The Register

Plus: Meg Whitman and Co had 'buyer's remorse' over $11bn purchase Autonomy Trial Mike Lynch was "thoroughly unreliable" and "willing to lie" to the High Court about the $11bn purchase of Autonomy by Hewlett Packard, according to HPE's lawyers in court yesterday.…

The 'experience' will be available from mid-January, 2020 Microsoft has been alerting admins today to changes to its Microsoft Teams Exploratory "experience", which effectively allow users to sign up for a trial rather than requiring admins to grant the privileges.…

Maker of cloudy PDF and services software ... yes, that's Perpetually Dosh Forming It was ho-ho-ho and a kerching for reassuringly expensive graphic design software maker Adobe last night as it danced all the way to the bank, reporting double digit spike in Q4 revenues (PDF) and an upward swing in profit.…

Redmond tears wrapping on new retro-look gaming console It's always interesting to see where industrial designers source their inspiration. Tesla, in creating the futuristic CyberTruck, looked to the dystopian world of Blade Runner. Iconic '80s movie Back To The Future directly inspired Nike’s self-lacing MAG kicks. And in creating the upcoming Xbox Series X console, Microsoft's muse was presumably a Gateway tower PC from the 1990s.…

Flexible workforce look to pre-election promises Contractor organisations are insisting the Tory government sticks to promises to revisit IR35 reforms as it emerges that GlaxoSmithKline is ordering contractors to switch to pay as you earn tax arrangements or leave the company.…

Like Trump’s Twitter feed, except not Her Majesty the Queen is after a head of digital engagement to run a small team of specialists based at Buckingham Palace.…

Arbitrary code execution in a controller, what could go wrong? Siemens industrial control systems designed specifically for energy plant gear are riddled with dozens of security vulnerabilities that are, luckily enough, tricky to exploit from the outside.…

But Danish boffins tapped cans on the side, not the top – we demand a retrial Should you be faced with the horrors of a shaken can of beer and an urgent need to open it, science has solved the question of whether or not tapping the can helps reduce the fizz when it is opened.…

Will no one think of the SMEs? Oh, actually some have made the grade The UK's central government is dangling up to £6.5bn under the noses of resellers to supply commodity hardware, software and services across the British public sector for the next four years.…

A tale of entry-level electrical skills On Call There's just one more day to get through before the weekend is upon us so burn a few minutes by chortling at the misfortune of others with On Call.…

We want to hear you share your insights, experiences, and plans Event Our machine-learning conference MCubed returns to London next October, and we’d love to hear about your latest adventures in the worlds of artificial intelligence and analytics.…

Either way, we'll take a one-way ticket, please. Now. Thanks. Good A hundred red objects blinking in and out of existence across Earth’s skies over the past 70 years have left scientists giddy: they believe this could be evidence of previously unseen astronomical phenomena or – and hold tight, now – alien civilizations.…

Trio of vulnerabilities made registry full of uncertain code even more of a risk On Wednesday, NPM, Inc, the California-based biz that has taken it upon itself to organize the world's JavaScript packages into the npm registry, warned that its command line tool, the npm CLI, has a rather serious security vulnerability. Version 6.13.4 has been rushed out with a fix.…

Think of a number, triple it, add seven, multiply by zero, and that's pretty much this tech giant's Q2 revenue growth Oracle's financial figures were more or less flat in its latest financial quarter compared to a year ago.…

Let's grab a nice cold drink on the Red Planet. Don't forget to pack a shovel There’s water ice buried below the surface of Mars, and all you’ll need is a shovel to dig some up, according to research published in Geophysical Research Letters this week.…

Techies lay out modest ambition to provide development framework for everything. Where have we heard that before? Google has translated Java's "write once, run anywhere" promise into the words "ambient computing," which it has begun using to explain Flutter's reason for being.…

Rambler claims code creator was working for them at the time and so they own tech worth $700m Nginx's Moscow office was raided today by police after the ownership of the popular web server's source code was disputed.…

Here's a rundown of some of the Middle East's cyber argy-bargy Iran claims to have staved off a major cyber attack on its national infrastructure, a couple of months after the Middle Eastern theocracy was blamed for real-world assaults on two Saudi oil refineries.…

Sentencing due in January for Sentry MBA shenanigans A London hacker is facing jail after he admitted illegally accessing National Lottery gambling accounts.…

OpenWorld moving to Vegas, baby: SF now too expensive not to mention the filthy streets, open drug use... Oracle's massive OpenWorld shindig is relocating from hipster central to the desert, or put another way, from San Francisco to Las Vegas.…

You know it's solid reporting when trial lawyers start quoting it Autonomy trial The Autonomy trial has resumed – with The Register being furiously quoted in legal arguments as Britain's biggest fraud trial begins slowly rolling towards its close.…

Postcards from the edge... of space? It has been a while but after a hiatus of more than seven months and a weather-induced delay, the rocket outfit bankrolled by billionaire box-flinger Jeff Bezos has sent its New Shepard booster into the blue.…

Plus: Insiders yanked from their rings Microsoft has decided that the Calls feature of its Android-bothering Your Phone app is ready to be unleashed upon the wider world.…

It's Lumen awful: Space Drop halted due to excessive douchebaggery Citing an explosion in fraudulent accounts, Keybase says it is ending its maligned Stellar Space Drop giveaway.…

Loss-making unit still putting hurt on 'puters 'n' phones biz If ever there was a good time to release bad news, it is today. As luck would have it, Dixons Carphone has filed a set of crappy half-year financials that show the extent of the damage that its loss-making mobile business is wreaking.…

Split between 550 subpostmasters accused of theft, that's not much The UK's Post Office has finally agreed to settle a long-running case brought by postmasters the company accused of theft based on evidence from the Horizon IT system.…

Yes, it's the debris tail of asteroid 3200 Phaethon, the source of the annual Geminids meteor shower Asteroid 3200 Phaethon's thick trail of debris, which is the source of the annual Geminids meteor shower here on Earth, has a mass of about a billion tons, is 60,000 miles wide, and is more than 14 million miles long.…

Uni brains pitch smart math for speeding up establishment of circuits in anonymizing onion network Academics in Germany say they've found a way to make Tor and similar onion networks more efficient and lower their latency.…

Billions wasted, lawsuits launched Enterprise resource planning projects are notoriously difficult to get right. While everyone wants the latest tech, that is less than half the challenge, and whether organisations choose Oracle, SAP, Infor, or IFS, they face a dilemma.…

'Sir, they're about to disclose the vulns!' 'Damn it. Accelerate the rollout!' How does Microsoft mitigate the risk of speculative-execution bugs on its Azure platform? The US goliath is unwilling to comment, despite running a session at its Ignite conference last month on exactly this subject.…

Problem: We have to do work. Solution: Delete all the work! Capita has told local councils up and down Britain that it will be closing all bug reports for its One Revenues and Benefits software suite which are more than 12 months old – even though these include flaws in the way student loans and housing benefits are calculated and paid.…

Talk about gone in a flash Video A pentad of bit boffins have devised a way to integrate electronic objects into augmented reality applications using their existing visible light sources, like power lights and signal strength indicators, to transmit data.…

We guess you could call this a.... mass debate An impossibly massive black hole that defied conventional theories has been called into question after multiple researchers suggested the data used to estimate the object’s mass may have been wrong.…

Nine 'commercial models' to access central database mulled at hush-hush meeting Exclusive Talks to package millions of British medical records into a vast, commercially valuable database that may then be sold on are already underway between NHS England bosses and global giants, documents exclusively obtained by The Register show.…

Gap in browser privacy tech embarrassingly detected by Google Apple on Tuesday updated its Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) system in its WebKit browser engine because it could be tracked.…

House of Representatives OKs Trump plan because it wants federal parents to take time off President Trump’s dream of a special space force have come true just before Christmas, with the US House of Representatives approving the new zero-gravity guardians in a monster military bill on Wednesday.…

Justice Department wins chance to track fitness-tracking purchase The US Department of Justice has beat out the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to become the top dog in an antitrust review of Google’s proposed purchase of fitness tracker Fitbit.…

And in the darkness bind them – to next year's IT budgets Cisco has launched a single chip architecture that it claims will work well in network routing and switching gear, and manage data better than existing processors in both categories.…

Dude, pass the indictment Three men have been arrested and charged with masterminding what prosecutors claimed is a $722m cryptocurrency ponzi scheme.…

Early adopters left out of pocket as winter and Facebook costs kill biz In a savage blow to the notion of nominative determinism, e-scooter startup Unicorn is shutting down after blowing all its money on Facebook ads.…

El Reg checks all the boxes. Dell: 'Hold my beer' Apple's Mac Pro turned up on the company's website this week and, yep, it's eye-wateringly expensive.…

Not cool, Coolest Cooler backers say If you want to hear a tale of woe, you don't need to dust off some Dostoyevsky – just head to Kickstarter, which has no shortage of stiffed punters and failed projects. The latest example in a long line of crowdfunding cockups is the Coolest Cooler, which raised over $13m in 2014 and collapsed earlier this week with 20,000 orders unfulfilled.…

You are the weakest Lynx A salutary warning arrived this week for those seeking to impress at the Christmas disco after a school bus had to be unloaded due to an excessive discharge of body spray.…

Good news? There is no good news File this one under "not everything needs a computer in it". Finnish security house F-Secure today revealed a vulnerability in the KeyWe Smart Lock that could let a sticky-fingered miscreant easily bypass it.…

Hot mic snafu reportedly caught by TV station Updated China's ambassador to Denmark has reportedly threatened to kill off a proposed free trade deal unless the semiautonomous Faroe Islands sign a deal with Huawei for 5G mobile network equipment.…

There is no escape from collaboration Microsoft has plugged the wafer-thin niche of Linux desktop users that want a native app for the company's Slack-for-suits platform, Teams.…

Double-encrypted. That said, if you're worried about over-sharing, what are you doing on Chrome? A new feature in Google's Chrome browser will warn you if your username and password matches a known combination in a security breach every time you type credentials into any website.…

That's quite the appetite you've got there Pirate lord or prodigious porn pumper – how much did YOU download this month? The majority of us will be on unlimited connections and such a question won't matter outside of mobile data.…

Yep that's our old friend Earworn Wearables by another name Wearable tech is seemingly big business, and according to number-cruncher IDC, the market grew by 94.6 per cent year-over-year in Q3 2019.…

Latest Which? study with NCC Group highlights toys it ain't smart to buy It seems to come around quicker every year – the failure of so-called smart toys to meet the most basic of security requirements. Which? has discovered a bunch of sack fillers that dirtbags can use to chat to your kids this Christmas.…