The Register

Bendy chemical cocktails designed to give anything a jolt when it needs one Engineers from Microsoft, Tesla, and Columbia and Massachusetts universities have teamed up to develop what on paper looks like a revolution in consumer battery technology that meets demands for fast charge, long life, and the ability to bend.…

'Technical solutions to service the vehicles' yet to be determined Volkswagen Australia has revealed that 77,000 vehicles in Australia carry the emissions-fudging software that has plunged the company into crisis.…

Software-defined storage for Citrix workloads ready for brave customers Citrix says it's ready to let customers loose on its software-defined storage play.…

WikiLeaks chief fears extradition by defenestration, GCHQ's grip on smartmobes Couch-surfer extraordinaire Julian Assange has granted an interview to Australian breakfast radio program “Kyle and Jackie O” in which he characterises his stint in the Ecuadorian embassy as a “siege” and reveals he has banned smartphones at the Ecuadorian embassy as he assumes they are all surveilled.…

First evidence discovered by ISS 'naut. Read no further and PANIC The European Space Agency set eyes a-bulge on Tuesday when it distributed an email with the subject line: "Aliens observed".…

Ruskies sling malicious packet to trigger denial of service. Positive Technologies researchers Timur Yunusov and Kirill Nesterov have found since-patched remote execution and denial of service vulnerabilities in a popular Huawei 4G USB modem that can allow attackers to hijack connected computers.…

Australian blogger's review rates new release as biggest change ever Australian backup blogger Preston de Guise has been able to take version nine of EMC's NetWorker backup software for a spin.…

Amazon ignites Web Applications Firewall to char security chaff Amazon has launched web application firewall to help customers guard against common web exploits.…

Prey company UXC operates a dozen diverse services outfits CSC is going shopping in Australia, dangling a cheque for AU$428m (US$305m, £200m) to the shareholders of services company UXC.…

Trio of failures: Targeted phish? No. APT malware? No. Russian? No. US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was one of possibly hundreds of thousands to have received allegedly targeted malware sent by Russian hackers.…

Is it a bird? Is it a data plane? No, it's a virtualisation container upstart A new robin has landed in the storage startup tree, whose song promises to clear up the sprawling horrible inefficient mess that is today's Big Data munching and analysing customer IT infrastructure. If that strikes a chord then read on.…

Certification for Desktop Infrastructure binned in favour of Devices and Apps course Microsoft has announced it will retire the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert) certification dedicated to “Desktop Infrastructure”.…

Du kan inte fly, pirater! The Swedish government has decided to appeal a court decision that protected the domain names used by torrent-search site The Pirate Bay from being suspended.…

Watchdog not happy with cam-bots entering restricted airspace, flying without permits The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has slapped a record fine on a photography company accused of conducting more than five dozen unauthorized drone flights.…

But it’s still not selling its own Fresh from an embarrassing glitch in its system that saw an ex-employee seemingly register Google.com, the search giant is now selling domain names with 90 top-level domains to choose from – such as .business, .world and .gripe.…

Back our lads as they tackle a 90km bike ride Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a very nasty disease. It takes most of its victims young and attacks their central nervous system. Severity and symptoms vary, but the disease progressively disables sufferers and eventually kills them.…

Finn named new boss of 'connected devices' Mozilla has appointed ex-Nokia man Ari Jaaksi as its new senior veep of connected devices.…

Now with added barometer and a better battery While Microsoft has been bigging up its Surface tablet/laptop rollout, Lumia phones, and HoloLens suite, there was still room for a few add-ons, notably its Band fitness tracker.…

If you don't mind using someone else's VPN A new tool approved by Apple and added to the iOS App Store blocks ads in Safari – and, if you trust the tool's makers, even in-app ads and banners in Apple's own software.…

Bureau of Stats data reveals 230-TERABYTE jump in downloads The arrival of Netflix in Australia has brought with it the largest-ever spike in downloads recorded in Australia.…

Trio of new Lumia handsets seek to tempt from iOS, Android Windows Phone has had a very rocky history, but Microsoft thinks it may have found a winning strategy to get its handsets into the business market – let them be PCs.…

Devices division set for overhaul to also include batteries and storage Sony is reorganizing its devices division, and spinning off its semiconductor business.…

JUST KIDDING, REDMOND – its first proper tab-top is packed with power and $1500 price tag As expected, Microsoft has updated its Surface Pro fondleslab with a new model powered by Intel's latest silicon. But unexpectedly, it has also produced a laptop version of the platform that is going to make Apple sick.…

Safe harbor ruling means it's 'open season against American businesses' The US government is "deeply disappointed" by the European Court of Justice's decision to effectively kill the long-standing "safe harbor" agreement covering the flow of people's personal data across the Atlantic.…

Shares intelligence widely Security researchers at Cisco have struck a blow against crooks behind the notorious Angler Exploit Kit, blocking or re-routing access around dangerous domains on the interwebs.…

WW3 will be fought by mercenariescontractors The United States' Cyber Command has floated a $460m contract to outsource pretty much all of its duties, as the nation seeks to bulk up its offensive cyberspace capabilities.…

Here comes the support, and sales, for Bezos fans Managed cloud computing company Rackspace will now sell and support Amazon’s mighty AWS, echoing a similar partnership with Microsoft.…

Pockets millions to grow forensics and analytics End-point backer-upper, file-sharer and security monitor Code42 has just raised a huge chunk of cash to grow its business into the big time.…

Redmond shows off geek goggs with 3D shoot-em-up Microsoft has been showing off its latest toys at a New York press conference – and HoloLens is looking likely to be out by the end of next year.…

Data-heavy, medium firms will be hit hardest The European Court of Justice’s decision to rule the EU-US safe harbour agreement invalid is causing panic among some companies dependent on keeping data flows going ... but Google and Facebook are probably prepared for it.…

Pictures and texts worth more than a mobe New laws which value the “emotional harm” of a crime could be brought to bear in mobile theft.…

Brief reign for Eugénie Journée The reign of this year's Miss Brittany, Eugénie Journée, was only marginally longer than that of Prince Louis-Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, after the 23-year-old was stripped of her title as a result of posting rule-busting "nude" photos of herself on Facebook.…

‘I burnt my life to the ground to work against surveillance’ Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has not done a deal with the Russian state security agency to acquire political asylum, the whistleblower revealed in a television version of a BBC interview.…

'Flavour'-switching particle has mass ... but how much? The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 has been awarded to Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo, and Arthur B McDonald of Queen's University in Canada, with a citation "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass".…

UKII senior chief with solid compliance past takes reins Oracle’s mighty software enforcement unit is now under new management in the UK, Israel and Ireland.…

It's like Humpty, without the King's horses Analysis Today's victory by Austrian privacy advocate Max Schrems in the European Court has massive repercussions for how the superpowers make law, and how Silicon Valley conducts business. And it may only get worse for America's data processing giants, very soon. Microsoft is challenging the notion that the world's data is by default also the US's data - an idea with inconvenient repercussions for Microsoft, but perhaps more inconvenient repercussions for Microsoft's rivals.…

If devs convinced by single platform, we're in business Microsoft is announcing new Windows 10 devices at an event in New York today. This is crunch time for the “One Windows” strategy, the idea that presenting developers with something like a single platform across many device types will stimulate a strong ecosystem of applications.…

These nuclear wolves will devour us all! The Chernobyl "Dead Zone": a terrible wasteland swept clean of life by a foolish humanity's meddling in things best left alone. Or is it?…

ZuckerBorg can assimilate us, but not on those terms The ZuckerBorg's continued refusal to assimilate anyone who won't provide their "real" name to the site has provoked an angry letter from 75 human rights, digital rights, LGBTQ and women's rights advocates.…

Commish: Quick, grab some exascale cash +Comment Data storage giant Seagate is launching a SAGE European Exascale HPC project with nine partners to find ways for storage systems to work with exascale compute mills, as part of a multi-billion-dollar EU research and innovation programme.…

Meanwhile, plans are afoot to extend it beyond France A collection of French journos have teamed up to take a new surveillance law to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), claiming it infringes "the rights and freedoms of journalists".…

Uncontrollable g-men crawl to local council on bended knee GCHQ's £330m headquarters in Gloucestershire, which was built in 2003, is already inadequate for the jam-packed Doughnut's workers – leading the agency to apply for planning permission to build more offices on its car park.…

Streamer, you know you are a streamer Review OK, so we all know what Google’s Chromecast is, yes? Someone at the back – why are they always at the back – seems unsure. In a sentence, then, Chromecast is a small Wi-Fi-connected slug that you slip into a spare HDMI port on your TV, and which plays video and audio under the direction of a remote control app.…

Time to get off the jet ski and get the lawyers on the blower In a landmark ruling that will have far-reaching repercussions, Europe’s highest court has ruled that data sharing between the EU and US under the Safe Harbour framework is invalid.…

Join our experts live today and find out Live Regcast 11 BST So, is a BOFH-friendly cloud service really possible? Register now, then join us live at 11.00 BST today to find out.…

New boss talks of factories, pipelines, power sub-stations On Monday, in his first major speech as new CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins was clear about one thing. He pretty much wants everything on Earth to be networked and connected together.…

Man-in-the-middle diddle leads to remote execution fiddle Google Project Zero hacker Tavis Ormandy has found a since-patched vulnerability in Avast antivirus that allows attackers to gain remote code execution privileges.…

Uber-leaker tells BBC's Panorama stuff he's told others before Whistleblower Edward Snowden has given an interview to BBC investigative programme Panorama in which he's added further detail on an array of tools named after the Smurfs* that allow UK intelligence agencies to hack smartphones.…

DLL hell means all your Outlook Web Access user creds can be siphoned Security researchers Yonatan Striem-Amit and Yoav Orot say attackers have cooked a dangerous backdoor capable of hosing organisations using Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA).…

Sold as seen: Missing one escape pod, 2 droids, some blaster damage Princess Leia's CR90 Corvette, also known as the Rebel blockade runner, has been sold at a Los Angeles auction for $450,000.…