Oracle unrolls tape roadmap

A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.

The error occurred, according to a report [PDF] released on Thursday by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), because the check-in software treated travelers identified as "Miss" in the passenger list as children, and assigned them a weight of 35 kg (~77 lbs) instead of 69 kg (~152 lbs) for an adult.

The AAIB report attributes the error to cultural differences in how the term Miss is understood.

A Google proposal which enables a web browser to treat a group of domains as one for privacy and security reasons has been opposed by the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).

Google's First Party Sets (FPS) relates to the way web browsers determine whether a cookie or other resource comes from the same site to which the user has navigated or from another site. The browser is likely to treat these differently, an obvious example being the plan to block third-party cookies.

The proposal suggests that where multiple domains owned by the same entity – such as google.com, google.co.uk, and youtube.com – they could be grouped into sets which "allow related domain names to declare themselves as the same first-party."

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.

In a case that dates back to 2019, Johannesburg High Court dismissed an attempt by Eskom to compel the global software giant to renew support services until April 2022.

The decision leaves the state-owned electricity company reliant on an "interim risk mitigating processes... to reduce the risk of its operations being disrupted."

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

Development of this new cut – version 4.15 – proved a little trickier than expected, with initial plans for three release candidates and a March 23rd release stretching to five release candidates and release today, April 8th.

Was it worth the wait? Xen’s feature list highlights the new ability to export Intel Processor Trace data from guests to tools in dom0, which means tools like Intel’s kernel fuzzer have more to work with and thus a better chance of spotting code nasties.

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."

WordPress is the content management system giant, with a 64.7 per cent market share and used in some measure by 40.9 per cent of active websites, according to W3Techs. Wix by contrast has a 2.4 per cent market share, though that is enough to place it fifth, behind Squarespace but above Drupal.

Wix kicked off its new campaign by apparently sending expensive Bose noise-cancelling headphones to selected people they considered to be influencers – the odd thing being that the gift was marked "Yours WP," though the sender was Wix.

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

It has been a while coming, but last night's Dev Channel Insider build of Windows 10 (21354) has made the MSPaint app updateable via the Microsoft Store.

The change, which was accompanied by a whizzy new icon for the aged bitmap editor, will allow Microsoft to tinker with the app without requiring a full-on Windows update. The same fate has already befallen the Notepad text editor, although we fervently hope those within the walls of Redmond fight the urge to fiddle with it too much.

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.

The idea behind the open-source Gitpod platform is that developers code, build, test, and debug in a remote workspace implemented as a Docker container, running on Kubernetes, and accessed via a web browser.

There are integrations with GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket, and the official IDE is Eclipse Theia – or was. "The IDE you get is now the original VS Code," co-founder Sven Efftinge told us.

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.

Find My is a service that allows iPhone, iPad, Mac, and AirPod owners to locate their missing devices through a dedicated application or website. Until now, Apple had refused to support third-party vendors, forcing careless punters to rely on other services, such as Tile or (ironically) Chipolo.

That's changed with the launch of the Find My Network Accessory Program, which will allow independent firms to piggyback off Apple's tech, provided they meet Cupertino's stringent privacy and security rules.

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

The claim, filed in the UK's High Court in London, asserts that Microsoft stifled the supply of preowned Microsoft licences in the UK and EEA and added clauses into contracts that restrict customers reselling their licences (in return for a discount).

"The net result," alleges the Derby-based software reseller, "has been higher prices and less choice for customers, who have been steered into cloud-based Office365 and Azure subscriptions."

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.

"During a judicial investigation into a potential service criminal organization suspected of knowingly providing encrypted telephones to the criminal environment, police specialists managed to crack the encrypted messages from Sky ECC," the Belgian police claimed, CNN reports.

"This data provides elements in current files, but also opened up new criminal offenses. The international smuggling of cocaine batches plays a prominent role in intercepted reports."

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.

The duo, named by the London South Employment Tribunal as Mr Bennett and Mr Day, both left the South London firm in 2019 after spending about two years working there.

Both claimed, in echoes of another tribunal case against Sparta Global, that Geeks had unlawfully withheld thousands from their final paycheques for unjustifiable training costs – but Employment Judge Corinna Ferguson ruled that the company acted correctly.