The Register

Major open-source projects need paid-for developers, but what is the business model? Interview The companies that do most to develop and evolve the LibreOffice productivity suite, both for desktop and cloud, say the project's business model is "beyond utterly broken" and that The Document Foundation (TDF), the charity that hosts the project, has to change its approach.…

Can't go worse than that time it bought 2.3 million Oracle licences. Right? The UK's Ministry of Justice has attempted to grab the interest of ERP software slingers by wafting around the prospect of a £100m deal.…

Asia-Pacific internet address registry strategist says smaller nations get better access – when their broadband works The move to virtual meetings among internet governance bodies has had mixed results, according to Joyce Chen, a senior advisor for strategic engagement at the Asia-Pacific internet registry APNIC.…

Pipeline looks good as C-level crystal balls predict need for more tech Indian services company Infosys has said that lower-than-planned costs for visas have helped it to record better-than-expected results for the first quarter of its financial year.…

Open-source Windows lookalike aims to fix its 'long neglected' storage stack The open-source ReactOS project has marked a "major milestone" by hiring a developer "full time at near-market rates."…

Failing mega-group discovers again it didn’t buy the right biz Arm was pressured by its owner Softbank to jack up its processor core licensing fees for some of its customers in an effort to squeeze more money out of its $32bn buy of the British chip designer, sources say.…

'Coordinated social engineering attack’ paved the way for miscreants to tweet out Bitcoin scam to millions Twitter has offered its initial analysis of the Wednesday mass hijacking of prominent twits' accounts – and suggested it all kicked off after its staff fell for social engineering.…

And lets the rest of its staff stay at home, because coronavirus Yahoo! Japan, the no-longer-a-joint-venture-with- Yahoo!- and still rather successful outpost of the web portal pioneer, has decided it will hire 100 strategic advisors and wants them to treat the company as a side hustle.…

$4.5bn splash turns out to be first installment in $10bn ‘Digitisation fund’ and development template for new products Google has revealed that $4.5bn of the $10bn “Indian digitisation fund” it revealed on Tuesday will go towards an investment in mobile carrier Jio Platforms.…

Multimillionaire found dead in flash pad by sister Tech entrepreneur Fahim Saleh was discovered dismembered at his New York City condo this week.…

Financial bod suggests this will go nowhere, which is just what Dell's share price is doing, dammit! +Analysis Dell this week announced it is exploring a sale of the 81 percent chunk of VMware it owns and that is not publicly traded.…

Details start to emerge on real-world impact of Prez-signed secret memo The CIA is running a secret cyberwar including Russian-style hack-and-leak operations with little or no oversight, US officials have warned.…

Staff face being turned away at the border for nation's treatment of Uyghurs The US government announced on Wednesday it will "restrict" the US visas of foreigners working for Huawei and certain other Chinese technology companies.…

All work and no play makes… you’re coming with us, you clown Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is heading back to jail after he pleaded guilty to defrauding several thousand people out of millions of dollars by pushing what he claimed was a new, better, Bitcoin.…

Miscreants have already obtained more than $110K from the credulous Updated The Twitter accounts of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and other celebrities were briefly taken over on Wednesday, along with the accounts of various cryptocurrency businesses and affiliated executives, to promote a Bitcoin scam.…

Autopsy finds rip-off gear is mainly about making coin, not bugging your network Two types of fake Cisco switches – discovered after a software upgrade hobbled counterfeit gear at an unidentified IT firm – appear to have been designed for profit rather than espionage.…

Admins sent scrambling after software mysteriously starts crashing Updated Microsoft's desktop email client Outlook has stopped working worldwide for countless users, whether they are using it with an on-premises Exchange server or with the Office 365 cloud.…

What are the upstarts doing right and the market incumbents doing wrong? Reader survey With network security increasingly positioned as an enabler of future business success, making the right purchasing decision in this area is more important than ever.…

'Retaliation should be public and painful' says Beijing-approved rag The ink has scarcely dried on the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport's speech to the House of Commons that confirmed Huawei would be banned from the UK.…

Sales crash by 20% and that break-even period has just been pushed out by up to another year Brit retailer Dixons Carphone has cautioned that the COVID-19 crisis is wreaking havoc on its already struggling Mobile division as sales continue to plunge and the prospect of breaking even is extended further.…

Vestager vexed Apple has had a €13bn (£11.6bn) tax bill overturned after the EU's General Court ruled that the iGiant was not the recipient of unlawful state aid from the Republic of Ireland.…

Ex-MD Jens Amail returns to Germany, and we can't blame him Former Microsoft veep Michiel Verhoeven has been appointed as the new managing director of SAP UK & Ireland to replace Jens Amail who is returning to Germany after two-and-a-half years in the role.…

Yet Virtzilla still won't say how many paying punters are actually using its Amazonian cloud VMware has made some notable tweaks to its AWS-powered cloud service.…

Sling some dollars Moz's way for that special WireGuard experience Those wondering how Mozilla plans to plug the holes in its finances were given a clue today in the form of a subscription-based Virtual Private Network (VPN) bearing the company's stamp.…

What a shame Something wicked has befallen San Bernardino National Forest, if signs posted around the protected woodland in Southern California are to be believed.…

'At least 30 days' notice of a suspension required – but there are plenty of get-outs Have you found your apps suspended or removed from the Play Store or App Store for no apparent good reason? A new EU law that came into force this week may help.…

And you've told your users their info may be harvested by Amazon, right? Across regions, yeah? Did you know if you upload pictures, text, audio, code, and other content to some Amazon Web Services' AI systems for processing, the internet giant may quietly keep your data to retrain and improve its current and future technology?…

Whatever it is they're doing, consultants will be kept busy North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative (NOE CPC), a buyers' group of NHS trusts, has dished out a juicy tender for an IT services and consultancy framework agreement worth up to £200m.…

These things are noticed when you have an IT pro in local government The local government of England's westernmost county, Cornwall, has become embroiled in a row about an apparent overpayment of licences to the tune of £2m on an Oracle Cloud ERP migration worth around £4m to the vendor when the contract was signed in 2017.…

But competitors concerned about hits to battery capacity and longevity The "charging wars" are in full swing, with vendors and chipmakers alike competing to replenish your phone's battery the fastest. Taking the lead is OPPO, which today touted 125W wired charging.…

80 among newly TUPE'd workforce may face redundancy, say insiders UK retailer the John Lewis Partnership continued its "digital transformation" this week by confirming another batch of staff are to be ejected into the arms of outsourcing giant Capgemini.…

Marian Rejewski's cyclometer recreated in hardware for first time in decades A Cambridge post-graduate student has recreated the “cyclometer”, the decryption device devised by Polish mathematicians that informed Alan Turing’s later code-breaking efforts.…

As were the morons whose illegal party was rumbled when they made a colossal KFC order Police in the Australian state of Victoria have fined Pokémon Go players for venturing out during COVID-19 quarantine.…

Boffins find flaws in the way software engineering hopefuls are sifted People applying for software engineering positions at companies are often asked to solve problems on a whiteboard, under the watchful eye of an interviewer, as a way to assess technical problem solving skills.…

New family can wrangle 2TB of RAM, has bandwidth to burn, makes single-socket beefy PCs sing AMD has revealed a new range of microprocessors intended for use in workstations.…

Reduce your mean time-to-resolution with efficient troubleshooting Promo There’s still plenty of talk of businesses pivoting to digital-centric approaches as the vast majority of us continue to work from home. If this shift to the "new normal" is on your radar, where should you go for in-depth technical information and discussion on the subject? Answer: Micro Focus’ Virtual Realize event.…

Says third party holding some business contact information has had trouble but its own infrastructure remains safe Citrix has taken the unusual step of rebutting dark web discourse that alleges its networks have been compromised.…

Contractors look to have copped it as offshore utilisation rates grew Wipro’s new CEO Thierry Delaporte has offered some initial insights into his plans for the services giant.…

Seeing as finance is Hong Kong's thing and that industry needs lots of security kit, this could be scary US President Trump has signed an order to end Hong Kong's special status, meaning that restrictions on high-tech exports to mainland China now apply to the Special Administrative Region as well.…

Spoiler alert: Cable companies are ripping Americans off Proposed changes to the way the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) measures broadband availability across America can’t come soon enough – as the state of Georgia has made plain.…

You'll want to patch that – and all these other bugs fixed by Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, VMware, SAP, Google Mega Patch Tuesday Microsoft on Tuesday patched a wormable hole in its Windows Server software that can be exploited remotely to completely commandeer the machine without any authorization. It was one of hundreds of security bugs squashed today by Redmond along with Oracle, Adobe, VMware, SAP and Google.…

When two don't become one A rogue white dwarf star hurtling through the Milky Way may have freed itself from a binary system after it partially exploded as a supernova more than 40 million years ago.…

EU antitrust folks give themselves two weeks to think about it Google has pinky-promised not to pull user health data from Fitbit devices into its monster ad empire if the European Union approves its planned $2.1bn acquisition.…

Funnily enough, triggering a brain drain and denting the economy isn't such a great vote winner The Trump administration today scrapped its new rule that would have forced up to a million foreign students to leave the United States if their universities didn’t offer at least some in-person tuition mid-pandemic.…

10 out of 10: Great in a test score, less good when it's for the severity of a flaw SAP customers should update their installations to close a security vulnerability that can be exploited to commandeer the software by anyone who can reach it.…

Redmond's Azure-based system pals up with virty dinosaur Microsoft has agreed to make Citrix a "a preferred digital workspace solution" for its Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), part of its Microsoft 365 suite.…

Brit firm inks deal with Best Buy in US as it eyes government tenders abroad UK modular PC flinger Kano has cast its ambitions overseas as well as at home for its updated edutech-flavoured Kano Windows 10 PC, out today along with a pile of new buildable accessories.…

Finnish comms biz says it's ready to go on a million radios already, despite what outgoing CEO said previously Nokia will allow telcos to repurpose existing 4G/LTE radios to support 5G, via an easily-deployed software update. Should we get our hopes up for near-ubiquitous fast mobile internet? Not if previous comments by the company's outgoing CEO are to be believed.…

Query data in one cloud and export the results to another Google's virtual Cloud Next event has kicked off with the introduction of BigQuery Omni, letting customers extend the tentacles of the analytics service to probe data across Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure.…

Country to be hit with £2bn cost, massive tech delay after firm 'materially compromised' by US's latest sanctions D-day has finally arrived for Huawei in Britain: UK.gov will outlaw the purchase of Huawei gear to build 5G networks by the end of this year, and from 2027 the country's mobile networks must eradicate the Chinese vendor's kit from their 5G infrastructure.…