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We'll keep on publishing, say web folk Germany’s domestic secret service is backing a criminal case against government officials who passed documents to the press.…

Wanna GTFO? Yay, blockchain Worstall on Thursday Hallelujah and may the Lord be praised! Someone has finally managed to find a decent economic use for Bitcoin. This isn't what those of us interested in the nitty-gritty of economics ever really expected, to be quite frank.…

Results follow increasingly gobby policy demands Online gogglebox Netflix posted a 22 per cent increase in sales, to $1.64bn (£1bn), for its second quarter results, while profits plummeted by 63 per cent to $26m (£17m).…

Snooping commish finds cops ignored law ordering them to get a warrant Two police forces used lawful surveillance powers to spy on journalists' confidential sources without getting a judge's approval, according to the Interception of Communications Commissioner's Office (IOCCO) latest report.…

Should Auntie be forced to identify what on Earth she is for, and do that? The Government has opened up a wide-ranging consultation on the future of the BBC, whose ten-year duration Royal Charter expires in 2017.…

Care about your privacy? Best move to Kenya, matey Vodafone has updated its annual report on what it must do to comply with the law enforcement disclosures in the countries where it operates – and is considering more detailed disclosures.…

Browser maker backs search for 'safer and more stable' alternative – like its own Mozilla has lifted its blanket block on Flash in Firefox following the release of security updates by Adobe on Tuesday.…

Bloodthirsty rivals cheer at thought of bloody amputation BT has launched an offensive against moves to have its Openreach division completely hived off, with its view being that maintaining a near monopoly is the best thing for the country.…

Finding direction and picking an heir to the late Satoru Iwata Game Theory I first met Satoru Iwata in 2012. At the time, the Wii's success was fresh in the memory, while the Wii U still had boundless potential. This was, after all, long before it had been exposed as underpowered and undersupported.…

'Helped improve detection capabilities' while allegedly selling badass trojan toolkit A former intern at security company FireEye has been arrested for creating and selling the slick and sophisticated Dendroid malware program after being caught in a global police sting that obliterated the Darkode cybercrime forum.…

Two companies, both alike in dignity, in fair Milan Cupertino's lawyers must hasten with all fair speed to Milan, where Irish company Probendi has filed a suit alleging infringement of the latter's iWatch trademark.…

Pseudo taxi service sanctioned for its business practice secrecy A Californian judge has ruled that Uber, by refusing to disclose particular business practices to state regulators, is in breach of the conditions under which it is allowed to operate in the state.…

China still a top trend says IDC HP has consolidated its position at the top of the HPC tree this year, after IBM’s protracted offloading of its x86 server business to Lenovo spooked customers and stalled purchases.…

Sometimes a token gesture is a good thing Analysis Most security experts estimate that the security offered within (and by) Apple Pay is superior to that seen in existing contactless credit or debit card systems.…

Tips for the canny SME The average SME has a modest infrastructure which has grown organically: a file server of some sort, probably an email server, then a handful of application servers hosting things like finance systems or the database back-ends to business applications.…

Dominance and predatory pricing to be looked at The European Commission has opened two antitrust investigations into possible abusive behaviour by chipzilla Qualcomm, including allegations of "predatory pricing".…

'You agree to receive automatic updates without notice' Microsoft's licensing on the upcoming Windows 10 OS means that most users will find their systems updating on command from Redmond without any option to stop this.…

Sun-like star, Jupiter-like gas giant ... Terra Nova? There are just two problems with the exoplanets we know about. First, they're generally too big to be really interesting, and second they're too close to their parent stars. Today, however, we have one that's a bit different.…

62 warrants served worldwide as feds spring their trap Coordinated action from law enforcement and judicial authorities across the world has succeeded in taking down Darkode, an English-language cybercriminal forum.…

Just say 'no' to rolling your own There’s a lot of angst right now over the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s open-source data centre gift to the world. Some, as detailed by El Reg, describe Open Compute testing as “a complete and utter joke.” One that isn’t apparently very funny.…

How a nuke blast lid may have beaten Soviets by months As any space enthusiast knows, beachball-sized Sputnik was the first manmade object to orbit the Earth after it was launched by the Soviets in October 1957. But it's possible the US managed to put an object into space a few months before that.…

Enterprise services unit on the chopping block eBay is about to sell off its enterprise services unit, according to folks whispering in the ear of The Wall Street Journal.…

Here's your chance to test servers-on-chips at ARM's length Backers of ARM CPUs as a data centre disruptor capable of knocking Intel off its lucrative Xeon-powered perch have a new poster child in the form of hosting company OVH, which has announced it will stand up a cloud powered by Cavium's ThunderX chippery.…

'You pick the time, place and manner' A legal eagle mocked the size of his client's manhood and then challenged him to a duel – not of the pink pistol variety – over an outstanding fee of just $400 (£256), according to an official complaint.…

Unauthenticated remote code execution among grizzly vulns. Oracle has poured cold coffee on a recent Java zero-day that's already under active attack, with just one of the critical patches it's released to address 193 holes in its sprawling product suite.…

This one simple attack busts WPA-TKIP in less than an hour Remember how many times the crypto world has shouted that the RC4 crypto algorithm needs to be wiped from the face of the Earth? It just got even worse, with researchers demonstrating an attack that can be executed in 52 hours.…

El Reg talks to IIX's Jay Turner The open-source CloudRouter project is getting closer to general availability, with its second beta hitting the Internet today.…

New Skills India plan calls for nation to export its brains in every field India's launched a new “National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship” that prime minister Shri Narendra Modi hopes will propel the country to become “the world's largest provider of skilled workforce for the world.”…

Chipzilla chiefzilla admits building tiny gates is really hard Intel has surprised the IT world by changing its plans. This doesn't happen very often, and it will affect its chips going into clouds and data centers over the next couple of years, which is a big deal. Let's break down what's happened.…

Cloudy PVR has denial of service problem, but the fix is in Cisco is asking Web broadcasters using its Videoscape TV-over-IP streaming product to get patching, after a denial-of-service vulnerability was found in the software.…

Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again? Microsoft won't do much more Microsoft has announced it will offer “limited support for major Linux distributions, third party and Open source technologies on Azure.”…

14 flaws nixed by crowdsourced code-hunters United Airlines has paid 1.5 million flight miles to two bug hunters who squelched 14 vulnerabilities under its newly hatched bug bounty program.…

Better order early, though HP got on the phone with The Register on Wednesday to shed light on how it plans to roll out PCs with Windows 10 preinstalled. The IT giant said you can expect at least some of its hardware to be available with the new OS on the day that it launches – July 29.…

First 'Wi-Fi Aware' chips pass certification A lack of connectivity options in devices like smartphones is clearly what stops location-based advertising from being the saviour of physical retailing.…

So long as they keep up the sweetheart interconnect deal, that is Netflix has publicly backed the proposed merger between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable (TWC).…

Ready or not, here it comes Microsoft has released yet another preview build of Windows 10, this time to both the Fast and Slow rings of the Windows Insider program, and it looks suspiciously like it could be a release candidate.…

Both the dwarf freezworld and moon Charon are active – that shouldn't happen Pics NASA has shown the first high-resolution picture of Pluto's surface, and the first proper picture of its largest moon Charon – and the photos have already turned planetary science on its head.…

Privacy activists alarmed by profiling implications The European Parliament's civil liberties committee LIBE voted on Wednesday in favor of collecting and storing information about all air passengers traveling into or out of the EU.…

Another glum quarter as customers shun PCs Punch-drunk Intel staggered along in the second quarter of its fiscal 2015 and somehow managed to outperform analysts' estimates, even though its results looked even worse than the previous quarter's.…

A sad catch President Obama will officially launch Wednesday afternoon a new program to get kids in flat-broke households online.…

We expected the Middle Kingdom to grow its own brains – just not this quick ISC 2015 Computer design guru Yutong Lu has outlined the blueprints for China's homegrown supercomputer chips following a US ban on Intel processor exports to the Middle Kingdom.…

Remind us again who owns half of Foxtel? Telstra? Really … Netflix's latest ranking of Australian service providers again shows that Telstra is the nation's worst-performing network when it comes to downloading the streaming video company's content.…

'It's not because of the money' says aging grumpy rocker "My music is being removed from all streaming services. It's not good enough to sell or rent," rock grumpster Neil Young said today.…

They'd like Canonical to make still more changes to licensing Canonical has updated the intellectual property rights policy for Ubuntu Linux to address a brouhaha over how the software is licensed, but free software advocates still aren't satisfied.…

Prius owners look less smug Toyota has become the third car manufacturer in two weeks to recall its cars because of software problems, with over 625,000 Prius hybrids needing an upgrade to stop the engine suddenly cutting out.…

It's alive! It's alive! Pic Apple is touting a new model of the iPod Touch with an eight-megapixel camera, a new processor, and new colors for its case.…

Fat man bites dog A company founded by Kim Dotcom, the file-sharing website kingpin who is accused of mass copyright infringement, is reportedly suing another biz for ... copyright infringement.…