The Register

Incoming: boffins scramble to catch debris' Sri Lanka re-entry A lost and forgotten piece of what was probably a rocket booster is set for a November 13 impact over the Indian Ocean, and it's got space boffins scrambling to make sure they capture the event.…

When it wins Citrix wins big, but Hyper-V and vSphere are winning too Citrix has taken the unusual step of releasing some market share data that doesn't show it in a completely flattering light.…

Catch-22: It's the best catch there is The Wikimedia Foundation's attempt to stop the National Security Agency (NSA) from spying on its users has foundered because it's impossible to offer court-acceptable evidence of the NSA's activities.…

Don't try this if your co-workers have access to weapons This is an idea of superlative malice: a developer has posted a GitHub project that replaces ASCII characters in C# code with near-homoglyphs from the Unicode character set.…

ISP calls in BAE Systems to probe security breach TalkTalk continued on its quest to be painted merely as a victim of crime today, while the budget ISP's website remained offline following a huge attack on its business earlier this week.…

Plus: Vacuum giants blow hot air at one another QuoTW This week, it was all about a CIA hack, a stock handout at Twitter and a tale of laid-off worker outrage.…

Life in Australia's tropical north offers Brit some new experiences The eXpat Files Just over two years ago, your correspondent finished covering the 2013 World Solar Challenge, the solar car race between the Australian cities of Darwin and Adelaide.…

What really went down on 25 October 1415? We have the answer Today is St Crispin's Day, and the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.…

Although, actually you know, we already do Worstall @ the Weekend There's an old jokule, vaguely traced back to Mark Twain, that the people of the Isles of Scilly used to eke out a living by taking in each others' washing. Yes, another economic thigh slapper: but the really weird thing is that for all of us seven billion humans in aggregate, we do really do that.…

Ahh yes, the hybrids have it TV Review Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!…

Telco: 'Crims can't nick cash without full credit card details, y'know' TalkTalk confirmed on Saturday afternoon that incomplete bank details were lifted by crims, even though its core systems were not targeted in the attack on its business earlier this week.…

Swift political, legal and tech rethink needed to comply Companies have been put on notice by Brussel's top privacy bod, who has warned them that the transfer of EU citizens' data to the US must be limited – and this must happen soon.…

Harding jockeys for understanding and forgiveness TalkTalk boss Dido Harding went from one Blighty news broadcaster to another on Friday, admitting that the budget telco had screwed up but declining to commit to compensating customers affected by the major criminal attack on its system.…

Mild sauce just too 'wuss' for asbestos-gutted gourmet It's agreeable to get a bit of feedback on our post-pub wobbly dining delights, and we're always keen to hear just how readers get on with our recipes.…

Smart-tech moves out of the shadows and finds its feet with BeON Review There's no getting away from it: talking about a smart light bulb is liable to subject you to immediate mockery.…

You chumps Something for the Weekend, Sir? I have an urge to dress up in unconventional clothing, don a wig and parade myself around east London.…

Now we play the waiting game We here at El Reg were very excited on Friday morning to note the launch of a new €150m ($165m) journalism fund called the Digital News Initiative, funded by everyone's favorite news service, Google.…

Another bottle of star-donnay, please waiter Pic Alcohol is pretty essential to life here on Earth, but for the first time, scientists have found the blessed fluid venting in huge amounts from a comet flying through our Solar System.…

TL;DR: Stop using 1024-bit keys ... like we said in 2005 Now that the cat is firmly out the bag, and it's clear that the NSA has cracked the encryption behind, potentially, a huge amount of internet traffic, the question inevitably turns to: what are internet engineers going to do about it?…

Kuiper Belt explorer will have next rendezvous in 2019 The Pluto-gawping New Horizons space probe is back in action and heading for a new target far out on the edges of the Solar System.…

FCC vows to reveal latest names and numbers each week US phone watchdog the FCC will publish a weekly updated list of annoying robocalling companies.…

Said while poking Europe in the ribs about honesty FTC Commissioner Julie Brill views the landmark decision to kill the US-EU safe harbor agreement as an opportunity to improve privacy laws on both sides of the Atlantic.…

Boys and girls in blue turn red in Twitter hijack shame Police in Essex, UK, have had a rough day of it after mischievous hackers broke into their Twitter account – and broadcast bogus security tips.…

Network appliance gets fixes for security holes Cisco has issued a firmware update to address four security flaws in its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) that open up the gear to denial-of-service attacks.…

Enjoy quiet while it lasts, penguins, Mir, Unity 8 on way Review Ubuntu 15.10, Wily Werewolf, continues Canonical’s recent Ubuntu tradition of delivering, well, nothing earth shattering.…

Some might say this is a terrible coincidence... Embattled telco TalkTalk, under fire for losing four million customers' data to an apparent hack, was hiring an information security officer just seven days ago.…

Hefty price tag for Dave Scott’s lunar timepiece A timepiece worn by Apollo 15 commander Dave R. Scott on the surface of the Moon has sold at auction for an astronomical $1,625,000.…

‘We’ve invested significantly in security’. Was it enough? Dido Harding, the chief executive of TalkTalk, has confessed her company should have done more to protect its customers' personal information, and has confirmed a seemingly related blackmail attempt.…

Chipzilla’s long game starting to pay off Comment According to Packet Pushers networking whiz Greg Ferro, Intel created NVMe because they needed it for 3D XPoint memory, which thought totally revised my thinking of NVMe as simply a way to create a standard PCIe flash card driver, and Intel's role in XPoint development.…

Four-rotor encryption rarity goes under the hammer A fully-functioning four-rotor M4 Enigma WW2 cipher machine has sold at auction for $365,000.…

Harvard brains claim investors don't care about big hacks Shares in TalkTalk dropped by 10.7 per cent this morning after the company released a statement admitting that a "cyber attack" may have exposed the data of its four million customers.…

It was a 'technical' issue Cloudy service provider Cobweb Solutions has 'fessed up to failing to renew its SSL certificate, leaving a number of its customers potentially exposed.…

Other suppliers have dodged a bullet there, says analyst HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has signed up global management biz Bain to migrate the department off its hefty £10.7bn Capgemini Aspire contract.…

Well which is it? Chaos reigns at TalkTalk as the telco appears to be claiming that a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack led to customer data being compromised – despite that being technically infeasible.…

Spoofed CLIs lead to rapidly shrinking balances Nine people have been arrested in the UK over an alleged £60m fraud targeting business banking customers.…

Processed meat to join carcinogenic black list, shock report claims In really, really bad news for bacon lovers, a shock report say that the World Health Organisation (WHO) will next week add processed meat to its "carcinogenic to humans" list.…

Now can you be more like Facebook? Having recently put down his axe after hacking away 336 staff earlier this month, chief executive Jack Dorsey has now donned his Santa suit to hand out $200m (£130m) worth of stock to remaining employees.…

Yoga woman exercised readers' minds Caption Competition Wow, what bumper crop of captions this week, it seems that El Reg readers are pretty flexible when it comes to posting thoughts on gymnastic computer users.…

The original disruptor in the act of imagining his legacy ¡Bong! I have been dismayed but not surprised to hear complaints that the movie by my friend Danny Boyle misrepresents the life of Steve Jobs, and contains numerous factual inaccuracies. Following our highly successful partnership on the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, Danny and I worked closely developing the movie. Indeed, at one stage BongVentures was a major investor in the project.…

Yes, you can look. No, you can't buy Bond on Film Aston and Martin. Two words as synonymous with Britishness as “cuppa” and “tea” or “Her” and “Maj.”…

Young hackers taking on continentals in inaugural whitehat tourney Ten young hackers have departed to Switzerland this week to represent the UK at the first European Cyber Security Challenge. They have been split into juniors (14-20) and seniors (20-30) teams, and are competing against opponents from Germany, Spain, Romania, Austria and Switzerland.…

The artist formerly known as McAfee wants you in a new and more modern cloud Intel Security is decommissioning bits of its software-as-a-service armoury.…

Thanks team, there's a lot going on here with FlashRay and semi-detached objects Recent NetApp Data Fabric literature presages a return of FlashRay and an apparently semi-detached integration of its StorageGRID product.…

Mal-mail mavens say Big Blue's got some security scraps to fight in near future IBM's US$2 billion acquisition SoftLayer is the world's largest source of spam, according to email vanguards Cloudmark and Spamhaus.…

One thing's for sure: more scale for VMs is on the way Brandon Salmon from the office of the CTO at VM-centric storage outfit Tintri dropped into Sydney this week, and dangled two future features before Vulture South.…

Just when VW thought it was back under control, a nasty 0-day pulls up Hackers can quietly disable airbags in cars sold by Volkswagen using a zero day vulnerability in software popular with car mechanics.…

This is why the mobile device management market is so very hot right now If you've gone down the bring your own device (BYOD) route and your users are always complaining about battery life, Facebook has just explained why: its iOS app sucks … ridiculous amounts of power.…

No coupon? Just make yourself ADMIN. Popular content management system (CMS) Joomla has pushed three patches, including a critical fix for SQL injection vulnerabilities that allow attackers to become admins on most customer websites.…

Intel InfiniBand follow-on pops up in product for first time DataDirect Networks has got itself an Omni-Connect architecture to hook up its storage to Omni-Path clusters, as well as having InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, and Ethernet connectivity.…