Facebook has once again found itself sizzling uncomfortably in the frying pan of user outrage recently, this time for apparently letting a bunch of Holocaust denial groups maintain shop on the site.

The companies that create and modernize operating systems are under the same economic pressures as the IT departments of corporations - large and small - that create and maintain their own applications atop those operating systems. And it comes as no surprise that the development of the venerable OpenVMS proprietary operating system - under the control of Hewlett-Packard since its 2001 acquisition of Compaq - is moving largely to India.

ReviewDoro is a Swedish company which launched its first range of back-to-basics mobile phones in 2007, aimed at the elderly and people with limited dexterity. Using a Doro phone is like taking a step back in time. A time before smart phones, mobile internet or even camphones – this is an extremely basic handset.

Police in the Russian city of Orlov have detained a 50-year-old Kursk businessman en route to Moscow with a bootload of "dressed mutton" - actually 15 skinned dog carcasses destined for Moscow eateries.

Enterprise solid state drive use means booming sales for STEC which saw revenues for its Zeus SSD rise 267.1 percent year-on-year.

Nortel is well-advanced in the process of splitting itself into self-supporting business units which could be sold off separately, if the firm cannot find a buyer for its whole business.

Ofcom has ruled that the 30 January culinary swearfest Ramsay’s Great British Nightmare - a two-parter which kicked off at 9pm - was in breach of the broadcasting code after racking up an impressive "115 instances of the most offensive language" in its first 40 minutes.

The British Chamber of Commerce, which campaigns for small business, is complaining that the government is failing to keep its promises on funding for training and apprenticeship schemes.

World of Warcraft, Wii Fit and Grand Theft Auto IV are just some of titles that helped ensure top-ten rankings for their respective development firms in this year’s Develop100 poll.

The Data Protection Act should not be a backup plan in failed defamation cases, a High Court judge has said. Mr Justice Eady has rejected a claim that an allegedly libellous statement was also a breach of the privacy law.

Google's Orwellian Street View snoopmobiles have been banned from prowling Greece's highways and byways, pending the search monolith coughing "additional information" as to just what it's up to.

Passengers who fancy catching a train on 23 May from Kettering to London St Pancras are advised to pack a sleeping bag and some heavy reading material because the normally one-hour-ish trip will take no less than 18 hours during which passengers will enjoy "seven changes, five bus journeys and a trip on the London Underground" - not to mention an overnight stay in Milton Keynes.

Jonathan Ive, designer of the iMac, iPod and iPhone, has lost a claim for domain names carrying his name because his name is not a trade mark and because he shuns publicity. His name is not used enough in commerce to be protected, an arbitrator has ruled.

You probably only associate ViewSonic with monitors and LCD TVs, but you’ll soon know the company for its handsets, it hopes. The firm has just announced plans to pump out smartphones.

Demand for Intel's netbook-oriented Atom processors plunged in Q1, but only from computer manufacturers, it seems.

In news which could be a boon for the fledging inflatable Moon habitat tent podule industry, a group of textiles students from North Carolina say they have invented a radiation-proof, solar power generating fabric ideal for lunar camping.

E-ink screens may be all the rage for e-book readers, but Samsung’s turned the display technology on its head by putting it to use as a keyboard on its latest phone.

Security researchers have revealed that the websites of no less than six anti-virus firms are vulnerable to cross-site scripting flaws, of a type that might lend themselves to phishing attacks.

Vodafone is set to announce a standard set of APIs, allowing third parties to create applications integrated with Vodafone servers around the world, including tapping the operator's billing system for micropayments.

A Taiwanese man is recovering in hospital after a snake sank its fangs into his todger as he sat down on the toilet at his rural home, Reuters reports.

There is no unified networking with FTS's freshly-announced Dynamic Cube - yet. But FCoE is coming.

Graphics card specialist Sapphire has rolled out what it reckons is the first board to boast a gigahertz-clocked GPU - from AMD, at any rate.

German software firm SAP has acquired a privately-held carbon management tech firm for an undisclosed sum.

Leccy TechZero Motorcycles is readying a ‘leccy sports bike that may just be the two-wheeler we’ve all been waiting for: a lightweight electric road racer equivalent of its soon-to-ship 125cc model S sports bike.

ExclusiveDavenport Lyons, the high profile London media law firm, has dropped its mass letter writing campaign on behalf of copyright holders, which accused internet users of illegal filesharing and threatened court action if they did not quickly pay hundreds of pounds compensation.

Sony's OLED-equipped portable media player, the Walkman X, goes on sale tomorrow the company has just announced.

Interesting news today for male Reg readers living in primitive, murderous jungle warrior societies. New research indicates that, while in general the more violent and aggressive you are the more success with the ladies you will have, there is a point at which diminishing returns set in.

A North American college has urged new journalism students to buy iPhones, exploiting a funding fiddle to promote the gadget as a learning aid.

On Tuesday, Juniper Networks rolled out the final - and biggest - hunk o'hardware in the line of Ethernet switches they announced back in January of 2008.

ReviewA whole heap of companies have started offering miniature Linux-powered PCs in the last few years, from Zonbu, Sumo and Koolu to DecTOP, that sells the device formerly known as AMD's Personal Internet Communicator. A number bear an almost suspicious resemblance to x86-powered thin clients, being based around inexpensive, low-powered but cool-running System-On-a-Chip (SOC) devices such as AMD's Geode processors, as used in the One Laptop Per Child XO-1.

A US teenager has admitted involvement in a high profile denial of service attack against Scientology websites last year.

The European Parliament is treading bravely into the world of social networking in order to get the kids involved in the exciting world of European politics.

Microsoft confirmed to the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday that it plans to sell a multi-billion-dollar debt offering, and in turn kicked off rumours that Redmond could be mulling a possible takeover of German software maker SAP.

Good news for fetishists wishing to protect their privacy on a night out in South London. Less good news for the rest of us, as Police and Government obsession with crime prevention continues to make inroads into our personal privacy and security - but some comfort, as senior politicians from all parties take up an issue first highlighted by The Register.

So farewell then, GN40, Intel's next major netbook chipset but now apparently destined for the chop before it was even launched.

Fresh from a bizarre food fight with rival Giorgio Maone of NoScript, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant has offered an olive branch to publishers - and along with it, an opportunity for his users to show that they're not a bunch of parasitic freeloaders.

Dell is now offering a 10in netbook for a pound under 200 quid.

UpdatedThe UK film industry today backed the record industry's long-running campaign for laws to force ISPs to cut off persistent illegal filesharers from the internet.

The European Commission has put out a series of recommendations to protect European citizens from the privacy risks associated with RFID chips.

One of the Pirate Bay’s co-founders is calling on Swedish police to conduct a new investigation into the notorious BitTorrent site’s operations.

Google has declared newspapers, orange juice and cheeseburgers that much more harmful to the planet than running a vast network of datacentres.

P2P-ers furious over the Pirate Bay case are being asked to get back at lawyers for the entertainment industry via the counter-intuitive route of ostensibly giving them money.

Freecom has unveiled what it’s claimed is the world’s smallest 3.5in desktop hard drive.

A US court has turned down an appeal from a man convicted of computer hacking offences for using a workplace computer to post nude pictures of himself onto a swingers website.

German software giant SAP is hosting its annual Sapphire user and partner conference this week in Orlando, Florida, and all the majors in the IT community (many of who use SAP to run their own businesses) want to get a little piece of the PR action. In the case of Hewlett-Packard, Sapphire is all about promoting its expertise in boosting the performance of SAP's ERP suites.

French politicians have handed the international music and video industries a victory against online media pirates with legislation to punish offenders.

The next blocks in Microsoft's SQL Server and appliance-based data-warehouse strategy will be put in place starting this summer.

Hitachi and NEC have reported their their fiscal 2008 results, and the numbers are not good. Hitachi set a new record for the largest annual loss by a Japanese manufacturing company as NEC struggled. On the up side, though, NEC was optimistic about the coming twelve months.

eBay announced today it's removing listing fees for users who only occasionally auction their wares on the online flea market - but seller beware.

While Moore's Law is cramming more and more computing power into a processor socket, not every customer needs a quad-core "Nehalem EP" two socket box to run their applications. Selling into the SMB channel with its System x server line has been tough for IBM in the past three quarters, particularly because in a tough economy SMBs start shopping more on price and less on performance.

Fear not the musty, masculine stench and wet towel snapping at Dell's regular website, lady shoppers. The computer giant has baked up a very special separate place for your delicate female sensibilities!

You've been curious about the back story when Sun Microsystems, as Intel chief executive officer Paul Otellini succinctly put it, "shopped around the Valley and around the world."

Oracle's management has been putting a positive spin on its proposed $5.6bn purchase of Sun Microsystems. Chief executive Larry Ellison - a man with an Ahab-like obsession for hardware appliances - has said the deal potentially makes Oracle the Apple of enterprise systems.

SearchologyGoogle has rolled out its answer to Twitter's much-discussed real-time search.