The Register

Don't worry, though – it still plans to play well with others Microsoft has inked a deal with Intel to buy Havok, makers of a top physics engine for 3D gaming, for an undisclosed sum.…

Version 2.0 for the fun guy too busy to eat Soylent, which produces liquid food for techies who hate chewing, has stopped shipping its gloop after some of it was contaminated with mold.…

TransUnion hunts for crooks First, Experian was hacked by criminals, and its sensitive records on 15 million people who applied for T-Mobile US phone contracts were stolen.…

$30m Google Lunar X-Prize now in play Moon Express, one of the teams competing for the $30m Google Lunar X-Prize, has booked five rockets that will be ready for a 2017 attempt to get to the Moon.…

Minerals mined overseas supposed to be converted to virtual cash The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says it has broken up an investment scam that defrauded citizens out of $32m by promising to mine minerals out of the ground – and pay out profits in cryptocurrency.…

Reports suggest fruity firms has acquired biz which previously sneered at Siri as a 'toy' Apple is reported to have snapped up UK artificial intelligence company VocalIQ, which had previously sneered at Cupertino's digital assistant Siri as being a mere "toy."…

Carrier CEO Claure claims cuts coming US mobile carrier Sprint plans to tighten its belt to the tune of up to $2.5bn in cost cuts over the next six months, a new report claims.…

Things got real weird with Atlanta HVAC company No one likes getting negative reviews online, and it's no secret that many business owners try to fudge the system by posting positive reviews of themselves under pseudonyms.…

Biz only found out when the FBI came calling If you've bought shares using retail broker Scottrade in the last few years, you may want to get in touch with the biz because its servers have been plundered by hackers unknown.…

Who guards the cyber-guards? Analysis The IT security breach that spilt the personal details of an estimated 15 million T-Mobile US phone contract applicants has thrown a new spotlight on the risks of breaches at third-party companies.…

Rumored purchase would double ABP's licence to print money AdBlock has been flogged off to a mystery buyer – and our sources have pointed to Adblock Plus as the shy purchaser. Such a move that would double the scope of Adblock Plus's empire.…

There is a slight decrease in capacity however Fujitsu has moved on from its first generation Ceph-based ETERNUS CD10000, a hyperscale system, to the S2 version, and reduced its raw capacity from 56PB to 42PB in the process, while increasing the storage node options.…

No schema required! Just step right up, good people Amazon is rolling out open-source Elasticsearch for consumers of its mega cloud.…

Fellowship program looks to get technologists teaching lawmakers A former US congressional staffer has created a campaign to put people with technology backgrounds in a position to work with US lawmakers.…

Conveniently, we happen to have this shared storage thing lying about. How about that? IBM has a packaged IBM Data Engine for Analytics – Power Systems Edition, a cluster that includes the integrated servers, parallel file system storage, network switches, and software needed to run MapReduce-based workloads.…

Ideal for when you want a cup of tea and a bit of light reading As if PCM (phase change memory) wasn’t esoteric enough, we now have optical PCM, thanks to sterling boffinry efforts at Oxford and other universities.…

Come hither, oh ephemeral cloudy thing, and bring your reduced latencies with you Filer speed turbocharger Avere has a faster virtual filer in the cloud and front-ends Google Nearline and DRA cloud storage.…

Squeaaaaak ... SNAP. This won't hurt a bit Prosecutors in Paris announced Friday that they were launching an investigation into the Volkswagen scandal, looking into what they termed as suspicions of "aggravated deception".…

First dibs on calling integrated camera the iOfSauron The long-rumoured iRing might not be a myth after all. Apple has just applied for a patent on "Devices and Methods for a Ring Computing Device".…

And SSD market has become a bit of a 'bloodbath' Declining PC sales took their toll on Micron's DRAM revenues, sending year-on-year growth into reverse for its fiscal 2015.…

Pop a cap on this WTF snap Caption Competition The witticisms keep flooding in for our biblical-looking chap, who provided "divine" inspiration for a great collection of captions from readers.…

Fat fingers, trainwrecks and everything else in between Reg roundtable Walt Disney said “a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you”. Well, for all his talents, Walt wasn’t attempting to secure an aging IT system while evolving a vision to “digitalise” his company and secure its future in the long-term.…

Great Firewall of Thailand? ไม่ได้อย่างแน่นอน, say locals Thai government websites dropped offline this week in what was either a politically motivated distributed denial-of-service attack or a case of badly designed websites falling over in response to an unusual increase in visitor numbers.…

Fast, cool, simple. Repeat Before Steve Jobs, there was Seymour Cray – father of the supercomputer and regarded as something close to a God in the circles he moved in.…

And at that point things will get mighty interesting EMC has most of October to answer activist investor Elliott Management's demands for a shareholder value increase through a sell-off of VMware.…

Neat idea could become reality with Reg readers' support A proposal for Lego to build an Analytical Engine staffed by Babbage and Lovelace characters has received just under a third of the support it needs to be considered for production.…

Let's just pretend that auction disaster never happened, OK? Having found that it can charge more than it used to for mobile spectrum, Ofcom is planning the same trick for 28GHz Broadband Fixed Wireless Access.…

It's all about the bass. And the treble. And the volume Review If you want a top-notch Android tablet and keyboard package, buy the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet. It's very good. But at £499 it's also very expensive. If money is tight, Asus can now offer you a superficially not dissimilar package for two hundred quid. That £300 saving suggests some major compromises, so is the Asus a bargain alternative or just a cheap knock-off?…

*Cough* Google *cough* In an interview which covered the company's data protection practices, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the company believes "from a values point of view, not from a commercial interest point of view," that privacy is a fundamental human right.…

Customers yell: 'My internet is broken. Arrrrggggh' Three UK is battling what appears to be a major outage affecting its mobile network.…

Never come between a digital disruptor and his Unicorn Poop ¡BONG! FRONTLINE DISPATCH Tsunami survivors say the first sign of impending disaster is that the tide goes out a very long way. One minute you're on the beach with water lapping at your feet. The next, there's nothing as far as you can see.…

Well not quite. Spaceplane fans read on... In September last year, the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team wrapped a successful Kickstarter campaign to take the launch of our Vulture 2 rocket-powered spaceplane to the US of A.…

Harvard boffins unmask 100% of 'encrypted' S Korean records Researchers from Harvard University have published a paper claiming a 100 per cent success rate in de-anonymising patients from their supposedly anonymised healthcare data in South Korea.…

So long, and thanks for all the emails Listicle Clickbait Special BlackBerry wants you to know that the BlackBerry 10 (BB10) isn't dead. But beyond receiving essential maintenance, it simply isn't a priority for BlackBerry, which boasts that it now has over 50 per cent of its staff in software and sales jobs.…

Mountain View scrambles after domain quirk gives intern Google.com access Google is investigating how an Amazon intern "bought" – and apparently had control of – its Google.com domain.…

Mike claims merger was sabotaged from Day One Analysis Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch has stepped up his rhetoric against HP in his latest lawsuit against the firm, having characterized HP as a snake pit of backbiting and internecine squabbling where execs "generally fought amongst themselves like cats in a sack."…

Bank trojan twin pivots to smash supply chain biz The formidable Dyreza and Dridex banking malware are back in renewed and rejigged macro-based campaigns that includes a shift by the former to target industrial supply chain organisations and by the latter to smash the UK.…

Lancashire cops issue contaminated whizz warning after four are hospitalised Lancashire cops have issued a warning to Blackburn speed-lovers after a "contaminated" batch of amphetamines prompted four cases of extreme aggression and adverse physical reaction.…

Want security? No no no don't go co-lo. Amazon has patched a vulnerability that could have let users to steal the RSA keys of other co-located customers.…

GPU-assisted clouds due for 2016 launch Microsoft is lobbing a bunch of GPUs into its Azure cloud to try and attract HPC-type workloads.…

Signs of the end times for patent trolls A US judge has tossed out a patent he considers “obvious”, and with it more than 150 lawsuits launched by a company called eDekka.…

And we'll spend $10 million on ads to prove it The Australian government has taken a break from trying to resuscitate the limping Trans-Pacific Partnership to spruik the Australia-China Free Trade Agreement.…

Two days, two WebSphere sites fall Australian high-falutin retailer David Jones has become the second in two days to admit to a data breach of its retail systems.…

The truth at long last? For decades, scientists have been arguing over what killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago – an asteroid or geological activity. Now it turns out both sides may be right.…

Stallman sycophant offers password reminders and handy debug tips. Threat boffin Mario Ballano says VXers have broken into a host of routers creating a botnet dedicated solely to securing and hardening the devices.…

15 GB file hits dump sites The attackers that compromised Patreon have dumped the data on various bin sites.…

'Cable cut' says Telstra Tweep Problems with an unnamed submarine cable are hitting in unexpected places: Apple iPhone users on the Telstra network are reporting catastrophically-slow performance downloading updates.…

Bonding beats Ώ-ophobia IBM has fetched out the hand-on-a-stick to give its back a pat over what it calls a “breakthrough” in carbon nanotube electronics: making a nano-scale contact whose resistance doesn't rise as its size is squeezed.…