The Register

Gates denies connection The Microsoft board was conducting an investigation into Bill Gates' alleged "inappropriate" romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee when he resigned in 2020, according to two investigative reports that appeared over the weekend.…

Fiscal year end forecast: Cloudy with a chance of litigation Oracle this month filed a lawsuit against Envisage Technologies, claiming the Bloomington, Indiana-based IT firm has been violating its copyrights by running Oracle Database on Amazon Web Services in an improper way.…

Firm working with FAA to 'investigate the anomaly' after second stage sputters What was supposed to have been a milestone in Rocket Lab's march toward reusability turned into a mishap over the weekend as a borked second stage sent the payload on the company's 20th Electron launch back to Earth considerably earlier than planned.…

Computer museums set to be unbolted again As the UK enters the latest stage of lockdown easing, The Reg can confirm that The National Museum of Computing and the Centre for Computing History will be reopening imminently.…

Why? It might reveal whistleblowers' names... British infosec accreditation body CREST has declared that it will not be publishing its full report into last year's exam-cheating scandal after all, triggering anger from the cybersecurity community.…

Sitting is as bad for you as smoking, and doesn't look nearly as cool Review Sitting, we're told, is the new smoking. The catastrophic health consequences of hours spent hunched behind a desk are said to include heart disease, colon cancer, and muscle weaknesses.…

No policy shakeup to deal with snatch of info from primary physicians Evidence from NHS Digital's website suggests that patient data held by GPs in England will be available to private-sector companies to help them understand market opportunities in the UK's health service.…

Trade you architecture and production tricks for lithography and yield plans? Political America likes to judge its presidents by their first 100 days. Corporate America thinks more in 90-day cycles, so as today is Pat Gelsinger's 90th day at the helm of Intel, it's an apt time to look at how he and the company are doing.…

Former Sun boss Scott McNealy offers interesting response Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of controversial research trove Sci-Hub, has claimed that Apple informed her it has handed over information about her account to the FBI.…

Phoning it in? Who, Me? We straddle the worlds of IT and telephony in this week's episode of Who, Me? where a reader fails to consider the tinkering of someone too young to know better.…

Combine as ‘GoTo Group’, will represent two percent of GDP and say scale will help them grow Indonesian web giants Gojek and Tokopedia have agreed to merge and become the new “Go To Group”.…

Sharp practices can leave temp tech workers with nowhere to turn Campaigners and MPs are urging UK government to introduce legislation to stop umbrella companies siphoning off contractor pay through a range of sharp practices.…

Over 150 million people given freebies or generous top-up deals Indian telcos are giving away services to help clients who don’t want to leave home during a savage second wave of COVID-19 infections.…

TraceTogether app becomes primary tracking tool and compulsory in many settings Singapore has made its Bluetooth-powered "TraceTogether" contact-tracing app its preferred means of recording movements in public spaces across the island.…

Head to the Nutanix Database Summit for a frank exchange of ideas Promo Databases are the key to unlocking business value, but far too many are still built on complex legacy platforms that cannot meet the demands of today’s businesses.…

Also puts brakes on data collection by carmakers China has signaled that ride-sharing companies can expect the same scrutiny as its web giants, and laid out regulations that will stop cars from collecting unnecessary data.…

Plus: Non-profit ML groups snub sponsorship money from Google In Brief Highway patrol officers in California arrested a man this week accused of riding in the backseat of his Tesla while it was under Autopilot.…

'An important step in our country’s interplanetary exploration journey' – state media Updated China's Zhurong rover today touched down on Mars from the Tianwen-1 orbiter, the nation's state media says.…

Coalition of 41 organizations oppose labor rule challenge Google is spearheading an effort to save a visa rule that allows the spouses of H-1B visa holders awaiting green cards to work in the US.…

Also wriggles out of exclusivity deal Amid fears the global semiconductor crisis may last until 2023, AMD has opted to extend its purchase agreement with GlobalFoundries, giving it access to a greater proportion of the fabricator's output.…

Sorry for trying to add it or sorry for cocking up the comms? Amid the smell of burning rubber, the new managers of open-source audio editor Audacity have announced a U-turn on plans to introduce "basic telemetry" into the product.…

How easy would it be for customers to depart the walled garden, legal eagles ask economist Epic Games' lawyers had a chance to put Apple's expert witness through the wringer in the latest from its California bench trial.…

Problem was of social network's own making, says unimpressed judge Facebook has failed to neutralise an order from Britain's competition regulator freezing its buyout of Giphy after having "sat on its hands" and failed to answer questions, the Court of Appeal has found.…

Sometimes you need to lift yourself out of the cybersec trenches and look up to the summit Promo Keeping your organization safe from cybercriminals and other ne’er do wells requires constant honing and refining of your own skills and knowledge.…

That's 37% of the country covered, and BT is expected to pick up the pace too A new Ofcom report shows the number of UK homes with access to gigabit-capable broadband hit 10.8 million in January, representing 37 per cent of households.…

By probing for installed apps with custom URL schemes, it's possible to build a 32-bit unique fingerprint FingerprintJS, maker of a browser-fingerprinting library for fraud prevention, on Thursday said it has identified a more dubious fingerprinting technique capable of generating a consistent identifier across different desktop browsers, including the Tor Browser.…

Visible from the launchpad... when it finally gets there NASA has slapped its worm logo on the side of the Crew Module Adaptor (CMA) for the Orion spacecraft as the first Artemis mission to the Moon inches closer.…

Russia-based criminals pick soft target in hope of easy gains Ireland's nationalised health service has shut down its IT systems following a "human-operated" Conti ransomware attack, causing a Dublin hospital to cancel outpatient appointments.…

OtterTune to compete with Oracle automation, but also for open source databases A university spin-out startup has announced a private beta of an automated database tuning service which its founder claims can double the performance or halve the cost of the popular AWS Relational Database Service.…

Retention of now-deleted security breach evidence sparks spat +Comment IT pro Rob Dyke says an NHS-backed company not only threatened him with legal action after he flagged up an exposed GitHub repository containing credentials and insecure code, it even called the police on him.…

You know it's time for an upgrade when your PC gets spanked by a sign Bork!Bork!Bork! The mean streets of Birmingham in England's West Midlands are our destination today, with an entry in the bork archive reminding us of the raw power of signage.…

Because our golf-obsessed boss has wandered off fondling his balls Something for the Weekend, Sir? "I am writing with regard to a data security incident relating to you."…

Be alert, not a-llam-ed Douyin, the Chinese app known as TikTok in the rest of the world, is apparently censoring Alpacas.…

Because now you have a bill to replace all these perfectly functional devices On Call Welcome back to On Call where this week we peek behind the scenes and see what happens when public-facing kit is reported as borked.…

Samsung and SK Hynix singled out as nation tries to become a titan South Korea's government announced a support package worth 510 trillion won (US$451bn) to bolster in-country chip production with the hopes of becoming a global supply chain leader.…

It's Space Race 2 for Russia and America Internet clothing mogul Yusaku Maezawa on Thursday said he and an assistant will take a 12-day trip to the International Space Station in December.…

Pen and sticky paper still a great analog productivity hack Obit Spencer Silver, the co-creator of Post-it Notes found in offices all over the world – occasionally with passwords written on them – has died at the age of 80.…

Testing dongle-driven ‘Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood’ and WebAuthn as alternative Poll Cloudflare has called on the world to “end this madness” by consigning Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAS) to the dustbin of history.…

First loss as a listed company thanks to Beijing’s $2.8bn antitrust fine Chinese tech giant Alibaba has posted its first loss as a listed entity, thanks to the $2.8bn antitrust fine imposed by local authorities, and also revealed that it has lost a major cloud customer “due to non-product related requirements.”…

Web giant tells us it's considering its response to €100m fine demand Google was tickled with a €100m fine by Italy’s monopoly watchdog on Thursday for unfairly holding back an Android app maker.…

Ad tech engineer out after autobiography sparks protest – and what does this say about iGiant's hiring process? Antonio García Martínez, hired by Apple last month as a product engineer on its ad platform team, no longer works for the iGiant following an employee petition objecting to his writings disparaging women and people of color.…

Cloud hyperscalers drive projects to slap restrictions on code use Percona’s CEO had taken a swipe at open-source software vendors switching to proprietary or less-permissive open-source licences in an attempt to avoid being run over by cloud giants.…

It’s the one lever you really need to get a grip on Webcast Moving to the cloud is so exciting isn’t it? New tools, unlimited infrastructure, a whole new world of analytics and machine learning. Why didn’t we do this years ago, they’ll ask?…

JAM with a distinct whiff of Redmond, as you would expect Microsoft's Azure Static Web Apps service, in preview since May 2020, is now generally available, together with extensions for Visual Studio Code to support local development and automatic deployment via GitHub.…

Anonymous sources get into war-by-media counterbriefing Colonial Pipeline's operators reportedly paid $5m to regain control of their digital systems and get the pipeline pumping oil following last week's ransomware infection.…

Sign-ups open in second half of 2021 Google has linked arms with SpaceX to hawk data and cloud services through the Starlink constellation.…

'I got bored sitting at home while retired ... I chose to go back to my roots' Language Summit Python creator Guido van Rossum this week told attendees at the Language Summit that he hopes to double performance in version 3.11.…

Paid fraction of his fellow execs, though he is worth $50+bn (just don't mention tax) For a man’s whose net worth is estimated at $50.7bn Michael Dell isn’t short of spare change, but he was paid a fraction of what his corporate generals received in fiscal 2021 after agreeing to forgo a huge chunk of his salary.…

We'll hire 7,000 to get it done by 2026, says boss BT's Openreach has promised to bring FTTP connectivity to 25 million premises by the end of 2026, an increase of 5 million against the previous target.…

Analyst: 'Company may need to license 7nm and below process tech' With the world facing a drought of crucial semiconductor components, Samsung Electronics has said it plans to dig a fresh borehole in the form of a new production facility, expected to open in Q2 next year.…