The Register

As China launches Alibaba antitrust probe, warns Tencent, and the clock keeps TikTok-ing for Oracle The Register’s writers and readers may have taken a few days off, but the US/China trade war rumbled on regardless. So let’s get caught up, shall we?…

Legal geniuses behind case ask for extra time to convert between Google Docs and MS Word The legal minds behind a so-far-failed attempt to sue United States vice-president Mike Pence so he can challenge the result of the nation’s presidential election have not only failed to put forward a convincing legal argument, but they also struggled convert documents from one format to another.…

Linus Torvalds has been back at work for a week and already has a second release candidate ready. What’s your excuse? Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has urged developers to “crawl out from under all the xmas wrapping paper piles and go test” after releasing release candidate two of version 5.11 of the Linux kernel.”…

For whom the return key tolls 12BoC Ah, Christmas dos. Remember them? A chance to humiliate oneself in front of colleagues and make the odd drunken confession or two. Welcome to the tenth whoopsie of our Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC) series*…

'You are fettered,' said Scrooge, trembling. 'Tell me why?' 12BoC It's that Christmas feeling: scrabbling around for the correct cable to attach a poppet's new toy to the family TV. Getting into the swing of things, today's bork, the ninth in our Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC) series*, sees something similar on a screen outside Waitrose.…

It has everything most normal people would want and costs £279 It's never been harder to buy a new phone. Five years ago flagships did everything, mid-rangers had obvious compromises, and sub-£200 handsets were trash.…

Tell you what, let’s have a meeting about it Something for the Weekend, Sir? Don’t wish me a Happy New Year: it doesn’t work. In fact, I think your annual good wishes may be hexing them.…

Santas sled of bork comes to Lanzarote 12BoC Viva Las Borkas! A trip to warmer parts today and a sign that seems to be showing us that most of unusual of things: a bork within a bork, on this, the eighth instalment of our Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC) series*.…

Brute force and ignorance a happy VAX does not make On Call The world of IT and hard physical labour are unlikely bedfellows, but a troublesome VAX installation brought the two together in today's On Call.…

El Reg lends our ear to companies and developers struggling to survive in Apple's cruel, cruel App Store world Special Report Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, currently dealing with antitrust investigations from governments and fending off lawsuits from their disgruntled customers, appear to be finally facing their moment of truth: Has Big Tech gotten too big?…

If it ain't broke, don't fix it Review Last month, Lenovo sent El Reg a loaner of its latest ThinkPad Carbon X1 ultrabook. This series is now in its eighth generation, showing that "innovation" doesn't always mean better. There's value in tried-and-tested designs, and this machine faithfully treads the steps of its forebears.…

Carpark sorrow as Windows failed to cough booty 12BOC On the seventh day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: a boot-hurt ATM, fix the printer, nerds, Scottish parking whi-i-i-i-nge, one dead DB, petty angry user, flightless Windows signage, and a server they said had ceased to be.…

A simple cut-and-paste text job from a 2008 EU treaty for genetic databases People are pointing to the inclusion of Netscape Navigator and SHA-1 in the newly-minted British Brexit trade deal – yet no one seems to have realised part of the text in question is a treaty underpinning an EU-wide DNA database.…

Lithium-ion had a lucky break early on. Successors will need billions of dollars to catch up – if they don't flame out first Feature "There are liars, damned liars, and battery guys" – or some variation thereof – is an aphorism commonly attributed to US electro-whizz Thomas Edison.…

Svelte, yet ordinary Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go is notable for its light weight, decent performance, and somewhat affordable price – but it is a long way from what the company had in mind when the Surface range was launched eight years ago.…

Two firewalls are better than one, right? 12BoC On the sixth day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: Fix the printer, nerds, Scottish parking whi-i-i-i-nge, one dead DB, petty angry user, flightless Windows signage, and a server they said had ceased to be.…

El Reg goes with the Flow Chromium may be all the rage nowadays, but other options that aren't Mozilla continue to be developed.…

To pay for parking you must first sign in to Windows 10 12BoC On the fifth day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: Scottish parking whinge, one dead DB, petty angry user, flightless Windows signage, and a server they said had ceased to be.…

WinFS, stability, and waking engineers Interview Everyone has their favourite when diving into the tub of SQL Server - for some its a chewy hard toffee that delights, for others its a thin choc shell crammed with overperfumed fondant. Microsoft's Rohan Kumar says his preferred version is SQL Server 2008.…

I've got the power! Psyche. I definitely don't 12BoC On the fourth day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: one dead DB, petty angry user, flightless Windows signage, and a server they said had ceased to be. Welcome to the Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period.…

Modem life is rubbish 12BoC On the third day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: petty angry user, flightless Windows signage, and a server they said had ceased to be. Welcome to the Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period.…

And when nerds are your audience, everything is easier Feature Video games are the new Hollywood, complete with celebrities and hyped blockbusters like Cyberpunk 2077. In 2019, they made half as much again as the movie sector's paltry $101bn. You know who won't see much of that dough? Desktop Linux games developers.…

'People got angry. Employees disappeared. Children started to cry' 12BoC On the second day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: flightless Windows signage, and a server they said had ceased to be. Welcome to the Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period.…

Over-promised, under-delivered, and plays like an alpha – try again later The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Merry Christmas? Maybe not if you found Cyberpunk 2077 in your stocking.…

A ghost-ship story for Christmas Something for the Weekend, Sir? Account suspended. Er, wot? [F5, spin spin] … Account suspended.…

Just a little jiggle 12BoC On the first day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: a server they said had ceased to be. Welcome to the Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period.…

SpaceX man rubbishes rumoured tech in future Apple car Elon Musk says he once tried to sell Tesla to Apple, but Cupertino wouldn’t even agree to a meeting with CEO Tim Cook.…

Even fitness trackers ruled a big risk due to potential for record-matching identifying your family The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has published a guide to the terrifying risks that businesses will expose themselves to if they use tech created in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) or engage in any business activity with the Middle Kingdom.…

Trump administration is behind the times: used old name for Chinese company Hutchison sold ages ago The CK Hutchison Group, the Hong-Kong-based conglomerate that operates the “3” mobile brand and maintains plenty of other telecoms investments, wants to clear its name after it appeared on a new list of companies the USA designates as military end users to which US companies cannot export.…

Those 35,000 connections that aren’t built? Celebrate the 11.86 million that were, says Minister Australia has declared its national broadband network (NBN) is “built and fully operational”, ending a saga that stretches back to the mid-2000s.…

Rule number one of sausage club: never ask what goes into the sausage Bork!Bork!Bork! ATMs are like sausages. Everyone likes them, but nobody wants to know what lurks inside. Come take a peak with another edition of The Register's look at computers behaving badly.…

Hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of consultancy work farmed out Deloitte, Atos, and Phoenix Software are among the 29 organisations who've been picked to provide a whopping £200m worth of IT consultancy services to the National Health Service in the north of England.…

Improving Windows' quality by making it not boot? A Windows 10 update rolled out by Microsoft contained a buggy version of chkdsk that damaged the file system on some PCs and made Windows fail to boot.…

Also: Rocket Lab rounds out a busy year, OneWeb returns to constellation work, NASA ploughs ahead with Orion In brief Dr Josef Aschbacher will succeed Jan Wörner as director general of the European Space Agency once Wörner's term ends on 30 June 2021.…

Compromised info include names, email addresses, DoBs, and National Insurance numbers Updated Workplace pension provider NOW: Pensions has emailed a number of UK customers to warn about a data leakage caused by contractor error.…

Plus: Govt has no targets at all for 5G deployment, claims telco insider The UK's cross-party Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has warned that the government risks missing its target to deliver gigabit-capable broadband to 85 per cent of the country by 2025, citing "considerable challenges" to the infrastructure rollout.…

Also: Santa drops a final Windows Insider release, new PowerShell, Skype Together Mode In brief As some Surface Hub 2 users continue to wait for Microsoft to deal with whatever has befallen the Windows update for their shiny wall decorations, the original Surface Hub can now pick up the new code via the Surface Hub Recovery Tool (SHRT).…

OK sunshine, but put it on-prem Few things are certain in computing, but the shift to the white and fluffy seems irrepressible. One prediction the European Centre for Midrange Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) seems confident in making, then, is that it needs to up its game in cloud computing.…

Doing both CentOS Stream and CentOS Linux would mean doing both poorly claims CentOS board member Red Hat's Karsten Wade, a Senior Community Architect and member of the CentOS board, has defended the decision to kill off CentOS Linux in favour of CentOS Stream, saying the two projects were "antithetical" and Stream is a satisfactory replacement in most cases.…

You can’t make this stuff up Google has proclaimed itself the “cleanest cloud in the industry” due to its exclusive use of renewable energy and announced a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia that will be resold by an arm of state-owned oil and gas company Saudi Aramco.…

Better capital returns than cash and all allowed under company rules Business intelligence software vendor MicroStrategy has revealed it’s sitting on a billion bucks worth of bitcoin.…

Ad giant’s promise to play nice with other exercise gadgets accepted in Brussels, deferred down under Australia’s picked a third fight with Google, this time telling it to jump higher if it wants to buy Fitbit.…

Dodges reports alleging Apple has put it on probation Taiwanese tech manufacturing concern Wistron has issued a stock market announcement in which it tries to hose down reports that Apple has put it on the naughty corner and shrug off the riot at its Indian iPhone factory.…

Come on in and enjoy our unprotected FTP server and unsigned configuration files Dell, which pitches its Wyse ThinOS as "the most secure thin client operating system," plans to publish an advisory on Monday for two security vulnerabilities that are as bad as they could possibly be.…

Legal challenges? Scrutiny? Ah, never mind those The NHS has signed a £23m two-year contract with Palantir without scrutiny, even though the controversial AI firm's engagement with UK the health service was originally supposed to be a temporary, emergency measure to help address the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Not sure how the last bit relates to COVID-19 but there ya go Over the weekend, Republican and Democrat lawmakers in the US reached consensus on a new $900bn coronavirus stimulus bill.…

Also: Would have been great if they'd chatted to an epidemiologist about Eat Out to Help Out project The UK government's insistence that it was simply "following the science" during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic was a big factor in the costly delay to the nation's first lockdown and postponed the introduction of face masks rules, according to an independent report.…

And SS7 telco hack rears its ugly head yet again In brief In an 8-K filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, SolarWinds has given more details on exactly how it learned its servers were spewing out malware.…

Meanwhile, Apple-1 in original box signed by Woz goes for $736,862 Steve Jobs may no longer be with us but the cult of Apple persists as fanbois haemorrhage money to own pieces from the company's past.…

And Sparta Global then didn't bother turning up to the Employment Tribunal A company hailed as the UK's top tech employer tried to diddle a former trainee out of £2,000 in unlawfully withheld back pay – and a judge was startled when he discovered how Sparta Global treats its new hires.…