UK ‘bans’ iPod radio add-on

Richard Stallman's return to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), from which he parted ways less than two years ago, has not been well received.

Following word that Stallman – who resigned from the FSF amid an outcry over his offensive remarks, past behavior, and warped opinions – had returned to the fold, open source organizations and members of the technical community responded with disbelief and dismay.

Even the official Twitter account for the FSF, an organization founded by Stallman in 1985, appeared to be taken aback by the man's return:

Analysis On Monday, 740 members of .uk internet registry operator Nominet made the drastic decision to ditch five of its 11-strong board of directors, including the CEO and chairman, in a fierce rebuke of the company’s efforts to move from a non-profit organisation to a commercial one.

Today, Nominet has an interim chair – one of the remaining non-executive directors – and no CEO. Two of its senior management – Eleanor Bradley and Ben Hill – were also removed from the board, and remain in their jobs at Nominet for the moment. The fifth board member to get the boot is non-executive director Jane Tozer MBE, OBE.

And while the remainder of the board have said they “will be working on a strategic change in direction,” the reality is that they have all supported the CEO and chair’s action over the past five years, all unanimously opposed the vote, and in some cases were highly critical of the reasoning behind it.

The vote was close. The 740 members in favor faced 632 opposing, resulting in a narrow three per cent margin of victory. Of those opposed, many acted on the former chair and CEO’s claims that a yes vote would be destabilizing for the organisation. That still might be the case.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have gone full California with the news that the actor’s husband is to become a tech exec.

Harry aka the Duke of Sussex aka the Count of Montecito has accepted a job as chief impact officer for life-coaching and mental-health startup BetterUp. It’s hard to imagine a better fit.

BetterUp sells itself as offering “personalized coaching, content, and care designed to transform lives and careers,” but in reality it is hoping to act as a kind of outsourced HR department with the focus on employees’ well-being.

The appointment is so opposite (and apposite) to Harry’s existence within the Royal Family that you have to wonder whether his new career is a meta statement on the state of the Windsors: no one in Buckingham Palace would ever consider discussing mental health in terms other than the need for a discreet doctor and an institution with locks and soft walls.

A sister and brother have admitted over-ordering hundreds of new MacBooks for "a private university" in Silicon Valley to steal and sell the expensive gear for millions of dollars.

Patricia Castaneda, 37, of San Carlos, California, worked at the university’s School of Humanities and Sciences, and was responsible for ordering replacement laptops for the faculty and its staff who were entitled to a new one every three years.

Over the course of ten years, starting in 2009, she methodically over-ordered and then sold them on, initially for cash through ads on Craigslist, and then through a man she met through one Craigslist ad, again in cash.

A California federal court has sentenced a "vengeful" techie to two years in the clink after he deleted 1,200 Microsoft user accounts belonging to a client.

Deepanshu Kher, a Delhi-based employee of an unnamed IT outsourcing firm, was tasked with helping a company (also unnamed) in the coastal city of Carlsbad, California, migrate its Office 365 environment.

According to court docs, he was flown into California in 2017 "to assist with the migration." Dissatisfaction with Kher's work led to him being pulled from the project by January 2018, and some months later he was terminated by his employer.

The Department of Justice said that two months after his June 2018 return to India, the 32-year-old decided to exact "revenge" by breaking into the systems of his former client and deleting as many Office 365 accounts as he could find, nuking 1,200 (80 per cent) of a total 1,500.

Updated The ship that spawned a thousand IT container jokes has been partially refloated [ah, yeah, see update below – ed.] after becoming wedged across Egypt's Suez Canal, blocking a crucial global trade artery.

Despite fears the route might be blocked for days – holding up as much as 10 per cent of the world's trade – the Gulf Agency Company (GAC) reported today the Ever Given container vessel was now alongside the bank of the canal [no, not quite, sadly – ed.] rather than its well-documented straddling of the waterway.

Efforts to shift the behemoth, which weighs the same as 22,988,822 adult badgers, had been hindered by wind conditions as Suez Canal tugs sought to remove its snout from the banks of the canal. The ship is 400 metres long, "the length of four football pitches," according to the BBC.

When version 90 of Google's Chrome browser arrives in mid-April, initial website visits will default to a secure HTTPS connection in the event the user has failed to specify a preferred URI scheme.

Lack of security is currently the norm in Chrome. As Google Chrome software engineers Shweta Panditrao and Mustafa Emre Acer explain in a blog post, when a user types "www.example.com" into Chrome's omnibox, without either an "http://" or "https:// prefix," Chrome chooses "http://." The same is true in other browsers like Brave, Edge, Mozilla, and Safari.

This made sense in the past when most websites had not implemented support for HTTPS. It was only in 2018 that the majority of websites redirected traffic to HTTPS. But these days, most of the web pages loaded rely on secure transport (ranging from about 98 per cent on Chrome to about 77 per cent on Linux). And among the top 100 websites, 97 of them currently default to HTTPS.

Transcription service Otter.ai has unleashed another remote-working survey. Today's report revealed that not only are workers not bothering to dispense with nightwear, a minority are content to virtually meet with just their undercrackers on.

Following Microsoft's announcement of tentative office reopenings, the YouGov/Otter.ai survey of more than 2,000 US and UK employees found 39 per cent were still working from home full time and fully expected to continue to do so "indefinitely."

A little less reckoned that the office would feature in their future in one form or another while just under a quarter were back with colleagues for at least some of the time. A fifth of workers, however, did not want to return to the office. Ever.

Of those who wanted to continue to dodge office life, 51 per cent cited the commute as a factor while 21 per cent were honest and admitted that a lie-in was welcome. Just over 10 per cent reckoned their diets at home had improved (something with which this hack and his pandemic paunch might take issue) and 15 per cent preferred non-formal clothes.

Updated Backup specialist Backblaze has fixed an issue where a Facebook advertising pixel was "inadvertently" included on signed-in web pages – but users are concerned private filenames and sizes were also sent to the social media giant.

The problem was spotted by Blackblaze customer Ben Cox who protested on Twitter: "WTF? @backblaze's B2 web UI seems to submit all of the names and sizes of my files in my B2 bucket to facebook. I noticed because I saw 'waiting for facebook.com' at the bottom while trying to download a backup."

B2 is the Backblaze cloud storage service.

The company responded with a blog post that stated: "On March 8, 2021 at 8:39pm Pacific time, a new Facebook campaign was created that started firing a Facebook advertising pixel, intended to only run on marketing web pages. However, it was inadvertently configured to run on signed-in pages."

Between a certain virus, the recession it caused, political turmoil in the USA, and the usual round of strife, the last twelve months have been distinctly sub-optimal.

And now The Register brings you news of a terrifying new crisis: a coffee shortage.

Bloomberg’s Indian outpost “Quint” details the disaster: droughts in Brazil have crimped supply, even as the ships and containers needed to get the diminished crop to market have become hard to find.

Quint pointed to research from liquidity hub Marex Spectron about the dire state of the market.