The Register

Alternative networks have Ofcom on speed-dial BT-owned Openreach has slapped a "massive" price increase on connections used by alternative networks for FTTP aggregation, with critics claiming it will "revert the country to a BT monopoly".…

'Cos that would be against the Fourth Amendment, legal team says The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the US government, claiming Homeland Security agents trampled over people's constitutional rights – by buying phone location data from commercial brokers rather than getting necessary search warrants.…

Maybe this might work after all Loon, known for its giant billowing broadband-beaming balloons, says it has figured out how to use machine-learning algorithms to keep its lofty vehicles hovering in place autonomously in the stratosphere.…

Admins have until late 2021 to move away, but Windows containers need caution "Docker support is being deprecated in Kubernetes. You need to pay attention to this and plan for it. THIS WILL BREAK YOUR CLUSTERS," said CNCF Ambassador Ian Coldwater on Twitter.…

Is this some kind of sick game of alien whack-a-mole? This is getting out of hand. Mere days after the metal "monolith" found out in the boondocks of Utah vanished, a similar structure has popped up on a Californian mountaintop.…

Somebody get this project more investment The LibreOffice team has published the first beta of version 7.1, with general availability planned for February 2021.…

Has anyone really ever seen someone else use either of these in the wild? Samsung hasn't given up on Bixby. No, the South Korean electronics giant has confirmed a major update to its voice assistant platform, introducing support for the DeX desktop computing mode while taking design cues from Apple's latest Siri refresh.…

You're probably all patched by now, which is just as well A Google security guru has published details of a critical hole in Apple's iOS that can be exploited by miscreants to hijack strangers' iPhones over the air without any user interaction.…

Has the TLD debacle forced ISOC back to its roots? Maybe The Internet Society has agreed to place the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on a firmer footing with a six-year funding commitment.…

While also making it harder to label dedicated and skilled sysadmins as recalcitrant box-huggers Comment Amazon Web Services poured out a deluge of news yesterday, but the most significant announcement could be an unusual and, I think, very significant hybrid cloud play with a set of new appliances.…

Here’s how to prepare your business for the next big disruption Promo The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has painfully illustrated how the ability of organizations to respond to disruption is determined by their ability to reconfigure their business and supporting technology operating models rapidly, successively and at scale.…

We’re talking about China’s Chang’e 5 lunar sample return mission, which has accomplished one of its main jobs China has released video of its Chang’e 5 probe successfully … erm … probing the moon.…

Means India no longer has the same number of visas to bid for as tiny countries The US Senate has passed an Act that will abolish per-country caps on visas for skilled workers.…

This one has Australia, America, even the wine-drinking world angry China has unleashed a fearsome new cyber-weapon: a meme so dank it has sparked a diplomatic incident.…

Microsoft's cloud repo rental biz finds a silver lining in 2020 It was the best of times for software developers, it was the worst of times for everyone else.…

Telecoms regulator now firmly a part of the burnt partisan landscape Analysis Although the Trump administration is in its final days, the destructive partisan politics it has persistently fanned are still in full effect at the FCC.…

Ryan Hernandez continued to raid gaming giant's systems even after FBI gave him a warning A young man caught hacking into Nintendo’s servers to steal secret Switch blueprints has been sentenced to three years in prison after ignoring an FBI warning to stop.…

And HPE is the one to do it, yeah? Better late than never, right? HPE CEO Antonio Neri has at last congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in the US election, taking the opportunity to urge his administration to focus on digital transformation.…

Join us and Pure Storage online to find out how to pay back borrowed time Webcast You’re not wearing cargo shorts, velour tracksuits, or Matrix trench coats anymore, so why on Earth would you be running SQL Server 2008?…

Kubernetes, Kubernetes, how shalt I manage thou, Kubernetes? SUSE has finalised its purchase of Kubernetes management specialist Rancher Labs as industry talk of an impending IPO for the Linux veteran circulates.…

Ivy league data inhalation as BB vows to grass on teen drivers BlackBerry has inked a deal with AWS to develop and sell the IVY intelligent vehicle data platform just months after it largely blamed a revenue drop in its software and services segment on the slowdown in the automotive market.…

You're tired of best-of-breed databases, apparently Oracle has upgraded the online analytical processing capabilities of its MySQL database, but only if you run it in the Oracle cloud.…

Samsung 5nm, Cortex-X1, integrated... wait, let's not give it all away Qualcomm this week unveiled the Snapdragon 888, its latest flagship system-on-chip destined to power next year's top-end Android smartphones.…

AWS 'reluctant to embrace a multicloud world' but Azure 'often more expensive than on-premises' Databases are moving to the cloud but Azure is expensive, Google has suspect support, and AWS is blinkered about multicloud, Gartner has observed in its latest Magic Quadrant.…

Did someone mention multithreading? Microsoft has once again unleashed some iffy knitwear on the world with an MS Paint-themed sweater to ring in the festive season.…

WAKE UP, SHEEPLE! You'd think the new-age hippies behind a shop called "Hemp in Avalon" would be a bit more groovy about the state we find ourselves in – but no, ads run by the biz came straight outta unhinged conspiracyville.…

But it's hacks all the way down You've heard the phrase "can it run Crysis?" Few have asked, however, "can it run Minecraft?"…

Bus stop / Bus goes / What's crashed? / Windows Bork!Bork!Bork! A welcome return for an old favourite in today's serving of Bork. No matter how oddly shaped the screen, Windows will always find a way to throw up an error.…

If you're mixing that up with File System Replication, maybe it is indeed time Hardworking vultures trying to think up new backronyms for TITSUP aren't alone judging by Microsoft's Windows Server Active Directory documentation.…

Gawd bless us, every one! TalkTalk Business customers (at least those using the talktalkbusiness.net email domain) opened the second door of their advent calendars this morning and were rewarded with... an extension to the switch-off date.…

With Trump on the way out, 2021 is going to be digital levy a-go-go time Like it or not, tech giants are all going to face sizable tax bills starting next year. Probably.…

Other Mac hosts are rather cheaper. And Azure has had cloudy Macs for months. But AWS still has a play here If you plan to use one of Amazon Web Services’ new bare-metal Mac instances in its cloud for more than 77 days a year, you may be better off just buying the Mac Mini instead.…

New customs software that digitises internal trade was just the beginning The European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trading bloc have vowed to intensify their digital trade and connectivity links in ways that could rival the corresponding parts of China’s economic Belt and Road Initiative.…

The plan is to make one pilot more potent by having drones follow their lead Boeing has announced successful tests of “teaming” technology that sees autonomous aircraft fly together while sharing information.…

Open source emulator wishes you a merry VM every day between now and Christmas Open source type 2 hypervisor QEMU has brought back its advent calendar.…

Super Cali goes ballistic, process was atrocious A judge in northern California has struck down the Trump administration’s latest effort to put restrictions on H-1B work visas, making plain his irritation that the case is a virtual repeat of a previous effort that was also struck down.…

Houston, we had a problem... in San Jose HPE on Tuesday announced plans to relocate its corporate headquarters from San Jose, California, to Houston, Texas.…

_If_ shareholders like the somewhat small-ish premium offered Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Slack for $27.7bn in cash and stock, and plans to make the collaboration tool the interface for Salesforce Customer 360, the system it sells to create a single customer ID and profiles.…

And we're only on week one of December's re:invent conference re:Invent Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy opened the rent-a-processor biz's re:Invent conference on Tuesday by touching on cheerful topics like disease and death.…

Hitesh Patel also faces $9m payback for defrauding thousands of US citizens The man who headed an international criminal call center racket that conned Americans into handing over tens of millions of dollars in the belief they were being chased for money by the US government has been jailed for 20 years.…

Redmond rips out usernames, says it will focus on customer orgs, not staffers If you heard a strange noise coming from Redmond today, it was the sound of some rapid back-pedaling regarding the Productivity Score feature in its Microsoft 365 cloud platform.…

Mission aims to bring home 2kg of stones and soil from up to 2m down China's Chang'e-5 probe has successfully landed on the Moon following its separation and descent from a spacecraft in lunar orbit.…

Flagships are falling out of favour while demand for cheap devices swells Samsung is reportedly planning to discontinue its Galaxy Note line of phablets next year as hard-pressed smartphone buyers continue to switch from high-end flagship devices to more affordable products.…

Star of science and celluloid is no more That's that then. The Arecibo Observatory appears to have been destroyed with the collapse of the platform previously suspended above the giant dish.…

Though COVID-19 vaccine coming, video chat is here to stay, claims chief bean counter Lockdown luvvie Zoom has reported a bumper set of Q3 financials – although a rise in the number of free users dampened gross profit margins.…

Various enhancements but merging still a big no-no The OpenZFS project, formerly called ZFS on Linux, has released version 2.0.0 with major new features. The previous release was version 0.86 in October. Both Linux and FreeBSD are supported.…

Speech patterns consistent with boredom?! Minus 10 points! The slightly creepy "Productivity Score" may not be all that's in store for Microsoft 365 users, judging by a trawl of Redmond's patents.…

Meanwhile, landlord reckons he's found a loophole in coronavirus restrictions by naming beer 'Substantial Meal' Ideally, government regulations should not be open to interpretation, but the UK's wishy-washy response to the coronavirus pandemic has only left people scratching their heads – or, worse, thinking of ways they can bend the rules.…

Windows Feature Experience Pack attempts to make beast more modular The modularisation of Windows 10 continued this week as Microsoft popped a batch of potentially standalone components into a seperate Windows Feature Experience Pack.…

America's outdated Computer Fraud and Abuse Act gets a roasting Analysis There’s a growing problem with computer laws written in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were produced just as PCs began entering widespread personal usage but they failed to account for what electronic devices would soon be used for most of the time: accessing information over the internet.…