The Register

Let's go round again, maybe we'll turn back the hands of time The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. This edition we are once again sticking with the indie scene as it's genuinely churning out the most interesting stuff as 2021 coughs and splutters along. Two games this time, both based on a "genre" of sorts that is almost as old as gaming itself.…

Cloud giant manages to dismiss only part of lawsuit brought against it Salesforce should face trial after its software was allegedly used by Backpage.com to track sex traffickers, pimps, and their johns online, a judge has ruled.…

And Elon Musk must delete 2018 tweet threatening loss of benefits for unionizing Tesla has been ordered to correct its unlawful labor practices, and its supremo Elon Musk must delete a related tweet from three years ago.…

Will you visit me please, if I open my door... in cars? Autonomous driving sales are accelerating, claims analyst house Canalys, citing global shipments of 3.5 million vehicles with Level 2 self-driving capability during calendar Q4 2020.…

Yes, it's old, but the handset has been supported for much longer than the big dogs usually manage If it's not the battery, it's the software. Phones can have a brief shelf-life and the road from cutting edge to obsolete is short. Bucking that trend is Fairphone, which is about to start rolling out Android 9 to its Fairphone 2 model, first released more than five years ago.…

'Many contributors have told us they no longer plan to participate in FSF events, and we stand behind them' The chorus of disapproval over Richard M Stallman, founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), rejoining the organisation has intensified as Linux giant Red Hat confirmed it was pulling funding.…

Wow, Redmond actually said soz! As Project Reunion - Microsoft's latest scheme to tempt developers back to Windows - lumbers closer to the finish line, the company has admitted it made a whoopsie in the deprecation of the Pivot control.…

A couple of execs have been let off the hook, though Oracle has failed to block a legal case that alleges it inflated cloud revenue with dubious sales practices, but has succeeded in reducing its scope.…

A little self-knowledge can take you a long way, says Nutanix Promo A year ago, tech teams, along with the rest of the world, had to react quickly to a new reality which few had done any meaningful preparation for.…

For organizations inclined to give, there's now some supporting infrastructure OpenCollective, an online funding and community platform founded in 2015, on Wednesday launched Funds for Open Source, a program to facilitate financial support for open source software projects.…

Ow. Thank you sir may I have another

For pity's sake, don't thank Jobs Two decades ago this week, the first version of Mac OS X hit shelves. We're not talking figuratively. The software was sold direct to consumers on disk, with a suggested retail price of $129 (roughly $190 today, adjusted for inflation).…

We've taken your comments on board but... In another sign that SAP is hellbent on migrating its customers to the cloud, the German ERP monster has scrapped community-based suggestions for updates to its on-prem in-memory database, HANA.…

The Register goes a-building once more – no glue required this time NASA's Perseverance is currently trundling around Mars. In the absence of an official Lego version, your hardworking vultures had a crack at a pair of recent designs for the nuclear-powered rover.…

I can indeed make things magically disappear if I shout loudly enough On Call A classic case of a user punching themselves in the face via the medium of technology awaits in this week's column dedicated to those brave professionals at the other end of the phone. Welcome to On Call.…

'Drug delivery would certainly be an intriguing application,' prof tells us Tiny so-called microswimmers coated with gold can be moved around in a liquid using a laser system controlled by a machine-learning system – and scientists hope the technique will be used in some way in the future to transport drugs inside humans.…

Crew Dragon briefly thought its power supply had problems. Also on the ISS: an Ethernet upgrade and missing wastewater NASA has suggested that radiation caused a computer malfunction on the International Space Station.…

Meanwhile, Outlook on Windows gets magical email completion powers Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board and once again emitted tools to detect and filter out swearing and abuse on its Microsoft 365 cloud.…

Takes number one smartphone sales slot across swathes of Europe Xiaomi has warned semiconductor shortages will shape its product release plans for 2021.…

Law bill to give developers a choice to opt out vanishes this week A law bill proposed in Arizona that would allow app developers to avoid Apple and Google's mandatory in-app payment systems and associated commission fees has stalled – after state senators mysteriously skipped a vote on it.…

Three big telcos also boast 1.3 billion 4G subscriptions, and 400m broadband connections heading to gigabit speeds China’s big three telcos – China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom – have said they added more than 300 million 5G subscriptions in 2020, an expansion supported by the construction of more than million new 5G-enabled base transceiver stations (BTS).…

Dive into Huawei’s Industrial Digital Transformation Conference right here to find out Promo If you think digital transformation is just a buzzword, just consider how technology has both enabled and changed the way we work together and collaborate over the last year. As the world teeters on the brink of opening up again, now is a good time to take stock of where we’ve been and to think about what about happens next, whether it’s how we power AI and build it into our decision making, make the cloud more intelligent, or reduce the environmental impact of technology.…

WISPA it softly - seven million people rely on wireless connections America is big. Really big. And for those living in the most rural parts, finding solid broadband can be an uphill struggle, with many opting to ditch fixed-line connections for wireless equivalents.…

Ahead of Fedora 34 release, we talk to project leader Matthew Miller Interview Fedora, the community Linux distro used by Red Hat for early implementation of new technology, is not just for experimentation, project leader Matthew Miller tells us.…

Debian, Ubuntu ahead of the curve in patching at least – don't be late yourself Two high-severity vulnerabilities in the OpenSSL software library were disclosed on Thursday alongside the release of a patched version of the software, OpenSSL 1.1.1k.…

Seeks jury trial and share of profits from IBM's Hybrid Cloud platform Updated IBM's cloud business is the subject of a lawsuit brought by a former employee in the US, who alleges Big Blue lifted his technology and then fired him.…

Revamped desktop and shell based on GTK 4.0 The GNOME project has released version 40 of its Linux desktop, with a new design for finding and launching applications and updated core apps.…

Join our Regcast to learn the power of APIs Webcast The pace of digital evolution can appear overwhelming, all the more so when you still feel weighed down by legacy applications and data stores.…

Watchdog bites Uncle Sam and Lockheed Martin over $14bn-and-counting efforts Agile methodology has not succeeded in speeding up deliveries of onboard software for the F-35 fighter jet, a US government watchdog has warned in a new report.…

Double the bandwidth of DDR4, with 13% less power consumption Samsung has unveiled its first DDR5 DRAM based on a High-K/Metal Gate (HKMG) process, debuting with a 512GB module aimed at the high-performance computing and AI markets.…

'I don’t think I should comment on exactly who did what' UK Prime Minister Boris has backed the country’s commitment to the nation’s Brexit Satellite constellation plan, although he is apparently unwilling to put his name to the deal which helped take satellite communications company OneWeb out of bankruptcy.…

Doc makes all the right noises if you like government support for business In a change from its recent bombastic blather, the British government has published a new Defence Industrial Strategy that looks like it wants to put the infosec industry on a gold-plated pedestal.…

Green Machine gets busy on photons The US military is exploring how machine learning algorithms can clean up quantum communication technologies and help soldiers send encrypted messages to one another on the battlefield.…

Tribute to wartime computer boffin hits circulation on 23 June Two years on from its initial announcement, the Bank of England has unveiled the design of the Alan Turing £50 note.…

Existing customers will continue to receive support, however SUSE is scrapping its Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) product. The German Linux shop has not officially announced the move, but we understand it informed some partners and customers of its decision in December.…

Lawmakers still need to sign off on launch from UK soil, though Scotland-based rocketeers are set to receive £8.5m in funding under the European Space Agency's (ESA) Boost! initiative.…

Free smartwatch? Don't mind if I do NHS Shared Business Services has awarded seats on a mega framework for computer hardware to a long list of suppliers in a deal worth up to £1bn.…

F-Secure confirms nature of email nasty to El Reg BP Chargemaster, purveyors of sockets for electric vehicles, seemingly had its email domain hijacked by criminals who used formerly legitimate addresses to send banking trojans to customers.…

Before 'end of Q1'* judgment we round up all the legalese into one place Updated Judgment Day draws ever closer for ex-Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch. As the promised “end of Q1”* date for judgment in the years-long case draws closer, The Register has collated a handy cut-out-n-keep guide to what the case is all about.…

Devs scramble for replacement mimetype data package On Wednesday, Bastien Nocera, the maintainer of a software library called shared-mime-info, informed Daniel Mendler, maintainer of a Ruby library called mimemagic, which incorporates Nocera's code, that he was shipping mimemagic under an incompatible software license.…

Droughts and transport bottlenecks reduce supply and hike costs. Can the world survive this crisis? Between a certain virus, the recession it caused, political turmoil in the USA, and the usual round of strife, the last twelve months have been distinctly sub-optimal.…

Fabric from Wright brothers' aircraft makes it to Mars Ingenuity, NASA’s dual-rotor drone right now strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover on Mars, is set to perform humankind's first-ever powered aircraft flight on another planet within the coming weeks.…

Execs say they're unworried by new Chinese regs on monopolies and online loans Chinese web giant Tencent has told investors it's ready for China's new antitrust and lending regulations, as it announced FY 2020 annual revenue of US$73.9bn in revenue, a 28 percent year-on-year jump.…

Netflix gets the 'won't someone think of the children' treatment over show for adults Content regulation and privacy have become hot topics in India, in three dimensions.…

66 percent jump saw $19bn change hands, but they’re just 14 percent of global spend China’s big clouds went on a world-beating spending spree to acquire new infrastructure in 2020, according to analyst firm Canalys.…

Most intimate snap yet of M87's supermassive abyss Pic + video Astronomers have captured the most detailed image yet of a supermassive black hole, demonstrating at an intimate level how its magnetic field polarizes light from the phenomenon.…

Posting pics of 'I got the jab' certs, complete with their QR codes, has authorities worried Indonesian officials have asked its nation's citizens to stop leaking their own personal data on social media by sharing pictures of certificates attesting to their receipt of COVID-19 vaccinations.…

Top legal eagles urge web giants to do more in this life and death matter In testimonies from the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to Congress, published on Wednesday ahead of a hearing this week on internet disinformation, the trio revealed their efforts to remove misinformation from their platforms.…

They’ve switched tactics. With Malwarebytes, we'll show how you can, too Webcast Much of the tech world patted itself on the back last year, as organisations switched virtually overnight to remote working and online collaboration.…

House panel to quiz web giant CEOs this week. Expect a degree of deja vu The heads of Facebook, Google, and Twitter will be questioned in Congress on Thursday by politicians probing "social media's role in promoting extremism and misinformation."…