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Never fear – they're moving to, er, Windows 8.1 instead Thousands of Metropolitan Police computers are still running Windows XP more than a year after the force promised to upgrade them, mayor Sadiq Khan has admitted in response to a Greater London Assembly question.…

Matching DNA and personality types Ubuntu's Unity interface is gone, which means there's one less desktop to choose from in Linux-land. And while dozens remain to choose from, Unity was one of the most polished out there. Many will miss its detail and design.…

Plus BT evaluates startups. Good luck, network kit giants Comment Hard on the heels of Orange's Telecom Track, which will support network infrastructure startups in association with Facebook's Telecom Infra Project (TIP), BT is evaluating startups for a similar scheme.…

Sugar's 'Hint' scraping service populates sales profiles by scraping 70 data sources Facebook's hit two billion users. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his creation on Wednesday to share the news.…

Redmond owned it, Google invaded. Your options Analysis Microsoft for decades not only defined personal productivity and team collaboration using Office, Outlook and Exchange – it kept the competition at arm’s length.…

VMworld content catalog lists live AWS services, Cross Cloud and OpenStack 4.0 The content catalog for VMworld 2017 has appeared and as usual offers a few hints about announcements at the show and the company's future plans.…

But the transport authority says that invalidates the card Killjoys at the public transport authority in the Australian State of New South Wales are warning users of stored-value-for-public-transport "Opal Card" that turning them into implants invalidates the card.…

'How would you rate your ride?' A police officer in Fayette County, Atlanta, has nabbed a murder suspect by appropriating the Lyft vehicle he figured the perp hoped to use as a getaway car.…

Australian airline QANTAS is partly offline, other carriers may be in trouble too The Amadeus airline booking platform is suffering another outage, so far mostly seen in a follow-on TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Usual Performance) hitting Australian airline Qantas.…

Four weeks, paid, to deal with family health crises Microsoft has decided that family caregivers deserve support, so it's decided to take its paid leave program global.…

This isn't ransomware – it's merry chaos Analysis It is now increasingly clear that the global outbreak of a file-scrambling software nasty targeting Microsoft Windows PCs was designed not to line the pockets of criminals, but spread merry mayhem.…

Upcoming early-access product details revealed Analysis Picture this. A little press conference with Primary Data at its headquarters in Milpitas, California, right in the armpit of Silicon Valley. CEO Lance Smith is briskly burbling away about his company, but us hacks are somewhat distracted.…

Settle down: This looks like a SNAFU, not Trump teasing techies All Daniel Stenberg wanted to do was endure about fifteen hours of air travel from Sweden so he could spend a fun week talking code at Mozilla's all-hands meeting in San Francisco. But the Moz developer and maker of the Curl data transfer tool was denied boarding in Stockholm, en route to London and then The City By The Bay.…

What could FE stand for? Fried Ears? Fearful Explosions? Flaming Emissions? Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 is about to make its comeback.…

Never a M or L when you want one, right? Astronomers looking for black holes have been baffled by the same question for decades: we've found large and small holes, but where are all the medium-sized black holes?…

Oi, tie your kangaroo down, sport ... Mad Max 2: The Roo'd Warrior ... etc etc Kangaroos continue to be the bane of self-driving cars in Australia, as automakers say they still can't figure out how to accurately detect the presence of the pouched marsupials.…

Five year march to One Login To Rule Us All still not over The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has rubber-stamped the government's MyGov portal, in spite of cost-overruns and a lack of performance metrics.…

Murgio gets off easy in money laundering case A kingpin of the ill-fated Coin.mx Bitcoin exchange was today handed a 66-month prison sentence for conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering.…

Tell it to the jury, judge rules Qualcomm will have to face trial against America's trade watchdog over alleged price gouging on its chip designs.…

IBM and Cisco gear? So you're saying two wrongs can make a right? IBM has found a new route for its channel into enterprise data-intensive workloads, courtesy of its Cisco VersaStack deal.…

Vid game biz failed to carry out pen-testing A small UK company that suffered a cyber attack has been fined £60,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).…

What's the future of cash? Analysis Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM), the first of which was installed outside Barclays Bank, Enfield Town in north London.…

Petya or cattle? Updated A huge ‪ransomware‬ outbreak has hit major banks, utilities and telcos in Ukraine as well as victims in other countries.…

How much can you find down the back of your sofa? Reg Standards Bureau In light of yesterday’s mega-bucks deal between the Tories and the Democratic Unionist Party, El Reg has added another unit of measurement to our Standards Bureau.…

Is this the beginning of the endgame? WDC and KKR have submitted a fresh bid for beleaguered Toshiba's memory business, in competition with the preferred INCJ/Bain/SK Hynix bid.…

Spotted on carrier control room screens - reports Updated The Royal Navy’s brand new £3.5bn aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is running Windows XP in her flying control room, according to reports.…

He'd only wanted to work 3 days a week, apparently Former head of the Government Digital Service Mike Bracken has quit his job as chief digital officer at Co-op to work on advising governments.…

Like Salesforce, but for sharing widgets Internet traffic wrangler Cloudflare is opening up its massive global network to third-party developers.…

EMETs? I've had a few The next big update to Windows 10 Creators Edition is out in the Fall – and Redmond is hyping up its security chops and admin tools.…

Just don't disable Skype for Windows updates, k? Security researchers have discovered a nasty vulnerability in older versions of Skype on Windows that might lend itself to hacker attack.…

Northern Ireland could 'lead the way in superfast broadband' after DUP deal Former digital minister Ed Vaizey has dismissed a report published by consumer charity Which? today finding more than 11 places in the UK still receive broadband speeds of less the 10Mbps.…

En-NNabla-blement of answer to Google's TensorFlow? Last night, Tokyo-based Sony open-sourced its deep learning framework, which it has dubbed NNabla – Neural Network Libraries.…

You're undervalued, says survey. But you knew this... Average annual salaries for maintenance jobs advertised online fell by 7.5 per cent this year - but the firm behind the analysis has warned that we shouldn’t forget about the humans who look after systems just yet.…

Abused its market dominance as a search engine, says commission Google has been hit with a record antitrust fine of €2.42bn (£2.1bn) from the European Union today for promoting its own shopping search service over those of smaller rivals.…

Abused its market dominance as a search engine, says commission Google has been hit with a record antitrust fine of €2.42bn (£2.1bn) from the European Union today for promoting its own shopping search service over those of smaller rivals.…

Update 18 months earlier meant recycle bin drained system resources, leading to crash A software glitch in the London Ambulance Service’s 999 call handling system, which prevented the system’s recycle bin from being emptied, led to an outage at the New Year – according to an official report.…

Govt to consult on code of practice as bits of Digital Economy Act go live The UK government is to start talks with social media providers about a code of conduct that will guide their response to online bullying.…

Funding for French privacy browser – and why not Privacy-focused French browser developer UR* has scored a grant from the European Union it hopes will help turbo charge its nascent technology.…

Finds 1,788 cases of potential harm The National Audit Office has slapped the NHS Shared Business Services for its failure to handle a backlog of misdirected clinical correspondence, which will cost £6.6m to work through.…

Sonic boom reduced to 'soft thump' by well-designed shockwaves NASA says the preliminary design review of its Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST) project suggests it is possible to create a supersonic aircraft that doesn't produce a sonic boom.…

Code churns through millions of heavenly objects spotted by Euro Gaia spacecraft An artificial neural network has detected rare super-fast stars zipping through the Milky Way – by crunching piles of data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia probe.…

But she's down to just 13kg of fuel after seven-minute eclipse-avoidance burn India's Mars Orbiter Mission – aka MOM – has celebrated its 1,000th Earth day in orbit around the red planet.…

It's official. Uranus clenches after taking in hot beams Scientists digging through old readings from NASA’s Voyager 2 mission in 1986 have found that Uranus’ magnetic field swings open and shut like the aperture of a revolving door.…

Mozilla engineer spots a gap in Web security, reaches for the patch kit In spite of the rise of HTTPS, there are still spots where content originating on the Web can remain unencrypted, so a Mozilla engineer wants to close one of those gaps.…

Moscow says it's about regulatory rules; Telegram says it's about encryption Russia's communications regulator is threatening to lower the boom on popular encrypted messaging application Telegram.…

The DMCA wasn't meant to stop you fixing your car Last week, to little fanfare, the US Copyright Office took its first baby steps towards stopping auto-makers wrapping their software in copyright rules.…

So they've welded Advanced Threat Defense to Email Security Appliances Cisco's adding McAfee's Advanced Threat Defense to platforms supported by its Email Security Appliance platform.…

'Avengers' and 'Justice League' are taken. 'Suicide Squad' won't fly. So meet 'The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism' Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have created a super-team to tackle terrorism.…

As I was on the motorway, I saw a man who wasn't there. Then things went pear-shaped If you've ever been dazzled by some idiot's high-beam driving towards you at night, you'd probably welcome a self-driving car – except one of the key “eyes”, LIDAR, can also be blinded, or tricked into reacting to objects that aren't there.…

Why does anyone do anything? I don't know, I was really drunk at the time Fueled by beer and bitterness, a US techie logged into his ex-employer's radio towers to sabotage them – and is now behind bars as a result.…