With exactly a month to go before the special meeting of Dell shareholders that could decide the company's fate, investor Carl Icahn has increased the pressure for a better deal for shareholders – chiefly himself.

Following more than 12 months of development and preview releases, Oracle has announced general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.3, bringing a number of important new features and enhancements to the open source clustering add-on for the MySQL database.

If the Republican-led House Subcommittee on Space has its way, NASA's proposed asteroid-retrieval mission will be killed, the agency's budget will be capped for the next two years at about 5 per cent less than last year's, and NASA's Earth observation efforts will be cut back.

Growing its smartphone shipments by 94 percent from Q1 2012 to Q1 2013 might not be enough to satisfy Huawei: it's reportedly floated the idea of acquiring Nokia.

36 Privacy Commissioners from around the world have written to Google to ask, in the polite-but-firm language of international diplomacy, for some details about Google Glass.

Despite weekly news of successful and nasty online attacks damaging organisations of every stripe, executive types remain blasé about security and don't pay it enough attention, says Jason Clark, chief security officer at Websense, who recommends fighting back by phishing CEOs and board members.

The Chinese group behind the recently discovered NetTraveler attacks is now using widespread interest in the infamous National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM surveillance program to encourage users to open malicious email attachments, it has emerged.

As all the world that cares knows, the leaders of the eight most powerful nations in the world have just been holding a summit meeting at the Lough Erne Resort in Northern Ireland.

At first glance, lighting a fire on the International Space Station (ISS) seems like a good way to earn a Darwin Award and the opprobrium of all humanity. Yet boffins have been doing it for some time in an effort to learn more about how flames behave.

The venerable PDP-11 minicomputer is still spry to this day, powering GE nuclear power-plant robots - and will do so for another 37 years.

India’s outsourcing giants are likely to face more delays in their frustrated bid to tap a potential IT services market worth $30 billion, after a report emerged suggesting the EU still has big data security concerns with the country.

Game TheoryI’ll soon be offering my thoughts and reflections on this year’s E3, but before all that it seemed worth waxing lyrical about new PS3 exclusive The Last of Us, a game that points the way to what the next generation should really be aspiring to do.

Exagrid, a supplier of deduplicated disk grid systems, clearly isn't worried about its products, but it has added two new execs to help boost the business side of things.

OpinionLast summer was a washout for us Brits, and indeed top meteorologists are meeting at the moment to find out just why. Some other odd things happened last year, too: exceptionally large areas of the Greenland ice sheet surface melted, as did record amounts of the Arctic ice cap, and ocean temperatures were high. How were all these things linked? What was the underlying cause?

Poverty-stricken dictatorship North Korea says the leak of NSA web-snooping project PRISM shows that the US is the “kingpin” of civil-rights abuses.

An updated Windows 8 from Microsoft will NOT be the "miracle cure" for traditional PC makers in need of a sales and profits injection. And that's according to IT biz analysts Context.

The European Commission has asked mobile telecoms firms and manufacturers of devices to provide details of any agreements they have with Google regarding the use of the technology giant's Android operating system.

Seagate has quietly built an enterprise-class 600GB hybrid drive: it combines the capacity of spinning platters with a fast flash cache of hot data.

Supercomputer company Cray is starting up a standalone storage company with a Cray Cluster Connect product for rustling up business supplying X86 Lustre clusters.

Julian Assange says he'll stay in the Ecuadorian embassy in London even if allegations of sexual assault against him in Sweden are dropped.

The Wi-Fi Alliance is now formally certifying devices conforming to 802.11ac, the 5GHz wireless standard capable of delivering 1Gb/sec, only a year after manufacturers started shipping kit.

CommentHigh rates of home ownership increase the unemployment rate, says a new study. This doesn't, at first, sound very sensible; we'd probably think that anyone with a house is working so damned hard to pay the mortgage that they'd have no time to be unemployed.

Carl Fiorentino, a former president at reseller Systemax, has been charged with accepting bribes worth millions of dollars in return for directing $230m worth of business to certain components suppliers. He was arrested yesterday and released on a $1m personal surety bond.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft will take a picture of Earthlings' home planet from the viewpoint of aliens on Saturn next month, snapping the image from hundreds of millions of miles away.

Ian Livingston has quit the top job at BT, after being poached by Prime Minister David Cameron to take on a key trade and investment role for the government.

ExclusiveAn IT blunder splashed photos of suspected criminals and details of Brits who reported them over the internet, The Register can reveal.

PicCops have arrested two men following a failed “smash and grab” robbery at Apple’s flagship store on Regent Street, London.

WebcastThree years ago you listened to vendors telling you how much we would all save from virtualisation. It seemed so plausible, but for most of us the savings never arrived. Why not? And what can we do about it?

Facebook claimed it has – for the first time – surpassed 1 million active advertisers who used the network in the last 28 days.

Wannabe cloud provider Tier 3 has created an object storage service based on the Riak distributed datastore.

Oracle is claiming victory in a case of alleged grey market trading against a US business that sells network, software and services management support to the enterprise. ServiceKey and its CEO Angela Vines inked a settlement deal with Larry's lot at the end of last month.

Eastman Kodak's creditors have backed its plan to sell 34 million shares worth $406m as it prepares to exit bankruptcy protection.

Still not acquired after bragging two months ago of an 80 per cent sequential revenue bump and an $80m annualized run rate as it exited the first quarter, virtual server-storage appliance maker Nutanix is widening its market appeal with new low-end and high-end configurations.

Viglen's financial performance has improved, meaning chief exec Bordan Tkachuk and chairman Claude Littner will avoid Lord Sugar's fearsome finger - which is usually waved about when numbers are down or Apprentice wannabes get the boot.

Dish has elected to ditch its pursuit of Sprint for the time being and concentrate on its potentially winning bid for Clearwire.

Podcast

International fugitive, criminal suspect and self-described eccentric millionaire John McAfee has released a tongue-in-cheek video explaining how to uninstall the security software that still bears his name.

Adobe dropped the D-bomb during a Q2 conference call with analysts after admitting some customers are "disappointed" it decided to murder future copies of its boxed Creative Suite.

Google has followed in the footsteps of Amazon by making it easier for businesses to load in masses of data to the company's cloud platform.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's latest TypeScript release, Google has shipped the first beta SDK for Dart, its own JavaScript killer alternative web language, including bug fixes, performance enhancements, and an improved editor.

Microsoft is breaking its long-standing tradition of not paying for security vulnerabilities by offering a $100,000 cash prize for the first penetration tester to crack Windows 8.1 and a $50,000 bonus to explain how they did it.

The Register is tired of Australia's broadband debate. As we explained yesterday, we're sick of the tribalism, parochialism and politicking.

Google is preparing to unleash a wave of apps that get intelligence from its mammoth machine learning models.

Mega mogul Kim Dotcom says he's "in tears" after a Dutch hosting company wiped data from servers formerly used by his now-defunct Megaupload business, an act that he claims destroyed "critical evidence" in his long-running legal battle with the US government.

Faced with a growing tide of angry gamers, Microsoft has pulled a U-turn on its forthcoming Xbox One console's terms and conditions to allow game sharing and internet-free gaming.