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LOHAN twangs BRASTRAP to unfetter mighty orbs
Pics+Vid Capping a hectic month for the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team - in which we revealed the magnificent Vulture 2 spaceplane, rescued our heroic playmonaut from the side of a Spanish mountain and finally got a rocket motor igniter to go bang at 20,000m - we're delighted to report that the Big Red Abort Switch To …
Samsung proposes 'remedies' to EU antitrust chief in fine dodge hope
Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone vendor, has submitted a package of concessions to the competition wing of the European Commission in a move to try to offset a massive fine.
The EU's antitrust commissioner Joaquin Almunia said during a speech in New York today that the South Korean electronics giant had "sent us a set of …
EMC snaps up ex Symantec veep to rule new HPC skunkworks
EMC has recruited an ex-Symantec exec to lord it over its Emerging Technology Products division. His product brief includes "hybrid Cloud Gateways and High Performance Computing storage" which is fine ... except EMC hasn't got any such products.
Chirantan “CJ” Desai will be the president of the newly-formed Emerging Technology …
Apple tackles iPhone lock-up cockup with iOS 7.0.2
Apple has plugged a gaping security hole in iOS 7 which allowed interlopers to snoop through fanbois' private content.
When iOS 7 was released last week, Apple watchers quickly found they could bypass the lock screen bypass method by sliding up the new Control Center and performing a nifty button combination requiring perfect …
BlackBerry Black Friday: $1bn loss as warehouses bulge with hated Z10s
BlackBerry endured a catastrophic second quarter as today it announced a $965m loss in those three months. Its revenue from the period was half of the first-quarter takings and half of last year's second-quarter revenue.
BlackBerry cancelled its conference with analysts that traditionally accompanies these quarterly results - …
BOOGIE BALLMER: Steve Dirty Dances at tearful Microsoft leaving do
A tearful Steve Ballmer bid official farewell to thousands of Microsofties at a stadium bash with a booming sound track.
Shy and (literally) retiring CEO Ballmer hosted the software giant's annual staff meeting at Seattle’s KeyArena yesterday, attended by 13,000 employees. This is the last mass gathering for Ballmer and his …
Have PIXmania. In fact, have £59m with it too, Dixons tell German VCs
Dixons Retail has forked out £59m to convince German venture capitalist mutares AG to take loss-making web shop PIXmania off its hands.
And so ends the retail firm's costly flirtation with the online gadget souk seven years after it coughed €266m for a 77 per cent stake in the biz and a little over a year after it bought the …
Congrats on MP3ing your music... but WHY bother? Time for my ripping yarn
Something for the Weekend, Sir? Good news. A year on from the ICT debacle at my son’s school, he has ditched the joint and found another place where his skills are more appreciated.
Faithful readers may remember - as for all you unfaithful readers, I understand the political parlance is to call you "sluts" - that a couple of days before he was due to embark …
Google FAILS in attempt to nix Gmail data-mining lawsuit
Google faces a torrid court battle in the US after a judge ruled that a class action lawsuit brought against the company that challenges its practice of scanning emails for ad-targeting can proceed.
Mountain View had protested against plaintiffs in the case, who claimed that Google had breached several stateside laws including …
Reg readers! You've got 100 MILLION QUID - what would you BLOW it on?
Telecoms regulator Ofcom is drawing up its plans for 2014/15, and is looking for suggestions about how it might direct its considerable resources during the period.
Last year, those resources ran up a bill a shade over a hundred million pounds, some of which comes from radio spectrum licensing and fines but most of it came from …
That's a money spinner: iPod wheel patent bout bags bod £2m from Apple
Fruity tech titan Apple (2012 profit: £25bn) has been forced to pay out £2m to a Japanese inventor - after a Tokyo court found its iPod click wheel design infringed his patents.
Cupertino’s learned friends have been fighting this legal battle in the Land of the Rising Sun for the past six years. It started when Norihiko Saito …
OpenSUSE uncorks a fine Ruby-red Bottle: Beta 13.1 didn't give me a hangover
Review The beta preview of openSUSE 13.1, released this month, shows this distro is waddling in the footsteps of its Linux brethren.
Codenamed, rather curiously, Bottle, openSUSE 13.1 has had work done under the hood that lays the groundwork for forthcoming features. The lower levels have had major updates in this version, such as the …
WET SPOT found on MARS: NASA rover says 'high percentage'
NASA scientists have reached a milestone in their quest to find life on the Red Planet after discovering significant traces of water in the Martian soil.
The Mars Curiosity Rover discovered water when investigating the very first scoop of soil it took from the surface of Mars.
The extraterrestial explorer analysed the dusty …
Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me
Comment So we're all back from our hols, noses down to the grindstone for the run into Crimble: time for some idle speculation on the future of our energy production systems. Or if we're to be purist about it, our energy production/transformation systems.
We will, thankfully, leave entirely aside the complete dog's dinner that our …
TalkTalk's commercial director WalkWalks away from telco
TalkTalk's outspoken commercial director David Goldie has resigned from the company's board after 14 years helping the business grow.
He oversaw the telco's shift from Opal to Carphone Warehouse to TalkTalk.
"As one of the main architects of TalkTalk, David has made an enormous contribution to TalkTalk and in fact to the …
OpenDaylight: meet networking's bright newcomer
Few of us have come across the word OpenDaylight in polite conversation lately, however many years we have spent using and managing networks.
It is, however, one of a number of related words that we are all going to be using a great deal over the next 12 to 18 months. Let us look at what it is and, more importantly, the wider …
Broadcom fries up '5G' Wi-Fi chips to chuck in your connected car
Broadcom's latest chippery supports 802.11ac and Bluetooth LE too – which the company reckons is good enough to warrant calling it "5G" and snatching a chunk of the automotive market.
The claim comes because of the Wi-Fi support, which has a theoretical top speed of 1Gb/sec, and despite the fact that this number was once the …
Online bookies must keep punters' cash in separate account
Licensing conditions proposed by the Gambling Commission may not adequately protect customers against the risk of losing their money or credits if gambling operators become insolvent, an expert has warned.
The Commission is consulting on draft plans that, if introduced, would oblige remote gambling licensees, except ancillary …
SIM card hacker: Bug is either 'a backdoor, gross negligence, or both'
QuotW This was the week that Karsten Nohl, the security researcher who found a way to hack into SIM cards with a single text, told El Reg that he was upset that the mobile industry seemed so unconcerned about the vulnerabilities he had reported.
He told El Reg:
We thought our story was one of white-hat hacking preventing criminal …
'200 million' fanbois using iOS 7 just a week after release - study
Half of all American iOS users have now updated to the latest operating system, analysts have claimed, while Apple itself reckons 200 million devices worldwide are now running iOS 7.
Just a week after the release of iOS 7, eggheads from Chitika Insights found that 52 per cent of web traffic generated by Apple mobile devices came …
Boris Johnson's ex-right-hand man's right hand lands johnson in web slip
London Mayor Boris Johnson's former deputy has been left red-faced after a series of selfies revealing his chap found their way onto Facebook.
Richard Barnes, 65, has denied that he intentionally uploaded the frank pictures, which feature full frontal shots of his meat'n'two veg. The images were deleted soon after.
The photos ( …
GIANT FLIP-FLOP IN SPACE switches between X-ray and radio emissions
Video An unusual pairing of objects called a “low mass X-ray binary” has been spotted by astronomers in which a pulsar shifts between emitting fast radio pulses and X-rays.
Dubbed the “Transformer Pulsar” in some quarters and the “missing link” pulsar in others, the 18,000-light-year-distant binary in the M28 cluster works like this: …
PC sales shrank less than expected during back-to-school 2013
Want a shock? Sales of desktop and notebook PCs during the all-important back-to-school period were actually better than expected, according to the latest figures from research firm the NPD Group.
That doesn't mean the PC market has suddenly leapt off its sickbed and started tap dancing, mind you. The numbers are still shrinking …
Amazon adds free Oracle analytics tool to cloud
Just two days after Microsoft made Oracle's technology available on its Windows Azure cloud, Amazon has added a sophisticated diagnostic tech to its own Oracle database service.
Amazon announced the addition of the Statspack performance diagnostic tool for all Oracle editions and engine versions offered by its Relational …
30 years on: The day a computer glitch nearly caused World War III
Computer problems are an annoyance for us all, but thirty years ago a fault in the Soviet Union's ballistic missile early warning system very nearly caused nuclear war, if not for the actions of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces.
1983 was a very dangerous time for humanity. In the US, President …
Microsoft defends Azure with two-factor auth security
Updated Microsoft's multi-factor authentication service has gone into general availability, doubling prices and giving enterprises a service-level agreement.
Microsoft announced the general availability of the product in a blog post on Thursday. The MFA technology allows admins to add an additional layer of security to accounts using …
Microsoft to merge Windows, Windows Phone stores in 2014
Microsoft is planning to combine the Windows Store and the Windows Phone Store into a single app store for all of its platforms as early as the spring of 2014, sources claim.
The Verge reports that Microsoft's new operating systems head, Terry Myerson, revealed the plan during an all-hands meeting in Redmond on Thursday.
The …
US House Republicans: 'End net neutrality or no debt ceiling deal' – report
Republicans in the US House of Representatives are reportedly including blockage of net neutrality among their laundry list of demands tied to the passage of an increase the government's debt ceiling.
This news comes courtesy of National Review Online, which reports that it received the outline of the GOP bill, which "originated …
Chinese building orbital lab by 2023 to make 'space medicine'
China has told the 64th International Astronautical Congress in Beijing that it plans to have a space station in orbit within the next decade, saying it will be used to study space medicine and study the effects on humans of spending long periods away from Earth's gravity.
The Nyu Wa space station, named after the Chinese …
Google reveals its Hummingbird: Fly, my little algorithm - FLY!
As more people have come online, the way people search has changed - so Google has overhauled its algorithms to better deal with the vague, rambling questions we bombard it with.
The new "Hummingbird" update was announced by Google at a shock-and-awe PR event held in the Menlo Park garage where the ad-slinger spent its early …
BlackBerry manufacturing partner Jabil looking to cut ties
When a relationship starts going badly, sometimes it's best to just move on. Case in point, Jabil Circuit, longtime manufacturing partner of battered Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry, which looks to be ready to pull the plug.
"We are faced with a strong possibility of disengaging with BlackBerry," Jabil CEO Mark Mondello …
Apple iOS 7 makes some users literally SICK. As in puking, not upset
Forging new frontiers in fanboi fragility, some members of the iDevice community have taken to Apple's discussion forum to complain that iOS 7 makes them want to puke.
No, their nausea isn't being caused by mere aesthetic revulsion. Rather, the source is iOS 7's many zoom animations along with the slight parallax effect that iOS …
Travel much? DON'T buy a Samsung Galaxy Note 3
Samsung has crippled its new Galaxy Note 3 by adding region-locking, making buyers of unlocked units attempting to use it in geographies outside of the area in which it was purchased subject to exorbitant roaming fees.
"We wish to make our customers aware of certain functionality limitation regarding SIM cards on the Note 3. The …
15% of Americans still holding off from this newfangled interweb thing
The latest data from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has found that there is still a sizable percentage of Americans who really don't get this internet thing, with 15 per cent never going online and another 9 per cent only doing so at work.
US internet use data from Pew 47 million people still without …
eBay unveils data center that runs on fuel cells
Online bid bazaar eBay has plugged a much-hyped fuel cell technology into its new data center, as the company tries to increase the efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of its colossal bit barns.
The announcement of the new facility was made by eBay at a press event in Utah on Thursday. The company revealed that along …
Bill Gates: Yes, Ctrl-Alt-Del salute was a MISTAKE
Vid Microsoft supremo Bill Gates has claimed that the ctrl-alt-del keystroke - once a way of admitting defeat in the face of crashing software - was a mistake all along.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of PCs will remember hammering those three keys to forcefully reboot the computer as code locked up. Some people even called the …
PayPal pays pals $800m for Braintree
PayPal, the dough-handling arm of online tat bazaar eBay, is buying rival payments portal Braintree for $800m in cash.
Braintree, founded in the US in 2007, specialises in mobile transactions and has nearly 200 employees working out of offices in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.
Braintree's CEO William Ready said today that …
Boffins have constructed a new LIGHT SABRE. Their skills are complete
Top boffins in the US say they have managed to make light behave in the same way as solid matter – and they've saved us the trouble by suggesting that this is pretty much the same as building a working Jedi light sabre.
"It's not an inapt analogy to compare this to light sabers," boasts Harvard physics prof Mikhail Lukin, one of …
Apple: Now that you've updated to iOS 7... YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK
Apple has banned any fanbois running iOS 7 from reverting back to a previous version of the iDevice operating system.
Fanbois who downloaded the latest release or developer beta of iOS 7 had the option of retreating back to the warm (and functional) cocoon offered by iOS 6. But with the release of the latest update to its mobile …
Is this the silicon chip KILLER? Boffins boot up carbon-nanotube CPU
Look out, silicon: boffins in the US have created a simple working microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes, possibly paving the way for faster and less power-hungry computer chips.
Nicknamed Cedric by its creators at Stanford University, it is the first of its kind: it can fetch software written in a subset of MIPS machine code …
Ericsson adds Dot to the office mobe coverage map
Ericsson has launched a palm-sized mobile phone base station called Dot, which camps on the office LAN to provide cellular coverage throughout your building and is managed by a radio stack in the basement.
The Dot is styled to disappear into the office décor. Weighing only 300g, it's more than an antenna but less than a …
Fresh shift of 'nauts arrives at Space Station, planning torch jaunt
Astronauts and cosmonauts from Russia and the US had a fuss-free journey to the International Space Station, where they have just arrived for a five-and-a-half-month stint working and living on the hurtling lab.
Oleg Kotov, Mike Hopkins and Sergey Ryazanskiy took just under six hours from lift-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in …
