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Failure forces humans to 'manually' feed ravenous pooches and pussies Outage Humans have been forced to temporarily interact with their dogs or cats – perhaps both – after PetNet’s internet-controlled smart feeder system suffered a blackout.…

Alliance is to splurge cash on plethora of new hardware and software Anti-Soviet defence pact NATO's IT division wants to award €3bn (£2.5bn) worth of “cyber, air and missile defence” contracts, spanning everything from buying new keyboards to improving space satellites.…

One gift from God (a) man did not want to see A church organist is due before the beak next month after he allegedly thrust his pink pipe through a glory hole in excelsis and “waited” for someone to make sweet music.…

You don't even need to know web design to be a baddie Cybercrime miscreants seem to be flocking to a one-stop online web business shop.…

Nicola Sturgeon’s home county stalked by angry Struthionforme Residents of Ayrshire are living in fear of a marauding family of ostriches that have mysteriously appeared in the usually quiet Scots region.…

And sent Constable Ned Kelly on an 11-week training course to use the things Police in Essex, UK, are using polygraph tests on convicted criminals – in its own words, “to help manage the risk posed by convicted sex offenders.”…

Total Inability To Support Usual Per... one server? UK-based web host Heart Internet has restored service to customers whose email has been titsup since Monday. Users were unable to use the service due to a single server failure.…

Don't worry, outsourcing giant is still doing a roaring trade Outsourcing giant Capita has hinted that the UK's decision to leave the EU will have an impact on its bottom line, while recording a sales increase of 5 per cent to £2.4bn for its first half-year results.…

New non-linear view poses threat to cosmic order Some crazy and terrible things have happened in 2016, but none can be more shocking than Microsoft PowerPoint adding a quite useful new feature for presenters. The ubiquitous slide presentation software has finally made a break with linearity.…

Processor design nets £100m in last quarter for Cambridge-based biz Cambridge-based processor design business ARM has posted substantial revenue and profit increases for the months in the runup to the Brexit vote.…

Chimera cybercrook competitor hands victims the keys Private keys of the Chimera ransomware have been leaked by a rival cybercriminal.…

Last quarterly results before the great Cavium slurp commences In its last quarter as an independent company, QLogic grew revenues 2.6 per cent and profits by 700 per cent in a year. Its future lies inside Cavium and it has to deal with a declining Fibre Channel business.…

You don’t always have to do everything yourself. Really There are some bits of computing that you just don’t want to trust other people with. They’re just too sensitive. But at the same time, there are some things that people can do as well or better than you, for a lower cost.…

Yahoo, DNC emails and, er, business cards

The difference between doing it and saying you're doing it After roughly 20 years, agile software development has wheedled its way into most every developer's mind as The Way Good Software Is Done. Like flossing, while we can all agree agile is a good idea, we're not quite up to snuff on keeping all our teeth in our heads, so to speak.…

Layered chippery leading to potential SSD capacity doubling Western Digital, via its acquired firm SanDisk, along with Toshiba, has started pilot production of 64-layer 3D NAND.…

Sure you want to rely on 'digital' to plug slashed jobs? UK MPs have warned that HMRC (HM Revenues and Customs) may struggle to overhaul its expensive £10bn IT systems with Capgemini, and that further cuts could ultimately waste more taxpayers' cash.…

Explo-Xen ... it rhymes with explosion Code dive A super-bug in the Xen hypervisor may allow privileged code running in guests to escape to the underlying host.…

19 century optics gets the 21 century treatment NASA Goddard boffins and engineers have taken inspiration from the Fresnel lens to craft a “photon sieve” they hope will help them observe the processes that heat the sun's corona.…

Remote 'complete account compromise' possible, Google hacker finds A dangerous zero-day vulnerability has been found in popular cloud password vault LastPass, which The Register has been told can completely compromise user accounts.…

Four unpatched bugs remain after nine found Nine security holes, four of them still unpatched, have been found in the Osram smart light bulb system, potentially giving attackers access to a home or corporate network.…

VXer mass posts to Reddit in sorrowful bid to make a living The eager-but-pwned net menace behind the JigSaw ransomware has been found targeting Reddit users with multiple malware in a bid to snare victims.…

Pay your dues, noob, or talk to Dunning and Kruger Cisco wants incident responders to be more self-conscious.…

Nearly US$15 BEEELION set down for 2.0 litre 'dieselgate' Volkswagen's “dieselgate” part-settlement has received preliminary approval from a US judge.…

DIY VR cam: only US$30k Facebook needs VR content for its Oculus Rift VR headset, so it's made good on its March promise to publish its Surround360 camera design and software.…

You're Putin me in a tough spot, here Poll Security intelligence firm ThreatConnect thinks it has found a smoking gun that links the leaked US Democratic Party emails to Russian hackers.…

Switches moving, routers and security decline The tough networking market continues to make growth difficult for the big names: Juniper Networks has reported flat year-on-year Q2 2016 revenue and has warned of a flat outlook.…

505-day trip won't engage much commercial interest An airplane powered by nothing more than the Sun's rays has completed its 42,000-km (26,098-mile) journey around the world after landing in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.…

What is it with the Japanese, radiation and made-up creatures? Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Co is upset that Pokemon Go players on the hunt for monsters are being lured into the Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone.…

Hashed passwords exposed, too Custom 3D model printing biz Shapeways has been hacked, who gained access to customers' shipping and email addresses, usernames and hashed passwords.…

Cook: Hey, we thought it was going to be even worse Apple is trying to put the best face on another bad quarter by saying it exceeded its own meager expectations.…

ISPs fudging performance claims in ads? Say it isn't so! The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is setting its sights on broadband speed claims, again.…

But privacy watchdogs warn they'll be gunning for it come 2017 Europe's data protection authorities will hold fire for one year on the new Privacy Shield agreement, withholding any potential legal challenges until mid-2017.…

LastPass owner brags about $1bn-a-year sales LogMeIn has effectively taken over Citrix's unwanted GoTo business.…

US peeps now get more control over tracking and remote wipes Some of the largest smartphone vendors and mobile carriers in the US say they have hit a milestone in the use of privacy-friendly anti-theft tools.…

Yahoo! is! going! to! love! it! here! Fresh from its $4.8bn acquisition of Yahoo!, Verizon says its sales dropped five per cent year-on-year in its latest quarter, the three months to the end of June.…

She's built like an E5 but handles like an E7 Just because Intel doesn’t make a lot of noise about a product does not mean that it is not important for the company. Rather, it is a gauge of relative importance, and with such a broad and deep portfolio of chips, not everything can be cause for rolling out the red carpet.…

Cisco cybersecurity report points to dangers ahead Organizations are unprepared for future strains of more sophisticated ransomware, a report by Cisco warns.…

While baking in extra security BlackBerry today took the wraps off its first phone of the year, the cryptically named DTEK50. As rumoured, BlackBerry has based its second Android phone on a reference design from TCL, which owns Alcatel, and "security hardened" it with BlackBerry's Android.…

KeySniffer – does what it says on the tin Millions of low-cost wireless keyboards are susceptible to a vulnerability that reveals private data to hackers in clear text.…

A million here, a couple of million there Commvault has sustained its recovery for a third quarter although it has recorded a loss after a much smaller income tax benefit was applied than a year ago.…

Nottingham's cloning success not usual, though Scientists working on a long-term study of the world’s first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep, have reported that cloned sheep age normally in a paper published today in Nature Communications.…

Plans for 2 million FTTP connections in next four years 'not enough' Sharon White, the boss of UK comms watchdog Ofcom, hopes plans to legally separate Openreach from BT will force it to increase its investment of two million fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) connections over the next four years.…

Does hyperconverger pass the say-it-5-times-fast test? Gridstore has gone ahead and bought DCHQ.…

Smithsonian on lookout for boozy history buff Had enough of tech? Sporting a big or any kind of unlikely looking beard or interestingly dyed hair? El Reg has found the perfect new job where you’ll get paid handsomely to espouse the wonders of trendy beer.…

Global compression and dedupe for faster transfer times File sync and sharer Panzura has announced its new SMARTSync tech, which it says will reduce the amount of info sent between sites in a sync-and-share network and speed sharing.…

Forget AWS (sort of): We've still got skin in the game EMC landed a punch on behalf of tech's old guard after it won a $75m deal to furnish Salesforce with shiny new on-premises storage hardware, sources have claimed.…

'Don't worry we never change your passwords.' Contact us! Startup tech news blogger TechCrunch appears to have suffered a security breach by online graffiti vandals.…

Disney subsidiary pleads guilty to criminal charges A subsidiary company of Disney has admitted criminal breaches of health and safety laws after a door of the Millennium Falcon almost crushed Harrison Ford to death in a Star Wars film.…

Are you a login-recycling gaming fan? Hackers have gained access to O2 customer data and put it up for sale on the dark web.…