O2 UK, after it found the mobile operator overcharged exiting pay monthly customers by a whopping £40.7m between 2011 and 2019.…

Rethinking the desktop with reference to Apple's early UI guidelines Updated A pre-alpha project to make a new FreeBSD-based desktop operating system has adopted a minimalist design intended to appeal to Mac defectors.…

Getting it half-right means you got it half-wrong Something for the Weekend, Sir? Give me a moment, I'm on another call. Hello? Hello? … Oh, it's just a recorded message assuring me that my call is important to them. Of course it is: it's a premium-rate helpline.…

Does your office have a singing swinger? On Call It seems that hardly anyone is flying these days. Handy because in today's On Call, one false move interrupts the monitoring of air traffic.…

Oodkind look even more terryfing AI researchers have attempted to reconstruct scenes from Doctor Who by using machine-learning algorithms to convert brain scans into images.…

Gives itself power to snoop and block anything, anytime – but at least it’s also consulted with industry Myanmar’s military Junta, which seized power in a coup last week, has drafted new laws that compel local carriers to collect customers’ data and make it available to authorities.…

WPA3 access may cause Blue Screen of Death Microsoft has issued an out-of-band Windows 10 patch to fix a self-inflicted error that can crash devices that attempt to access Wi-Fi networks secured with Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) standard.…

Chinese New Year gift for Beijing, maybe for Oracle too The Biden administration has paused the United States’ attempts to run TikTok and WeChat out of the country.…

Making Google and Facebook cough up could help USA’s currently fragile democracy, argues Pres Brad Smith Microsoft has said the USA should copy Australia’s plan to force Google and Facebook to pay for links to news content and suggested that doing so will help improve social cohesion and strengthen democracy.…

Another privacy improvement from Cupertino, just a small one Apple's forthcoming iOS 14.5 release, currently in beta, will conceal the IP address of Safari web surfers from Google's Safe Browsing service, integrated into Safari to spot fraudulent websites.…

Victim shot dead a week after he got engaged to fiancée An MIT AI researcher is wanted by police in connection with the murder of a Yale graduate student, who was shot dead last weekend in Connecticut.…

Antisocial network sued by Proofpoint in scrap over domain names Security biz Proofpoint and its subsidiary Wombat Security Technologies have sued Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary to prevent the seizure of internet domain names used for security testing.…

Just don't hit that big, red button Hewlett Packard Enterprise has taken another crack at the ultimate in edge computing with a second launch of hardware to the International Space Station (ISS) in the form of Spaceborne Computer 2.…

German car giant looks to Azure for AI smarts as Ford opts for Google's cloud Volkswagen and Microsoft will build an "Automated Driving Platform" powered by AI services on the Azure cloud, according to an announcement from the two giants today.…

'Teams and Skype video conferencing up to 1080p at 30fps' – sign us up! Lucky UK shoppers will at last be able to get their hands on Microsoft's magical folding phone, the Surface Duo, next week for a bargain-basement price of… £1,349.…

18 months after dispute emerged, techies say enough is enough Exclusive Openreach repayment project engineers (RPE) are set to strike for 48 hours later this month in protest at parent company BT Group's overhaul of the grading structure, the Communication Workers Union has told members.…

I always feel like somebody's watching me An Azure customer was outraged after finding himself on the receiving end of an unexpected LinkedIn message from Ubuntu maker Canonical last night.…

Plus: All his former Deloitte auditors can be made to testify against him The US government will never drop its criminal charges against Autonomy founder Mike Lynch "even if extradition were refused," his US attorney has told a British court.…

No one can save your bacon now Cute, intelligent and delicious with a tendency for totalitarianism, pigs have a lot going for them. But they're also capable of grasping video games – of a sort.…

Brexit bonus for EU, it's losing millions after endless rule changes The British owners of 74,000 suspended .eu domain names have been given an additional three months to change their registration details to an address in Europe before they are permanently taken away.…

Space is about to looking a lot clearer, thanks to adaptive optics Astronomers who devised a technique to capture direct images of nearby potentially habitable exoplanets have found what could be a world orbiting a star a mere 4.3 light years away from Earth in the Alpha Centauri group.…

Now in preview, says Microsoft Microsoft has nudged out an update to the C#/WinRT NuGet package and added a preview of C#/WinRT authoring to an otherwise relatively humdrum release.…

'We cannot guarantee to suppliers any business through this Commercial Agreement' The UK government has made a £2bn contract award for "Digital Outcomes and Specialists" as part of a one-year framework agreement.…

Google Cloud Platform account required, API key comes with Ts&Cs Hands On Google has big ambitions for its new Open Source Vulnerabilities database, but getting started requires a Google Cloud Platform account and there are other obstacles that may add friction to adoption.…

Board of dot-UK registry operator scrambles to save itself Analysis The board of .uk registry operator Nominet has offered a series of concessions to its members in an effort to win back their support in advance of an extraordinary meeting that could see most of them fired.…

Tune in next week and you’ll be able to talk storage like a cloud native Webcast If you haven’t already adopted containers and Kubernetes, they’re probably on your agenda for this year.…

Upgrades to version 7.0 are going to require your full attention, especially if you’re fond of VGA output VMware has published new and tighter security configuration guidance for its flagship vSphere private cloud suite.…

Could the lucrative era of light-touch regulation finally be over for Google and Facebook? On Wednesday, Wojciech Wiewiorówski, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), opined that Europe's Digital Services Act proposal should go further in its effort to promote online transparency and safety by eliminating targeted advertising.…

Test on tricky route planned for later in 2021, followed by productisation Samsung has floated the prospect of soon selling autonomous ships, if it can sail one successfully in August 2021.…

Plans week-long orbital mission, with Chicken Korma already pencilled in on the menu India’s space program will test a vehicle it expects will soon carry a crew into space in December 2021.…

Nicholas Faber joins accomplice Michael Fish in admitting he raided university portal for sensitive info A college graduate has admitted hacking into the email and online accounts of female students, stealing their nude photos and videos, and trading them with others.…

Biden-era Dept of Justice forced to make call after UK judge blocks on mental health grounds The US Dept of Justice will continue pushing for the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.…

Fawbush and Miller supers will crank away at weather-forecasting models HPE has built two supercomputers focused on weather forecasting for the US Air Force that, when combined, are said to be six times more powerful than their predecessor.…

Also: NASA to use SpaceX's Falcon Heavy for the Lunar Gateway while eyeing another seat in a Soyuz In Brief Typical. You wait years for missions to Mars and then a whole bunch come along at once. Less than a day after the Emirates Mars Mission dropped into Martian orbit, China's Tianwen-1 has followed suit and NASA will be arriving shortly.…

Security researcher finds it's easy to confuse build systems with malicious versions of private software libraries Bug hunter Alex Birsan last year managed to compromise the software supply chain of 35 companies by exploiting packaging mechanisms used by JavaScript, Python, and Ruby developers.…

And the cost of hitching their HR and finance system to the cloud? $52.5m over half a decade The good people of Iowa can breathe a sigh of relief as their state government has found a more conventional way of funding a new Workday-based HR and finance project than raiding coronavirus federal aid funds.…

National Crime Agency nabbed network that stole money, Bitcoin, personal data Brit cops have cuffed eight men in England and Scotland amid a probe into SIM-swapping attacks on high-profile US targets – including sports stars, musicians, and "influencers" – that had money and personal data stolen.…

New dependencies will rely on runtime from March The death march of legacy Edge and Internet Explorer 11 continued today with an addition to the Microsoft 365 roadmap warning that new features would likely rely on WebView2.…

And more gaffes from the world of lockdown videoconferencing Yes, we're still in the thick of a pandemic. No, we haven't seen anyone outside our immediate family for months. Yes, we're working from home. Bit boring, isn't it?…

54k staffers can WFH permanently, come in 1-3 days a week for meetings - or if they must - use vendor's 'immersive workspaces' Global CRM SaaS pusher Salesforce has told its staff and the wider world that the 9-to-5 workday is dead.…

'I don't have the energy to be a server admin for something that's held together with scotch tape and prayers' The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) project is moving development to GitHub today despite what a core developer calls "calamitous design choices" in git, for the sake of familiarity and wide tool support.…

No downtime for major updates CloudLinux has added the Raspberry Pi to its KernelCare patching service, although only if you're running Ubuntu.…

Mike Lynch remains popular with the Leftpondians, court hears Autonomy founder Mike Lynch is part of a gang of "English thieves" who deserve to be extradited for targeting "their fraudulent guns" and "grasping claws" at "American companies and American money," a US government barrister told a London court yesterday.…

Waiting for a bus while welcoming Windows Bork!Bork!Bork! You can't beat that factory-fresh smell except, it appears, when waiting for both a bus and somebody to finish setting up Windows 10 on a rainy Scottish evening.…

Too much money wasted on on-demand pricing A report from the FinOps Foundation has found that many organisations pay more than they need for cloud services, with challenges including getting engineers to control costs, and too much use of on-demand pricing.…

Soon may the phisherman come to leave our inbox quite undone Kind old Google has published data on targeted email attacks and dispensed advice to help users separate friend from foe.…

Dodging lock-in good for the career as well as the soul Getting skilled up in open source could be a better career bet than focusing on a specific vendor's cloud technology.…

Reckons the world is going to re-wire and revisit security Cisco has reported a small downwards revenue wobble, but reckons there are better days ahead because the post-COVID world will need more networks.…

Orbital mechanics leads to rush hour The United Arab Emirates space agency successfully maneuvered a spacecraft into Martian orbit on Tuesday, marking the country’s first foray into interplanetary exploration.…

MEP driving EU’s Digital Services Act backs down under cash dangle plan Australia’s plan to make Facebook and Google pay for links to news content have found a toehold in the European Union.…