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Reader acronym poll firmly backs the late and great Sir Terry Our search for a suitably snappy title for our forthcoming final Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) test flight has ended agreeably with a reader poll coming down firmly in support of PRATCHETT.…

Major tech firms plead for no Crypto Wars restart Google, Apple and 140 other technology companies will write to US President Obama today (19 May) to reject plans which could see the security of communications devices compromised for the sake of government surveillance access to encrypted data.…

The perils of managing suppliers, customers...even users? Reg Events If you expect your company to be around five years from now, you can also expect that the IT department is going to be called on to help sales, marketing and procurement deal with the world far beyond the server room.…

Game's 25th anniversary to be celebrated with REDMOND BLOODBATH May 18th marked the 25th anniversary of Microsoft giving the world its Solitaire app, so Redmond has come up with a fine way to celebrate – a deathmatch for its staff.…

Firm decloaks Ethernet drives and object storage OpenStack Summit Industry leader trailer Toshiba America is demoing direct-addressed Ethernet disk drives for scale-out object storage at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit, and it's developing hybrid flash/disk array tech using the drives.…

New preemptible VMs cost 70% less – but are unreliable by design Google has announced what it calls "a new class of compute": virtual machines (VM) that are predictable in price but not in operation.…

In North Korea they just add an extra can in the middle of the string A law requiring the mass installation of spyware on teenagers' smartphones suggests that the frightening level of population control exercised by its neighbours in "Best Korea" has rubbed off on the Republic's administrators in Seoul.…

Strengthens support and quality of service Maxta is polishing up its OpenStack credentials by adding Kilo support, service quality policies, and call-home diagnostics to its hyperconverged software-led systems.…

It started with a kiss Game Theory So, I've had sex with three women this week, and before you ask I haven’t changed sexual preference and succumbed to any Sapphic tendencies. No, it’s because I’m balls deep in what may be the defining action RPG of our time — The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.…

Pleads with watchdog not to delay planned buyout BT claimed on Monday that its planned gobble of EE was a good thing for competition in the UK – despite the fact that such market consolidation would make the former state monopoly more powerful.…

Networks could drop 'The Bomb' and block ads by default For those mobile operators wanting to block adverts and prevent them reaching subscribers' screens (all in the name of reducing bandwidth usage and saving customers’ money of course) Israeli tech company Shine can make that happen.…

But activist investor Carl Icahn says it'll ship in 2016 Apple spent ten years working on a television, but gave up last year after deciding it couldn't devise something that would crack the competitive market.…

Clearly a slow day for the provisional wing of Northumbria Police Firearms officers from Northumbria Police have shot dead a fugitive cow following an escape attempt by some cattle.…

When you say 'move along, nothing to see here', the bad guys get interested Melbourne penetration tester Thiebauld Weksteen is warning system administrators that robots.txt files can give attackers valuable information on potential targets by giving them clues about directories their owners are trying to protect.…

SPACEHENGE spotted by Rosetta? The European Space Agency (ESA) has released images of what it's cautiously calling "an unusual formation of boulders in the Aker region on the large lobe of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko ... reminiscent of so-called 'balancing rocks' on Earth."…

Farewell to HBA twin Emulex too; away we go to Avago QLogic, a storage networking adaptor vendor, is escaping the sagging Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) revenue trap by focussing on fast Ethernet and adding in-line data reduction, availability and encryption services.…

Sure, we're handing over your data, but you won't have to hand over much cash Australian internet service provider (ISP) iiNet has proclaimed a victory of sorts in its legal stoush with Dallas Buyers Club LLC (DBC) and Voltage Pictures LLC (Voltage).…

Search UI guru Jon Wiley now leading VR design Google luminary Jon Wiley has taken a sideways jump that's seen as signalling a serious move on the virtual reality market.…

The harder you rub, the more the sparks fly It'll be good if they can pull it off: Ricoh has come up with a way to brush up on electricity generation with nothing more than a piece of rubber.…

Take these coding standards and, if pain persists, consult your doctor Medical devices shouldn't be hackable, so the IEEE has published the first steps towards laying down decent security practise for the sector.…

Patch but don't panic Oracle has released patches for its virtualisation software to crimp the VENOM vulnerability that allows attackers to break out of virtual machines to attack hosts.…

Security to agile chaps: You want me to lock that down HOW EXACTLY? Software-defined networking (SDN) will give IT teams a new reason for internecine conflict, as those looking to build automated, software-defined data centres come up against the hard-headed trust nobody pragmatism of security teams.…

Come HERE for $4 billion Less than two weeks after Uber kicked off the bidding war for Nokia's HERE maps unit, the price has escalated and the rumoured alliances have shifted.…

Even the cloud provider can't see what you're doing Get ready for the spooks to howl: Microsoft Research has developed another layer of security to lock up customer data in the cloud.…

And don’t call me Shirley Claims by a security researcher that he hacked an aircraft in flight have been questioned by the hacking community and the airline industry.…

*If nothing else goes wrong The delayed national broadband network (NBN) satellite launch will happen in 2015, Airanespace reckons.…

Act now to get your cheap computing fix at the Chocolate Factory Google is cutting prices on its Cloud hosted computing service.…

Auto-bundle emerges and search giant focuses on brands Google has sold its rights to all internet addresses ending in ".car" to a joint partnership of two other registry operators.…

Yeah, it's dead, but there's no need to dox the survivors The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issied an official warning to the companies taking over the assets of North American electronics retailer Radio Shack; don't touch customer data.…

Cupertino gets a mixed blessing in smartphone row Apple was dealt a setback today when a US court reversed part of its patent case against rival Samsung, getting part of a $930m judgement confirmed, but not all.…

Red-faced Revenant fires up for June and E3 It's been nearly 11 years but Doom is back.…

140-character insights will come direct from @POTUS Hold on to your hats, Barack Obama has arrived on Twitter in his formal position of President of the United States.…

Uber dismisses claims as 'completely baseless' Uber is being sued by the founder of a small wireless business who claims Uber stole his idea for a ride-sharing app.…

Oh yeah, and George Wallace, Alabama's ex-governor, was a wrong'un Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that Steve Jobs' vision of the fruity firm's products conquering the world has been a success, while highlighting how smartphones help tackle injustices.…

Can you survive without support? Windows Server 2003 will pass out of Microsoft support on July 14, 2015. Different organisations report different numbers, but all agree that there are millions of Server 2003 servers still running in the wild.…

Gamers find themselves in latest Mods & Rockstar punch-up Cybercrooks are cooking up malware disguised as mods for the Grand Theft Auto V video game.…

Only consumer caution and govt regulation can stop us! Nissan's CEO has said the company is on track to deliver its driverless cars by 2020, although he expects government regulation to be a stumbling block to their usage on public roads.…

Unencrypted DVDs go missing from drawer, not reported for two years South Wales Police has been hit with a £160,000 fine for losing a video recording which formed part of the evidence in a sex abuse case.…

Yep Napoleon, we should’ve let China sleep Chinese Amazon equivalent Alibaba has unveiled plans to become the dominant international tat bazaar, aiming to shift more Chinese wares to the international market while simultaneously encouraging foreign companies to flog more goods to Chinese punters.…

Consider your needs before rushing out and investing in new storage tech COMMENT I’m talking about Big Data, OpenStack and object storage. In the last two days I’ve come across a couple of articles (here and here), which discuss the adoption of these technologies.…

Despite starting a probable alien invasion when at Bebo* Tory Baroness Joanna Shields OBE, ex-Tech City supremo, ex-head of Bebo*, ex-head of Facebook Europe and ex-MD of Google EMEA, has been appointed minister for internet safety and security.…

On the road today, I saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac In a move calculated to appeal to the aging hippies who now run Silicon Valley, Violin is entering readers of its marketing white paper-type docs into a Grateful Dead concert ticket sweepstake.…

Chinese giant tools up to take on AWS Expansion-hungry Alibaba is set to increase the global reach of its cloudy biz Aliyun by opening a data centre in Europe, a senior hand has told El Reg.…

It's not clear if even the Borg could pull off this assimilation +Comment Jared Rinderer, a senior research analyst at Equity Capital Research Group, has claimed Cisco is about to buy converged infrastructure enfant terrible Nutanix.…

Like Ubuntu but a darn sight slimmer Review The Xubuntu project recent unveiled a stripped-down build of its Xfce-based Ubuntu: Xubuntu core. Core offers a very basic version of the Xfce desktop, along with the basic look and feel of Xubuntu, but any extras like an office suite, media player, Xfce add-ons or even a web browser will have to be installed separately.…

Execs go to Cupertino, possibly using a map to get there Apple is making efforts to improve its location software by acquiring Coherent Navigation, a startup developing a "high-precision navigation service" using GPS technology.…