The Register

Do all bodies in a vacuum really fall at the same speed? Earlier this week, France's snappily-named "Micro-Satellite à traînée Compensée pour l'Observation du Principe d'Equivalence", aka Microscope, rode a Soyuz lifter to orbit on a mission to " test the equivalence principle, which postulates the equality between gravitational mass and inertial mass".…

Zen and the art of computer security The scourge of Android malware is helping to bolster the bottom line of security software firm AVG but the firm still ended up recording a slight decrease in profits.…

Where to start, what to look for On 26 May 2016 at 15:00 BST / 07:00 PDT we’ve got a studio packed full of experts and tasked with exploring the question: if hybrid is the answer, how well are organisations achieving it and what challenges are preventing them from progressing further?…

Exec departure flight gains yet another passenger At some point you have to say this is starting to look like a rout. VMware EVP Bill Fathers is taking a hike, no longer content to be general manager of the cloud services business unit.…

Cupertino losing streaks continues Apple Watch started 2016 on a losing streak, ceding market share* to a range of cheaper rivals.…

Twitter-defacing twits are still teaming up, may hit marginally bigger targets Remember when pro-Daesh/ISIL/ISIS hacking groups banded together to form a unified force? They're still, er, hooking up, according to a recent study.…

Competition, not copyright this time Photo giant Getty Images has had enough – it has filed an antitrust complaint in Europe against Google. And the reasoning behind the action is more subtle than readers might think. Getty Images' VP Jonathan Lockwood explained why.…

Z400 PC SSD gets capacity raise and faster cache Acronym alert: SanDisk has upgraded its Z400 PC SSD by changing it from an MLC drive to a TLC one with an SLC cache, doubling its capacity as well making it faster.…

Putin witnesses inaugural Soyuz launch Russian president Vladimir Putin was on hand earlier today to witness the first launch from Russia's new Vostochny cosmodrome, as a Soyuz lifter carried three satellites* heavenwards.…

Swede also speeks his branes on Saint Richard of Stallman Interview Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder of Neo Technology, says the world is at “a huge inflection point for graph databases” as his company, which supports the open source Neo4j graph database management system, releases v3.0 of the software.…

But you still have to bring your other-OS kit into the fold When you run a corporate IT infrastructure, the chances are you run Active Directory underpinning a predominantly Windows-based array of servers, desktops and laptops. And that's fine: it probably serves 90 per cent of the kit you have and is a secure, easy-to-use way of authenticating user logins.…

Oh, and Hull is the worst city in the UK for take-up The government may claim that 90 per cent of the UK have access to superfast broadband, but in reality an analysis of customers' speeds in 20 major cities, including London, found most folk aren't even getting 24Mbps speeds.…

Webscum copy skilled VXers to duck antivirus, sandboxes. Cisco's Warren Mercer and Matthew Molyett are warning that software downloaded from sites run by French firm Tut4PC likely included trojan backdoors. The Borg's security arm, Talos, thinks some 12 million machines have been infected.…

End of a long era as mainframe-sourced OSes will no longer require companion hardware Unisys has announced that its ClearPath MCP “operating environment” can now be run without having to also buy Unisys hardware. The company also plans to do the same for its OS 2200 product.…

Browser bods emit ten patches in total, some for critical or high severity holes In version 46 of its popular Firefox web browser, Mozilla has patched 10 vulnerabilities, some rated either critical or high severity, that permitted remote code execution.…

Stanford University engineers hope to create next-gen power sources The secrets to a longer battery life may lie in the shape of nanoparticles. That's according to a Stanford study published in Nature Materials today.…

When galaxies collide Astro-boffins commissioning part of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) array have incidentally spotted a monster 3.8-billion-solar-masses black hole created in a three-way galactic collision.…

Standard suggests death for old TLS … by the generous deadline of July 2018 The 2016 upgrade to the PCI's DSS standard, 3.2, has landed.…

Release candidates for version 4.7 should emerge any day now The Xen Project will bring non-disruptive patching to its hypervisor, version 4.7 of which is set to debut onJune 3rd, 2016.…

Phone-fondlers fondle fave phones for longer, spoiling upgrade cycle Prospects for handset-makers just got worse, with the smartphone market recording its worst quarterly growth ever.…

DS8888 high-end flash array for mainframers and the like IBM launched three new all-flash array products, including an all-flash DS8888 monolithic array.…

Pen tests find holes galore in common messaging apps BSides Canberra Australian security duo Matt Jones and Daniel Hodson have found dangerous vulnerabilities in popular instant messaging platforms currently marked 'secure' by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Scorecard.…

What's the time? It's time to get ill. Unless you fix these beastly flaws Cisco has turned over a bunch of Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) vulnerabilities to the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative.…

Contain yourself: Nano install now possible as System Centre's new look also arrives Microsoft has delivered another preview of Windows Server 2016 and says this effort is “feature-complete”, meaning this is still not final code but there won't be any new surprises the final version of the software.…

Well, this blows Microsoft's relentless Windows 10 nagware interrupts a live TV weather forecast, urging meteorologist Metinka Slater to upgrade.…

House passes Email Privacy Act by unanimous vote, now to see if the Senate follows In a rare display of bipartisanship the US House of Representatives has passed the Email Privacy Act (EPA) in a 419-0 vote.…

Samsung pushes its vision: an open world with it in the middle There are countless problems with making the so-called "internet of things" (IoT) a pragmatic reality: hardware, software and standards to name the big three.…

Don't sit on your ideas, bug chief urges hackers Bugcrowd chief executive officer Casey Ellis says its recent win of $15m in Series B investment is a signal that Australian startups can score big.…

Agility in Canberra: ten months effort produces eight-page document The Australian government has decided it could do with some public input regarding the use of a controversial site-blocking law.…

$5.4bn can buy a lot of laser drones Facebook says skyrocketing advertising bucks are behind a huge jump in revenues and income this year.…

Smart TVs are working well, let's make smart homes and smart lights and smart furniture The success of Amazon's voice-controlled Echo speaker has not gone unnoticed.…

What could possibly go wrong if we adopt fibre-to-the-distribution point? Plenty Internet Australia's new National Broadband Network (NBN) policy advocates using a technology yet to be proven to work at scale.…

Yet another failed merger for Fiorina Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz will announce his running mate at a campaign event on Wednesday afternoon – and the pick to revitalize his flagging campaign is Carly Fiorina.…

Red Dragon mission is go SpaceX, a rocket upstart known for making bold promises, has announced its intention to send one of its Dragon capsules to Mars in two years.…

And you're gonna pay A US federal court has ruled against Amazon in its case with the FTC over youngsters breaking the bank with in-app purchases.…

Insurance companies happy – but why should motor owners bother? Samsung is developing a small black box device that will plug into your car under the dashboard and instantly turn it into a smart, connected car.…

Cops, coroner probe shock death on Infinite Loop campus An Apple employee was found dead in a conference room at the iPhone giant's HQ in Cupertino, California, this morning. A gun was discovered nearby.…

Open Artik platform for making sense of the internet of things launches Samsung has launched a new cloud service, aimed at the internet of things (IoT), that lets companies collect, store and act on data from any device.…

World's changing. Is VMware adaptable enough to cope? Sysadmin Blog It is commonly held that if an article asks a question in the title or lede, you can safely answer no and avoid reading the body of the article itself. While not always true, the aphorism is accurate enough to be considered reliable.…

State funding awarded to break into private firms' proprietary code A computer science professor has landed a €2.4m EU research grant to crack open embedded software on... e-bikes.…

Fashion retailer plans Top Pitch competition for wearable tech High-street retailer Topshop is opening an innovation hub for wearable tech.…

X-IO, facing AFA market mayhem, calls it quits Comment Following news of its restructuring there will inevitably be layoffs at X-IO’s Colorado Springs facility. We hear that the company is working to get staff employment with other companies. The situation is fast-developing and X-IO’s concern is its employees and not the media, so we'll hear more later.…

Better tools shown off in Florida EVOLVE 2016 Xamarin's Evolve conference is under way in Orlando, Florida, where around 1,600 attendees are coming to terms with Microsoft's acquisition of the company, completed less than one month ago.…

Obi Worldphone aims for the budget buyer The startup backed by former Apple CEO John Sculley is most famous today for being elusive - but all that’s about to change. Obi Worldphone told us today its first UK phone will launch here next month, promising style and mid-range specs for a paltry £119.…

Either way, biz wants to cut 1,092 UKK staffers from the wage bill Exclusive Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to initiate a voluntary redundancy (VR) option nearly two months after putting 1,092 UK staff in Enterprise Services (ES) on the chopping block.…

Eats nourishing E60 in Nexsan OEM deal Nexsan, the renamed Imation, has signed an OEM agreement with X-IO Technologies whereby X-IO will add Nexsan’s E60 storage array to its product portfolio as a capacity disk tier.…

'Its a 500 acre forest: there's room for Apple and the badgers' Apple's plan to build a €850m (£658m) data centre in Galway, Ireland is to face fresh scrutiny in an oral hearing next month, following a number of environmental objections – including disturbance to bats and badgers.…

The decision to kill off Windows with Bing heaps misery on OEMs Microsoft last year effectively murdered one part of the mobile PC market that was going gangbusters - Windows with Bing (WwB) - and unsurprisingly this is now reflected in weaker sales across Western Europe.…

More module issue fixes still require()d The Node.js Foundation has released version 6, which now falls just seven per cent short of complete support for the ES6 specifications.…

Fans: take out the adtech middleman, and have a clear conscience? When is ad-blocking ethical? How about when the adtech industry is behaving so unethically it destroys people’s livelihoods?…