Farewell, Reg: This hack is hanging up her Apple jacket
Leach flees for land of pinstripe suits and upstarts
It's a fond KTHNXBAI to Register readers as your humble hack heads for the door after 18 months as a Vulture, leaving behind some stale doughnuts, a promotional frisbee and taking with me some memories - great ones.
Writing stories for the bumper 7.3 million Reg readers has been a privilege, and I've enjoyed reading your …
UK injects £88m into Euro bid to build Hubble-thrashing 'scope
Building work starts on world's biggest space-gazer
The UK will bung £88m towards the European Southern Observatory's £1bn project to build the world's largest telescope. The cash injection is on top of Blighty's annual £18m contribution to the ESO.
Construction of the ground-based European Extremely Large Telescope is underway and is expected to take ten years to complete. We're …
Welsh bureaucrats busted for getting political on Twitter, Facebook
Should have done it in Welsh, nobody would have known
Three Welsh civil servants were slapped down last year for giving out their opinions on social media, a Freedom of Information request from the BBC has revealed.
One public servant got a slapdown for posting a comment about Government policy on Twitter, a second tweeting bureaucrat criticised a government consultation and a …
Apple: OK, we tracked your every move... but let's call it a caching bug, m'kay?
It's a T&C question, not privacy invasion - Apple tells court
Apple's lawyers have asked a Californian judge to dismiss a case against the company on the basis that no harm was caused by Apple storing detailed maps of users' movements.
Apple has already redefined the case as a question of information storage rather than a privacy invasion.
The iPhone users who sued Apple can't prove that …
Queen of Tech City says she will decide what Tech City does soon now
It's not a place, it's a movement. No, not a bowel one
CEO of Tech City Joanna Shields says that the "woolly" objectives of London's (in)famous Tech City predated her, but she isn't giving much more clarity on what the government initiative should achieve.
Challenged on the vagueness of the organisation's remit at an event on Friday, the former Facebook VP distanced herself from …
Sergey Brin emasculated after HORROR smartphone disaster
I was just fondling my slab, minding my own business and...
Seething mass of testosterone and Google co-founder Sergey Brin has stated that smartphones are emasculating.
Speaking at the Technology, Education and Design TED conference series on the subject of Google Glasses and the future of Google, Brin let drop that he finds the fastest growing technology of the past decade to be " …
Now even MORE 'interns' make iPhones - Chinese labour watchdog
Apple: We're improving... Besides, look at Samsung
The number of students forced to "intern" on iPhone assembly lines has increased, says a new report from a China-based labour rights watchdog.
The report 'Apple Fails in its Responsibility to Monitor Suppliers', published on 26 February by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) also says that Apple …
One titsup server kills Brit-hosted Donhost websites for THREE DAYS
Where was the back up?
A fault in just one server at Brit web hosting biz Donhost took out thousands of websites and emails for more than three days.
The service slowly found its feet again on Wednesday afternoon after the company officially confirmed it fell over on Monday at 7am. Affected customers posting in a help forum put the start of the …
Apple assimilates France, Sweden and pals into iCloud
Europeans - lower your shields and surrender ...
Finnish, Belgian and Cypriot fanbois are among a group of European and Nordic Apple users who woke up today to find themselves able to share films with iCloud. The cloudy service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your Apple kit, allows users to access their previously purchased movies and music. If they …
First, servers were DEEP-FRIED... now, boffins bring you WET ones
Super-cooling liquid shaves 97% off data centre cooling costs
We've seen quite a few innovative engineers who have tried to bring down data centre cooling costs, including this mad crowd who dunked theirs in a deep fryer... Now boffins at Leeds University and British start-up Icetope have invented a super cooling liquid that could create a new generation of "wet servers". They say it could …
iPhones, 'droids go to WAR: US soldiers invade TOP-SECRET cloud
Chiefs stop short of letting BYOD tech onto classified networks
Spooks and soldiers will get iPhones and Android kit after the top brass promised to open up its top-secret communication networks to handsets beyond BlackBerrys.
A new US Department of Defense implementation plan - which covers the Army, Navy, Air Force, CIA and tech research group DARPA - will allow employees of all levels to …
EU web chief: Europe's slow on 4G, but 5G GLORY WILL BE OURS
MWC 2013 Steelie Neelie pledges €50m to design ultra-fast networks
A top Euro politician has urged Europeans to get cracking on rolling out 5G networks after falling behind Asia and America in adopting 4G.
Neelie Kroes, who is vice-president of the European Commission and heads up the continent's digital strategy, has earmarked €50m (£43m) for funding research into faster-than-4G mobile …
Apple patents situational awareness for oblivious fanbois
Get ready for a sensitive iPhone that responds to your surroundings
Maintaining an awareness of sensory cues in the vicinity has just been patented by Apple – for portable electronic devices, anyway.
The technology outlined in Apple's new Patent 8,385,039, which the US Patent and Trademark Office granted on Tuesday, would make iPhones, iPads, and a potential iWatch capable of sensing certain …
Apple to cough up $100m after kids rinse parents' credit cards on apps
Compensation offered for virtual fruit spending sprees
Parents whose credit cards took a hammering after their kids went on iTunes spending sprees are in line for some compensation from Apple - in a lawsuit settlement that could cost the fruity biz $100m.
Parents were horrified to receive huge bills from their iTunes accounts for items such as virtual vegetables for iPad games. A …
North Korean citizens told: Socialist haircuts are a thing... go get some
Government proclaims: All your hairs R belong to us
The North Korean government has issued haircut guidance for its citizens and chosen 28 hairstyles it deems "appropriate" for members of the single-party state. According to the WantChina Times, photos of the 28 haircuts recommended by the totalitarian regime (pictured below) have been issued to salons around the country. The …
Barnes & Noble to sling their Nook - report
Insider sheds light on B&N moves ahead of Q3 results on Thursday
As Barnes & Noble prepare investors for disappointing quarterly results on Thursday, the company will move away from making hardware and put more emphasis on shifting digital books, a New York Times source says.
The company - America's biggest bookseller and the maker of the Nook tablet - has announced that yearly revenue for …
Unwearable tech: Five ways IT garb's gone HORRIBLY WRONG
Yeah, um, good luck with those glasses, Google
The Chocolate Factory has the technology for its Google Glass locked down in a patent but it has to collaborate with fashion retailer Warby Parker to make its artificial eye tech look cool, says the New York Times. The augmented reality spectacles are supposed to change the world, but currently they look too dorky to catch on …
iPhone-maker Foxconn not gonna save Sharp
Sharp starts making plans to save itself without help
iPhone-maker Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn, will not come to the rescue of floundering Japanese manufacturers Sharp, says Reuters.
Sharp will have to look to itself to save its wilting electronics manufacturing business, says Reuters' unnamed source.
Sharp had asked the Taiwanese bits-maker Hon Hai for a …
Council IT bod in the dock for flogging scrap work PC parts
Saving disks from scrapyard landed him on the scrapheap
A council IT worker who flogged his employers' scrap kit on eBay for £10,000 has been ordered to do 150 hours of unpaid work by a court.
Ian Holwell, 52, grabbed PCs and laptops due to be disposed by Derbyshire County Council and stripped out their parts to sell online. But he was rumbled and sacked after a whistleblower alerted …
Twitter opens ad API... awaits cash TSUNAMI from ad-slingers
#Widens revenue stream
Ads will be creeping into Twitter clients as the social network has opened up an advertising API allowing advertisers to create more complex, targeted advertising using Promoted Tweets and Promoted Account campaigns on the social network.
Along with the API, Twitter has named five partners as the first to sign up: Adobe, …
New blow for Microsoft Surface: Touch Chromebooks 'on sale in 2013'
New blow for Google stablemate Android, too
Google has developed a new touchscreen Chromebook that will be out this year, claim industry sources. It's the latest story to surface about a touch-driven netbook powered by Google's Chrome operating system, which is based on open-source Linux.
A video leaked earlier this month appeared to be an advert for a touchscreen Google …
Quit the 2D internet, flee your cave, and GET LAID, barks rock star
Jack White's charming message for Record Store Day
Rock star Jack White, formerly of The White Stripes and The Dead Weather, has told fans to switch off the "two-dimensional" internet, get out of their "cave" and start experiencing something in "the real world".
Recently appointed as an ambassador for the world's official Record Store Day, the musician has been getting into the …
France Telecom takes huge profit hit after swallowing €1.8bn writedown
CFO says it might put 20% of EE on the market
Telecoms is not the fat market it once was as the low spend in the UK 4G auction showed today, and Euro telco giant France Telecom has also felt the pain. The former French monopoly telco had to write down €1.84bn on units in Poland, Egypt and Romania, which was partly to blame for the hefty 79 per cent plunge in profits year-on …
Rid yourself of Adobe: New Firefox 19.0 gets JAVASCRIPT PDF viewer
Built-in reader escapes into wild from beta incubator
Mozilla's Firefox web browser now includes a built-in PDF viewer - allowing users to bin plugins from Adobe and other developers.
The move to run third-party PDF file readers out of town comes after security holes were discovered in closed-source add-ons from FoxIt and Adobe. The new built-in document viewer is open source, just …
Clarkson: 'I WILL find and KILL the spammers who hacked me'
Telly bloke promises to 'visit' Twitter hijackers
Motormouth Top Gear star Jeremy Clarkson has joked he will kill the spammers who took his Twitter account on a joyride to tout dodgy diet pills.
Several tweets appeared on his feed promoting miracle weight-loss medicine. But the stunt may backfire on the Twitter-jackers: rather than delete the spam and reset his password, …
Microsoft: You want Office for Mac, fanboi? You'll pay Windows prices
Hikes up prices by 17% to push users towards Office 365
Microsoft has increased the price of Office for Mac by up to 17 per cent, another move in the software giant's territory battle with Apple in the personal computing market.
The new pricing structure, which was not officially announced by Redmond, asks Mac users to hand over around the same amount as users of Office 2013 for …
Baby-boulder bowling burglar breaks Boulder Apple Store's $100k glass door
Nicked kit surprisingly worth LESS than knackered entrance
An intruder stole Apple kit worth over $60,000 from the Apple Store in Boulder, Colorado, but caused more financial damage by breaking the door, reports ABC News Denver.
The custom-made glass door of the Apple Store on 29th Street in Boulder cost $100K.
The Apple burglar - described by cops as a hooded man armed with three …
Iceland thinks long and hard over extreme smut web ban law
IP-address blocking and filters proposed to cull violent vids
Iceland is mulling a new law banning access to violent internet porn following research into the effect of extreme grumble-flicks on kids.
The proposed rules, which were put forward by interior minister Ögmundur Jónasson, are being scrutinised by the country's parliament.
It is access to violent pornography - rather than common …
Twitter row goes to court, beak says man must cough £17,500
And say he's sorry. On Twitter of course
A Twitter user has been ordered to delete tweets, tweet an apology and pay £7,500 to another Twitter user in a judgment handed down by the High Court of Justice, Leeds Queens Bench Division last week.
Judge Gosnell ordered Toby Pedley to delete all tweets relating to racing boss Carl Harris and his partner, and to pay a hefty …
Apple design bloke Ive finally honoured properly - with Blue Peter badge
Yeah not you, Scott Forstall
The Apple products he designs have high-cost premium components, but Jony Ive fondly remembers making a paintbrush holder out of an old detergent bottle after watching a Blue Peter episode during his childhood in Essex.
Sir Jony told Blue Peter presenter Barney Harwood in a show to be aired this Saturday that he "remembered …
'Bah, this Apple Shop is full of APPLES'
Enraged fanbois lead fruit emporium to rebrand
A cider shop in Norfolk has had to change its name after receiving up to 24 phone calls a week from fanbois with computer problems.
Since an Apple Store opened in Norwich, locals have been calling mistakenly phoning the Apple Shop in Wroxham Barns, with their iPhone and Apple-related woes.
Apple Shop owner Geoff Fisher told the …
Pop's Chubby Checker condemns use of Palm to check pocket-chubby
Twist star 'stiffed' by app, sues HP
Yesteryear popstar Chubby Checker is suing HP for selling todger tool The Chubby Checker from its webOS app store.
Checker, who topped the charts in 1960 with The Twist, is taking the tech titan and its subsidiary Palm to task over the software, which claimed to predict a man's penis size from his shoe size. It was available as …
The official iPhone actually runs Android - in Brazil
Apple left hurting by painful Brazilian procedure
Apple has lost the rights to the trademark "iPhone" in Brazil to a local manufacturer which makes an Android phone called the iPhone NEO. Yesterday the Brazilian Trademark and Patents Office rejected Apple's claims to the trademark "iPhone" in the category of telecoms and the category of electronic devices.
"Registration …
Apple: iOS 6.1 network overload caused by our Exchange SYNC OF DOOM
Fanbois should switch it off and on again
The source of the battery-draining bug that sucked the life out of iPhones, and strained mobile phone and corporate networks, has been identified by Apple as a cock-up between its iOS calendar app and Microsoft Exchange servers.
The flaw affects people synchronising their Microsoft Exchange calendars with their iOS 6.1 devices. …
Android? Like Marvin the robot? Samsung eclipses Google OS - Gartner
Sammy Galaxy 'a synonym' for Android mobes
Samsung's soaraway successful Galaxy smartphones are starting to overshadow their Google-built Android operating system. That's in the mind of the public at least, who can't tell the difference between an Android mobe and a Samsung Galaxy, according to Gartner.
Gartner Analyst Anshul Gupta explained in the report Mobile Phones, …
Perky smartphone figures can't stop droop of worldwide mobe sales
Total sales shrink 1.7% in 2012
Worldwide mobile phone sales fell 1.7 per cent in 2012, a shrinkage of 30 million units from 2011. Increasing smartphone sales were not enough to compensate for the fall in feature phone sales, according to a Gartner report. Total global sales to end users for 2012 were down 30 million units to 1.75 billion from 1.78 billion in …
Capita bosses defend £30m migrant-poking IT deal with Border Agency
Sending texts from a db sounds like 'money for old rope' to MPs
Outsourcing giant Capita's CEO has defended his company's £30m migrant-chasing contract with the UK Border Agency - and insisted it is not, as one MP delicately put it, "money for old rope".
Paul Pindar, the London-headquartered plc's top boss, and two of his high-ranking lieutenants were told to justify the new four-year IT …
#Forwhy: American Express lets you pay by tweet
Taking your cash is bad enough... now vendor gets free ads too?
Credit card company American Express has launched a service that lets customers buy things using Twitter.
The new Card Sync service from American Express syncs customers' credit cards to their Twitter accounts and allows Twits to burn the plastic from the comfort of of their Twitter app.
"You can turn a hashtag into more than …
Twitter translated to LOLCATZ: Strangely this had not been done
THNX ... I canz make conversashun with el cat
If you've got nothing better to do than faff around on Twitter, you're likely to be the sort who will enjoy having your Twitter account translated into Lolcatz, the language. Not your actual tweets, nor the tweets of anyone else, but just the various commands and buttons that furnish the page around the tweets.
The languages of …
UK financial watchdog bends Autonomy over for fresh probe
Financial Reporting Council sniffs allegations surrounding Brit software biz
HP-owned software house Autonomy faces more probing, this time by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC).
The British corporate governance watchdog announced today it will investigate allegations that the Brit biz overinflated its value by $5bn just before Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2011.
HP's buy-up of Autonomy for $10.7bn is …
iOS 6.1 KNACKERED our mobile phone networks, claim Vodafone, Three
Updated iPhone 4S fans ruin 3G, calls, texts for EVERYONE
Vodafone has urged iPhone 4S owners to not upgrade to iOS 6.1, the latest available, because it believes the software jams 3G and phone connections.
Vodafone claimed that the bug is Apple's fault and that it affects Voda's rivals as well as its own UK network, although it only named Three Austria* as another impacted telco. The …
Michelin critics to football blogger: Salaud! Unhand that URL
It's the best Michel Platini website we have ever seen
Michelin restaurant guides have issued a cease-and-desist notice to a blogger who has nabbed the URL michelinguides.com and filled it with photoshopped pictures of European football boss and 1984 European Championship top goalscorer Michel Platini.
The blogger bought the domain, retitled it "Michel In Guides" and filled it with …
Ebook price-fixing: Macmillan settles with DoJ, Apple fights on
Cheaper electronic reads from today...
EBooks published by Macmillan will become cheaper as of today, said the US Department of Justice (DOJ), announcing that the publisher has agreed to settle a price-fixing lawsuit.
MacMillan and the DOJ came to a settlement today, nine months after the department launched the lawsuit for price-fixing against Macmillan, four other …
'Depression-era grandma' Apple responds to bolshy investor
Board to 'evaluate' the proposal
Apple has taken the unusual step of publicly responding to a complaint from a shareholder who compared the company to his cash-hoarding grandmother.
David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, said that Apple Inc had a "depression era" attitude to cash that reminded him of his grandmother who refused to leave voicemail …
Good news! UK IT jobs up. Bad news? They're with a bunch of bankers
Contractors doing best of all
Cockle-warming stats from the UK jobs market show that job openings for techies went up at the end of 2012 and that opportunities in the well-paying financial IT sector rose for the first time in six months.
Permanent IT jobs advertised in the UK went up 6 per cent in the last three months of 2012 compared to the year before, …
200 million office workers gagging for a... Microsoft Surface?
Windows tablet is most desired by office workers - report
Microsoft Surface tablets are top of office workers' wish lists, research from Forrester has found, in a surprising discovery from its yearly survey of global information workers.
That means 200 million people want their employers to get them a Surface this year, states Forrester in the report 2013 Mobile Workforce Adoption …
Space station 'naut supplies Reg with overhead snap of Vulture Central
'So much of history came from this city'
We've all seen photos of London before, but this one was snapped from 250 miles above the Earth's surface by astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is hurtling round and round the planet aboard the International Space Station at the moment.
This is what London looks like from the station. Showing the metropolis at night the orbital shot …
Watch your back, Amazon: Google coughs $125m for 'shopping engine' firm
Buy-up of Channel Intelligence suggests new focus on retail
Google have bought inventory tracking software company Channel Intelligence for a hefty $125m.
Its owner, ICG Group, announced the cash buy-up from Google today. The parent company said that Channel Intelligence's "Boost services", which help its clients to track transactions online and drive their referred sales, include: …
Ex-ICO: Draft EU privacy rules will turn every citizen 'into a liar'
Current commish: Data protection reforms must target crooks, not biz
Britain's Information Commissioner wants the force of the European Data Protection Directive to fall on rogues, not on businesses which already face mountains of paperwork. That's the message that Chris Graham will be taking to Europe when he goes there to hash out a compromise on the new European Data Protection Directive …
Twitter spends $70m to juice your tweets, tell biz what you want - report
Said to have bought out social TV analytics upstart
Twitter has reportedly spent big on acquiring social media analytics startup BlueFin Labs.
Twitter is shelling out $70m for the firm, reports All Things D. If it's true - we've asked Twitter, but it has yet to reply - it would overshadow the site's biggest buy to date: Tweetdeck, for $40m.
BlueFin Labs' speciality is "social TV …
