The Register

‘Technology Associate’ exams that taught general skills like Python, HTML and Java are on the way out. No refunds offered Microsoft has retired the exams for Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) certifications, its broad entry-level tech certifications, and replaced them with a heavily Microsoft-centric curriculum.…

Everything will be anonymised, promises vendor In a sign that interest in process mining is heating up, vendor FortressIQ is launching an analytics platform with a novel approach to understanding how users really work – it "videos" their on-screen activity for later analysis.…

De facto one-party state decrees censorship scheme that sounds a lot like China's Great Firewall Cambodia has formally announced a National Internet Gateway that will filter all traffic coming into the country, or traversing networks within its borders.…

Wants big players to build locally for locals, then build export capability India has created a new tech manufacturing investment attraction fund, this time for telecom equipment and enterprise networking kit.…

26 years after IBM paid Lotus $3.25bn, the Notes email client might be getting useful India’s HCL, the new owner of groupware combo Notes/Domino, continues to evolve the products for the faithful and maybe, just maybe, the occasional new buyer.…

Nothing says urgency like non-binding future reports The new acting head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Jessica Rosenworcel has emerged from her first meeting in charge of America's telecoms regulator stressing urgency and the need to act at a “critical time.”…

As News Corp and Google strike global news payments deal and bill passes lower house Analysis + Update Facebook has barred the sharing of news articles in Australia, effectively immediately, because it thinks Australia’s pay-for-news plan is unworkable.…

Oh yes, and hacking Hollywood, allegedly Three suspected North Korean military intelligence hackers have been charged with, among other things, conspiring to loot more than $1.3bn (£938m) from banks, ATMs, and cryptocurrency companies, according to an indictment unsealed by the US Department of Justice on Wednesday.…

State legal filing answers Amazon's preemptive federal lawsuit last week Five days after Amazon filed a federal lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James to preempt anticipated state legal action, James has answered with a complaint against the e-commerce giant alleging labor law violations.…

New views, card types, and branding as 10th anniversary nears Australian dev tools supplier Atlassian has unveiled a new look and new views for its Kanban-bothering application, Trello.…

API now stable, more on the way Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), aimed at providing building blocks to simplify application development for Kubernetes.…

So, Zoom again then? Updated Microsoft’s video conferencing service Teams has suffered a massive outage causing widespread disruption as people in the United States logged in to start work on Wednesday.…

Doesn't matter which court, Cupertino vociferously defends App Store terms Bismarck in North Dakota (population 128,949) and Brussels in Belgium (population 1.2 million) couldn't be more different. Except for one thing. Both cities are venues where Apple's App Store governance policies have faced, or are facing, intense scrutiny from lawmakers.…

Everyone wants to be the 'Snowflake of X' – in this case, the graph DB world Graph database purveyor TigerGraph has announced £105m in funding to add to the $65m stash already raised.…

Reassuring the regulators Microsoft has unveiled a preview of Azure Firewall Premium, aimed at highly sensitive and regulated environments.…

Next step in Redmond's 'complete virtualization stack with Linux' Patches submitted by Microsoft for the next version of the Linux kernel, 5.12, add the ability to boot the OS as the root partition on its Hyper-V hypervisor.…

Immutablity or vulnerability – it’s your choice Webcast If you think your backup strategy means you’re protected from the worst that cyber-criminals can throw at you, we’ve got some bad news. Ransomware creators know all about backups, too.…

Still Missing In Action for Windows Insiders Windows 10 21H1 is on its way, and seemingly without the major new features we've come to expect in a Microsoft spring rollout, if a post on Redmond's Windows Hardware Certification blog is anything to go by.…

Hold up, just a few more questions... The US Department of Justice has written to Salesforce and Slack to ask a few questions about December's $28bn merger announcement.…

James Bond? Inspector Gadget? Yup, all here A Soviet equivalent of Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher machine has sold for more than double its auction asking price – while a secret camera disguised as a pack of cigarettes went for nearly $20,000.…

Next up: Clinical trials to test the code's suggestions Machine-learning algorithms may help pharmaceutical companies identify old drugs that can be rehashed to treat the COVID-19 coronavirus in elderly patients, according to a study published in Nature Communications.…

Open-source stuff stays for now, company promises Palo Alto Networks (PAN) has described its $156m buy of cloudy DevSecOps biz Bridgecrew as a "key bet" at a time when the world has never been more reliant on off-premises computing.…

No penalties for contractor oopsies in first year, but you'll still have to pay what HMRC thinks you owe An IR35 snooper squad sniffing out contractors won't be coming to a town near you anytime soon unless there is a strong reason to suspect "criminal" behaviour.…

Going green or just plain mean? Exclusive Fujitsu wants to tighten the group's corporate belt by removing the benefit fuel card afforded to hundreds of UK staff, and anyone resisting could potentially be fired and rehired on new contractual terms.…

Do y'all think Samsung might rethink plans to spend $20bn down there? As winter storms cause power outages across the United States, a lack of juice in Texas has led Austin's fabs to shut down.…

Having apparently lost, UK registry operator tries desperate legal gambit The UK’s internet registry operator Nominet has claimed that an effort to remove members of its board and replace them with two caretaker directors is not legal and is refusing to put it to a member vote.…

‘Help Wanted … in Space’ signs go up for first time in over a decade The European Space Agency is about to advertise for astronauts for the first time since 2008 and is open to candidates with a physical disability under a new “Parastronaut feasibility project”.…

Ex-copper signed over copyright to bosses, judge rules A British developer has lost his fight to claim ownership over software he wrote while working for digital forensics firm MD5.…

New CEO pledges 'aggressive targets' to regain market share and leadership After completing nine years as CEO of VMware last week, Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday started work in the same job at Intel and prioritized delivering on promises and innovating quickly.…

Minister claims investment attraction regime is working, also asks for help getting products from villages into Marketplace Amazon.com will make some of its own-brand electronic in India.…

Azure and AWS already have same cloud deal, but hey - new friends! Google and Tata Communications have teamed to spread the G-Cloud further inside India.…

Serial entrepreneur regrets the error Attendees of the Abundance 360 Summit in January paid $15,000 or more to attend an in-person event that arguably shouldn't have happened under California's December 5, 2020, stay at home order. And for that price, 12 of the 30 who showed up left with a COVID-19 infection.…

Cough up if you want to use it with your laptop and phone Password manager LastPass has changed its terms and conditions to limit the free version of its code work on a single device type only per user, seemingly in an effort to force free folks into paying for its service.…

Trend Micro claims software is full of security flaws that allow data out and malware in Trend Micro has published a report claiming that data-sharing Android app SHAREit, which has over a billion downloads, contains multiple vulnerabilities after the app's maker ignored advice to fix the flaws.…

'Every country will need to change its ways' says Microsoft billionaire Review Bill Gates' book How to avoid a climate disaster is a sombre but informative read.…

But the growth can't last forever... The pandemic has been relatively kind to the UK arm of Virgin Media, which reported [PDF] growth in its broadband and contract mobile business units during 2020.…

Be honest, what's YOUR 'bus factor'? DevOps writer Gene Kim spoke at the Dynatrace Perform event last week, saying not a word about Dynatrace but focusing on technical debt and developer productivity.…

'Don't give out the location!!' Everyone has a quirky personal interest or two, but few have pursuits that would move us to drive to Exmouth amid a national lockdown that dishes out fines for non-essential travel.…

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage: Wearable Brick Apple Watch Series 5 or Apple Watch SE owners can now send their devices for a free service after multiple units of the fancy wristwear refused to charge once entering Power Reserve mode.…

Shipments up a whopping 90+% in Q4 despite industry-wide shortages The one-device-per-person trend caused by the pandemic fuelled a boom in notebook sales across Britain in Q4 that resulted in a near year-on-year doubling of shipment growth.…

All these use cases, not much action Wrinkles and bubbles in wonder substance graphene are showing electronic properties researchers say could one day help solve limits on current microprocessor designs.…

Second attempt to run entirely in the browser – but nothing works yet The LibreOffice team has been working on a port to browser-hosted WebAssembly, and hopes for a working demo by summer 2021. "It's the way the industry is heading," said Document Foundation board member Thorsten Behrens.…

Web hosts infiltrated for up to three years in attack that somewhat resembles SolarWinds mess France’s Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information (ANSSI), the nation’s cyber-security agency, has identified a years-long campaign to infiltrate IT monitoring platform Centreon.…

LA hosting outfit SkySilk puts itself in the hot seat because it thinks other clouds wrongly act as judges Social network Parler is back online, five weeks after Amazon Web Services told the service company it had breached its terms of service, and therefore shut down its servers.…

Veteran Unix Admins offer new cut of systemd-free Debian derivative and get the name right this time Devuan, the Linux distribution that came into being after the 2014 disagreement over Debian’s adoption of the systemd as the operating system’s init daemon, has celebrated its sixth anniversary by adding a third init option.…

Maybe it can use the spatial data that India also liberalised yesterday to deliver promise of unplugging rogue operators India's government has become so tired of SMS scams that it's creating two new national bodies to deal with the problem.…

Want to shake off NDMP for good? Tune in this week Webcast Ensuring your organisation’s NAS data is protected is fraught with challenges. You need to ensure you’re capturing the right data, at the right time, and if the worst comes to the worst, you want to be certain you can restore it and get your company back in business as quickly as possible.…

Boss reckons half a dozen institutions will follow suit this year Barclays Bank is to join the Open Invention Network (OIN), as is Canada-based Toronto-Dominion (TD) Bank Group, in order to resist what Barclays told us are "overt or veiled threats of litigation from patent trolls."…

Ah, the old 'liquidate your company' trick. Classic Another month and two more British companies behind nuisance marketing calls are collectively facing a £270,000 penalty for breaking the law by calling people registered by the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).…

Decision would mean less complicated situation for Blighty's digital economy The EU is set to rule that the UK's laws are sufficient to ensure "adequacy" for the safe sharing of personal data, a move promising to end uncertainty over data protection rules post-Brexit.…