The Register

Desktops. Pah! Intel is putting its Xeon processors into laptops for the first time, ushering in what it hopes will be a significant performance boost and marketing opportunity.…

Hit the roadmap, Jack Umpty-squillion surveys come out every week, and they generally disagree with each other. Personally I tend to take notice of the ones that tell me that red wine is good for weight loss and long life.…

So long, and thanks for all the laughs Susan Sheridan, a star of the BBC's radio adaption of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, has passed away aged 68.…

Site will become a time capsule, rather than being flung into the fires of /dev/null/ To the wailing of music geeks and the gnashing of audiophiles' teeth, music curation site This Is My Jam (TIMJ) has announced it will be shutting down in September.…

The Celeron cost-cutter for us simple folk Review You only have to own a mini PC for a short while to understand the attraction. Minimal footprint, easy to handle and with any luck, a useful selection of interfacing options. Go for the latest fifth generation Intel chips and you can have sufficient grunt to tackle even the most arduous of desktops tasks.…

'Outsourcing hasn't worked,' says Price in new drive to digitise Interview Zurich Insurance, Europe’s third-largest insurer with $70bn in revenue and 55,000 staff, hinted last week that it might buy RSA Group. Yet six major acts of M&A have saddled RSA with 15 data centres, managed and run differently and propping up a creaking architecture.…

Well, maybe, but at least it's defo harder to miss emails now Microsoft has updated its Outlook service for iOS to support the Apple Watch, the wristjob the world isn't quite wearing, at the moment at least.…

Scrabble dictionary used to out randomly-generated malware-hosting domain names Cisco has developed a means to accurately identify the fleeting pop-up domains used by some of the world's worst malware.…

Three-stage launcher promises 95 per cent re-usable sat-slingers The University of Queensland has launched a new plan to use scramjets as satellite launch vehicles.…

If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail, again If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail, again Perenially-in-crisis web portal Yahoo! has decided to revive a tactic from its glory days in an attempt to create new glory days.…

Bell Labs and uni propose SEARS protocol to improve on EC2's own storage schemes Boffins from Bell Labs and Stony Brook University have put together a cloud storage system they hope can serve as a reference design for future cloud implementations.…

No. No. No. So much no for this. Just no. Nada, nyet, no An opera about Steve Jobs will be premiering in 2017, titled The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.…

Astro-boffins revisit sunspot count and find big boo-boo that quenches 'modern maximum' A bunch of boffins has completed the first-ever revision of the world's most important sunspot data repository, along the way challenging the theory that climate change is substantially attributable to the prevalence of sunspots.…

Maharashtra offers land for R&D, manufacturing facilities Foxconn and the Indian state of Maharashtra have announced a relationship that will see the contract manufacturing company spend up to US$5 billion on a colossal manufacturing complex.…

Android biometric banks more Fort Nope than Fort Knox. Four FireEye researchers have found a way to steal fingerprints from Android phones packing biometric sensors such as the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the HTC One Max.…

Devs offered grey walls to crush creativity, coffee mule duties and no functional spec Hey, software developers: been out of work for a while?…

Red romaine lettuce grown aboard space station will be wiped with acid before eating Fresh food grown in space will, for the first time, be consumed by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).…

Whether you 'haha', 'LOL' or 'hehe', you're only doing it 15 per cent of the time online Facebook data scientists Udi Weinsberg, Lada Adamic, and Mike Develin say most social media addicts will write 'haha' once a week, that New Yorkers are emoji addicts, and none uses 'lol' anymore.…

Cisco lawsuit will be sorted by Christmas says junior networker High-performance data centre switching upstart (and Cisco litigation target) Arista Networks has reported 47 per cent revenue growth year-on-year for the quarter ended June 30.…

Board calls review as it considers 'interest from a number of parties' Opera Software, maker of the Opera browser, has “has initiated a process to evaluate and consider strategic alternatives for the Company”.…

Bread-heads scratch heads over 'leccy car maker's future Whatever its utility, Tesla's robo-charger video did one thing for the company: it distracted attention from the company's latest financial reports.…

And would you believe that Windows XP market share went UP last week? Windows 10 looks to be doing alright, according to measurements taken by StatCounter.…

Hi! UbiquitiCEO@gmail.com here. Really is me! Please send cash from Hong Kong to here! Ubiquiti Networks has been defrauded of more than US$46 million by scammers who spoofed its communications.…

Malcolm Turnbull rolled again Australia's tech sector could be forgiven for regretting the welcomes it gave Malcolm Turnbull to the communications ministry in 2013. The Attorney-General's Department, in fact, seems to exercise more effective ministerial control over the telecommunications industry than its own minister.…

Classy way to thank team who hacked his car DEF CON 23 It takes guts to own up to your mistakes and Tesla’s CTO showed plenty when he arrived on stage at DEF CON to personally thank the hackers who uncovered six serious vulns in the Model S sedan.…

Mystery particles rarely interact with matter Scientists working on the NOvA experiment have spotted what they say is evidence of oscillating neutrinos for the first time in the lab's particle accelerator.…

Thermite, kinetic shock and power surges tested DEF CON 23 Four years ago at DEF CON a popular presentation examined how best to destroy hard drives in a data centre within 60 seconds of a three-letter agency knocking at the door. Now, that research has been updated with new techniques.…

2.4 million customers at risk after personal info stolen Britain's data watchdog plans to investigate a massive hack attack on Carphone Warehouse's systems, which has put 2.4 million customers at risk of having their personal info ransacked by wrongdoers.…

Boosted to wheel out firmware patch DEF CON 23 Boosted electric skateboard fans will need to get patching after hackers exposed a flaw that can send them into reverse at maximum power.…

Plus: 'Apple Music f**king sucks' QuoTW It was a week of Firefox flaws, unruly Windows and big game news.…

Wow, Mainwaring was right, they are ‘unthinking automatons’ On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our regular reader-contributed weekender in which we recount tales of the weird and wonderful things you've been asked to do at anti-social times in decidedly out-of-the-way places.…

Not if it's just to dodge some taxes, anyway ... Worstall @ the Weekend As the result of a so far successful, but probably not worth it, piece of tax avoidance I can tell you three things. First, something that should be blindingly obvious: middle-aged men can't do long road trips with quite the ease that their younger selves could.…

Pupil shape determines whether animal is hunter or prey Vid Vision boffins have seen the light – they believe that the shape of pupils in animal eyes can often reveal whether the beast is a hunter or the hunter's prey.…

Credit card info of 90,000 users may have been nicked Carphone Warehouse has taken three days to go public about a serious data breach affecting nearly 2.5 million customers – with the confession that up to 90,000 subscribers may have had their credit card info ransacked.…

Making fake babies is child's play, too DEF CON 23 Most of us have had occasional fantasies about killing someone. Now, as governments demand more personal information from citizens online, it has apparently become surprisingly easy to turn that fantasy into a reality, at least on paper – courtesy of some glaring loopholes.…

A Quattro hatch equally suited to school runs and hillclimbs Vulture at the Wheel On the June 6 1936, Audi – or Auto Union, as it was known at the time – first visited the Shelsley Walsh hillclimb course with its 550hp Grand Prix car. Rain spoiled Hans Stuck’s runs on the day, but in practice he had equalled Raymond Mays’ course record of 39.6 seconds up the 1.5km hill in rural Gloucestershire. Just over 50 years later, on July 6 1986, the team returned, with Hannu Mikkola driving the legendary Sport Quattro. He managed to shave a fraction over 10 seconds off Stuck’s time, albeit on a much-improved road surface and in dry conditions.…

App equipped cameras all ready to keep an eye on you and yours Feature The technology to keep our homes safe has been remarkably static over the years. Most alarms still rely on the same tried and trusted techniques to work out if there's someone in your home when there shouldn't be. Typically they rely on motion detectors, door and window sensors, or pressure mats. Oh and you can have fancy light beams if you want a Mission:Impossible look to your flat.…

Don’t trust experts to fix anything Something for the Weekend, Sir? My toilet is working again. I’m sure regular readers are overjoyed to learn this, and I extend a particularly warm welcome from me and my toilet to those reading this Saturday morning’s column while eating breakfast.…

Turns out jalopy security is pretty sloppy DEF CON 23 Last month, pro hacker Samy Kamkar caused a kerfuffle at General Motors when he successfully hacked the car giant's RemoteLink mobile app to unlock and start vehicles, and now he's explained how it's done – and how to get into the garage that houses a target car.…

iPhone line worker, 28, throws himself from building A worker at Apple's iPhone manufacturing plant in Zhengzhou, visited by CEO Tim Cook just a few months ago, has been found dead, reigniting concerns over how the iGiant's Chinese outsourcer Foxconn treats its employees.…

New court filing says they ALL must go – yes, even the tellies Oracle's lawsuit against Google over Java copyrights probably won't be back in a courtroom again until next year, but in the meantime, Oracle has asked the court to let it expand the scope of its complaint to include events that have occurred since it was first filed in 2010.…

Anti-piracy mechanisms block reverse-engineering and security studies DEF CON 23 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has used the DEF CON hacking conference to launch a campaign to stamp out digital-rights management (DRM) technology.…

Merciful engineers teach robots to escape beatings from tyrannical tykes Vid Researchers in Japan have programmed a robot to flee children after groups of tearaways were recorded abusing the 'droid.…

DANE cooks in one-way encryption of contact details Email addresses of domain-name admins should be encrypted one-way – aka hashed – when added to DNS records, an IETF working group has decided.…

Come back, Trump, all is forgiven Former HP CEO and current presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina says Apple and Google should just hand user information over to government investigators.…

And it opens today in New York It's been a persistent joke for a while: that the internet is nothing but cat videos and porn.…

Storage blog says now you see it, now you don't EMC has made a smaller VNXe array, the 1600, which slots in below the VNXe3200 and gives it a lower-priced VNXe offering.…

Just promise to use our products. Come on, please Exclusive Oracle customers could soon be the beneficiaries of an unlimited, all-you-can-eat licence for its core database, with the giant understood to be readying a deal that would grant use of its database in perpetuity at a flat rate.…

Practical application could take years to reach, though Aluminum-doped zinc oxide is the key to building faster, optical chips, according to researchers at Purdue University, Indiana.…