WinAmp flayed by skins attack

UK Prime Minister Boris has backed the country’s commitment to the nation’s Brexit Satellite constellation plan, although he is apparently unwilling to put his name to the deal which helped take satellite communications company OneWeb out of bankruptcy.

Speaking to the House of Commons Liaison Committee yesterday, the Tory leader responded to a question from Labour MP Darren Jones, asking whether Johnson had been involved personally in the controversial move and that the chancellor personally had to sign the cheque, as reports suggested.

Embodying his carefully crafted blonde-mopped buffoon persona, Johnson declined the opportunity to take responsibility for it.

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.

On Call A classic case of a user punching themselves in the face via the medium of technology awaits in this week's column dedicated to those brave professionals at the other end of the phone. Welcome to On Call.

Our story takes us back to the eve of chocolate egg day at some point in the 1990s. Our hero, Regomised as "Sean", was working as a field engineer and had been sent from his company's Midlands base to a customer site in Bristol. He'd been charged with the task of installing some new printers and "my boss had said that as soon as the job was finished, I could toddle off home for Easter – happy days!"

Sadly, as Sean was to learn, his boss had failed to take into account that special breed of user: the self-inflicted face-puncher.

Agile methodology has not succeeded in speeding up deliveries of onboard software for the F-35 fighter jet, a US government watchdog has warned in a new report.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its annual report into F-35 design and development that software development practices within the F-35 Joint Project Office (JPO) and jet manufacturer Lockheed Martin were below par – and had hindered the supersonic stealth fighter's progress.

"The program's primary reliance on the contractor's monthly reports, often based on older data, has hindered program officials' timely decision making," said the GAO. "The program office has also not set software quality performance targets, inconsistent with another key practice. Without these targets, the program office is less able to assess whether the contractor has met acceptable quality performance levels."

Two years on from its initial announcement, the Bank of England has unveiled the design of the Alan Turing £50 note.

Due to hit circulation on 23 June, the design replaces the relatively short-lived incarnation featuring Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Instead, the update will show the scientist Alan Turing and the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) he developed.

As the note of choice for shady deals (or so we're told) and the thing occasionally passed over just before a grandparent wheezes their last, we're sure a few readers have a wad of "bullseyes" stashed away behind the bookcase of dusty .NET tomes.

Updated On Wednesday, Bastien Nocera, the maintainer of a software library called shared-mime-info, informed Daniel Mendler, maintainer of a Ruby library called mimemagic, which incorporates Nocera's code, that he was shipping mimemagic under an incompatible software license.

The shared-mime-info library is licensed under the GPLv2 license and mimemagic was listed as an MIT licensed project.

"Using a GPL file as a source makes your whole codebase a derived work, making it all GPL, so I think it's pretty important that this problem gets corrected before somebody uses it in a pure MIT codebase, or a closed-source application," wrote Nocera in an Issues post.

Episode 3 Things are tense.

On the one hand the Company is trying to be as thoughtful as possible in accommodating the needs of staff over this protracted period, and on the other hand there's the iron fist of enforcement - all bundled up into a brand new bloke, Greg, the Workplace Wellness Facilitator.

His job is to routinely 'touch base' with each person on staff via Zoom calls and in the process of these calls put you in contact with appropriate support services, give you some advice on the good ways to streamline your return to the physical workplace and - the kicker - introduce you to the recent changes to your employment contract.

Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board and once again emitted tools to detect and filter out swearing and abuse on its Microsoft 365 cloud.

News of the profanity protector popped up on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, a feed of information from Redmond about new features coming to the tech giant's sprawling subscription software and services suite.

On Thursday, a new item appeared titled: “Microsoft 365 Compliance Center: Microsoft Information Protection & Governance now supports 7 languages for the Threat, Targeted Harassment and Profanities classifiers.”

Ingenuity, NASA’s dual-rotor drone right now strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover on Mars, is set to perform humankind's first-ever powered aircraft flight on another planet within the coming weeks.

And during this historic trip, fingers crossed, the solar-powered helicopter gizmo will aptly enough carry with it a small piece of history: a patch of material taken from the Wright Flyer, the plane flown by the Wright brothers in 1903.

“When NASA’s Sojourner rover landed on Mars in 1997, it proved that roving the Red Planet was possible and completely redefined our approach to how we explore Mars,” said Lori Glaze, director of the NASA’s Planetary Science Division, on Wednesday.

Two decades ago this week, the first version of Mac OS X hit shelves. We're not talking figuratively. The software was sold direct to consumers on disk, with a suggested retail price of $129 (roughly $190 today, adjusted for inflation).

Back in 2001, Mac OS X 10.00 Cheetah was a rough-around-the-edges break from the ageing Classic Mac OS, which had much of its origins in the original Macintosh’s System 1 software. In the years since, the platform has undergone two architecture shifts (PowerPC to Intel, and now Arm) and matured to the point where it commands nearly 10 per cent of desktop market share globally.

Getting there, however, wasn’t easy.