New strategy means hardware business is just clinging on, at best It isn’t just Microsoft that’s going on a drastic phone diet. BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen today indicated that the Canadian enterprise vendor would cut its device portfolio from the four devices previously promised for 2015 to “two or one” a year.…

Users shirk managers for manual p@sswords claiming: 'Noone can hack my mind'. Antivirus software has copped another beating from security experts, who axed the tool from their list of top five security-enhancing recommendations.…

MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL to be thrown into the Bluemix IBM has acquired Californian database-as-a-service concern Compose, formerly known as MongoHQ, for an undisclosed sum.…

Nearline service goes live, creates nightmare for tape vendors Google has flicked the switch to take its “Nearline” archival cloud storage service live, and tossed in an offer of 100 petabytes of free storage to set the snowball rolling.…

Commodore successor won over gamers, graphic artists alike On July 23, 1985, Commodore kicked off a new era in its history with the launch of the Amiga 1000.…

Meanwhile, trademark holder gets hit with $50,000 for pushing its luck Bloomberg has filed with the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) to get hold of the domain name that embarrassed the organization and boosted Twitter's share price temporarily last week.…

Faking Bad or Breaking Bad at nerdy science org – the Feds want to know US Congress has opened an investigation into a blast at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland, that is suspected to be the result of a drug-cooking operation gone wrong.…

Mmmm …. vCloud Air used for internal workloads Telstra's not only hosting the Australian incarnation of VMware's vCloud Air public cloud, it's also using it.…

Think smart dandelion seeds with sensors The boffins at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been awarded a $100,000 grant to design autonomous probes that could ride through the upper atmosphere of Jupiter drawing power from its huge turbulence.…

Investors blindsided by unexpected profit Amazon wowed Wall Street by posting an unexpected second-quarter profit on Thursday, which included strong gains in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud division.…

Another OPM scandal, this is not Anonymous hackers have swiped databases from servers used by the US Census Bureau, and dumped their contents online. The bureau, as you might imagine, collects information on the American population every 10 years – although the leaked data does not include citizens' census records.…

Have you tried turning it off and on again? Oh Virgin Media subscribers are complaining that their TiVo set-top boxes are randomly and repeatedly restarting in what appears to be a widespread service disruption.…

Whoop-whoop! Pull up! Pull up! After a terrible first quarter of the year, SanDisk revenues continued to fall in its second quarter, which has just ended. However, profits went up sharply, giving hope that a turnaround at the wannabe enterprise flash storage supplier is under way.…

Space-telescope finds Kepler 452b, a far-away world possibly teeming with life Pics NASA boffins poring over data from the Kepler space-telescope have spotted a huge Earth-like planet that could be home to alien lifeforms.…

Sources whisper to El Reg while firm won't confirm – or deny That’s that then: it was a $415m mistake. We have heard from several sources that Cisco has laid off virtually the entire Invicta all-flash array engineering and development team. If true, Cisco – still led by John Chambers – has admitted the 2013 Whiptail acquisition was a complete cock-up.…

Networks are the future, reckons John Chen's firm BlackBerry shed some light on its latest acquisition target, AtHoc, today. It looks an improbable fit at first: AtHoc does crisis comms for emergency services and campuses, and its big customers include the military, the Department of Homeland Security and the DoD.…

When hydrogen fog cloaked the Epoch of Reionisation Top astro brainboxes report that they have managed to use the mighty ALMA array, situated high in the Atacama Desert of Chile, to peer back in space and time right into the first billion years of the Universe's life, when hydrogen fog cloaked the tadpole galaxies as they were born.…

Massive outsourcer seeks to reinvent itself Outsourcing giant Accenture has snapped up digital biz Chaotic Moon for an undisclosed pile of cash.…

The tools becoming the building blocks Virtualisation was once seen as little more than a hardware reduction method. It was fundamentally viewed as a tool, albeit an extremely clever and complex one, for reducing the amount of tin in a data hall.…

Which? study finds slurped details are dead easy for crims to abuse online Consumer association magazine Which? has highlighted a security flaw in contactless card systems, which, if combined with a lack of checks by retailers, could be exploited by thieves to make expensive online purchases.…

Media call set for 5pm UK, noon EDT. Habitable world? Aliens? Any fule kno the Kepler space telescope, whose six year mission (so far) has seen it discover many planets orbiting other stars - the task it was specifically built for, indeed.…

CEO sends united federation off to seek out new life and new civilisations Comment Succession, transformation and a customer buying pattern sea-change are simultaneously embroiling EMC’s top management and board in a perfect storm, according to CEO Joe Tucci in the quarterly results earnings call.…

Crumbling building needs firewall support The Houses of Parliament is looking to splash up to £6m on a data network management and support services network.…

They'll quaff their urine, but won't use turds as fertiliser - yet The International Space Station (ISS) is set to welcome three new crewmembers today - and these will be some of the first humans to eat food grown off planet Earth.…

Hardened security and inevitable container angle Enterprises are rarely in a rush to upgrade their operating systems – they want others to do the battle testing for them first. As is the way with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, released in June 2014.…

Make the most of the opportunities As we all know, the world of backup is changing, and not just in obvious ways such as the move to disk and cloud-based backup, the adoption of deduplication, the need to copy, back up and restore virtual machines, and so on.…

And verily, let it be known as 0.15625ml We're obliged to Reg reader Stephen Gunnell for providing a possible answer to the pressing question of how much exactly is a "smidge".…

Former spook-operated biz now worth more than £60m Cyber security outfit Darktrace, which is backed by billionaire superyacht owner Mike Lynch, has raised yet more cash, this time drumming up the princely sum of $22.5m (£14.4m).…

Linux-for-cloud head rejects pioneer's claim of a 'lost soul' The OpenStack Foundation’s executive director has defended the community project’s growing corporatisation following criticism from a colleague and lead pioneer.…

No pain yet but the works order is already in the post Microsoft has run out of time to fix four critical zero-day bugs in Internet Explorer, prompting HP's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) to disclose their existence without revealing any damaging details.…

Build a better interface and the world will... wait, where are you all going? Comment In one of my recent posts, I wrote about private object storage not being for everyone, especially if you don’t have the size to make it viable. On the other hand, we are all piling up boatloads of data and users need to access it from many different locations, applications and devices at anytime.…

Surpassed only by 1910, 1911, 1913, 1915 and, um, majority of other years, actually Climate change has certainly had a mighty impact this year, with the United States' NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) reporting a shockingly high set of average temperatures for the first part of this year.…

Scale of online abuse images revealed two years on from gov internet crackdown Two years on from the launch of David Cameron's smut filter, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) announced that two offenders are being convicted every day for possessing child abuse images.…

Descendants now survive only among Amazon tribes A long-vanished race of humans, whose descendants now survive only among certain indigenous peoples in Australasia and in the Amazon jungles, may have been the true, original Native Americans, according to new genetics research.…

An IT checklist It has been two years since Yahoo! chief Marissa Meyer hauled her remote working employees back into the office, intent on eliminating flexible working. The concept is becoming more popular, though, whether people like Ms Meyer like it or not.…

Politicians claim protection under the Wilson Doctrine A trio of politicians are challenging the government in a rare public hearing at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal today, alleging that British authorities ignored a ban on the tapping of MPs' and peers' telephones under a system of "blanket surveillance".…

No licence fees needed then. Thoughts, BBC? An Austrian court has ruled that online radio streaming does not actually constitute “broadcasting”, and therefore listeners do not need to pay a licence fee.…

GCHQ days of form-filling and 'bulk' intercept Feature David Anderson QC’s review of Britain’s anti-terrorism laws, published earlier this month, has mostly been examined for its potential impact on the government’s plans for a new act of Parliament on surveillance, known as the Snooper’s Charter to opponents.…

Hackers can turn your home into an unintentional rave – and there's nowt you can do New security research has revealed a whole new area of concerns for the soon-to-be-everywhere Internet of Things – smart home hubs.…

File a formal complaint guys, or move on There’s seemingly no let up in Google’s European antitrust woes, as yet another new possible battlefront opens.…

Redmond reveals slimmer, faster 'Send' email app for the old in-out Microsoft has admitted that its Outlook email and calendar app is too weighty and slow, releasing a new version, essentially a lighter and faster email client for the times you want to send snappy messages.…

If only you could buy shares SophosLabs researcher Fraser Howard says the Angler exploit kit is dominating the highly-competitive underground malware market, growing from exploding a quarter to 83 percent of market share within nine months .…

Technicolor flings €550 million to pick up Borg's Connected Devices Division Cisco's Connected Devices Division, a purveyor of set top boxen for service providers, is off to Europe having been acquired for €550 million / US$600 million by Technicolor.…

There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Universal Pictures France appears to have tracked down one source of pirated copies of dino-flick Jurassic World: the loopback port of one of its own boxen.…

Hot chips and other kit produce artefacts that let bad guys indentify and isolate VMs Research published by a US masters student reaches the somewhat unsettling conclusion that current cloud technologies don't separate virtual machines (VMs) as well as they could.…

Android had been p0wned from Ice Creams to Jelly Beans The next piece of weaponised malware to emerge out of the Hacking Team leak has arrived: a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) for Android.…

Carrier club SLAMS Comms department's submission to ACCC wholesale price caper Australia's Department of Communications has argued that higher broadband prices are necessary in order to protect the under-construction National Broadband Network (NBN).…

Pitch: Bust up the 200 day-long hacker party. Microsoft's Advanced Threat Analytics is going general-availability next month, so – as Redmond says – enterprises can more quickly spot intruders in their networks.…

Six password attempts? How about 10,000? A flaw in OpenSSH lets attackers bypass simple limits on the number of password login attempts that can be made per connection.…

placeholder It's pretty obvious really: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has pointed out that the researchers responsible for the now-infamous “Jeep hack” broke America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).…