The Register

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.…

Negative torque didn't bring the plucky spacecraft down, thankfully The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, the farthest lander to ever make it in the outer solar system, spun wildly in the opposite direction as expected as it descended onto one of Saturn’s moons. Now, scientists have finally figured out what went wrong, 15 years after the probe’s landing.…

Undergrads hired to tutor juniors due to 'rapidly increasing enrollment' – for too little in return The University of California, Berkeley is under pressure to cough up more than $5m to reimburse computer-science students who were denied benefits and tuition fee refunds despite working as part-time teaching assistants.…

Legal war could rest on nineteenth century mapping ruling by past court With America's Supreme Court expected to hear arguments in Google v. Oracle over the copyrightability of software application programming interfaces come March, the search biz's ideological allies have rushed to support the company with a flurry of filings.…

Another day, another critical set of flaws A pair of widely used WordPress plugins need to be patched on more than 320,000 websites to close down vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain admin control of the web publishing software.…

Ad giant chides rivals for encouraging invasive tracking techniques Analysis On Tuesday, Google published an update on its Privacy Sandbox proposal, a plan thoroughly panned last summer as a desperate attempt to redefine privacy in a way that's compatible with the ad slinger's business.…

Grab your Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, Intel, and VMware fixes now Patch Tuesday In the first Patch Tuesday of the year, Microsoft finds itself joined by Adobe, Intel, VMware, and SAP in dropping scheduled security updates.…

This isn't the way to make the Cook(ie) crumble Analysis Apple has responded to a demand from the United States' Attorney General William Barr that it grant the FBI access to two iPhones used in a recent shooting by carefully calling bullshit on his claims.…

RAM, bam, thank you .. actually... hmmmm. That's kind of excessive There's just a few short weeks until the Samsung Unpacked launch event, where the South Korean giant will unveil this year's ultra-pricey flagships. Predictably, most of the pertinent details have already dripped out. The latest pertains to the potent Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra*, which packs some unbelievably meaty specs.…

American security officials fly to London to 'brief' Boris It would be "nothing short of madness" to use Huawei gear in Britain's 5G mobile networks, an American national security adviser has reportedly told UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.…

Project holding steady for resident techies but white knuckle ride continues Fantasy model manufacturer and tabletop wargames flinger Games Workshop has dispatched a warning note about the continued danger inherent to an ongoing project to replace its core ERP systems with Microsoft Dynamics 365.…

You may not have plumbing to the premises, but by god you'll have fibre Good news for much-maligned new-build contractors in the UK - equally maligned broadband infrastructure provider OpenReach today said it will drop the threshold for installing gigabit-capable fibre-to-the-premises connections to new build developments - from 30 houses to just 20.…

Docker who? Veteran Hadooper already plugging away after 6-month stint at container biz Cloudera has turned to the co-founder and one-time CEO at Hortonworks - the business it merged with in 2018 - to run the show.…

Only Linux, um, Windows 10 can save you! The Windows 7 hysteria machine has most definitely kicked into gear today, with Viking burials and scary statistics for the orphaned operating system.…

Not keen to let them Hang Solo. (We're here all week.) Next Friday's filing aims to stop work before it begins on 11 Feb Amazon Web Services is expecting a decision next month from a US court about whether the brakes will be slammed on the Pentagon's lucrative Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract awarded to Microsoft.…

Like manna from Microsoft: Windows 7 great escape out-trumps crappy Intel CPU availability Businesses upgrading to Windows 10 forced global PC sales into the black for the first time in seven years in 2019, but it could have been so much better if Intel's chip drought had eased.…

Oppo and OnePlus stablemate plans shock for 2020 Chinese phone maker Vivo has wowed attendees of the past two Mobile World Congress megafests with intriguing — and hugely divisive — APEX concept phones it hoped would set the industry tempo for years to come.…

Support? Hello? Is anyone here? Programmers are complaining that Google's Chrome Web Store still looks more like an ill-tended shack than a legitimate store.…

Also: Fancy a trip round the Moon? Of course you do, but there's a catch... Roundup It's a been a busy start to the new year in this week's SpaceX-heavy round-up of news for rocket fanciers.…

Any one thought about actually testing this on diabetics? Er, no? Academics have applied for a patent describing how a neural network can detect low blood-sugar levels by analyzing heartbeat patterns rather than a blood sample.…

Insight and security in a complex environment? Let NetApp guide you with help from Freeform Dynamics Webcast You know the story: your users are creating data faster than ever before.…

Mainstream support officially ends today Britain's cyber-plod have warned people not to use Windows 7 machines for online banking, nor emails, nor any other services that contain sensitive information – which rules out pretty much everything except reading The Register.…

That's way, way, way older than the dust off your oldest PC Boffins think they have found the oldest known substance on Earth, dust grains that were formed around five to seven billion years ago - before the Solar System had even formed.…

Purchase funded by debt, includes another ex-ICANNer, will be done through four different companies. All perfectly normal Analysis DNS overlord ICANN has finally released additional details over the proposed sale of the .org internet registry to a private equity firm – details that raise more questions than answers.…

Amazon puts (a tiny amount of) its money where its tax bill isn’t Comment The richest man on the planet, with an estimated fortune of $150bn, has got his internet company to pledge an extraordinary $1m to battle ferocious wildfires in Australia: that’s Australian dollars, so $690,000 in US bucks.…

Study shows top telcos are naff at fending off cellphone number hijackings Four Princeton University eggheads have published a report showing that the five major US mobile carriers implement weak authentication techniques, leaving customers vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks that transfer victims' phone numbers to devices controlled by scammers.…

FBI probes massive fraud A miscreant managed to swipe $2.3m from a Texas school district after staff inadvertently wired large sums of public money to the crook's bank account.…

Open letter to Chocolate Factory's Sundar Pichai penned by 50 campaign groups For much of Android's existence, Google has adopted a relatively hands-off approach that lets manufacturers ship units with pre-installed bloatware which, in many cases, cannot be easily removed. This has infuriated users and privacy advocates alike, leading 50 of the latter to pen a blistering open letter to Google and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai urging him to take action.…

Nine-month production run of gear provides 'intermittent' charging results for fans Apple has announced yet another replacement programme — this time for several models of its pricey Smart Battery cases.…

UK.gov decision to use Chinese biz or not due in a week or two, maybe, perhaps... sort of The head of Britain's domestic spy agency, MI5, has declared that he has "no reason to think" that his country's impending decision to use Huawei in the core of 5G mobile networks will harm UK-US relations.…

Up for discussion? Iran, another term for Trump, and maybe, just maybe, Bezos and THAT cloud contract will get a mention Oracle execs are no stranger to pressing the flesh with senior politicos in the White House and tonight, Oracle's chief techie Larry Ellison is set to break bread with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.…

In other words... A long time ago we left the Galaxy far, far away... The success of the Huawei Mate X has always been in doubt. But, improbably, sales have actually been fairly decent, with the Chinese tech giant claiming to be flogging 100,000 each month (in Chinese). That’s not too bad, considering the unfortunate geopolitical circumstances Huawei finds itself in.…

His helicopter costs £550/hour to fly, don't you know The managing director of a Manchester-based infosec firm has been fined for flying his helicopter into an air traffic control zone without permission – having first launched a rant at tower controllers.…

Plus: Fresh Visual Studio for Mac, another Release Candidate for PowerShell 7 and New Edge nears GA Roundup Welcome to the final round-up of the Microsoft news you might have missed before a cheery engineer pulls the plug on the Windows 7 freebie security fix machine for the last time.…

Thanks Vegas - it's been weird CES The 2020 edition of CES has wrapped up. Friday was the last day of the trade show, which attracts hundreds of thousands of attendees from across the globe to the Marlboro-scented glamour of Las Vegas. At the weekend, vendors began dismantling their booths, ready to head home.…

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a lawyer? It's Larry's lawyers Linux kernel jockey, Linus Torvalds, has taken time out to remind open source loyalists that he is no fan of the ZFS file system due, in part, to the sometimes tortuous nature of open source licensing.…

Plus: Hollywood wants to revamp the film business with AI, Nvidia improves StyleGAN Roundup Welcome to the first AI round up of this year. AI continues to spread like wildfire and everyone wants a slice of the pie - even Hollywood. Read on for the latest flop in facial recognition, too.…

Either Brit DVLA bigwigs have a very special DeLorean on the books, or the Y2K20 bug has bitten A mysterious "blip" has caused the printers of the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) to skip back a century as 2020 rolled round, unless the acknowledgement of a change of keeper took a really long time to arrive.…

Info Commish has £2m annual legal budget to face off with multinationals The UK Information Commissioner's Office has kicked £280m in data breach fines against British Airways and US hotel chain Marriott into the long grass.…