The Register

Plus: Report shows soft opening next cannot come soon enough for some Microsoft has firmed up plans to reopen its facilities and set 29 March as the date when employees might once again set foot in its Redmond-based HQ.…

Cross-platform appeal outweighs performance penalty, argues Linux flinger With an aim to expand the Linux app ecosystem, Ubuntu desktop engineering manager Ken VanDine has popped up in marketing material for Flutter to say that Google's cross-platform framework is Canonical's "default choice for future desktop and mobile apps".…

LTE it be: Nobody seems to care, so off the 15,000 lines go Greg Kroah-Hartman, responsible for maintaining the stable branch of the Linux kernel, has nudged WiMAX a little nearer the precipice with a commit to Linux staging to strip the technology from the operating system.…

Existing leadership to continue while majority shareholder exits stake Dutch business application biz Unit4 has been bought by private equity group TA Associates in a deal said to be in the region of $2bn.…

'Cases like this... stifle innovation and ultimately harm consumers,' says iGiant A jury in the Eastern District of Texas has ruled that Apple infringed upon a patent held by Personalized Media Communications (PMC) LLC, ordering it to pay over $308 million in damages.…

It's just 'Opera on iOS' now Opera has pushed out an update for its iOS browser, dropping the "Touch" in Opera Touch to become just plain old Opera on iOS.…

Try, try, try to understand, it's a Magic WAN Network infrastructure biz Cloudflare on Monday plans to launch a service called Magic WAN to allow companies to bring geographically dispersed data centers, offices, devices, and cloud services under a single cloud-managed wide area network.…

'Some of you will be happy at this, and some might be disappointed' Updated Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), announced at the organisation's LibrePlanet virtual event that he has rejoined the board and does not intend to resign again.…

Plus: Young female Japanese biker turns out to be boring 50-year-old uncle In brief AI proto-boffins can now rent up to 16 GPUs, the largest amount on any single virtual machine currently available, via Google Cloud.…

Plus: Exchange and SolarWinds autopatch tools and shocking news! In Brief Graham Ivan Clark, part of the crew that hijacked around 130 high-profile Twitter accounts and used them to collect cryptocurrency, has been sentenced to three years in prison for his part in the scam.…

On the plus side: Can't laser-cut that Live Laugh Love slogan into chipboard without software Column It takes a lot to stir the peaceable men and women of Makerhood into angry revolt, but 2D robo-snippers Cricut did it last week. Cricut makes desktop thingies that can print, cut and score a variety of flexible materials, which produce 2D templates you then glue, sew or otherwise fashion into 3D things like baseball caps for Etsy.…

What's wrong with Dynamics 365, huh? Meanwhile, SAP is on ServiceNow Sometimes vendors struggle to see the world as it really is – complex, messy, and for the most part filled with technology that so often falls short of its initial promise.…

When fixing legacy bugs turns out to be a career-limiting move Who, Me? The weekend is no more so start your working week with a Who, Me? tale about the hazards of simply trying to do the right thing.…

Not quite, says peer-reviewed journal, but with prices well below rivals the 80 percent of hearing impaired people with no helpful tech will be listening Samsung says a study of Samsung's Galaxy Buds Pro, conducted by the Samsung Medical Center, suggest its wireless earbuds could be a handy substitute for hearing aids. Samsung does not make hearing aids.…

iPad doodle offered as a ‘cryptic currency’ non-fungible token, natch Comedian John Cleese has jumped aboard the non-fungible token bandwagon, with an offer to sell a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge for $69,346,250.50 using the newfangled blockchain-infused digital certificates of ownership for digital goods.…

Pirate papers site is best blocked on grounds it threatens university security The City of London Police, which has responsibility for intellectual property crime across the UK, has warned universities and scientists not to use “open science” site Sci-Hub and called for it to be blocked by universities.…

Customers concerned over 2017 posts describing power outage, confession to sub-par design OVH has written off a second data centre because of the March 10th fire that destroyed its SBG2 facility.…

Five percent of clean room cooked, hopes to be back in a month A fire has damaged a fabrication plant belonging Japanese chipmaker Renesas.…

Even though its Great Red Spot appears to be shrinking, the storm behind it will probably live on Terrifying winds rip across Jupiter’s poles reaching speeds of up to 400 metres per second, or 900 miles an hour, three times faster than the most powerful tornadoes on Earth, according to the first direct measurements of the gas giant's turbulent stratosphere.…

Pre-release code ready for validation and enablement Microsoft has made the next version of Windows, known as 21H1, available to commercial customers ahead of its release to General Availability.…

At last, after a year, my PhD is finally complee- bzzt! Think you're having a bad day? Spare a thought for the IT team at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington who accidentally managed to wipe files stored on desktop computers last week.…

It's keeping a low profile (ahem), but yes, it's an actual clickety laptop A keyboard can make or break a computer -- just ask Apple. On that note, Dell has partnered with German outfit Cherry to bring its mechanical Cherry MX keyswitches to its Alienware m15 R4 ultrabook.…

Social ad biz is working to restore service, for better or worse Updated On Friday, shortly after 1700 UTC, users of Facebook and its WhatApp and Instagram subsidiaries began reporting difficulties connecting to the respective services.…

You have less than a week left to bid on the offending document The world is close to discovering how much a person is willing to pay for a brush with the Jesus phone's Maker - a job application penned by heroic Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is about to go under the hammer later this month.…

Money for nothing but your nicked IP In-depth The latest passive income trend, we're told by Lithuania-based internet biz IPRoyal, is internet sharing, a term that here means "subletting" or "reselling."…

Are we at the tipping point? Does anyone care? Six out of every 10 servers sold worldwide in 2020 were placed in the racks of data centres owned or rented by the world’s purveyors of fluffy white services, signifying a tipping for business clouds.…

Tough luck if you're in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales To quote the Mancunian philosopher Stephen Patrick Morrissey: "Stop me if you've heard this one before." The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has promised a fresh tranche of funding for rural full-fibre internet in a new initiative called Project Gigabit.…

Keep those vacancies coming in and we'll promote them for free Job alert The Register is publishing free job ads to help keep tech professionals in gainful employment during these unusual times.…

But there are legal protections... right? The Ministry of Defence has ordered its contractors not to answer certain questions on the UK's once-in-a-decade census – despite threats of £1,000 fines being handed to people who don't complete the national survey.…

Deal inked 'without competition' due to COVID, says dept The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a £14.5m year-long contract to Tata Consultancy Services without any competition.…

Could slow the spread of misinformation without needing draconian law Research including a Twitter field experiment has found social media organisations might have a 3rd option that doesn't involve the banhammer or a laissez faire attitude to tackling the fake news plague infecting platforms.…

Major upgrade for sound editor – as long as you don't need FAT32 support Open-source audio editor Audacity was upgraded to version 3.0 this week with a new single-file project format emitted alongside other fresh features and fixes.…

Space agency now that much closer to the Moon tossing multi-million dollar Space Shuttle engines in sea NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) core stage has finally completed its test, taking the Artemis program one step closer to the Moon and relieving nervous engineers across Stennis Space Center and beyond.…

I hope he doesn't call me Pedoking Something for the Weekend, Sir? You know my name. Look on my works and despair. "Does he get paid for that?" Yup, I can hear you despairing right now.…

Alternatively: Python's pickle pilloried with prudent premonition of poisoning Evan Sultanik, a computer security researcher with Trail of Bits and an adjunct computer science professor at America's Drexel University, has unpacked the Python world's pickle data format and found it distasteful.…

Here's looking at you, kid On Call It's Friday! Pour yourself a beverage, break out the end-of-week treats, and enjoy a reader's tale of international intrigue and derring-do that began with an innocent stint On Call.…

Chipzilla hints at bringing 10nm ASIC FAB to US soil to sate desire for faster and cheaper custom silicon The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced an effort to “expand access to domestic manufacturing capabilities to tackle challenges hampering the secure development of custom chips for defense systems.”…

Tell us more about those services you say were stealing your brand Encrypted phone network Sky Global has seemingly shut down after European police swooped on users and distributors, and its chief exec was indicted by American prosecutors.…

Russian chap tried to crack Tesla security, SpaceX engineer traded dodgy info on dark web stock tipping forums The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has revealed that two sets of crooks have confessed to conspiracies against companies led by Elon Musk.…

Remember the dream of microscale machines? They may look like this Video Measuring just 60 microns across – about the width of a single strand of human hair – the world’s smallest self-folding origami bird is a feat of engineering.…

Till Kottmann may also have helped with Verkada vid-cam exploit and other cracks, now accused of fraud on top of merry pranking The US Department of Justice says a grand jury has indicted Swiss security provocateur Till Kottmann over multiple exploits and attempts at fraud, and authorities have quickly moved to rule out free speech as a defence.…

Calls for YouTube to cough up, plus Facebook and Google India may be on the way to adopting Australia’s legislation that compels Facebook and Google to pay local news publishers or face forced arbitration.…

Supply chain hardships hit the region harder than most, and 2019 had already been a bumper PC-buying year PC shipments in the Asia Pacific region flatlined in 2020, even as global rates soared. But buried in the data is a marked shift from desktop to notebook sales.…

FlickType claims it's being squeezed to force an acquisition A tiny startup that develops virtual keyboards for the visually impaired has accused Apple of unfair competition and negligence by booting its software out of the App Store.…

Terminal and Power Automate elevated to inbox status, Auto HDR for gamers Microsoft has thrown its long-suffering unpaid testers a bone in the form of a fresh Windows 10 insider build with tweaks to Virtual Desktops, a preview of Auto HDR and changes to what comes in the box.…

Ugh, it's so opinionated, sometimes in an arbitrary way Amazon Web Services has previewed an "opinionated deployment tool for .NET" as part of its pitch to attract .NET developers to its cloud services.…

World's most used mobile phone OS gets some new toys Google has rolled out the second Android 12 developer preview, with the pre-release version of the mobile OS largely focusing on security and UI tweaks.…

Rolling over the Martian stones toward a drop-off for the Ingenuity Helicopter Ever wondered what it sounds like to drive on Mars? The answer involves clonks, squeaks, and a distressing amount of scratching.…

Bugs, patchually: Just when you thought it was safe to print from Windows Microsoft continues to demonstrate its impressive commitment to Windows quality by admitting the patch it released to patch the patch that broke printing was, er, itself broken.…

How to curb GPT-3's tongue Special report OpenAI is building a content filter to prevent GPT-3, its latest and largest text-generating neural network, from inadvertently revealing people's personal information as it prepares to commercialize the software through an API.…