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On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of delivering excellent tech support amid your colleagues' ambivalence, anger, and unjust admonitions.…

Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch. The Register: As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives. Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremely ambitious," according to Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital. Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets continue to use Microsoft in parallel. Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.

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Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has signed an agreement with Alberta's premier that will roll back certain climate rules to spur investment in energy production, while encouraging construction of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. From a report: Under the agreement, which was signed on Thursday, the federal government will scrap a planned emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and drop rules on clean electricity in exchange for a commitment by Canada's top oil-producing province to strengthen industrial carbon pricing and support a carbon capture-and-storage project. The deal, which was hailed by the country's oil industry but panned by environmentalists, signaled a shift in Canada's energy policy in favour of fossil fuel development and is already creating tensions within Carney's minority government. Steven Guilbeault, who served as environment minister under Carney's predecessor Justin Trudeau, said he was quitting the cabinet over concerns that Canada's climate plan was being dismantled.

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Fresh court filings try to keep the case about copyright, and in US courts

VMware has come out swinging in its case against Siemens over alleged unlicensed use of its software.…

‘Our soup’s not toxic but this chap’s behavior was’ is the gist of the defense

Food company Campbell’s, best known for its soups and the iconic cans they come in, has parted ways with a vice president for IT after another member of the company’s tech team recorded him criticizing the company’s products.…

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued new guidelines outlining when inventions created with the help of AI can be patented. From a report: USPTO Director John Squires said on Wednesday in a notice set to be published Friday, that the office considers generative AI systems to be "analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, research databases, or any other tool that assists in the inventive process." "They may provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention," the office said. "When one natural person is involved in creating an invention with the assistance of AI, the inquiry is whether that person conceived the invention under the traditional conception standard." The office reiterated its guidance from last year that AI itself cannot be considered an inventor under U.S. patent law. However, it rejected the approach taken by the PTO during former President Joe Biden's administration for deciding when AI-assisted inventions are patentable, which relied on a standard normally used to determine when multiple people can qualify as joint inventors.

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The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney said. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

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Talk about buyer’s remorse

South Korean web giant Naver has had an interesting week, after it acquired a cryptocurrency exchange that the next day revealed it had suffered a serious cyberattack.…

Platforms including Meta and TikTok will be held liable for financial fraud for the first time under new rules agreed by EU lawmakers in the early hours of Thursday. From a report: The Parliament and Council agreed on the package of rules after eight hours of negotiations to strengthen safeguards against payment fraud. The deal adds another layer of EU regulatory risk for U.S. tech giants, which have lobbied the White House to confront Brussels' anti-monopoly and content moderation rules. [...] Social media has become rife with financial scams, and MEPs pushed hard to hold both Big Tech and banks liable during legislative negotiations. EU governments, meanwhile, believed banks should be held responsible if their safeguards aren't strong enough. As a compromise, lawmakers agreed that banks should reimburse victims if a scammer, impersonating the bank, swindles them out of their money, or if payments are processed without consent.

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