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Relevant Bill section now five times longer Lawyers are exempt from tweaks to UK law aimed at combatting "patent trolls". The Intellectual Property (Unjustified Threats) Bill received Royal Assent last week to little fanfare.…

Shaping up for a Red Hat or SUSE future If the recent news that Canonical is killing its Unity 8 desktop/phone interface and Mir display server caught you off guard, it’s only because you haven't been paying attention to the ups and down of the Linux world.…

Total annual contract value highest ever recorded The total annual value of outsourcing contracts agreed in the UK in the first three months of 2017 hit record levels, according to new figures.…

Calls for UK.gov to close the loopholes allowing 'bogus' self-employment status MPs have slammed the "bogus" self-employment practices of so-called gig economy companies, accusing the likes of Uber, Amazon and Deliveroo of passing the buck on to the welfare state.…

Software-defined satellites will run XenServer and let you upload new workloads Virtualization admins asked to explain what they do for a living may finally have something cooler than server consolidation to tell their kids, thanks to space upstart Vector deciding it's a good idea to create software-defined satellites that lift a hypervisor into orbit.…

Rodan + Fields discovers you can't put lipstick on this pig of a tech setup Rodan + Fields managed to turn skincare and social marketing into a billion dollar business over the past 15 years, but for the past week, the high-flying cosmetics seller has been without a website to handle sales.…

Winter upgrade boosted 'inverse femtobarns' for more accurate stuff-spotting CERN says the restart process for the Large Hadron Collider is complete and the proton-smasher is ready to start its 2017 science program.…

MPs suggest 'system' of punishments in web crackdown An influential panel of UK MPs have proposed fining the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter if they fail to remove illegal content within a certain timeframe.…

ECRYPT WhobOx Challenge opens May 15 Defender or attacker, it's less than a fortnight away from the WhibOx Challenge, a capture-the-flag (CTF) competition operated by the EU-supported ECRYPT.…

Also won't say why <1,000 people didn't get paid Stricken Australian payroll-services-for-contractors outfit Plutus Payroll is “very solvent” and has “no prospect of receivership”.…

Outlook Forms aren't macros, after all - but is it a bug or a feature? A bunch of white-hat researchers have turned up a nasty new vector for attacking Microsoft Outlook: a forms creation feature that bypasses macro rules so attackers can get to the victim's shell.…

Truck hauls up Nextgen fibre, the fix is in once repair crews can find the break A cut to a Nextgen Networks fibre is cutting off Northern Territory Optus and TPG customers north of Katherine.…

'Americans must transform and modernize its information technology' but Silicon Valley hasn't been invited to help United States president Donald Trump has issued an executive order to establish an “American Technology Council” and given it a job to “coordinate the vision, strategy, and direction for the Federal Government's use of information technology and the delivery of services through information technology”.…

DevOps types are going to have to prioritise Ops for a bit to quash Java, login vulns Cloudbees's Jenkins needs a patch against a Java deserialisation vulnerability.…

US$610 million shaves a third from last year's valuation Cisco has just paid $US610 million to buy an software-defined WAN outfit founded and managed by former Cisco execs.…

Don't worry, baby, it'll be really great in the second quarter AMD is optimistic about its chances of getting back into black ink after what it felt was a strong quarter to start the year.…

Plutus Payroll 'is suspending our business activities due to a commercial dispute' Tech contractors say the've not been paid after an outfit called “Plutus Payroll” removed all substantive content from its web site and replace it with news it “is suspending our business activities due to a commercial dispute.”…

Bosses must fix workplace culture Analysis Among the reasons people leave jobs in the technology industry, the most common, according to a study released last week, is unfair treatment.…

Remember how awful it was last time around? Just you wait Blowback from the decision to reopen net neutrality rules in America is continuing, with cities, the Washington courts and presidential advisors all piling in.…

Vuln reported in March, now fix is coming... slowly For the past nine years, millions of Intel workstation and server chips have harbored a security flaw that can be potentially exploited to remotely control and infect systems with spyware.…

No fix ready yet for DoS-able home gateways Netgear has warned customers about the trivial denial-of-service vulnerability discovered in its Intel-powered gigabit cable modems.…

That's one way to boost new handset sales Google has published timelines for when it will kill off security patches for its Nexus-branded Android line.…

Begun, the immersion lithography wars have Updated ASML and Zeiss have counter-sued Nikon over patents used in the manufacture of microchips.…

'Green Knight' - aka HPE - says it's more agile after cutting itself in half with a light sabre Dell EMC looks to be courting HPE sales people with a Monty Python and the Holy Grail parody that compares the latter company to the film's infamously incompetent Black Knight.…

Court deems the site's for copyright infringement, orders DNS blocks Australia's Federal Court has come to the conclusion that KickassTorrents' primary purpose is copyright infringement and has therefore ordered the nation's internet service providers to block access to its many URLs.…

Head of consumer orders staff into stores on May day to have salt rubbed into wounds Huawei's taken drastic steps to mollify customers upset that its response to a chip shortage was to grab lower-performance substitutes.…

It's a big release for storage, shared memory, CPU speed boosts and touchy-feely types Linus Torvalds has given the world version 4.11 of the Linux kernel.…

Trove then disappears, as folks point out the privacy problem Amid a storm of criticism, a set of facial images built by scraping the Tinder dating service has been pulled from Kaggle.…

Final release sprint decides to take a hurdle off the track Debian's release team has decided to postpone its implementation of Secure Boot.…

The IBM arrays are okay, but the PC you used to set up the array might be in trouble Big Blue is red-faced after shipping malware-infected initialisation USBs for its Storwize disk racks.…

WikiLeaks finds the spooks' work experience kids' Scribbles Web beacons are objects such as transparent, single-pixel GIFs planted in emails and web pages to phone-home when users access the content. They're trivially easy to expose – simply forcing an e-mail client to show URLs instead of links can do the trick.…

Surprising signs of hope, and a few of danger Interview In 2015, writer and activist Cory Doctorow told the DEF CON hacking conference that he was rejoining the EFF on a new campaign to eliminate digital rights management regulations by 2025.…

Welcome to the crazy world of Oregon state law Interview Last year, Mats Järlström was fined $500 for revealing troubling flaws in the mathematical formula used to govern the timing of US traffic lights.…

The answer – because net-neutrality slayer Ajit Pai wants to stay in charge Special report This week, Ajit Pai, chairman of America's broadband watchdog, decided to reignite the contentious debate over net neutrality – by proposing scrapping the country's open internet safeguards.…

Curious time to stop listening to Americans talking about foreigners, eh, Donald? Updated The NSA has, in theory, stopped snooping on American citizens' private communications that loosely involve foreigners in some way.…

Chip biz says Cook's crew has commanded tech world to withhold patent dosh Qualcomm claims Apple has ordered chip manufacturers to stop sending royalty checks to the Snapdragon designer amid the pair's patent licensing war.…

Reference to vulns suddenly vanishes after El Reg probe Apache OpenOffice, sized for euthanasia by one of its own last year, still lives and should see an update before the end of May, allegedly.…

Like their hockey teams, Canadian systems went down this week eh Canadians have had a mildly frustrating week as a pair of IT problems derailed broadband connections, blacked out TVs, cut off phone lines, and halted buses in America's hat.…

Paranoid fella hid operating system, weapons manuals in USB drive cufflinks, no less A paranoid Welsh Muslim who wore gloves while typing on his laptop, admitted being part of Islamic State, and, gasp, harbored a copy of Linux Mint, has been described as a “new and dangerous breed of terrorist.”…

All the bits and pieces: It's like the three-day weekend has come early

'He was the most talented and handsome man we have ever worked with,' mourns office After just over two years at The Register my contributions from now on will be dropping to the comments section.…

Now to find out if it has fewer crashes... The M6 is officially the UK's worst motorway for 4G coverage.…

So far, no silly Bluetooth toothbrushes Internet of Things startup investment firm Breed Reply is a curious creature, pouring cash into IoT companies that aren’t punting laughably silly technology.…

Ah, the old 'Windows upsell' one-two Analysis Sales of Surface, falling 26 per cent year-on-year, wasn't the only wrinkle in Microsoft's third-quarter trading period.…

Ageing systems, Brexit, exodus of contractors, delayed agile projects... The departure of UK Home Office chief information officer Sarah Wilkinson after two years at the helm comes at an interesting – and crucial – time for the department.…

Much, much more than a nostalgia trip 24-Hour Test The hottest phone in town this week isn't the new Samsung but, improbably, BlackBerry's comeback device. Partly this is a quirk of a staggered rollout by TCL, which has awarded the UK virtual exclusivity for a month before the US gets it. But it's not entirely down to production issues.…

Spies, bank raiders gravitate to growing stealth technique A newly uncovered cyber-espionage campaign targeting Israeli organisations relies on "fileless" malware hidden in Microsoft Word documents, a hacker tactic that's becoming a growing menace.…

Offended? Go hassle Merriam-Webster, not us Apple fanbois are officially sheeple. So says American dictionary Merriam-Webster.…

Oh, and voting is the only say you get in how the government handles your information The Digital Economy Bill 2016-17 has received Royal Assent, and with Her Maj's rubberstamp it shall henceforth become a requirement for all pornography-serving websites to verify the ages (and thus identities) of all of their visitors in the UK.…

Thousands left terrified worrying about limiting their beer intake this month There's drama aplenty for NatWest customers this morning as account transfers are “disappearing” according to aggrieved customers.…