The Register

I missed my Self Assessment filing deadline because.... a rundown of the worst excuses Brits’ favourite government department, Her Majesty’s Revenues & Customs, has released a listicle of the most bizarre excuses people have given for missing the Self Assessment tax returns deadline, along with the weirdest biz expense claims…

Bloc to make not-quite-universal connector universal within its bounds The EU plans to force manufacturers to use a common connector – the happily symmetrical USB-C – for all mobes, fondleslabs, e-readers and similar electronic tat.…

One Irishman and one Dutchman both nicked Two men have been arrested after Britain’s National Crime Agency and its international pals claimed the takedown of breached credentials-reselling website WeLeakInfo.…

Microsoft releases a Windows 10 Fast Ring refresh and previews new calc toys While 45 years of carbon emissions from Microsoft were being scrutinised by execs last night, the Windows Insider team made an emission of its own, in the form of a fresh Windows 10 build.…

Snafu-ridden maintenance software behemoth to be replaced The US military is dumping its Autonomous Logistics Information System (ALIS) in favour of ODIN as it tries to break with the complex past of its ailing F-35 fighter jet maintenance IT suite.…

Plans to cancel out emissions from power consumption since 1975. No word on warming through excessive corporate hot air though Microsoft has set itself the goal of being "carbon-negative" by 2030, nailing its colours to a so-called "moonshot" for worldwide removal and reduction of carbon.…

There's an app for that, and it's utter pants Something for the Weekend, Sir? Sitting in my tin can far away from home, I marvel that I got here at all.…

State of Wasm: 'Better support for high-level languages', plus interesting cross-platform news Interview WebAssembly will not magically speed up your web application and may be as significant running in environments other than web browsers as it is within them, a co-designer of the language told The Register.…

New perspective on FBI, Interpol demands for backdoors Vid Police Scotland to roll out encryption bypass technology, as one publication reported this week, causing some Register readers to silently mouth: what the hell?…

It's getting hot in here, so open all your doors On Call Welcome to On Call, The Register's regular foray into the increasingly unreliable memories of those who have to pick up the phone when everything is on fire.…

Guess we can't escape our future Terminator overlords Artificial intelligence with frickin' lasers beams attached can see objects hidden around corners, according to a study published in the journal Optica on Thursday.…

Share all our code modifications with others? Think again, hippie Permissive open-source software licenses continue to gain popularity at the expense of copyleft licenses, according to a forthcoming report from WhiteSource, a biz that makes software licensing management tools.…

Meanwhile, AMD snags Intel exec as server chip boss Google is hoping to improve the appeal of its mid-tier Cloud platform to enterprises with a new set of support and response options.…

Good news: There is none. Well, apart from you can at least fully patch the Microsoft blunder Vid Easy-to-use exploits have emerged online for two high-profile security vulnerabilities, namely the Windows certificate spoofing bug and the Citrix VPN gateway hole. If you haven't taken mitigation steps by now, you're about to have a bad time.…

Connecticut Supremes affirm trial judge's decision to toss 'pay to play' claim Gartner did not defame network app biz Netscout by placing it in the "challenger" section of its Magic Quadrant instead of the "leaders" section, the Supreme Court of the US state of Connecticut has ruled.…

British copyright law probably wasn't right way to do this one An Azure consultant has lost his bid to sue Google for copyright infringement over search results that sent web users to a website run by a hotlinker who was displaying one of his photos.…

Apple: 'The apps you use every day.' Except that one. And that one. And those are right out The macOS Catalina bad news train kept on rolling this week as AccountEdge, friend of the Apple-using beancounters, threw in the towel over the forced migration of Macs to a 64-bit world.…

'A very long haul' says judge as HPE v Lynch and Hussain reaches its end Autonomy Trial After 93 days in the courtroom, the $5bn Autonomy Trial has reached its end, with Mike Lynch's lawyers urging the judge to dismiss all of HPE's claims against the British software firm's former CEO.…

Bankers ring in 2020 by thwacking employees with the Windows stick Microsoft and UK finance behemoth Lloyds Banking Group have signed a deal that will see the Windows giant manage the group's desktops and mobile devices.…

Dive into an all-day workshop – now at early-bird prices – for practical advice from experts in the field Event If you want to get deep into continuous delivery, or get your hands dirty with Kubernetes or Lambda, our Continuous Lifecycle London conference has a workshop for you.…

Docs keen to hear how, as promised, project will make their own logins less of a Hancockup UK doctors' union the British Medical Association (BMA) is seeking clarification on how GPs will access the £40m funding for single sign-on to health systems recently promised by health and social care secretary Matt Hancock.…

Software licensing issues made it harder to turn the page Libraries Northern Ireland - the public sector organ which, erm, runs libraries in Northern Ireland - has renewed an IT services contract with Fujitsu worth £12m after running out of time to run a tender process.…

June 2020 is the end for users on Windows, Linux and Mac Google has rolled out a new schedule for ending support for Chrome Apps – packaged desktop applications built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript – in favour of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and other browser-based approaches such as Chrome Extensions.…

German Constitutional Court is much more dangerous than people think It has been years in the making and Europe’s largest law firms are smacking their lips in anticipation but the long-held dream of a single European patent system may die next month – and everyone appears to be in denial.…

Execs don't care to keep things shipshape if they don't see a return.... so let's MAKE them Column On New Year's Eve 2019, the good ship Travelex struck the iceberg of ransomware. That's not a good metaphor, to be honest: when the SS Titanic hit its frozen nemesis, it had the good taste to unambiguously sink in two hours and 40 minutes. Not so Travelex.…

Join us next month in a cosy pub to hear all about Ordnance Survey's latest project Register Lecture A golden age of cartography is upon us. Only this time, it's satellites and tech firms’ vehicles that are crossing the Earth’s surface, compiling maps for their distant masters who are building geospatial services.…

Sign up now: The UK government's scheme to help new companies grow and scale is back Promo If you need your new security company to get noticed, Tech Nation’s Cyber programme is back, opening its doors for another cohort of infosec companies looking to scale at speed.…

Yum, long noodle-like stars Astronomers have finally figured out what the peculiar object known as “G2” orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is: a behemoth star created from the merger of two binary stars being stretched by the extreme tidal forces around the black hole.…

Decision is preliminary and unenforced, though a good start Analysis In a massive win for privacy rights, a preliminary ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has made clear that national security concerns do not override citizens’ data privacy. Thus, ISPs should not be forced to hand over personal information without clear justification.…

Most-accurate algorithms showed 'little to no bias', so nothing to fear, eh? Vid A recent US government report investigating the accuracy of facial recognition systems across different demographic groups has sparked fresh questions on how the technology should be regulated.…

Wow, it's all coming up Trump right now, huh? America and China have struck a deal that may signal the beginning of the end in their ongoing trade war.…

Enjoy that new version 72? Donate.mozilla.org is a thing, folks On Wednesday Mozilla Corporation, maker of the Firefox browser and would-be internet privacy protector, said it plans to lay off an undisclosed number of employees.…

Exposed: Intimate... personal details belonging to thousands of folks A pair of misconfigured cloud-hosted file silos have left thousands of peoples' sensitive info sitting on the open internet.…

House of Larry delivers massive update for 93 products Oracle has released a sweeping set of security patches across the breadth of its software line.…

Redmond loves Linux so much this Internet-Explorer-replacement is for Windows, macOS only right now Microsoft's Edge browser, retooled to run on Chromium's open source foundation, has shed its beta designation and entered general release on Wednesday, promising performance, productivity, privacy, and value – a word which here means Microsoft Rewards gift card points for using Bing and access to so-called Premium News.…

Going like Blazor(s) everywhere, says Microsoft, but will this enthusiasm last? Microsoft will provide experimental support for native mobile applications using its Blazor web development platform.…

£20k 'incentive' up for grabs if you can get something into the App Gallery before the end of Jan The embattled Chinese networking gear and mobe slinger used its London Developer Conference on Wednesday to lure coders to its HMS (Huawei Mobile Services) platform as a post-Google world beckoned.…

Plenty of cash flying around ahead of that $5bn biz gobble Updated What an interesting world of revolving doors the enterprise storage sector can be sometimes.…

No Continuum this time, now it's all about the Android Review Late, lightweight and looking like a Macbook, the new NexDock has finally arrived. But with the world agog over foldables, is it any good?…

Now sing with us: Validation, governance and security Ontotext, the Bulgarian software developer focused on organisational semantic knowledge, has rolled out an update to its graph database, GraphDB 9.1.…

One-time chief finance suit's legal defence sums up at end of marathon $5bn trial Autonomy Trial Key witnesses in the Autonomy Trial testified against Mike Lynch and Sushovan Hussain to save their own skins from US prosecutors, Hussain's barrister told London's High Court.…

Big Blue to build and run private cloud TSB parent, Spain's Banco Sabadell, has signed a €1bn group deal with IBM to build and run its entire banking infrastructure via a private cloud among a raft of other services – the outage-hit UK arm has told The Register.…

This is what happens when you scrimp on software dev, testing and docs Boeing's deliveries of new airliners have slumped to a reported 11 year low following the 737 Max software flaw which caused two fatal crashes.…

We'll 'empower millions of citizen developers' says Google. Now where have we heard that before? Google has cleared the way for non-developers to build applications that make use of Google cloud services with the acquisition of Seattle-based no-code development platform AppSheet confirmed.…

Surely only a matter of time before the Matrix has you? Scientists say they have used electricity generated by plant life to power an IoT sensor and send a signal to an overhead satellite.…

Who will control the CC TLD in future? Well, only one company fits the criteria, funnily enough Special report The Colombian government has been accused by its own internet community of fudging a contract so that just one North American company in particular is eligible to operate the .co top-level domain-name registry.…

Must have missed Oracle's December memo: 'It is now time that we part ways with this business' Customers of Oracle's DynDNS who used the service for domain registration - rather than just dynamic DNS - have suffered a sudden involuntary change of registrar, in some cases redirecting websites to those of different companies.…

Plus: 'Member when we modelled sales for Remain? Good times – analyst IT departments should stash away some of their budgets to cope with the likely disruption caused by Brexit - the UK is scheduled to shift to a new trading agreement with the EU and further afield by the end of 2019.…

EDR is an SMB's best friend, says F-Secure Webcast We don’t want to spook anyone, but… cyber-criminals have been busy.…

Meanwhile: IBM Power processors to appear in a Google Cloud near you, if you ask nicely Data-center operator Equinix has agreed to acquire upstart Packet in what it hopes is a move into the edge compute market.…