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ValueLicensing also calls for action to 'restore and maintain competition and choice in the market' Updated Microsoft is being sued by UK reseller ValueLicensing for £270m in damages over claims of restrictive contractual practices and abuse of dominance.…

Euro cops take $1.65bn of blow off the streets after poring over messages The Belgian plod says it seized 27.64 tons of cocaine worth €1.4bn (£1.2bn, $1.65bn) from shipments into Antwerp in the past six weeks after defeating the encryption in the Sky ECC chat app to read drug smugglers' messages.…

Company acted fairly and reasonably, rules judge Two men who quit software development firm Geeks Ltd failed to prove the company unlawfully withheld more than £2,000 from each of them to claw back its training costs, a tribunal has ruled.…

Though framework agreement 'cannot guarantee any business' The UK government has awarded 25 suppliers places on a framework deal for software design and implementation which could be worth up to £1.5bn.…

Reports of Cloud team's demise may be premature Chinese giant Huawei has conducted an internal re-organisation and The Register understands one result is its cloud and business computing groups have come together under new leadership.…

Take the heat out of your firewall deployment Webcast If you’ve got an application which faces the web, no one would dispute that you should probably have a web application firewall sitting in front of it.…

Terms and conditions 'not transparent or fair', High Court judge says The High Court of England and Wales has ruled that bookmaker Betfred must pay a Lincolnshire blackjack player £1.7m ($2.3m) in winnings that the betting site withheld because of a supposed software glitch.…

Wait... what? Strap in for the story of an Australian rare earth miner, partly owned by China, and worries about uranium dust The future of a China-backed rare-earth mining operation in southern Greenland has become uncertain following an election in which one of the winning party's key policies was opposition to an Australian mining company.…

Working to improve 'cyberwalls', but for now swift recovery is main strategy Video The highest-ranked officer in India’s armed forces has admitted that China has cyber-war capabilities that can overwhelm his nation’s defenses and suggested that only cross-forces collaboration will get India to parity with its giant neighbor.…

And ponders whether to let itself be bought by private equiteer CVC for $20bn Toshiba has received an offer to go private.…

Let's see what the regulators say Shareholders in AMD and Xilinx on Wednesday approved their massive proposed merger.…

The trick is to get buddies to decline low-paying jobs and check old code DoorDash drivers are encouraging one another to turn down food delivery jobs below a minimum threshold of $7 in an attempt to game the company’s in-app payment algorithm.…

Software nasty also 'persists after a factory reset' Android smartphones from Gigaset have been infected by malware direct from the manufacturer in what appears to be a supply-chain attack.…

Or the cost triples, which is one way to encourage concise programming AWS has declared Python support in its automated code review system CodeGuru production ready, as well as reducing the price by "up to 90 per cent."…

DeeperVision software coming to Azure Marketplace Microsoft has buddied up with Thales Alenia Space as it continues to set up ground stations in its data centres as part of its Azure Orbital push.…

Now sulky teens can TikTok while you marvel at boring nature stuff AccessParks, broadband provider to the US National Park Service, has signed up FreedomFi to deploy 5G networking over hundreds of sites using Magma open source 5G software.…

Crypto-mining jerks at least partly to blame Engineers around the world have been given a few hours off today, assuming they are using Microsoft's Azure DevOps Hosted Pools, as the platform buckled under a second wave of attacks.…

SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 steps up to boost the coffers of NoSQL database biz Redis Labs, a commercial backer of the open-source key-value store database Redis, has secured $110m in funding, with backers including Softbank Vision Fund 2.…

Digital Markets Unit takes aim at giants' conduct with users and advertisers The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today launched its Digital Markets Unit (DMU) watchdog, which aims to regulate large online platforms like Google and Facebook, and create rules governing their conduct with users and advertisers.…

Emulation could save you from a complete meltdown Webcast No-one likes to have a silo of specialized but aging kit that requires special care and attention embedded in the heart of their computing infrastructure.…

Possible culprit: Ancient code running in production. A vuln 'would not be terribly surprising' says maintainer PHP maintainer Nikita Popov has posted an update concerning how the source code was compromised and malicious code inserted – blaming a user database leak rather than a problem with the server itself.…

Aww, did the big bad criminals get a little lockdown burnout too? Compromising every web-connected server and service you can find gets tiring after a while – and by the end of 2021 internet criminals targeting British companies were as fatigued as the rest of us, according to Bitdefender.…

Swarm programming with audio, video, and everyone editing at once – what could go wrong? JetBrains today pushed out Code With Me, formerly in preview, a plugin to support remote collaborative coding, as well as updates to its Java and Ruby IDEs.…

Not rewriting the whole OS, of course, but using the language going forward Google has signalled support for the Rust programming language in low-level system code to limit the prevalence of memory-based security vulnerabilities.…

Tracking ID placed on mobile device without informed consent, says campaign group Privacy group noyb, founded by rights advocate Max Schrems, has instigated a new complaint about Google's use of the Android Advertising ID (AAID) to track users.…

Yes, that Horizon branch office management IT system The UK Post Office has awarded Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension to run the Horizon IT system, faults in which led to dozens of subpostmasters being wrongly prosecuted.…

Windows whinging? Take your mind off it with a sausage roll Bork!Bork!Bork! The Easter Bunny has been and left us with a basket of bork in the form of Microsoft's Windows 7 End of Support (EOS) fairy.…

Ball gazers don't see devices flying off shelves in 2022. Do they know something we don't? Analysts are forecasting worldwide IT spending to top $4 trillion in 2021 with devices leading the charge as organisations adapt to changing workforce demands.…

Expresses fondness for Biden administration infrastructure plan that would help parcels be delivered faster and boost broadband speeds Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said he supports increasing corporate tax rates after receiving criticism, yet again, from US President Joe Biden.…

We might just be witnessing a final state of these incredible space rocks Not only did a telescope on Earth spot, for the first time in history, an extinct comet on a close fly-by of our home world but scientists now reckon the space rock is covered in a substance similar to talcum powder.…

Membership data row ascends to desk of California attorney-general The Atheist Alliance International, an organisation that works to demystify atheism and advocate for secular governance, has taken legal action it hopes will prove that members’ personal data does not remain in the possession of the rival International Association of Atheists.…

Looks like the Galaxy S21 did well, and Texas storm shutdown blew over Samsung has pre-announced its Q1 2021 earnings and predicted $58.1bn of consolidated sales and $8.3bn of operating profit.…

36 years for the first. Then it was like buses: none for ages, then 2 zettabytes came along almost at once Disk-maker Seagate claims to have become the first company to ship three zettabytes' worth of data storage devices.…

What’s this got to do with Big Blue's hybrid cloud obsession? Cloudifying COBOL ... until you repent and go back to z/OS IBM has announced a COBOL compiler for Linux on x86.…

Labs offered tech by Arm as well as its upstart rival and others Engineers and scientists working on American military research programs can now access RISC-V processor core designs and associated blueprints through DARPA's Toolbox, and use the technology in their prototypes and experiments.…

If you can’t guess why, how’s life under that rock? The organisers of COMPUTEX, Taiwan’s annual PC-tech-fest, have shelved plans to run a real-world event this June.…

WebNX facility falls offline in blaze, takes customers down with it A power outage kicked off a fire in web hosting biz WebNX's Ogden data center in Utah on Sunday, knocking the facility offline temporarily and leaving several servers in need of a rebuild.…

So please don't delay in applying updates, says, well, everyone SAP and security analysts Onapsis say cyber-criminals are pretty quick to analyze the enterprise software outfit's patches and develop exploits to get into vulnerable systems.…

Forget smartphones – whaddabout motors? The US automotive industry has warned it faces a bleak six months of disruption caused by the global shortage of semiconductors, adding that the chaos will result in 1.28 million fewer cars made this year.…

'Improving the state of the world'... by not paying the government SaaSy CRM giant Salesforce.com is among the tech companies named in a think tank report for paying no corporate income tax in the US despite sizeable earnings.…

Join us with Red Hat and IBM – and learn how to apply a little data discipline in the cloud Webcast Security and governance are tough enough problems when it comes to conventional computing. When it comes to cloud native, they can be enough to stop a migration project before it’s even off the drawing board.…

Would-be Node.js successor gets $5m cash injection Deno, the JavaScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, is now a company with nearly $5m to fund development – though its developers say it will remain "permissively free."…

Timing is everything It may be chilly in the UK this week, but that is nothing compared to the state of Hell as Microsoft continued its support of OpenJDK.…

Stop, collaborate and listen, Chipzilla's back with its brand new invention Intel on Tuesday announced the availability of its "Ice Lake" 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors, intended for applications running on servers, high-end workstations, and in data centers.…

Shouting cyber cyber cyber, mega mega fail thing The UK Cyber Security Council announced itself to the public realm last week by touting a domain it doesn't own. Helpfully, internet jokesters then bought up variations on the official address.…

Nothing to do with THAT court case or lack of Oracle certification on GCP. Nope. Definitely not Google owner Alphabet has switched from Oracle to SAP for its main financial software in a move that has dented Big Red's share price.…

Now to recreate re-entry with a short drop onto a hard floor We bring our Lego My Own Creation (MOC) odyssey to a close today with a bit of unabashed self-indulgence in the form of a Skylab model and Skylab modification for the enormous Lego Saturn V.…

If you can't measure it, you can't research it A team of European researchers have succeeded in slowing down antimatter in a study that could lead to more accurate measures of this strangely elusive substance and help confirm the fundamental symmetry of nature.…

Not to worry, zombies with a gambling addiction probably won't eat your enterprise brains Column It seemed like a classic April The First spoof. Indeed, some tech titles had it on their lists of best pranks of the day. But it's true: the software zombie court case to end all zombie software court cases has woken from its slumber. Nearly 29 years after it first lurched from the crypt, SCO v The World Of Linux is back, and it smells just as bad as ever.…

Starts year-long proof of concept for the basics, meanwhile China is already testing cross-border crypto-payments The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has announced it will study the feasibility of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).…