The Register

Check out the 4X speed increase, and 5X capacity increase Seagate has improved the punch and capacity of its EVault hybrid backup products, with 4X speed boost and 5X capacity enlargement.…

It's ‘playing its part in reducing the budget deficit’, apparently The number of Home Office IT staff has been slashed by one third, following the latest round of redundancies at the department, The Register can reveal.…

Hermit Kingdom activists can feel more secure with Open Office ERNW security analyst Florian Grunow says North Korea's Red Star Linux operating system is tracking users by tagging content with unique hidden tags.…

Solar wind is stripping Pluto's thin atmosphere First, the New Horizons probe found a patch on the surface of Pluto that looked like the Disney canine that shares the dwarf freezeworld's name. Now NASA has found another doggy-style feature: a long tail.…

Tree-rat crimewave as another furry hellraiser goes wild, wrecks pub German police have detained a squirrel for stalking a woman and chasing her down the street.…

Best results since 2003 as Phisherfolk stop dangling their bait Spam levels have fallen to below 50 per cent of all email sent for the first time in a decade, according to security firm Symantec.…

State targeted after tech, aerospace, transport campaign Hackers are attempting to break into US Government agencies using a recently patched Adobe Flash vulnerability, the FBI is warning.…

ISPs line up for 'superfast' services BT's Openreach has taken another step in the introduction of G.fast services, and late last week briefed Brit ISPs on how to join customer trials.…

Coma Cluster's 'dead galaxies' are 99 per cent dark matter, boffin says It's generally accepted by astronomers that dark matter makes up roughly 27 per cent of the known Universe – but in a galactic cluster 300 million light years away, that proportion is all skewiff.…

'Loudest phone' is an Android with a sound card for FLACing good sound Fans of the Marshall look and sound can now carry it around in a smartphone.…

Same box, but marketers are paid more than you Oracle has decided that nobody wants to buy a virtualisation appliance, but reckons you're all ready to stampede in the direction of a private cloud appliance. Big Red's marketers have therefore enriched some printers by changing the name of the “Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance” (VCA) to the “Oracle Private Cloud Appliance” (PCA).…

Q2 results beat forecast Ericsson boss Hans Vestberg is breathing a sigh of relief, with America's demand for mobile broadband stabilising enough to help it beat forecasts for the second quarter.…

VMware in the lead again, despite vSphere 6.0 missing the cut The analyo-mages at Gartner have emitted their Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure for 2015 and found a race in two between Microsoft and VMware, the only companies rated “leaders” in the field.…

'User focussed' and 'industry led' effort to stop folks coming a cropper post-copper Australia's government is looking for industry input into National Broadband Network (NBN) migration policy, and wants submissions by August 20.…

Reports say authorities considering possibility of inside job Reports have emerged that ex-staff of hacked spookware-spaffer Hacking Team have been questioned by police in Milan.…

Mozilla plans to be steady and stimulating as it tries to score in mobile The Mozilla Foundation has formalised Firefox OS development, pledging that henceforth new versions will emerge every six months.…

Brit pilots agree: Get gizmos' batts out of holds Boeing has decided that lithium-ion batteries, the engine-room of the tech gadget boom, are too dangerous to haul around in bulk on cargo planes.…

No longer need a DVD drive to install latest Microsoft OS Microsoft has confirmed scuttlebutt that had been flying around for a number of weeks now: Windows 10 will be sold on USB Flash drives.…

Contact lists blighted by dodgy messages FOR WEEKS An unknown number of frustrated Skype customers have been pestered by spoof messages on the Microsoft service for weeks, but the company is yet to close what appears to be a gaping hole in its software.…

Plankton brighten up fluffy stuff above our heads, apparently Plankton aren't just there to stuff the bellies of hungry fish – they also light up clouds over the Southern Ocean, according to a new scientific study.…

Warning: Dev services STILL COMATOSE until mid-week Popular open source code-hosting repository SoureForge has been battling a significant outage for days and is slugglishly recovering from a lengthy Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) drama.…

Inspirational comic visionary, revered in Britain yet ignored at home Feature It’s 25 years since Bill Hicks took the Montreal Just For Laughs comedy festival by storm with a blistering, intelligent comic set that was basically his, then new, debut album Dangerous. Within two years the semi-underground stand-up was a regular on British TV in-between successfully touring across the USA and Australia. And within three years he was dead – killed by pancreatic cancer just as the big time beckoned.…

Brings film cameras into the digital realm with capture metadata Review For many people, digital photography is a no-brainer. You can shoot as much as you like, there's no need to worry about running out of film, and you don't need to carry a notebook with you to record all the details of every shot. At the very least, your digital camera will record exposure details such as shutter speed and aperture, and some will embed geolocation info too.…

Plus: Top penguin Torvalds is icy on Gmail's spam filter QuoTW It's been a week of petite planets, weird Windows and hacked hospitals.…

He begged, cajoled, then said L****R and bang, everything was OK On-Call Is there anything worse than a contact centre operative who just will not help you, even if you've told them there are metaphorical flames licking around your feet, and no matter what their script says they really need to help you out? NOW!?…

Ostrom's work more than simply disproving Hardin Worstall @ the Weekend Something popped up in the comments from BobRocket a couple of weeks back, namely that the Tragedy of the Commons is a myth spread by the landgrabbers, and Elinor Ostrom proved this was wrong. Well, no, not really; not at all in fact.…

Game on for anyone running Redmond's latest OS build It's just 11 days until Microsoft takes the covers off its latest operating system – and, to keep the marketing hype building, the software giant has began offering Xbox streaming to Windows 10 customers.…

Artefacts suggest wreck dates back to American Revolution Scientists have discovered a ghoulish shipwreck on the sea floor off the North Carolina coast, which they believe dates back to the late 18th or early 19th Century.…

According to 'research' using 'relatively poor data' New research from the Global Commission on Internet Governance has reached a surprising conclusion: cyberspace is actually getting safer.…

All the accessories you could want (but not a decent satnav) VULTURE AT THE WHEEL It’s all about the engines. Fiat has added new Euro 6 compliant engines to its line-up and this is the excuse the company has employed to call the facelifted 500 “new”.…

Or how the Marvel universe has jumped the SharkMan Film Review We were invited by Dolby to see a screening of Ant-Man at its custom-built screening room in San Francisco the other night. And so, of course, we went along.…

And printers play silly buggers for fun

Blame our suppliers, says drugstore giant Updated US drugstore* chain CVS has shut down its online photo printing service after it was compromised by hackers, who may have swiped people's bank card details.…

New performance packages for Model S 'leccy cars unveiled Tesla boss Elon Musk has outlined new performance packages for his company's Model S sedan, including a "ludicrous" speed option that will turn the electric car into a darting demon.…

Kernel chief Linus claims his spam bin had more than 30% false positives Linux kernel supremo Linus Torvalds has published a scathing open letter to Google's Gmail team after discovering that the service had incorrectly marked hundreds of his incoming email threads as spam – including ones containing kernel patches.…

California hospital group says dirtbags broke in last October UCLA Health hospitals say hackers may have accessed personal information and medical records on 4.5 million patients.…

Hills, smooth plains, troughs all part of 'astoundingly amazing landscape' Pics NASA has released the latest data sent back by its New Horizons probe and it includes images of smooth, segmented plains, possible hydrocarbon deposits and our first look at Pluto's moon, Nix.…

New gTLD goes live for all Today, Friday, sees the launch of one of the more interesting new internet top-level domains that has been approved by ICANN: .love.…

Traditional enterprise shared-storage facing extinction event Analysis In ten years, legacy enterprise storage-area networks (SANs), network-attached storage (NAS), and direct-attached storage (DAS) revenues will have lost 88 per cent of their present value, according to Wikibon research.…

Telco chips $17.5m into federal pot after leaving millions of Americans in the lurch T-Mobile US will cough up a $17.5m (£11.2m) fine after a botched equipment upgrade cut off emergency 911 calls for millions of Americans for hours.…

Hackers vow to publish all if AFC Kredieten doesn't pay up Hacker collective Rex Mundi has stolen 24,000 financial records from Belgian loan company AFC Kredieten, it claims, and if the company doesn't pay up before Friday at 8pm, it will publish every loan applicant record in its possession.…

Phoenix IT Group adds 3,600 new customers to stables of new parent Management at Daisy Group today start the mammoth task of integrating Phoenix IT Group, and getting the respective sales staff to cross-sell following yesterday’s purchase completion.…

Meanwhile 'unlawful' law stays in force until March next year. Trebles all round! The government has announced it will appeal a High Court judgment which has ruled its DRIPA surveillance legislation unlawful.…

Let's discuss how to migrate legacy applications The move to cloud computing in enterprises has until recently largely been confined to new greenfield applications, test and development solutions or software-as-a-service solutions from companies such as Salesforce.…

BYOD was just the beginning Just as IT professionals and others responsible for mobile security have come to terms with BYOD, the problem has moved on, with the lines between business and personal activity blurring even more. Against this background, effective management of mobile risk will increasingly require a user-centric approach.…

Public transport is predictably popular, finds poll Apple Pay has upset a few people already. People who can’t get to work, people who’ve been charged twice, and people who bank with HSBC.…

The fight for the living room's future is on Breaking Fad The battle for Smart TV dominance continues to ratchet up, with Google and Firefox now both wading into the same connected space. The former has reignited its living room ambitions via Android TV, while open source rival Firefox has partnered with Panasonic.…

But, contrary to what Cal tech boffins say, there IS a solution Deadly female blood-suckers have been shown to zero in on their living prey by sniffing out the CO emitted in exhaled breath, according to new experiments.…

Or is it the other way around? Interview To the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, where we caught up with Bill Mannel, general manager of HP’s freshly minted HPC and Big Data group, a business unit within the server division.…