The Register

Data analytics helps to boost contributions by 151% GitHub's annual "State of the Octoverse" report shows that Python has overtaken Java as the second-most popular language after JavaScript, based on the primary language of repository contributors.…

A swappable battery would be icing on the cake, though The Surface Pro X is in the hands of US users and the iFixit crew has already ripped into it. The repairability results might please Microsoft's legions of loyalists but give iPad fanbois pause for thought.…

From legacy migrations to data management, the cloud has its perks and pitfalls Webcast You’re counting down the days until you can finally pull the plug on your expensive and inelegant on-premises servers. Like countless businesses before you, you’re embracing the flexibility and cost savings of the cloud.…

Debut adventure of tween occultist goes for $150,000 A first-edition copy of history's most influential takedown of creationism has sold for $564,500 at auction, the highest amount yet for the tome.…

Only 18% of mobile users across world will have access to 5G in next 5 years China will dominate the global 5G market by 2025, along with the US, Japan and Korea, leaving Europe to lag behind, according to a study by global mobile operator data-wranglers at GSMA's Intelligence branch.…

Windows and Office teams shun Xamarin in favour of JavaScript/C++ solution Ignite Microsoft has hinted that cross-platform development framework React Native is a key solution to the problem of writing applications that span both Windows and mobile.…

Supermarket takes appeal to most senior legal eagles Brit supermarket Morrisons is arguing in the Supreme Court that it shouldn't be held vicariously liable for the actions of a rogue employee who stole and leaked the company's payroll.…

Look like RoboCop, play with holograms The wait is over. Microsoft has finally begun shipping its pricey augmented reality headgear to customers.…

Mobe chip flinger's investors seem chilled, though, as it predicts 2020 bonanza In the driver's seat of the 5G hype bus right now is mobile chip designer Qualcomm with its forecast that up to 225 million smartphones running on the next-generation chipsets will find a buyer in 2020.…

Information Commissioner's Office is very knowledgeable about why that's bad A strong grasp of data privacy is key for anyone wanting a job at the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), according to the blurb on its microsite. Just one catch: the site itself enables hundreds of cookies – seemingly without consent.…

AI, AI! You can't go looking at that! Ignite Got governance? Microsoft reckons there is room for improvement – it should know – and has used its Ignite Florida knees-up to batter compliance with its overused AI stick.…

Hyatt, we've had a problem The Register is at Microsoft's Ignite shindig in Orlando, Florida and while the event itself has been liberally hosed with the cloud and decked with impressive workflows, we reckon the Windows giant might want to offer up some of the assembled engineers to work out just what the heck is going on with Hyatt hotel's booking system.…

Don't spend a thousand quid before you fish around, folks What even is a flagship phone anymore? It was only a few years ago that the line of demarcation between a scrappy midranger and a high-spec handset was well defined.…

Infosec veteran Marc Rogers on why we need a better system to rate vulnerabilities Disclosure The way we rate the severity of computer security vulnerabilities and bugs needs to change if people and businesses want to be better protected from malware and cyber-crime.…

But you're going to have to insert a decoder yourself as Microsoft's left the safety on this tech Microsoft researchers have built a chatbot from OpenAI’s text-generating model GPT-2, and trained it on millions of conversations scraped from... oh crap.…

Your guide to some of the security enhancements announced this week Ignite Amid the flood of news from Microsoft's Ignite conference in Florida this week, Redmond dropped word of several new features and additions to its cloud services aimed at protecting user data.…

Chipzilla says it didn't intentionally mislead anyone Intel on Wednesday disputed a news report that Chipzilla had intentionally published misleading benchmarks in a comparison between the Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 and the AMD second-generation Epyc 7742 processors.…

One cuffed by Feds this week Two now-ex Twitter employees have been charged with spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia – after they allegedly leaked internal records for accounts linked to critics of the Saudi royal family, including the assassinated journalist Jamal Khashoggi, while working for the social network.…

As thousands of internal files leak revealing antisocial biz's pressure on app makers California’s attorney general has gone to court to force Facebook to hand over documents as part of an investigation into the company.…

The App Defense Alliance posse will scrutinize Android app code before release Google, after more than a decade of dealing with Android malware, has formed an alliance with three security companies to help it defend its mobile platform.…

Senators: Um, no. The NSA was unable to give a single example of how one of its most controversial spying programs has been useful in the fight against terrorism in a Congressional hearing on Wednesday morning.…

Insider sold 120,000 customer records to scammers Trend Micro today revealed one of its staff went rogue and illegally sold the personal information of roughly 120,000 of its customers.…

So you can work on something while you work on something Google has added virtual desktops to its Chrome OS, used in Chromebooks, enabling users to create multiple workspaces and switch between them.…

Oh dear, HMRC – that's two defeats in a week UK TV presenter Helen Fospero has claimed the latest victory against Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) over its off-payroll tax clampdown, winning her appeal against an £80,000 payout under IR35 rules.…

737 NG and 787 Dreamliner hit with safety flaw allegations Ailing Boeing has been hit with a double whammy of recent controversies alleging safety flaws with its 737 NG (not the fatally flawed Max) and the 787 Dreamliner.…

Software survivor celebrates middle age with facelift File transfer veteran Laplink has taken advantage of the impending demise of Windows 7 to remind those faced with a migration challenge that it still exists.…

27-year-old 'fessed up to 8 offences Exclusive A man has pleaded guilty to hacking low-cost airline Jet2, including an attempt to compromise the CEO's email account.…

Melanie Dawes will fill Sharon White's £500k shoes – report Brit regulator Ofcom has appointed internal director Jonathan Oxley as interim chief exec, with the permanent position to be announced after the UK general election.…

Latest in the great will-they-won't-they corporate love story Updated Broadband and cable business Virgin Media has inked a five-year deal with Vodafone UK to provide its network to more than three million customers.…

Reports indicate faded ink tech heavyweights mull arm linkage Xerox is reportedly mulling a daring multibillion-dollar bid to take over hard-pressed HP Inc – a company that has three times its market capitalisation.…

Plus: SpaceX to end Florida Falcon drought and more from the realm of rockets Roundup This week Boeing unveiled its lunar lander ambitions after a sort-of successful commercial crew test, Virgin Orbit revealed plans to shoot smallsats as far as Mars, and SpaceX dried off fairing recovered from the ocean for use in a static fire test.…

But analyst reckons that's 'ambitious' given dependence on Chinese punters Huawei is bullish about seeing a 20 per cent uptick in smartphone sales next year despite the escalating US-China trade war – a prediction branded by analyst Canalys as "ambitious".…

Appeals court hears why they should be allowed to collectively sue for $100m Analysis More than 8,000 female Microsoft employees have appealed a decision not to grant them a collective legal right to sue the software giant for pay discrimination, claiming that top management knew it was a problem but failed to fix it.…

War stories wanted: Tell us what's really happening in your world Reader survey If data is the fuel powering the modern British financial industry, where are the refineries, oil wells, and storage tanks for these bits and bytes? Any self-respecting IT pro knows the answer: it's complicated.…

Like a particular module? You're one command away from being able to donate some dosh for it NPM Inc, maintainer of the widely used JavaScript package manager npm, has taken a step toward fulfilling a promise made in August to help open-source developers seek compensation for their labor.…

Do your worst, terrifying neural network OpenAI’s massive text-generating language model, which was whispered to be too dangerous to release, has finally been published in full after the research lab concluded it has “seen no strong evidence of misuse so far.”…

The last thing we need right now is a rise in ignorant cyber-Judge Dredds The self-driving Uber car that hit and killed a woman walking her bike across a street wasn’t designed to detect “jaywalking pedestrians.”…

Katie Moussouris speaks out on modern-day flaw finding and infosec jobs Disclosure Bug-bounty pioneer Katie Moussouris has urged companies to hire the necessary staff to handle vulnerability disclosures before diving headlong into handing out rewards.…

'We want to break down barriers, move ideas seamlessly across applications, across people, across devices' Ignite Microsoft is previewing its Fluid Framework, first announced at its Build developer event in May, and presenting it as a key technology for content-based collaboration.…

How IT titan's 'Incentive Plan Letter' anti-contract is starting to unravel Analysis A 17-year veteran of IBM is suing the American giant claiming it failed to pay him promised sales commissions – a charge made by other Big Blue salespeople in at least two dozen similar lawsuits over the past fifteen years.…

Regulator OKs Sprint-T-Mobile US merger because... 5G? Higher prices? Analysis The FCC today ushered in a new era of reduced competition in America's mobile market by approving a merger between the third and fourth largest operators, T-Mobile US and Sprint.…

Watchdog agrees one day of profit ought to be enough after 5 years of arguing Comment Toothless American consumer watchdog the Federal Trade Commission today agreed to let AT&T settle a five-year battle over phony “unlimited data” promises for just $60m. That's $40m less than expected, and less than one day of annual profit for the telco giant.…

The BOFH's secret command centre discovered? Buying a house is a major ordeal. You go from door to door, months zip past and something's never quite right... then you find it, "the one". A five-bedroom home in Pinner, Harrow, northwest London.…

MoD offshoot names winners who dipped into £2m anti-drone ideas pot o' gold The British government has funded 18 anti-drone projects as part of its £2m push to stop a repeat of the Gatwick drone fiasco of 2018 – including a friendly drone swarm that will employ "peregrine falcon attack strategies" to down errant unmanned flying things.…

RISC-V-based blueprints available for all to freely use OpenTitan – an open-source blueprint for a Root of Trust (RoT) system-on-chip based on RISC-V and managed by a team in Cambridge, UK – was teased by Google along with several partners today.…

Plans to aggregate it with other databases should be discussed, says ethics group Updated An independent ethical advice group has raised concerns about the UK Home Office's £842m Biometrics programme, which will store millions of people's highly sensitive biometric data, due to go live next year.…

It's like an automatic knowledgebase creator for enterprise intranet Ignite Having unleashed Teams on the world, Microsoft has been pondering what else it can do with all the data lurking in Microsoft 365. The answer, it seems, is Project Cortex.…

Once is an unfortunate cockup. Twice needs stamping on British telco Three UK has once again let random people viewing its homepage view its customers' account details as if they were logged in, exposing personal and billing data to casual browsing.…

You better make arrangements for missing deadlines, says Public Accounts Committee Another week, another damning report about Her Majesty's Courts & Tribunals Service's (HMCTS) modernisation programme – this time from UK government spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee.…

Buyer being sought London-based events and training business Skills Matter has gone into administration.…