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Russians ready a new state corporation. Called Roscosmos Following the announcement that the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, managed to "lose" 92 billion rubles ($1.8bn) last year, it is set to be replaced by a state corporation during the second half of 2015.…

Good job they don't need to know this stuff for work John Hartson, Ray Parlour and Nigel Winterburn – a veritable array of ex-Arsenal players – have learned how to say 'Huawei'.…

No one (well, maybe just Cisco) wanted it Comment How many times have you heard one of these statements: Tape is dead! Mainframe is dead! The laptop is dead ... and so on. It then turns out not to be true.…

Be less dog poop O2 customers up and down the UK were left without access to the carrier's mobile service on Bank Holiday Monday, after its network buckled for five hours yesterday evening.…

Free-range for devices Internet of Lawnmowers How are the next 10 billion devices going to connect to the internet of today, tomorrow? Having all of these gizmos talk to one another over your standard 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi is not going to happen, so how will all those gizmos connect to the wider internet, and how will we keep them all safe, happy and updated?…

Paint job honours Flight Lieutenant James Brindley Nicolson VC The RAF is commemorating this year's 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain with a fetching makeover for one of its Eurofighter Typhoons, repainted with the markings of 249 Squadron's Flight Lieutenant James Brindley Nicolson VC DFC.…

Hybrid cloud backup appliance startup pockets a cool $41m Rubrik has gotten itself a $41m B-round funder just months after its $10m A-round.…

Laggard agencies understand the risks and can cope, says GDS The UK government has decided, as foreshadowedby The Reg, that it can do without extended support for Windows XP.…

Open source overlords need a break too... but devs told to keep on testing Work/life balance is important. But important enough to slow development of a tool on which a fair slab of the world relies every day?…

Sneaky DNS change doesn't need remote management. A cybercrime vigilante known as Kafeine says criminals are hitting thousands of victims with a hacking tool that targets more than 40 router models.…

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz in which to charge my smartmobe? Qualcomm's won a deal with Daimler (whose Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team it sponsors) to push wireless tech into the latter's luxury cars. The two also reckon they'll try and crack the tough nut of charging electric vehicles without cables.…

It's okay, you Tweeted your FitBit stats anyhow, right? The popular Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon protocol isn't just a privacy risk up close – it can spaff your phone's or wearable's movements and information from a decent distance, and make you trackable.…

More a case of getting some new subordinates? Apple's Jony Ive has been promoted, it would seem.…

New colosso-iron ClearPath Dorado 8300 is all Chipzilla, all the time Unisys has unveiled a new range of all-Intel colosso-servers, effectively closing the chapter on Unisys's own proprietary CMOS chips.…

Smartmobe accelerometer data reveals your movements, isn't secured in any way Nanjing University boffins Jingyu Hua, Zhenyu Shen, and Sheng Zhong have tracked commuter train trips with 92 percent accuracy using stolen phone accelerometer data.…

Excuse me while I hug myself BT's boss has taken the opportunity during a visit to Australia to heap praise on his company's domestic broadband rollout, and antipodeans are lapping it up, with the local network builder promising to share information about how to build “superfast broadband”.…

At last, emoji kids and adults can all understand Want a bacon, avocado and cucumber salad? Next year, you'll be able to order it with emoji.…

Blocking third party access to content speeds up your browser You already know that too many tracking cookies will slow Web page loading down to a crawl. Now, a study by Mozilla and Columbia University quantifies the problem.…

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again Comcast may have given up trying to acquire Time Warner Cable, but junior US telco Charter now looks set to swoop with a deal of its own.…

IBM Model 1401 can hash, will produce a Bitcoin some time after the Sun explodes Vintage hardware enthusiast Ken Shirriff has shown that a model 1401 mainframe, which IBM announced in 1959, can mine Bitcoin. If, that is, your definition of mining includes “chugging away at the problem until pretty close to the heat-death of the universe.”…

Meanwhile registry's charitable trust is propped up with exiting Board members Despite having claimed the scalp of his predecessor and a former chair – and almost forced a government takeover of the company – the new CEO of .UK registry Nominet, Russell Haworth, will look into how his organization is structured.…

Comic actor and acclaimed astronomer extraordinaire Feature It’s 80 years since Gainsborough Pictures released the comedy Boys Will Be Boys, the movie that finally established ex-music hall performer Will Hay as a British film name – during that same year of 1935 he also published an accomplished astronomy book Through My Telescope. Hay was now a rising star in both senses of the word and in 1936 film exhibitors would vote him one of the UK’s Top Ten film performers.…

Blighty's Jeep – done in a thoroughly British way Geek's Guide to Britain We all know there’s only on one true Land Rover: the Defender. A cheerful, competent, boxy-shaped device that’s been in production since 1948, inspired by the Jeep, the Allies' WWII workhorse.…

Fading glory for Google, Microsoft and Amazon go-betweens? For decades, we’ve survived quite nicely using on-premise storage. According to industry research, though, that may be changing as cloud-based storage emerges. A Tata Communications survey last year found that within ten years enterprises will store 58 per cent of their data in the cloud, compared with 28 per cent today.…

Final avionics test flight in honour of the late, great Sir Terry The Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team is gearing up for one final test flight, codenamed PRATCHETT in honour of the late and great Discworld author Sir Terry.…

100 lucky premises to test standard BT says might hit 500Mbps Businesses and researchers around Swansea are going to get the chance to fool around with what will probably be copper's last hurrah, the VDSL-successor G.fast.…

All in the name of customer service, natch The economy of Luxembourg is about to shrink by a few billion pounds, with Amazon bowing to UK pressure and announcing it'll book UK sales through its British branch.…

'Resist gratification', says super-GNU-man freedom fighter Linux GNU firebrand Richard Stallman says Windows and Apple's OS X are malware, Amazon is Orwellian, and anyone who trusts the internet-of-things is an ass.…

Mars? Been there, done that Russia couldn't promise the moon, it seems, so India has lost interest in a joint probe project scheduled for 2022.…

Cheaters cheated, then fleeced by premium SMS 'malware' removal tools ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko says a whopping 2.8 million users have downloaded malicious Minecraft Android applications.…

And its Chinese developers just scored US$52m of VC to sniff more passwords China's internet services aren't stellar, which is why the nation's State Council recently decided to spend US$182bn on network construction in an effort to speed up local connections.…

'Firefox experience' will play some low-key gigs in private beta The Mozilla Foundation reckons it has found a way to sneak its Firefox browser into Apple's walled garden.…

Possible prank sees trojan that lifted $300 million suggest Kremlin as controller Trend Micro researcher Maxim Goncharov says one of the world's most sophisticated and dangerous bank-robbing trojans is now pointing to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).…

Nash and wife, Alicia, die in New Jersey taxi accident A car accident in New Jersey has claimed the life of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and subject of the book and movie A Beautiful Mind, John Forbes Nash.…

Review sets 2016 target for faster, simpler spectrum handling regime Australia's government is moving ahead with its planned revamp of spectrum management, in the hope of replacing today's fragmented management of the RF spectrum with a single regime.…

The People's Front of Judea would be proud of this rebranding exercise The Internet Society of Australia has changed its name to Internet Australia, but kept the name Internet Society of Australia for official purposes.…

Enterprise Services needs to find $2bn of savings, but s'ok, got 3 years to do it Just when the folk at HP Enterprise Services thought the multi-year cost cutting timetable was almost at an end, along comes another plan to lop $2bn off the expenses bill.…

404bhp worth of twin-turbo Ferrari V6 is no error Vulture at the wheel When Joe Walsh sang “My Maserati does 185, I lost my licence so now I don’t drive”, he was lying. In 1978 no Maserati could do that speed.…

Biz fomerly known as RIM desperately seeking profits from device unit Blackberry is to axe workers across its loss-making hardware division to lighten overheads, the ailing Canadian smartphone maker has confirmed.…

The 'mad scientist' creator thrusts torch under chin, says 'AAhahahahaha' A Google patent uncovered by tech law firm SmartUp seems to describe a toy that will look at and talk to your kids, then update a remote media device, depending upon the child's feedback.…

Plus: 'Why should I care if my taxi's insured or not?' CoTW What's that lumbering over the horizon, groaning theatrically? Yes, it's the late, unlamented corpse of Comment of the Week, reanimated for your reading pleasure, dear commentards!…

One for young maritime fans Theatre Review There's no sign of Captain Pugwash as I make my way through the streets of Greenwich to the National Maritime Museum, although I do surprisingly spot several swashbuckling Jack Sparrows.…

Fashionably great Product Roundup I’ve long sung the praises of the Longchamp Le Pilage. Stylish and hardwearing, this super light bag weighs in at just 225g. Yes, you have to add your own laptop sleeve, but what’s not to love? Yet in the daytime commute, women everywhere now haul this stalwart bag. A First World problem it might be, but who wants to be one of the homogeneous bunch?…

Every single journey's got a story to tell The eXpat Files In this instalment of The eXpat Files, we meet Joshua Puckett – a native of Maryland, USA – who, at 23, has managed to work in 50 countries, with extended stays in Switzerland and Hungary.…

But the absence of one can Worstall @ the Weekend What with another budget just coming up, to correct the one that chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne kidded everyone with before the election, it might be time to answer the question of whether deficits really matter?…

'White House DIDN'T ask secret court for 90-day extension' Edward Snowden supporters were claiming victory for the privacy of millions of US citizens today, after the Obama administration seemingly decided not to seek a 90-day extension to allow g-men to collect bulk phone records.…

Plus: NetApp 'operationalises' 500 staffers right out of a job QuoTW This week brought with it cruddy security, an expensive business opportunity and a free lunch.…

Weird behaviour never before seen in our Milky Way Scientists have observed odd features present in a supermassive star in our galaxy that they have somewhat appropriately dubbed Nasty 1.…