Profit healthy, sales up, 4,000 staff face axe. Cisco CEO, here's your pay doubled to $21m
Cisco chief exec John Chambers has received a whopping pat on the back from the networking giant with a pay rise of nearly 100 per cent.
According to a regulatory filing, the biz supremo saw his total annual compensation almost double to a massive $21.05m (£12.9m) in the financial year that ended on July 27, up from a measly $11 …
NASA's search for a new Earth maps WEIRD ALIEN CLOUDS
NASA has mapped the "cloud" structure of an alien world for the first time using its Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes, an early step towards finding planets with human-compatible atmospheres.
Partially Cloudy Skies on Kepler-7b Kepler-7b (L), which is 1.5 times the radius of Jupiter (R), has its clouds mapped by Kepler and …
First Twitter, now Candy Crush King. So who ISN'T 'filing a secret IPO'?
King.com, the Brit mobile gaming firm behind the smash-hit amusement Candy Crush Saga, has reportedly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US.
A well-placed source told Reuters that the company responsible for the sweetie swap-and-match distraction has submitted to watchdogs its confidential paperwork to go public …
Clear this week's diary - Twitter just might flash its secret $15bn IPO in public
Twitter hopes to reveal to the world its secret initial public offering (IPO) filing this week, according to sources whispering in the ear of news website Quartz.
One of those people familiar with the matter told the site that the social network would like to start trading before Thanksgiving, likely on the New York Stock …
Hundreds of hackers sought for new £500m UK cyber-bomber strike force
The UK's Ministry of Defence wants to recruit an army of computer experts to serve as "cyber reservists" to defend national security.
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the MoD will take on "hundreds" of IT wizards to work "at the cutting edge of the nation's cyber defences" at a cost of up to £500m. The tech talent will work …
'Who knew in 1984 that Steve Jobs would be Big Brother?'
This was the week when Linus Torvalds, chief Penguin of LinuxLand, unleashed not one, but two mighty rants on the interwebs. First, Torvalds said he resented recent attacks on the integrity of the kernel's security.
This is after a call was made for the use of Intel processor instruction RdRand for generating random numbers to …
Facebook stock-spaffers officially LOSERS: Stock hits all-time high of $45
Facebook shares rose over three per cent to a new high yesterday, finally breaking past $45 for the first time since its IPOcalypse last year.
This means that even those who paid the highest price the shares hit on the first day of trading would no longer be out of pocket if they sold – that is, if they have held on to their …
Steelie Neelie calls for TOTAL BAN on EU mobe roaming charges
The European Commission is planning to scrap all roaming charges across the Continent as part of its efforts to turn the telecoms market into a single market across all EU countries.
Announcing the proposed changes, the EC said they'd be good for everyone, reducing red tape for companies and letting them expand across borders, …
US plaintiffs can seek damages over Street View data slurp - court
A US appeals court has rejected Google's efforts to dismiss a lawsuit over the data it grabbed from Wi-Fi networks while collecting snapshots for use in its Street View program.
The Chocolate Factory is being sued by a number of plaintiffs who want to hold it accountable under the Wiretap Act for the data it intercepted from …
Googorola now shipping 100,000 Moto X phones a week... from TEXAS
Motorola is now shipping 100,000 of its flagship Moto X phones a week from its factory near Dallas, Texas.
Chief exec Dennis Woodside said in an interview that the Texas manufacturing facility, operated by contractor Flextronics, was capable of producing tens of millions of phones a year, but expansion would depend on demand.
" …
Dyson takes Samsung to court in UK over vacuum cleaner
British vacuum cleaner firm Dyson is suing Samsung for "ripping off" one of its inventions for its own Motion Sync hoover.
Dyson claims that the new model, which the South Korean chaebol showed off at the IFA technology show in Berlin last week, infringes on its patent for a steering system for cylinder vacuum cleaners.
"This …
BBC releases MYSTERY RIDDLE poster for Doctor Who anniversary episode
The BBC has released a teaser image for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, which will be a feature-length episode called The Day of the Doctor.
Doctor Who 50th Anniversary episode poster. Credit: BBC (click to enlarge)
The pic is full of clues about the episode, showing two damaged Daleks, the Tenth, Eleventh and "X" …
Tell me why I don't like Moon days: Bob Geldof heads into SPAAACE
Sir Bob Geldof has dubbed himself the "first rock astronaut" after confirming that he'll be on a trip to space in 2015 with the Space Expedition Corporation.
Bob Geldof
The Boomtown Rat said he was given the chance to go on the trip after his band agreed to perform at a charity ball where further flights on the same trip will …
Virgin Media gives TiVo users access to Netflix
Virgin Media is planning to let Netflix subscribers watch the video-on-demand service through their set-top TiVo boxes.
The cable company announced that the Netflix app would be coming to 1.7 million TiVo homes this year, starting with a pilot rollout this week. Around 40,000 customers have been chosen for the pilot scheme, …
James Bond's Lotus Esprit submarine car sells for £550,000
The James Bond submarine car used in The Spy Who Loved Me has sold at auction in Blighty for £550,000.
James Bond submarine Lotus Esprit car
Despite the over half-million price tag for the Lotus Esprit – which isn't road-worthy – it failed to reach the guide price expected by RM Auctions of between £650,000 and £950,000, the …
Alibaba stands firm against Hong Kong exchange over IPO
Chinese tech biz Alibaba has revealed details of its internal partnership structure, which would allow a group of founders and senior employees to keep control over the board after the company goes public.
Founder Jack Ma spilled the details in an email to employees, according to Reuters, adding to pressure on Hong Kong to …
ICAHN'T with this guy: Activist investor gives up battle with Big Mike
Activist investor Carl Icahn has announced that he and his partner Southeastern Asset Management are giving up the fight to stop Michael Dell from taking the PC maker private.
Icahn said in an open letter to shareholders that he still thought that Big Mike's $13.88 per share offer for the firm undervalued it, but had decided …
Verizon finally drags FCC into court fisticuffs to end one-speed internet for all
Broadband provider Verizon and US watchdog the FCC will face off in court today in a crunch battle for net neutrality – a longstanding principle that guarantees a fair and level playing field for all on the web.
Verizon and fellow ISPs want to charge websites and other online businesses a premium for piping their data faster to …
Brit online property bazaar Zoopla ponders BILLION-pound flotation
British online property portal Zoopla is reportedly considering a stock market listing that could value it at £1.3bn.
The UK's second-biggest property search website by page views is looking for new ways to compete with its main rival, Rightmove, and has appointed investment bank Credit Suisse to help it assess its strategy.
" …
IRON MAN MUSK: Elon reveals Tony Stark-style 3D design smarts
Elon Musk has posted the video of his Iron-Man-esque 3D design process, where he makes rocket parts using a Leap Motion controller and a 3D printer.
Kicking off with an onscreen representation of the part that Musk can flick around with his hands, the design then moves to an actual 3D projection, just like in the movie and an …
BAN THIS SICK FILCH: Which? demands end to £1.50-per-min 'help' lines
Consumer campaigners at Which? are calling for a ban on costly helpline and customer call-lines.
Executive director Richard Lloyd said it was "outrageous" to force people with questions or complaints to call higher-rate numbers - such as those starting with 09, 0845, 0844, and 0871 - that could charge up to £1.50 a minute.
"It' …
Virgin Galactic spaceship goes supersonic in second test flight
Virgin Galactic has moved one step closer to actual spaceflight with its second supersonic flight of its passenger carrying SpaceShipTwo.
The test flight was a key milestone in the firm's attempt to become the world's first commercial space liner, flying (wealthy) tourists for brief journeys into suborbital space.
The company …
NSA is 'great at some sophisticated tasks but oddly bad at the simplest'
It's all going down in Redmond! Last week, chief exec Steve Ballmer announces his retirement, this week, the one-time king company of computing announced it's going to slurp down the tattered remnants of Nokia's mobile business.
Yes, in a bizarrely timed acquisition, Microsoft has decided to take them newfangled speaky-boxes …
Mail.ru says 'да' to half a BILLION dollars, flogs its 14m Facebook shares
Russian internet giant Mail.ru has gotten rid of the last of its Facebook shares, making over $525m.
The company originally invested $200m in Facebook in 2009 and had a stake worth around $700m just before the social network went public last year. Mail.ru sold off some of its stock in the IPO and said it had let the remaining 14 …
Jury reckons Motorola wasn't 'fair and reasonable' to Microsoft
Microsoft has said that a Washington jury had agreed with its claim that Google-owned Motorola had broken its promises to standards-setting bodies to license its standards-essential patents at fair and reasonable rates.
The jury awarded Redmond $14m in damages, around half of what it had asked for. Most of this, $11m, is to pay …
NAO: UK border bods not up to scratch, despite billion-pound facial recog tech
The UK Border Force's inefficient use of technology is one reason it's failing to carry out enough customs checks or detections of illegal immigrants, according to the National Audit Office.
The NAO said in a report that border staff managed to cut immigration queue times down during the London Olympics, but only at the expense …
LinkedIn looks at bank account, thinks: We'll raise one Instagram*
LinkedIn says it will sell off an extra $1bn worth of stock to raise funds to buy new systems, tout better services and potentially snap up other firms.
The social network for the gainfully employed hasn't said when it expects the sale to take place. The website had around $900m in cash and short-term investments as of the end …
UK fraud office hauls Olympus into court over accounting scandal
Japanese camera firm Olympus will be prosecuted by the UK's Serious Fraud Office along with its British subsidiary Gyrus Group following a £1bn accounting scandal at the company.
The SFO has been investigating both companies after three of Olympus' former execs admitted to falsifying financial statements, overstating net assets …
Shareholders' advisors back Big Mike's deal to take Dell private
Dell continues to insist that founder Big Mike's offer to take the firm private is what's best for it, announcing today that proxy advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), Glass Lewis and Egan Jones are all recommending it.
“We are pleased that all three of the nation’s leading proxy advisory firms have …
But it's only wafer thin: Skinniest keyboard EVER is designed by Camby biz
Wireless technology specialist CSR has come up with the world's thinnest touch keyboard, which is less than 0.5mm thick.
Ultra thin keyboard The ultra-thin keyboard
The flexible Bluetooth-capable interface can change any surface into a keyboard or extend the touchscreen of tablets and smartphones, CSR said.
The Cambridge- …
You must be croaking! Boffins reveal SOUND-GOBBLING frog's secret
Bioboffins have figured out how one of the world's smallest amphibians, the centimetre-long Gardiner's frog, can hear other frogs croak despite not having any ears.
Gardiner's frog Toad you so ... A Gardiner's frog. Credit: R. Boistel/CNRS
Using X-rays, an international team of scientists have discovered that the frog listens …
Techie Crotty will put £1m in Bletchley museum's kitty ... if you do the same
The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park has been promised its largest ever single donation of £1m, which it hopes to use on refurbishments.
Donor Matt Crotty, a tech entrepreneur and trustee of the museum, has pledged the million-pound gift. The eggheads who run the joint now need to find matched funding to …
Baffled boffins 'closer' to finding origins of extragalactic COSMIC RAYS
Scientists at the South Pole have moved a step closer to figuring out the origin point of the cosmic rays which can damage electronics on Earth and zap astronauts in space.
IceCube Lab by moonlight
The origin of the high-energy particles has been baffling boffins for decades, but the latest study, which uses data from the …
Level 3 starts round 2 of layoffs: 60 UK workers to lose jobs
Major internet network operator Level 3 Communications will be axing 60 people in the UK – amounting to five per cent of its British workforce. Altogether, 700 L3 workers are being axed worldwide.
Sources told The Register that the company had failed to hit its targets in Europe and the UK and that customer satisfaction with …
'World's worst director' plans Snowden-inspired movie comedy
Uwe Boll, the recipient of a lifetime Razzie award who has been called “the world's worst director” has taken to Kickstarter to fund a political comedy movie inspired by Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
The German director, most famous for making terrible films out of video games like BloodRayne and Far Cry, wants to use the …
Nasdaq blames rival NYSE Arca for 3-HOUR trading outage
The company behind the NASDAQ stock exchange has said that last week's three-hour outage was partly its own fault, but mostly the fault of rival exchange firm NYSE Arca.
The glitch forced Nasdaq to take trading offline on Thursday last week – and thousands of Nasdaq-listed stocks were frozen in place for three hours across the …
Revealed: HUNGRY frosty Arctic cleft that could eat 2 Grand Canyons
A huge mega-canyon, nearly double the length of America's Grand Canyon, has been discovered beneath a mile of ice in Greenland.
The canyon in a 3-D visualisation of the Greenland bedrock for the northern half of the island, looking north
The canyon looks like a winding river channel and is at least 750km (466 miles) long, …
Amazon: OK, OK. We'll let traders flog tat more cheaply elsewhere
Amazon has agreed to stop forcing third-party traders to offer their cheapest prices on its online marketplace within the EU, Blighty's Office of Fair Trading has announced.
The online bazaar had been banning traders from selling their products at a cheaper price elsewhere using threats of Amazon account suspension and payment- …
Siri: 'STOP trying to strap me to your forehead. It won't work'
This was the week when ahem colourful chief exec Steve Ballmer announced his retirement from Microsoft. The 23-year veteran Microsoftie is to leave the Windows giant with bulging pockets and love in his heart. He told employees in a heartfelt missive:
I love this company. I love the way we helped invent and popularize computing …
Skype: 3D video calling is the FUTURE
Online chat biz Skype says it has developed 3D video calling - but it doesn't know when it will roll out the feature, if at all.
Having to yell at your parents overseas that they need to turn off normal video if they want to have enough bandwidth left to hold anything akin to a decent non-time-lapsed conversation is not enough …
Steelie Neelie accused of killing €0.01-per-megabyte roaming fee cap in Europe
EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes has reportedly dropped her plan to dramatically slash wholesale mobile roaming fees, a move that could have helped drive down Europeans' phone bills.
In a fresh draft proposal for the future of telecoms on the Continent, seen by Reuters this week, Steelie Neelie did not mention the caps on charges as …
We've cracked riddle of ANTIGRAVITY mountains on Saturn's Titan - boffins
An icy shell around Saturn's largest moon Titan is thicker and tougher than boffins previously thought – and it is concealing a bizarre interior with inward-facing spikes.
ESA's Huygens probe image of a mountain on the surface of Titan A root mountaintop on Titan. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
NASA's Cassini …
Now your iPhone apps can be FAT losers: Apple gobbles data diet upstart
Apple has picked up AlgoTrim, a Swedish upstart that knocks together tools for quickly decompressing apps, photos, videos and other stuff on mobile phones.
As well as image squeezing, AlgoTrim touts a code compression library that crams software into the flash memory of ARM-powered devices, possibly reducing the size of programs …
Obama prepares to crawl up NSA's ass with microscope
President Barack Obama has quietly put together an intelligence review group to look at how to make people more comfortable with the US's snooping.
In a short statement, the White House said Obama had met with the panel, made up of intelligence officials including former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell and academics like …
Ebook judge: Guilty Apple must hire anti-antitrust watchdog to probe itself
Apple won't have to restrict contracts with suppliers of movies, music and TV shows to iTunes in its ebook price-fixing injunction, a US judge said yesterday.
District Judge Denise Cote said in a court hearing that the final order on Apple, after the company was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to set the price of …
Supercomputer hacker coughs to flogging DoE logins to FBI agent
The US hacker caught after trying to sell Department of Energy supercomputer logins to an undercover FBI agent has pleaded guilty in a deal that could see him go to jail for up to 18 months.
The 24-year-old hacker, Pennsylvania man Andrew James Miller, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and computer fraud to cut his …
Boffins lay bare exotic Lara Croft meteorite element ununpentium
Boffins have found fresh evidence for the existence of the new, super-heavy element ununpentium, known to gamers as the element found in meteorites in games like Call of Duty and Tomb Raider.
Periodic table up to date in May 2013
The element with atomic number 115 has no official name yet, but its temporary moniker is …
SiriusXM sued for millions in 'unpaid' music royalties
Digital rights organisation SoundExchange has filed a lawsuit against satellite radio giant SiriusXM for what it termed "massive underpayment of royalties" from 2007 to 2012.
The nonprofit group, which collects digital royalties on behalf of artists, said it believed that the satellite radio service provider – which had 25 …
Sponsored Stories ruck: Zuck chucks 15 bucks at ad photo suck schmucks
Facebook will dish out $15 to lucky users in a court-approved $20m settlement over "sponsored stories" - the little ads that surprised netizens by using their names and photos.
US District Judge Richard Seeborg gave the final green light to the offer to end a lawsuit against the online flyers, which automatically hoovered up …
United Nations to grill US over alleged NSA bugging of its HQ – report
The United Nations has said that it plans to contact the US over a report that the NSA had bugged its New York headquarters.
Germany's Der Spiegel, citing secret documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, reported on Sunday that the US had "cracked the encryption" of the internal video conferencing system at the UN in …
