This means Linus Torvalds has definitely won, doesn't it?

Ignite  Microsoft will release its Edge browser for Linux next month, initially through the browser's Dev preview channel.…

What Redmond is calling Ground-Station-as-a-Service

Ignite  "Ground-Station-as-a-Service" is what Microsoft is calling its Azure Orbital service (a shame because GaaS would have been a far more puntastic set of letters), unveiled in preview at vendor's Ignite shindig, but if you're hoping for a Natick-style data centre being sent into space, there's bad news.…

Plans HPC play with AMD, Intel silicon, too

Oracle will add Arm-powered servers to its cloud and tout them as delivering "the best price-performance compared to any other x86 compute instance on a per core basis with an order of magnitude of cost savings."…

Virtual commutes and touchless meetings

Ignite  It wouldn't be a Microsoft event without some VP somewhere banging on about Teams, and the company's annual Ignite (now virtual) get-together did not disappoint.…

Flexpai may have been a world-first, but it wasn't very good. The follow-up phone straps on 5G

The history books will remember that the first tech company to release a foldable phone wasn't any of the usual suspects but rather a little-known Chinese outfit. Sure, Royole's Flexpai was universally panned, but that hasn't deterred it from releasing a 5G follow-up.…

Sam Newman speaks to devs at GOTOpia Europe

Sam Newman, a consultant and author specialising in microservices, told a virtual crowd at dev conference GOTOpia Europe that serverless, not Kubernetes, is the best abstraction for deploying software.…

Also makes itself denser, in a good way, with N1 upgrade

Arm is taking another serious tilt at server silicon with new designs that incorporate the Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) beloved of HPC and machine learning types.…

You can only use it to weigh yourself now... how disgustingly low-tech

In 2015, German sportswear manufacturer Adidas acquired a plucky Austrian IoT startup called Runtastic, which, among other things, manufactured a $129.99 "smart" scale called Libra. Now that product is being discontinued, preventing owners from synchronising their data or even downloading the app required to use it.…

Fitness fans get more battery capacity in thinner case, and replacing it is doable for the brave

iFixit, terror of the tri-point, has pulled apart Apple's latest wrist job and found that the friend of the well-heeled fitness fanatic has retained the repairability of its predecessor.…

Yes, why not haul the system into the 21st century?

The UK's Ministry of Justice has put out market feelers for the second time in three months in what could amount to a £20m deal, this time for a new payroll system.…

Also: Rocket Lab rehearses for a US debut while Firefly fires up an Alpha

In Brief  Mother Nature scuppered SpaceX's twelfth operational launch of its Starlink satellites, forcing the company to throw in the towel "due to severe weather in the recovery area."…

Once you're over the learning curve, it's a cross-platform all-rounder

Review  When you think about iconic mechanical keyboards, the Happy Hacking is among the first to spring to mind. Its compact design is unusual if you're used to full-sized boards with the numpad, function keys, and arrow keys excised. The result is a keyboard that is unfathomably small, occupying little desk real estate.…

Decentralised app rolling out soon, but manual process remains problematic

In the absence of a working contact tracing app, the UK government has been forced to rely on manual data collection and human-powered tracing to identify potential cases of exposure to the Covid-19 virus. But, as Parliament’s cross-party Joint Committee on Human Rights claims in a new report, this is just as problematic as the original centralized app, particularly when it comes to user privacy…

Single high-level impulse noise kicked in with morning cuppa. Owner vows never to use the set again

Turning off an old second-hand television has restored internet services to a village in Wales.…

Join us on September 29 – and get ready for 2020’s OWASP Top 10

Webcast  OK, it’s only updated every three years or so, which means it’s not quite the same as breathlessly clustering around the radio to see whether Blur or Oasis have grabbed the top spot or whether Rhiannon’s Umbrella is still number one, or whether team Taylor will see off Perry.…

What strange magic is this? 41st release and sequel to version 3.38 will be called version 40

Popular open source desktop-and-more outfit GNOME has taught itself a new way to count.…

Ambitions to see the rise of a Brit equivalent to Apple is cool and all but that strategy must include safeguarding chip designer, says union

The UK government has been urged to add legal protections to the proposed £31bn sale of Brit chip designer Arm to Nvidia to protect jobs, protect its neutral business model, and make sure it remains headquartered in Cambridge.…

Branded tat and disrupto-talks could return - albeit nine months later than usual in Oz plague capital

Cisco has invited its faithful to travel abroad to a mass-attendance event in December 2021.…

Scumbag sobs in court as judge orders him to cough up $1.5m

The front man for the notorious Dark Overlord hacker gang, which threatened to leak stolen confidential information unless paid off, has been sentenced to five years behind bars in America.…

Court sends him into lockdown that’s not a whole lot nastier than some used to control a certain virus

An IT contractor has been found guilty of pinching his employer’s supercomputer to mine cryptocurrency.…