The Register

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.…

Rimini sets back claim as Oracle "streamlines" theft claims Rimini Street has struck back at Oracle after the database giant withdrew its claim for $210m damages against Rimini.…

Tat sales up seven per cent, compared with bumper PayPal growth Online tat bazaar eBay confirmed it is flogging off its eBay Enterprise division for $925m (£591m), while posting a seven per cent second quarter revenue increase to $4.4bn (£2.8bn).…

Tat sales up seven per cent, compared with bumper PayPal growth Online tat bazaar eBay confirmed it is flogging off PayPal for $925m (£591m), while posting a seven per cent second quarter revenue increase to $4.4bn (£2.8bn).…

US activist fund murmurs something about being ‘disappointed’ Shouty US investment firm Elliott Associates has itself been shouted down by Samsung shareholders, who today voted in favour of the company's mega merger with itself.…

Whoops-a-daisy, tide's out and my nakedness is showing They say that when the tide goes out you can see who's been swimming naked. It's going out for Barracuda, QLogic, and Seagate, and Quantum makes four as it bares lousy preliminary Q1 numbers.…

Volume shredding via a REST API. How relaxing Hybrid array supplier Nimble Storage has added evolutionary tweaks to its array software to enable more precise control of performance, better data security, and a programmatic interface for building your own workflows and reports.…

The enterprise tide will lift our boat, or something Comment Cloudian, an object storage startup, says that, with its integral S3 support, as the enterprise IT world adopts S3 its fortunes will benefit from that adoption. A rising S3 tide will lift its boat.…

You've got six weeks to migrate all your creds. Chop, chop Password manager service ‪Mitro‬ is to shut down permanently from the end of August.…

Come, fellow Luddites, help us smash the Borg before it's too late Vid Humanity has struck the first blow in the coming war against the machines, though the human error that lead to one of Google's robotic cars being rear-ended had the Pyrrhic quality of hospitalising the wonkamobile's three passengers.…

Government has until March 2016 to write new legislation The High Court has ruled that the "emergency" DRIPA surveillance legislation rushed through Parliament last year is unlawful.…

It's said to be the dog's danglies – but so were many other things before it Facebook's React Native framework is hot. The question is, for how long? After all, while Facebook-born React is smoking, it wasn’t very long ago that Google-spawned AngularJS had the web world all a’flutter.…

Looks like only Tiscali and Lineone have been targeted Hundreds of TalkTalk customers have been locked out of their email accounts after the network took steps to deactivate legacy addresses.…

IOCCO investigates snooping snafus by asinine authorities and other idiots The Interception of Communications Commissioner's Office (IOCCO) half-yearly report revealed 17 serious errors committed by British authorities using interception powers, including one which lead to an innocent citizen's home being raided after the police mistyped a suspect's email address.…

VXers say Microsoft's good intentions let them brew truly evil malware Trend Micro researcher Jay Yaneza says Point of Sales malware has begun using Microsoft .NET, following its release as open source last year.…

Revealed: Project Zero team's anti-exploit defenses for Swiss-cheese plugin Google's team of computer security gurus have described the anti-hacker defenses they've helped Adobe add to Flash Player.…