The Register

'Its life doesn't have to end!' More than 10 years on from its campaign to persuade users to dump Windows 7 for a non-proprietary alternative, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a petition to urge Microsoft to open-source the recently snuffed software.…

From Screw you, Brits... to Up yours, Delors... Perhaps predictably, Apple has hit out against the European Parliament's renewed calls for a common charging standard. Its battle call? "It'll stifle our profits innovation."…

Courtesy of Species360 (not a move by Microsoft into the zoology space) Is your team flinging poo at visitors to your business? There's a cloud for that – as long as those doing the flinging are literal monkeys.…

TUPE or not TUPE? That is the question. Unison calls on lawyers ahead of 30 June D-Day IBMers who provide tech services to ScottishPower have voted "overwhelmingly" for industrial action in a consultative ballot over deepening uncertainty surrounding their jobs.…

And what about my buttocks, eh? Something for the Weekend, Sir? It's that hum in the office. It's getting to me.…

Hadoop slinger's big bet joins list of rivals doing the same thing When Hadoop distributor Cloudera marked a year since it signed off its merger with rival Hortonworks with the appointment of a new CEO, it was hardly a glowing endorsement of the strategy so far.…

Polishing balls for mates is no way to make a living On Call Welcome to an On Call with a difference. Today The Register retells a story familiar to all too many readers: "You know about computers, right?"…

Some engineers are just better than others... at being noticed The idea that some software developers matter more to coding projects than others is controversial, particularly among open source projects were community cohesion and participation can suffer if contributors are not treated fairly.…

'These models should not go into clinical practice at all,' academic tells El Reg A surprising number of peer-reviewed premature-birth-predicting machine-learning systems are nowhere near as accurate as first thought, according to a new study.…

Now 29-year-old faces years in the clink after long battle to bring him to justice A 29-year-old Russian scumbag has admitted masterminding the Cardplanet underworld marketplace as well as a second forum for elite fraudsters.…

What do we want?! $100. When do we want it? As soon as we finish this shift Protesters rallying outside court in Vancouver, Canada, this week in support of embattled Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou turned out to be paid actors – who said they thought they were extras for a film or music video.…

'Closed source' blueprints available for all to gawp at – and potentially exploit Source code, internal user names and passwords, and private keys, for the website and online account systems of Canadian telecoms giant Rogers have been found sitting on the open internet.…

Just don't mention the FPGAs Intel on Thursday reported $20.2bn revenue for the fourth quarter of 2019, a gain of eight per cent year-on-year, and $72bn for the full-year, a two per cent increase.…

This is Windstream, going dark... US ISP Windstream says a video game update is to blame for an outage affecting its business VOIP service earlier this week.…

Both the hero we need and the hero we deserve News has reached Vulture Central of a US resident's attempt to have his beer registered as an emotional support animal in the hope of bringing the amber nectar onboard public transport.…

The dirty dozen... well, almost Updated Xerox is done playing mister nice guy – the company has named a slate of directors it wants to shoehorn onto HP's board to spearhead its £33bn hostile takeover bid.…

MP claims HPE vs Autonomy High Court trial has cost £40m to date Ex-Cabinet minister David Davis has called for former Autonomy exec Mike Lynch's potential US extradition to be halted – at least until judgment in the lengthy UK civil case brought against him by HPE.…

Only up for five hours, but that's plenty of time for the wrong person to spot it Updated An Amazon Web Services engineer published exchanges with customers and "system credentials including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys" to a public GitHub repository by accident.…

Don't want to incriminate yourself? Tough luck, you terrorist The Government Reviewer of Terrorism Laws has declared that safeguards protecting Britons from police workers demanding passwords for their devices must be watered down.…

New SDK shows both potential and challenge of the new Surface devices Microsoft has released a preview SDK for its forthcoming Android Surface Duo device, and has confirmed a Developer Day on February 11th when the SDK for the Windows dual-screen Surface Neo will be previewed.…

Bye-bye Kohsuke Kawaguchi Kohsuke "Father of Jenkins" Kawaguchi is taking a step back from the DevOps tooling he created as he ventures into startup territory.…

Yep, the Verizon that sold subscribers' location data Verizon has slung out a new, privacy-focused search engine in an effort to win over customers who prefer not to have their browsing habits tracked by ad-slingers and the like.…

Shades of Saturn V as Artemis I inches closer to launch Engineers have lowered NASA's monster SLS core stage into the B-2 Test Stand at the agency's Stennis Space Center.…

Weren't you going to use it for 'continuous improvement'? Pub and hotel company Fuller’s has decided to ditch its Infor ERP system and search for a simplified accounts package a year after selling its brewing division to Japanese beverage biz Asahi for £250m.…

Open-source distributed system teaches bots to find their way without a map, just cam, GPS, compass A reinforcement-learning algorithm was open-sourced this week by Facebook that can train AI bots to navigate simulations, with each droid armed with just a camera, GPS, and a compass – and no map.…

So give him a call FFS Like the unfortunate soul who finds himself being loaded onto a cart of plague victims in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a bloke from Forfar in Scotland has had to declare himself "still alive" after finding his name on a headstone in a local graveyard.…

Innovation freedom may not be so free if US Supreme Court rules Google ripped off Oracle's Java APIs Column Later this spring, the US Supreme Court will hear Google v Oracle. This is the final appeal of a decade-long case in which Oracle claims Google stole the Java application program interface (API) structure that defines how programs interact with Java's own libraries. That Google reproduced the API in Android is not in doubt; until Oracle kicked up a stink, it was also not in doubt that APIs could not be copyrighted.…

Well, AWS hopes you will because they're doing AI/ML/etc for it New tech-driven Six Nations stats will "show you which teams are really clinical" at making line breaks inside the opposition's 22, England rugby legend Will Carling has told The Register.…

Macron suspends cyber levy plan after The Donald has a quiet word French President Emmanuel Macron has confirmed his country will suspend its plan to slap a digital tax on tech giants after threats from US president Donald Trump to impose trade tariffs.…

Handy FireEye tool roots out indicators of compromise Citrix and FireEye have released a new security tool to help admins find out if their servers have been hacked via the high-profile CVE-2019-19781 flaw that was disclosed in December but only patched on Monday.…

Space prang rose temperatures, melted glaciers, influenced climate, next thing we know: we're sharing AI-filtered selfies on Insta Pic Scientists studying minerals in the Yarrabubba crater in Western Australia have confirmed the giant pit was formed when an asteroid struck Earth 2.229 billion years ago, making it the oldest impact site yet found on our planet.…

We say take off and nuke the entire codebase from orbit. It's the only way to be sure To mark the arrival of the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, Microsoft software engineer Eric Lawrence, who helped shift Edge to its Google-driven open source foundation, issued a plea to Windows users to let go of Internet Explorer.…

Talk about high tech: Software maker exposes cloud silo of personal info in tale of security gone bong A tech biz specializing in software for marijuana dispensaries inadvertently exposed to the public internet a database containing tens of thousands of mellow Americans' personal information.…

Rapporteurs call for investigation, technical security report leaks The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, has been officially fingered as the man responsible for hacking Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s iPhone X, causing a massive stir in diplomatic circles.…

Chocolate Factory boffins doubt Apple can fix it, either Google security researchers have published details about the flaws they identified last year in Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP), a privacy scheme developed by Apple's WebKit team for the company's Safari browser.…

Bad-a-Bing, badda-boom: Netizens complain of browser hijacking Users who install or update Office 365 Pro Plus, part of the Office 365 subscription for larger businesses, will find their browser search engine automatically set to Bing, according to Microsoft documentation.…

Homeland Security memo not an abuse of power, court decides An effort by tech companies to put the Trump Administration's tough new visa requirements on hold has been thrown out by a US federal judge in Arizona.…

High flying exec joins 'leccy car-driver co-boss in Switzerland Only one half of SAP’s joint CEOs managed to travel to the World Economic Forum 2020 in Davos by relatively environmentally friendly means, the other opted to jump on a jet plane.…

'Two down, four to go,' quips John Cleese as another member of comedy crew kicks bucket Obit Actor, writer and Python Terry Jones has died at the age of 77.…

Report suggests public interest defences for infosec professionals, academics and journalists Britain's main anti-hacker law, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, is "confused", "outdated" and "ambiguous", according to a group of pro-reform academics.…

What happens when big tech ventures completely fail? A High Court trial! In a long-running spat, British insurer Co-Op Insurance is suing IBM for £155m over what it claims is Big Blue's "deliberate" failure to deliver a new IT platform for the British financial services provider.…

Quickly shuttered partially redacted leaky DB included 'internal notes marked as confidential' Five identical Elasticsearch databases containing 250 million records of Microsoft customer support incidents were exposed on the internet for all to see for at least two days right at the end of 2019.…

If yours won't support a merger, we'll install some who will Xerox is preparing to nominate up to 11 directors to HP's board to push through a $33.5bn takeover bid, according to the Wall Street Journal.…

Total Inability To Secure Upgrade Programme in Berlin German authorities are waking up to a Windows 7 headache, with approximately €800,000 required in order to keep the elderly software supported a little longer.…

Canonical goes playing in the streams Ubuntu daddy Canonical is aiming at the likes of Huawei and Google with its take on app streaming with Anbox Cloud.…

Destined to die a lonely Martian death? How about Doomed Buggy? NASA has announced the finalists for its Mars 2020 Rover naming and the options are as worthy as one might expect.…

CloudEndure gets cheaper, new host-level backup for VMs as AWS looks to lock 'em in AWS has lopped 80 per cent off the price of its CloudEndure disaster recovery service and 50 per cent off Kubernetes (K8s) clusters.…

Emailing stuff is hard, m'kay? Capita Education Services had a bit of an oopsie yesterday as a new helpdesk system spurted potentially thousands of email addresses at unsuspecting users.…

Not for surveillance, honest Drug dealers and dodgy pharmacies illegally touting opioids online – think heroin, fentanyl, codeine, morphine, and so on – may have their collars felt by an AI cop soon. Ish. Maybe.…

Old? Windows-only? Community struggles with '40-year-old male' problem Microsoft senior software engineer Michal Strehovský has run a small .NET Core application on Windows 3.11, a version of the OS released in 1993.…