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After almost seven years, Nintendo has won a patent case that involved the original Wii. On Tuesday, the company announced that a federal court in Dallas ruled in its favor against iLife Technologies, overturning an earlier 2017 decision that would have forced Nintendo to pay out $10.1 million in damages. Engadget reports: The original suit, which was brought against Nintendo of America in 2013, alleged that the company used iLife's technology to create the Wii's motion-sensing controller. The patent that was at the center of the case described a technology designed to detect when a person falls and monitor babies for symptoms of sudden infant death syndrome. iLife had initially sought $144 million in total damages and an injunction against Nintendo. In this latest ruling, however, the court decided that iLife's claim wasn't specific enough.

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Total Inability To Secure Upgrade Programme in Berlin

German authorities are waking up to a Windows 7 headache, with approximately €800,000 required in order to keep the elderly software supported a little longer.…

Canonical goes playing in the streams

Ubuntu daddy Canonical is aiming at the likes of Huawei and Google with its take on app streaming with Anbox Cloud.…

Destined to die a lonely Martian death? How about Doomed Buggy?

NASA has announced the finalists for its Mars 2020 Rover naming and the options are as worthy as one might expect.…

CloudEndure gets cheaper, new host-level backup for VMs as AWS looks to lock 'em in

AWS has lopped 80 per cent off the price of its CloudEndure disaster recovery service and 50 per cent off Kubernetes (K8s) clusters.…

Emailing stuff is hard, m'kay?

Capita Education Services had a bit of an oopsie yesterday as a new helpdesk system spurted potentially thousands of email addresses at unsuspecting users.…

Not for surveillance, honest

Drug dealers and dodgy pharmacies illegally touting opioids online – think heroin, fentanyl, codeine, morphine, and so on – may have their collars felt by an AI cop soon. Ish. Maybe.…

China's Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) -- the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope -- is now operational. The telescope was completed in 2016 -- 20 years after it was first proposed -- but has been undergoing testing and commissioning since then. Phys.Org reports: FAST's nickname is Tianyan, which means "Eye of the Sky" or "Eye of Heaven." It's built in a natural depression in Guizhou, Southwest China. Among other things, its scientific goals are to study pulsars. FAST has already discovered two of those, in August 2017. FAST's name is not exactly accurate. Though it does have a 500 meter diameter, only 300 meters of it is used at any one time. The telescope is active and can change so that one 300 meter segment is focused on the receiver. According to Xinhua, all the technical indicators from FAST are meeting or exceeding planned levels. FAST is a powerful radio telescope, and scientists think it will make some major discoveries, especially in its first couple of years. FAST will also perform two sky surveys, which will take about five years. It'll take another 10 years just to analyze all that data. Still, there's room for flexibility in the telescope's operational schedule to pursue any surprises that come up. The surveys will take up about half of the telescope's observing time, leaving room for objectives like searching for exoplanets with magnetic fields, which are probably crucial for life.

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Old? Windows-only? Community struggles with '40-year-old male' problem

Microsoft senior software engineer Michal Strehovský has run a small .NET Core application on Windows 3.11, a version of the OS released in 1993.…

Shock discovery after Brit super-boffin's stuff disappears decades earlier

More than 250 items belonging to super-Brit Alan Turing, including his OBE medal, that went missing decades ago were found hidden behind a bathroom wall in America, according to new court documents.…

Hidden for now, probably coming to a desktop near you, soon, ish

Microsoft is secretly testing in-house ads in WordPad, the basic text editing app bundled into its desktop operating system since Windows 95.…

With Half-Life: Alyx launching in March 2020, Valve is offering gamers the opportunity to play every Half-Life game on Steam for free. "This is basically a two-month-long trial; you won't get to keep these games," notes The Verge. "Every game is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS (though all of these games are 32-bit apps, which means they don't work on macOS 10.15 Catalina)." From the report: This promotion includes the original Half-Life (the Source version of the game with added physics to make it feel more modern to play, not the beautiful remaster Black Mesa) and its expansions, Half-Life: Blue Shift and Half-Life: Opposing Force. Also available for free is Half-Life 2 and its two episodic expansions. (According to Valve, Half-Life: Alyx takes place before the events of Half-Life 2.) Valve's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, its tech demo for HDR lightning, isn't included in this promotion. You can view all the Half-Life games on Steam and start downloading them here.

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Big Blue rides Red Hat into the black

A tenth of a percent still counts, right?…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today's example of smart stuff going dumb comes courtesy of Under Armour, which is effectively rendering its fitness hardware line very expensive paperweights. The company quietly pulled its UA Record app from both Google Play and Apple's App Store on New Year's Eve. In an announcement dated sometime around January 8, Under Armour said that not only has the app been removed from all app stores, but the company is no longer providing customer support or bug fixes for the software, which will completely stop working as of March 31. Under Armour launched its lineup of connected fitness devices in 2016. The trio of trackers included a wrist-worn activity monitor, a smart scale, and a chest-strap-style heart rate monitor. The scale and wristband retailed at $180 each, with the heart monitor going for $80. Shoppers could buy all three together in a $400 bundle called the UA HealthBox. The end of the road is nigh, it seems, and all three products are about to meet their doom as Under Armour kills off Record for good. Users are instead expected to switch to MapMyFitness, which Under Armour bills as "an even better tracking experience." The company also set the UA Record Twitter account to private, effectively taking it offline to anyone except the 133 accounts it follows. Current device owners also can't export all their data. While workout data can be exported and transferred to some other tracking app, Record users cannot capture weight or other historical data to carry forward with them.

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Amazon is planning to give more data on counterfeit goods to law enforcement in a further crackdown on fakes listed on its e-commerce sites. Reuters reports: In the past, the world's largest online retailer has informed authorities of counterfeit peddlers when it thought it had enough information for police to pursue a culprit. Now, the company plans to disclose merchant information to European and U.S. federal authorities every time it confirms a counterfeit was sold to customers, increasing the frequency and volume of reporting to law enforcement, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Why the new program was happening now was not immediately clear. In recent weeks, Amazon has held meetings with government authorities and related organizations to discuss its new counterfeit reporting strategy and how the company can further their enforcement efforts, the person said. The hope has been that Amazon's coveted data will help law enforcement make connections about criminals. According to the source, Amazon will report a merchant's name, company name, product and contact information to authorities, after it confirms a business was selling fakes, closes the seller's account, and the account holder does not make a successful appeal via Amazon's typical processes.

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Source of Amazon boss's steamy pics might not be what was first thought

Candid pictures used to threaten Amazon boss Jeff Bezos were exposed not by his current parmour's brother, as some have suggested, but through a sophisticated hacking operation personally directed by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, The Guardian has asserted.…

Boeing confirmed that it has stopped building 737 Max airplanes in Renton, Washington, as it waits to get permission for the plane to fly again following two deadly crashes that killed 346 people. CNN reports: Boeing will not furlough or lay off workers because of the shutdown, but pain will ripple through its supply chain and could hurt America's economic growth. Boeing would not release a headcount for people who had been working on the plane. The company said the employees will be reassigned to other duties during the shutdown, and there are a number of reasons for that. The 737 Max has been grounded since March following two fatal crashes that killed all 346 people on board. Although Boeing couldn't deliver the 737 Max planes to customers, the company continued to build the jets, albeit at a slightly reduced pace of 42 a month. It now has about 400 completed jets parked in Washington and Texas, waiting to be delivered to airlines around the world. The company hoped that the plane would fly again before the end of 2019. But in December Stephen Dickson, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, announced approval would not come until some time in 2020. Shutdown plans were announced a week later.

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MojoKid writes: Today AMD launched its latest midrange graphics card based on the company's all new Navi architecture. The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT slots in under $300 ($279 MSRP) and is based on the same Navi 10 GPU as AMD's current high-end Radeon RX 5700 series cards. AMD's Radeon RX 5600 XT is outfitted with 36 compute units, with a total of 2,304 stream processors and is essentially a Radeon 5700 spec GPU with 2GB less GDDR 6 memory (6GB total) and a narrower 192-bit interface, versus Radeon RX 5700's 8GB, 256-bit config. HotHardware took a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT around the benchmark track and this card has a BIOS switch on-board that toggles between performance and silent/quiet modes. In performance mode, the card has a 160W power target, 14Gbps memory data rate, a Boost Clock of 1,750MHz and a Game Clock of 1,615MHz. In silent/quiet mode, things are a bit more tame with a 135W power target, 12Gbps memory, and 1,620 MHz/1,460MHz Boost and Game Clocks, respectively. In the gaming benchmarks, the new Radeon RX 5600 XT is generally faster than NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 overall, with the exception of a few titles that are more NVIDIA-optimized and in VR. Though it lacks the capability for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the new AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT weighs in $20-30 less than NVIDIA's closest competitor and offers similar if not better performance.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Wine 5.0 has been released today and contains over 7,400 bug fixes and numerous audio and graphics improvements that will increase performance in gaming on Linux. With the release of Wine 5.0, WineHQ hopes to resolve many of these issues, with the main improvements being: -Builtin modules in PE format: To make games think Wine is a real Windows environment, most Wine 5.0 modules have been converted into the PE format rather than ELF binaries. It is hoped that this will allow copy-protection and anti-cheat programs to not flag games running under Wine as being modified. -Multi-monitor support: Multiple displays adapters and multi-monitor configurations are now supported under Wine. -XAudio2 reimplementation: XAudio2 libraries have been added back to Wine and will use the FAudio library for better compatibility. -Vulkan 1.1 support: "The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec." Here are the release notes, download locations for the binary packages (when available) and source.

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Cuffed procurement bureaucrat took percentage cut, it is alleged

An IT worker at a New York bank steered multi-million-dollar deals to a technology contractor in exchange for $900,000 in kickbacks, it is claimed.…