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Eskom disputes results of Big Red audit

South African electric utility Eskom is set to appeal against a court decision that refused to force Oracle to support software used by the firm while a licensing and payment dispute is settled.…

General Motors is reducing production in some of its North American plants due to a global semiconductor chip shortage. From a report: The chip shortage is affecting automotive companies around the world, with semiconductors functioning as a key component for steering systems, car brakes and other automobile features. GM has temporarily closed some plants, with expected downtimes ranging from a week to several weeks. GM expects the closures will cost them between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in operating profits this year. The chip shortage stems from slowed production and manufacturing in 2020. Semiconductor chips require long lead times due to their complicated technology, resulting in a backlog of demand.

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Teases new ‘Hyperlaunch’ tech that will allow booting of whole VM fleets

The Xen project has released another upgrade to its open source hypervisor.…

A British company is suing Microsoft for $370m in damages [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] in the English High Court, alleging that the US company is trying to crush a multibillion-dollar market in second-hand versions of its software. From a report: ValueLicensing buys pre-owned Microsoft software licences from companies that upgrade their IT or become insolvent, and then resells them across the UK and Europe. It claims on its website that its customers can save up to 70 per cent by buying used software, and points to one NHS Trust that allegedly saved $1.37 m by using Microsoft Office 2019, rather than the latest version of the office tools suite. Jonathan Horley, ValueLicensing's founder, accused Microsoft of harming competition in the used software market by persuading companies to relinquish their perpetual licences, often in exchange for discounts on Microsoft's cloud-based software, such as Office 365. "Microsoft has an incentive to move to its new cloud-based model and remove the old licences from the market so customers have no choice but to move to its subscription model," said Mr Horley, in an interview with the Financial Times.

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The U.S. Commerce Department said Thursday it was adding seven Chinese supercomputing entities to a U.S. economic blacklist for assisting Chinese military efforts. From a report: The department is adding Tianjin Phytium Information Technology, Shanghai High-Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center, Sunway Microelectronics, the National Supercomputing Center Jinan, the National Supercomputing Center Shenzhen, the National Supercomputing Center Wuxi, and the National Supercomputing Center Zhengzhou to its blacklist. The Commerce Department said the seven were "involved with building supercomputers used by China's military actors, its destabilizing military modernization efforts, and/or weapons of mass destruction programs.' The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment. "Supercomputing capabilities are vital for the development of many -- perhaps almost all -- modern weapons and national security systems, such as nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement.

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'Creepy' videos liken CMS giant to 'absent, drunken father' – but its market share is only rising

Hosting company Wix is apparently running a bizarre campaign in an attempt to win over WordPress customers, causing WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to accuse Wix of "dirty tricks."…

Peter Thiel is "pro-crypto" and "pro-Bitcoin maximalist," but he also thinks the cryptocurrency may be undermining America. From a report: Thiel, the venture capitalist and conservative political donor, urged the U.S. government to consider tighter regulations on cryptocurrencies in an appearance on Tuesday. The statements seemed to represent a change of heart for Thiel, who is a major investor in virtual currency ventures as well as in cryptocurriences themselves. "I do wonder whether at this point, Bitcoin should also be thought [of] in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.," Thiel said during an appearance at a virtual event held for members of the Richard Nixon Foundation. "It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar." He added: "[If] China's long Bitcoin, perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works."

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You cannot kill what does not die

Microsoft Paint has followed its long-lived chum Notepad into the howling wilderness of the Microsoft Store.…

Apple plans to argue at a trial that developers and consumers will suffer if Epic Games succeeds in upending how the iPhone maker's app marketplace is run. From a report: Apple presented a California federal judge on Thursday with a road map of how it will push back against Epic in a high-stakes antitrust fight over how much the App Store charges developers. The filing comes ahead of a May 3 trial before the judge with no jury. In a summary of its legal arguments, Apple contends the 30% commission it charges most developers isn't anticompetitive as it's a typical fee across other mobile and online platforms. Moreover, the company argues taking a share of the revenue is justified by the billions of dollars it has invested in developing the proprietary infrastructure that underpins its App Store, including software development kits and application programming interfaces. The maker of Fortnite, which Apple removed from its store last year, accuses the iPhone maker's app store of being an illegal monopoly because developers are barred from making their iPhone and iPad apps available through their own websites. On Thursday, the game studio laid out its own arguments in the dispute, saying Apple's conduct harms innovation and allows it to profit at the expense of independent developers.

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'Allowing everyone to use their favourite IDE just makes a lot of sense'

Gitpod, which provides remote environments for testing and debugging code, has shifted to Visual Studio Code from Eclipse Theia and is sponsoring a new event called DevX Conf, focused on the developer experience.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: PayPal said it would achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2040 as it looks for ways financial technology can prevent climate change. The payments giant also vowed to use renewable-energy sources to power its data centers by 2023, and pledged to reduce its operational greenhouse gases by 25% by 2025. The promises are part of PayPal's commitment to help limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement. "Our climate action goes beyond our science-based targets," Sri Shivananda, PayPal's chief technology officer, said in an email. "As we continue to develop more effective and efficient payment solutions, we have an opportunity to identify financial-inclusion solutions that build greater climate resilience and maximize outcomes for underserved communities hit hardest by climate-related extreme events." PayPal said it has also been financing projects in communities where it has significant operations to address the "unavoidable climate pollution" they generate. The firm, for example, has been helping a foundation restore historically Black cemeteries in Richmond, Virginia, as a way to offset its greenhouse gas emissions. "It will take us all to succeed at creating a climate-neutral economy," Shivananda added. "We will lead on researching opportunities and bringing in partners for collaboration to advance innovative fintech solutions that prioritize climate and financial-health impact."

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Expensive bike, earpods can now be tracked from inside the walled garden

An upgrade to Apple's Find My app has added support for devices from third-party manufacturers including gadget-tracking startup Chipolo, Belkin, and niche Dutch bike maker VanMoof.…

ValueLicensing also calls for action to 'restore and maintain competition and choice in the market'

Microsoft is being sued by UK reseller ValueLicensing for £270m in damages over claims of restrictive contractual practices and abuse of dominance.…

Euro cops take $1.65bn of blow off the streets after poring over messages

The Belgian plod says it seized 27.64 tons of cocaine worth €1.4bn (£1.2bn, $1.65bn) from shipments into Antwerp in the past six weeks after defeating the encryption in the Sky ECC chat app to read drug smugglers' messages.…

Sky TV, one of the largest broadcasters in the UK, has won a court injunction to prevent links to its TV shows from being illegally shared online. The interim order targets a man who moderated several TV-focused communities on Reddit while raising funds through Patreon and PayPal. TorrentFreak reports: According to an action filed by Sky in a Scottish court, Cherzo1 was the moderator of three sub-Reddits -- r/UKTVLAND, r/notapanelshow, and r/UKPanelShowsOnly -- which together had more than 51,000 subscribers. Cherzo also had a YouTube channel with more than 95,000 subscribers. According to Sky, all of these platforms were used to infringe the company's copyrights. In evidence to support its action, Sky states that Cherzo1 was motivated by money, receiving payments from fans and followers via Patreon and directly into his PayPal account. [...] In order to curtail Cherzo1's activities, Sky asked the court to hand down an "interdict ad interim," a term used in Scotland to describe an interim injunction. The broadcaster asked the court to order Cherzo1 to stop uploading copies of broadcasts, stop posting hyperlinks to shows on Reddit and anywhere else on the Internet, and forbid him from assisting any third party to do the same. A court will grant an interim interdict if it believes there is a prima facie case against the defendant. [...] Anyone found breaching such an order could be subjected to a fine or even imprisonment.

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Company acted fairly and reasonably, rules judge

Two men who quit software development firm Geeks Ltd failed to prove the company unlawfully withheld more than £2,000 from each of them to claw back its training costs, a tribunal has ruled.…

Though framework agreement 'cannot guarantee any business'

The UK government has awarded 25 suppliers places on a framework deal for software design and implementation which could be worth up to £1.5bn.…

Reports of Cloud team's demise may be premature

Chinese giant Huawei has conducted an internal re-organisation and The Register understands one result is its cloud and business computing groups have come together under new leadership.…

Take the heat out of your firewall deployment

Webcast If you’ve got an application which faces the web, no one would dispute that you should probably have a web application firewall sitting in front of it.…

IBM has announced a COBOL compiler for Linux on x86. "IBM COBOL for Linux on x86 1.1 brings IBM's COBOL compilation technologies and capabilities to the Linux on x86 environment," said IBM in an announcement, describing it as "the latest addition to the IBM COBOL compiler family, which includes Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and COBOL for AIX." The Register reports: COBOL -- the common business-oriented language -- has its roots in the 1950s and is synonymous with the mainframe age and difficulties paying down technical debt accrued since a bygone era of computing. So why is IBM -- which is today obsessed with hybrid clouds -- bothering to offer a COBOL compiler for Linux on x86? Because IBM thinks you may want your COBOL apps in a hybrid cloud, albeit the kind of hybrid IBM fancies, which can mean a mix of z/OS, AIX, mainframes, POWER systems and actual public clouds. [...] But the announcement also suggests IBM doesn't completely believe this COBOL on x86 Linux caper has a future as it concludes: "This solution also provides organizations with the flexibility to move workloads back to IBM Z should performance and throughput requirements increase, or to share business logic and data with CICS Transaction Server for z/OS." The new offering requires RHEL 7.8 or later, or Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, or later.

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