Yahoo! can! get! stuffed!

Deno, the JavaScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, is now a company with nearly $5m to fund development – though its developers say it will remain "permissively free."

Deno 1.0 was released in May 2020 by Ryan Dahl, Bert Belder, and Bartek Iwańczuk. Dahl, the original developer of Node.js, had reflected on what he considered to be his design mistakes, some of which he saw as unfixable, and therefore created Deno.

The new runtime ticks boxes for modern development trends, including being part-coded in Rust and having first-class support for TypeScript. Like Node.js, the project depends on the Chromium V8 JavaScript runtime.

It may be chilly in the UK this week, but that is nothing compared to the state of Hell as Microsoft continued its support of OpenJDK.

A preview of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK was announced today in Long Term Support guise. The distribution includes binaries for Java 11, based on OpenJDK 11.0.10+9, on x64 server and desktop environments for macOS, Linux, and (of course) Windows.

The company has come on quite some way since its tentative signup with OpenJDK back in 2019, noting that Microsoft "and its subsidiaries are heavily dependent on Java in many aspects."

Intel on Tuesday announced the availability of its "Ice Lake" 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors, intended for applications running on servers, high-end workstations, and in data centers.

And, yes, this is Intel's first Xeon Scalable processor family on its much-delayed 10nm process node.

"Our 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable platform is the most flexible and performant in our history, designed to handle the diversity of workloads from the cloud to the network to the edge," said Navin Shenoy, EVP and general manager of Intel's Data Platforms Group, in a statement.

The UK Cyber Security Council announced itself to the public realm last week by touting a domain it doesn't own. Helpfully, internet jokesters then bought up variations on the official address.

A brainchild of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the UK Cyber Security Council is billed by government as "the regulatory body, and voice, for UK cyber security education, training and skills." As part of that it "drives progress towards meeting the key challenges the profession faces."

All very worthy and important. When British infosec folk noticed that the official press release mentioned an email address for ukcybersecurity[.]org[.]uk, however, everything started unravelling.

Google owner Alphabet has switched from Oracle to SAP for its main financial software in a move that has dented Big Red's share price.

The timing of the news, which first appeared on CNBC, is also likely to raise eyebrows, coming as it does on the heels of Google's victory over Oracle in the long-running Java code dispute.

Alphabet and Google's core financial systems will move to SAP in May, Google apparently told employees in an email. Alphabet will continue to run various other Oracle systems, however, according to the outlet's sources.

We bring our Lego My Own Creation (MOC) odyssey to a close today with a bit of unabashed self-indulgence in the form of a Skylab model and Skylab modification for the enormous Lego Saturn V.

Why two? Simply because in spite of the sheer size of the Lego Saturn V, the scale means that a model of America's space station to fit might seem a little small. Instead, we opted to build one to Saturn V scale, as it sat on the launchpad back in 1973 and another as it was in orbit, missing a solar array and featuring the rapidly designed and constructed shade erected by the first crew.

For those unaware, Skylab was America's first crack at a space station (at least one that made it to orbit). Converted from the S-IVB third stage of the Saturn, the launch in 1973 nearly ended in disaster after shielding was torn from the rocket during ascent, ripping off one solar array and jamming the other.

A team of European researchers have succeeded in slowing down antimatter in a study that could lead to more accurate measures of this strangely elusive substance and help confirm the fundamental symmetry of nature.

Antimatter has certain properties – such as electric charge – which are inverted from those of normal matter. In this anti-universe, the anti-electron (aka positron) has a +1 electrical charge, and the antiproton has a −1 electric charge. However, anti-particles do have the same mass as their matter counterparts.

Antimatter is also tricky to work with. If an anti-particle comes into contact with its counterpart, "they annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy."

Column It seemed like a classic April The First spoof. Indeed, some tech titles had it on their lists of best pranks of the day. But it's true: the software zombie court case to end all zombie software court cases has woken from its slumber. Nearly 29 years after it first lurched from the crypt, SCO v The World Of Linux is back, and it smells just as bad as ever.

The details need not worry us: they were bad enough at the time. Have a look at this timeline if you want to follow the trail of dead.

At its most basic, the whole saga started with the reanimated Unix dev corpse SCO Group claiming it owned the rights to core technology in Unix and Linux, and that everyone else was using them illegally. An opening court case against IBM was followed by a salvo of letters demanding money from 1,500 companies, then the pre-IBM Red Hat countersued to stop the nonsense.

The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has announced it will study the feasibility of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

“In [proof-of-concept] Phase 1, the Bank plans to develop a test environment for the CBDC system and conduct experiments on the basic functions that are core to CBDC as a payment instrument such as issuance, distribution, and redemption,” said a Monday announcement, that added this phase will last until March 2022.

Assuming concepts are satisfactorily proven, the Bank could issue regulations and a pilot program that involves payment service providers and even actual end users, according to executive director of BoJ Shinichi Uchida.

Sponsored The SolarWinds attacks compromised tens of thousands of systems across US federal government agencies and private sector companies alike. The US will feel its effects for years, and it was largely avoidable. In fact, according to Lior Div, CEO and co-founder of Cybereason, if those systems had been using a concept called operation-centric security, they could have spotted it immediately.

Operation-centric security is a term that Div has coined to describe a new way of approaching cybersecurity. It correlates subtle chains of behaviour that reveal potential cyber attacks earlier by providing analysts with more context across devices and users. If you're a security operations center (SOC) analyst, it might just save your sanity - and your network.

VMware has released an update of the mostly experimental cut of its flagship ESXi hypervisor for the Arm architecture, adding support for 80-core server processors and hinting that more server-makers have come aboard.

Known as “Project Monterrey” and offered as a technology preview under VMware’s program of releasing official but unsupported code as “Flings”, ESXi Arm Edition was first suggested as a fine way to run workloads on SmartNICs, network interface cards that pack an Arm SoC to give them the capacity to handle other chores.

SmartNICs are widely used by hyperscale clouds to provide extra isolation and reduce the amount of work that needs to be done by CPU cores that the big clouds rent to their customers. VMware looked to be offering a way for others to adopt the same technique.