Fleeing flocks of furious testers who think your last beta was more like a pre-alpha compiled after a Friday night bender? Or perhaps you're more the independent operator who wants an environment in which the PHB* is far, far away and your users are a captive audience.

Three members of iconic British psychedelic rockers Pink Floyd have penned an editorial condemning the practices of streaming music service Pandora, which they say has been trying to trick recording artists into cutting their own pay.

Chinese electronics giant Huawei has jumped feet-first into the emerging tablet-that's-also-a-phone market with the release of the MediaPad 7 Vogue, a seven-inch tablet that can be had in either a Wi-Fi-only or Wi-Fi plus 3G phone call–capable version.

As Sony's PlayStation 4 pre-orders take off (perhaps at the expense of the already-unloved Xbox One), speculation has emerged that the console's underlying operating system is based on the FreeBSD operating system.

Australian app developers short of funds but long on the business of extracting useful information out of government data have the chance to top-up their finances to the tune of $AU5,000 courtesy of a Queensland government competition.

Declining to state just where NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden went after dodging the press, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has issued a statement saying that Snowden is “healthy and safe”.

Security vendor Trend Micro has embiggened its industry collaboration credentials this week after helping Taiwanese police arrest one man in connection with a widespread targeted attack, and teaming up with Interpol on a new cyber crime prevention centre.

Technology companies in India are warning prospective employees of a fresh round of scam mail designed to trick job-seekers into paying a security deposit in return for an interview.

A pub in East London has become the first in Britain to accept Bitcoin in lieu of real money.

Philippines authorities are hoping technology will help save lives this rainy season, after announcing a plan to equip local disaster officials with tablets to access and upload key info to prevent flood-related deaths.

UK consumer magazine Which? has dropped a benchmark bucket on the iPhone, rating it the slowest of seven smartphones under test.

Apple has released details of the compensation it will hand out to parents whose credit card took a pounding when their kids made ludicrously expensive in-app purchases.

AnalysisTwenty years ago a myriad of hard drive vendors pushing essentially the same technology fought themselves into oblivion.

A German teen with an uncanny resemblance to Kim Jong-un has been outed as the manager of an "official" North Korean Instagram account.

The Premier League is set to ask for a UK court order to force ISPs like BT and Sky to block popular football streaming site FirstRow1.eu.

An eagerly anticipated talk by Charlie Miller on car hacking, rejected by organisers of the Black Hat security conference, will get an airing in Las Vegas this summer after all.

HPC blogEight universities have travelled to the 2013 International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, to participate in the 2013 ISC Student Cluster Challenge. They’ve deployed their clusters and are busily working to turn in the best results on a series of HPC benchmarks and scientific apps.

Telcos in Europe are being asked to consider encrypting their subscribers' personal information as Brussels confirmed new rules on Monday about the industry's obligation to notify customers about data breaches.

FeatureDigital video guru and author of The MPEG Handbook, John Watkinson, examines the next generation of TV and film and reveals it shouldn't be anything like what we're being sold today.

StoragebodShould enterprise vendors consider becoming service providers? When Rich Rogers of HDS tweeted this my initial response was:

Risqué photo-sharing app Snapchat has convinced VCs its saucy-selfie-sending service can provide serious returns for their $60m investment in its latest funding round, led by venture capital company IVP.

BlackBerry Work Space is now available for iOS and Android, creating a secure container (under your own BOFH's control, natch) on devices owned by employees.

Erstwhile LulzSec spokesman Jake Davis has been freed from detention, with strict conditions on the 20-year-old's use of the internet and computers.

Fusion-io has tweaked its acquired ioTurbine software to offload up to 96 per cent of mixed read/write requests from a SAN, by caching data in server flash caches.

Google has ditched the old version of its Groups service after revamping the tool to allow users to share an inbox with others.

Could the watchful eyes of regulators soon come to rest on the old and often creaking IT systems that run the back offices of the UK’s leading banks?

HPC blogEight universities have travelled to the 2013 International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, to participate in the 2013 ISC Student Cluster Challenge. They’ve hastily pulled together their data-nomming HPC beasts and are now busily working to to hit the jackpot on a series of HPC benchmarks and scientific applications.

The European Union's Court of Justice has agreed with Google by saying that search engine providers should not be held responsible for the type of personal data that appears on web pages it processes.

Joyent has spun-up an object store in its cloud that spans multiple data centers as it tries to specialize in one area where its technology may draw developers away from the black hole that is Amazon Web Services.

HPC blogThe cluster kids on eight international university teams have now deployed their clusters at the 2013 International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany. The 2013 ISC Student Cluster Challenge entrants are now fighting each other to win a series of HPC benchmarks and scientific apps.

Gartner slashed its PC sales forecast yesterday evening amid warnings that a glut of unwanted Windows 8 kit is sitting in warehouses gathering dust.

IBM has axed nearly three thousand workers in Canada and the US, according to employee union Alliance@IBM, as its cost-cutting drive begins to bite.

Game TheoryNow that the dust has settled on the maelstrom of gaming news that is the E3 show, it’s down to us gamers to sift through the detritus and choose sides. Why can’t we all just get along, huh?

Both North and South Korea are under cyber attack from a group of unidentified hackers who blitzed senior government officials' websites and a group of media companies.

ObituaryAcclaimed science fiction and horror writer Richard Matheson, who will perhaps be best remembered for his novel I Am Legend, has died at the age of 87.

Microsoft's Blue wave of Windows, tools and services updates has started breaking complete with an early glimpse of the Windows 8.1 start button.

HPC blogChina has sent two teams to the eight-university 2013 International Supercomputing Conference Student Cluster battle, but they had to earn their trip. As student cluster competition aficionados know, the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge held their first regional cluster competition last April.

Salesforce.com and Oracle are to integrate their clouds at application, platform and infrastructure levels, the companies announced today.

Microsoft has produced the name of a corporate customer in a fresh attempt to convince us Windows 8 is being adopted by businesses.

Back in January, system administration tool maker Puppet Labs got a $30m equity injection from VMware, and the company has put some of that money to good use with a major revamp of its commercial-grade Puppet Enterprise tool.

Barnes & Noble has announced that it is abandoning the color tablet business in an effort to stabilize its lossmaking Nook digital division.

HPC blogIt was a hot week in Leipzig - "sweating through your shirt five minutes after you walk out of your hotel" hot. However, extreme heat and even the resulting prickly heat won’t keep us from checking in with all of the teams during the last day of the ISC’13 Student Cluster Challenge.

Object storage supplier Amplidata has been replaced by fellow supplier Caringo at Massive Media, which bills itself as the world's largest social discovery site.

After some heavy-handed hints, Sony has used the Mobile Asia Expo 2013 to show off the latest version of its Android SmartWatch, intended to be the fashion item of choice for the mobile cognoscenti.

Exactly one year to the day since Microsoft's $1.2bn acquisition of Yammer, Redmond says its plan to bring social collaboration to the enterprise has only just begun.

It was nice to start today with more than $5,000 pledged on Pozible for The Register's NBN study – but we're still $94k-plus shy of the target, and our intent is serious.

Are you one of the silent minority that's still planning to buy a Facebook phone but just hasn't got around to it yet? You may be out of luck, as AT&T has reportedly sold out of its initial stock (and it won't be ordering any more).

Research@IntelIntel researchers have developed a way to make the increasingly tiny processors needed to power the impending "Internet of Things" even tinier: compress the code running on them.

AnalysisThe notoriously shy and unassuming CEOs of Oracle and Salesforce have announced a major partnership after spending years throwing clods of muck at one another – leading many to ask what is going on in the IT industry to cause this change.

With a terse statement – “The committee recommends that the Senate pass the Bill” – Australia has moved a small step closer to having mandatory data breach notification.