Amazon Web Services may be hellbent on uploading world+dog into its public cloud, but Microsoft has other ideas – and a new Azure update makes it easier for admins to consume Redmond's cloud as an add-on service for on-premises installations.

In the never-ending quest to shield impressionable minds from some of the internet's less family-friendly content, Google has unveiled "supervised users" for Chrome on Windows, OS X, Linux, and Chrome OS.

The new iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display weren't the only bits of Apple kit that were revealed at Tuesday's product rollout in San Francisco; there were also upgraded versions of the 13-inch and 15-inch Retina display MacBook Pros to talk about.

The first direct-access-over-Ethernet Kinetic hard drive is a modified 4TB Seagate Terascale.

Canalys Channels ForumHP CEO Meg Whitman has told the Canalys Channels Forum in Bangkok that the company will enter the 3D printer market in the middle of 2014.

Canalys Channels ForumApple risks repeating the mistakes of the 1990s as it sticks to a high price strategy on its iPads and other products, even as the surging tablet market heads for excess inventory in the fourth quarter.

EMC has accused flashy startup Pure Storage and “numerous former EMC employees” of conducting a “campaign” “to compete unfairly with EMC by, among other things, misappropriating EMC’s Confidential Information and Property, unlawfully soliciting EMC’s customers and raiding EMC of its valuable employees, all in an effort to increase Pure Storage’s presence in the marketplace at the expense of EMC.”

A Swedish court has reduced the fine of a teenage boy to just £2,400 after he uploaded a pornographic video of his ex-girlfriend without her permission.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally shown the green light to the first ever generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), and they’re all international strings written in Arabic, Russian and Chinese.

On August 1st, 2012, high-frequency equities trader Knight Capital lost $US462 million after automated trading systems went haywire, a mess that has now been traced to a mistake by a single sysadmin.

Canalys Channels ForumHP's CEO Meg Whitman says the company is not just turning around its various messes, but is doing so well it has gleaned sufficient insights into the divine and can build a computer to God's specifications.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fairest mid-range array of them all? Why, the 3PAR 7400, says enterprise data storage analyst DCIG.

Researchers have claimed that modern technology has made workers almost five times more tired productive than they were in the '70s.

VideoThe Metropolitan Police have put out a video showing just how easy it is to steal a mobile telephone, as long as one has a scooter and a mate to go pillion.

Stealthy – well, sort-of stealthy – storage upstart Maxta aims to converge compute and storage in a virtual server world by harnessing commodity servers' direct-attached storage to create a pool of storage available to virtual machines running in the host servers.

ReviewOffice equipment invariably goes through years of abuse and is often consigned to landfill only after a strategic coffee spill brings about a lethal end to a troublesome or antiquated device. In more enlightened environs, the idea of a kit refresh from time to time isn’t an alien concept, but there is an inclination for simply more of the same.

Under-fire education tech specialist RM has finally admitted what the rest of the industry already knew: that it can't make money building PCs and will instead concentrate on developing software and services.

Facebook has removed one video of a beheading that was posted on the free-content ad-network – and told its users to be more "responsible" about the material they dump on the site.

Sysadmin blogFor a sysadmin, fighting malware feels like an uphill battle that you are never going to win.

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Canalys Channels ForumCash and acquisition-stuffed Cisco insisted today that it had no plans to offer its own public cloud. Or at least, not one that competes with industry giant Amazon.

The UK army of cyber reservists is open to the idea of hiring convicted hackers into its ranks.

Nokia WorldSometimes you have to leave prejudices aside. To me, phondleslabs (or phablets) – phones with large screens – are inconvenient and slightly ludicrous. If you saw somebody talking into a plate, you’d think they had gone mad.

Security developers have released a stripped-down privacy-friendly browser, Aviator, based on the open source browser core Chromium as used by Google Chrome.

Gorilla Glass maker Corning has announced that it's going to buy out Samsung Display's stake in their LCD joint venture, in a deal that gives Samsung Electronics a 7.4 per cent stake in Corning.

Former Baywatch thesp Pamela Anderson has written to the Spanish Senate asking it to reject a bill which would declare bullfighting part of the nation's "Cultural Heritage".

Revenue-boosting projects to help customers flee the Windows XP OS en mass helped Computacenter record near double-digit sales growth in calendar Q3, according to a trading update by Blighty's largest reseller.

The founder of The Pirate Bay has written a letter to the Swedish government urging it not to deport him to Denmark.

Cisco is tackling another email storm today, just weeks after its servers were deluged with millions of "reply-all" messages being sent by the networking giant's staff - with many requesting they be removed from the list.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has cashed in on Netflix's good fortunes, bagging profits of between $700m and $800m by selling three million shares earlier this month.

Seven electronics companies have been caught in the sights of a massive patent infringement lawsuit from Optical Devices, which is currently attempting to get a ban on the import of devices using the allegedly infringing tech from the ITC. These include everything from storage devices and servers to TVs, console gaming systems and BluRay players from some of the biggest names in the business.

Readers' cornerAnd so to El Reg forums, where Julian Bradfield, an academic, writes:

PicsAstronomers have glimpsed the most distant galaxy known to Man: it's an early cluster system more than 13 billion light-years away and was formed barely 700 million years after the Big Bang.

ReviewMicrosoft’s first take on Surface RT was a disaster, culminating in a $900m stock write-down in July.

Ten million people have apparently downloaded the new BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) app for Android or iOS in just 24 hours. But with activations being metered out in half-million lumps it will be a while before they can all start chatting.

Jittery Juniper Networks is axing hundreds of workers amid concerns the US government shutdown could hamper its stateside federal business.

A senior White House official has been fired after he was unmasked as the man behind a widely followed Twitter account from which he dispensed insults and sarcastic remarks about public figures and government policies.

NASA has successfully tested a broadband communications system built into its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) probe, firing data to and from the Moon at rates of up to 622Mbps.

Canalys Channels ForumMicrosoft's president for the Asia Pacific, César Cernuda, has tried to explain why some of the company's products cost rather more in Australia than in other parts of the world.

Eucalyptus was created to clone the Amazon cloud for on-premises deployments, but recent advances by Bezos & Co in private software, aggressive development by Microsoft of Azure, and momentum in OpenStack raise a pitchfork of challenges for the open-source infrastructure management system.

TeardownWe knew that Microsoft's Surface Pro 2 tablets wouldn't stray too far from the original Surface Pro design - but according to the tool-and-part masters at iFixit, the new tablets are virtually identical to the old ones – meaning they're just as difficult to repair.

After years of inaction on patent law, a new bill has been introduced to the House of Representatives that could curb the scourge of patent trolls that is costing American businesses billions every year.

IT security biz Tripwire warns that a critical security vulnerability in some Netgear storage devices is going unnoticed by users, partly because the vendor has downplayed its importance.

A US district court has ruled that self-confessed "hackers" have all the skills needed to swiftly destroy evidence, allowing anyone suing them to seize their equipment without warning.

South Korean electronics giant LG has joined the likes of Alcatel, Geeksphone, and ZTE by offering a handset based on the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox OS platform.