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El Reg talks to network architect David Wilde, who explains how to do SDN at oceanic scale Last week, an international group of researchers and vendors demonstrated international carrier-scale software-defined networking (SDN), exchanging 15,000 routes across a trans-Pacific link.…

Redmond discovers the limits of cloud-first Microsoft's only just announced its new Nano server, but has been using it in production on Azure since late 2013.…

URL-handling leaves users well and truly rooted A notorious piece of Mac maintenance software been found to have a critical remote code execution vulnerability.…

My god, it's full of spots! NASA's Dawn spacecraft has completed its first mapping orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres and the bright spots spotted on the surface are much more numerous than first thought.…

Cloudy growth not coming fast enough for testy shareholders Shares of cloud hosting provider Rackspace were battered on Monday after the firm reported a lackluster forecast for the second quarter of its fiscal 2015.…

Selling off an ICON The Australian government's dark fibre network, ICON, is one of the many assets slated for sale under tonight's federal budget announcements.…

Telstra ranked last in video-streamer's speed table Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, offers Netflix customers the slowest download speeds, the video-streamer says.…

Samsung, Toshiba take a dive in latest estimates Apple is now the top smartphone seller in China, topping foreign and domestic competitors alike in the Middle Kingdom, but overall Chinese handset sales fell for the first time in six years.…

DMV reports all low-speed, half human's fault Self-driving cars have put in hundreds of thousands of miles on California's roads and, according to the state's Department of Motor Vehicles, they have had four crashes along the way.…

Developers get new version of mobile OS to play with ahead of conference Apple has posted a new beta build for the iOS 8.4 mobile platform.…

Your data isn't going to get on Redmond's cloud all by itself Microsoft has invested in two new cables to connect its North American data centers with facilities in Ireland, and it says it will soon help build similar data networking links to Asia.…

Choc Factory calls for a rethink after digital vandals run wild From Tuesday, Google is cutting user-submitted edits from its Maps feature after admitting that it can't prevent online tricksters from abusing the system.…

FCC decides FCC was right in earlier FCC ruling The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it will implement its net neutrality provisions despite objections from telcos.…

Drawing parallels between enterprise IT and fiscal policy A mathematician (a Fields Medal winner, so a real one) once asked an economist whether there was anything in economics that was non-obvious and non-trivial.…

Ministry of Fun’s Whittingdale argues payment must reflect demand, eventually Analysis The appointment of backbench Tory heavyweight John Whittingdale MP to head the Ministry of Fun will throw the BBC’s senior management into a state of high anxiety, and have the Beeb's opponents grabbing their crotches in excitement.…

The lessons of shaping a mathematical 'reality' Whatever you may think about the outcome of last Thursday’s General Election, there is one issue on which public, politicians and pundits alike seem to be broadly united: how badly the opinion pollsters fared. They got it very wrong!…

Far-right extremists suspected in ‘criminal, sick attack’ Sicko cyber-crooks defaced the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp memorial website with images of child abuse late last week.…

Self-proclaimed 'loyal person' threw in towel straight after Tory election victory Lord Sugar has declared that he is quitting the Labour Party thanks to its "anti-business" policies.…

Together they can save the world from social media and democracy Russia and China have promised to play nicely and not hack each other.…

Markets vs. Monkeys. Who has it right? Does the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH among friends) have any value when looking at tech companies in the enterprise and data centre world?…

Mid-ranger with tip-top build quality and a touch of style Review The most important Samsung phone of the last 12 months was the Galaxy S6, right? Nah. It was the Galaxy Alpha. The Alpha heralded a momentous change in Samsung design, from tired and mundane to rather stylish, and in material quality, from cheap plastic to high quality metal.…

EMC leads the way Well, here's another nail in the coffin for traditional storage arrays; Gartner claims array SSD sales were up just one per cent year-on-year, while server flash sales grew 51 per cent. EMC leads the AFA players, while Cisco and Dell are nowhere.…

Drinker of café au urine shows off spaceborne khazi Italy's first female astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti, has offered the internet a full talkthrough on one of the International Space Station's most famous facilities: its lavatory.…

Live! Press release! Live! Live! Live! Gearing up for an IPO, copy data virtualiser startup Delphix has hired veteran blogger Tom Foremski as its communications editor, a CFO and corporate comms head.…

Brilliance of the AeroMobil prototype's parachute demonstrated Czech company AeroMobil, which claims to have spotted a gap in the market for flying cars, managed to take its experimental prototype to an altitude of 300 metres before test pilot and inventor, Stefan Klein, "encountered an unexpected situation" and opened the vehicle's parachute.…

Boffins point to 1964, 1983 and 1991 ‪Pop music history has been marked by three distinct revolutions over the last 50 years, according to data-crunching boffins.‬…

Vulture-branded storage now a modest £7.99 It's with a small fanfare of trumpets that we can announce that El Reg's merchandising tentacle Cash'n'Carrion has knocked a fiver off its Vulture-branded 16GB USB stick.…

PM gently re-shuffles Tory cabinet after election victory Theresa May has – despite her failure to ram through the Snoopers' Charter under the previous Tory-led Coalition government – once again, been handed the troublesome Home Office brief.…

Cure your fear of updates The three biggest challenges for IT managers are security, reliability and performance. Ideally, an organisation’s software will excel at all three but in practice we know that isn’t true.…

From end-points to remote offices Comment It's not the end after all. End-point backup 'n' sharing biz Druva believes it can extend its end-point expertise to remote offices.…

One of the things we might get in 5G, so worth a think A conference at Bristol university is set to reveal the current state of the art on Full Duplex technology, which allows for transmitting and receiving signals on the same frequency at the same time.…

Australia to fine tech tax-dodgers 100% of their avoided tax, plus profits Australia's treasurer Joe Hockey has revealed that he and other money ministers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have shared plans to have online retailers charging the appropriate consumption tax on intangibles and goods bought online, at the rate of the buyer's home nations.…

Asteroid mining and floating seismometers also win exploratory funding Jupiter's moon Europa isn't the place for a Curiosity-style rover, since under its icy crust it may well have liquid oceans, so NASA's slung some money towards developing a robot eel concept.…

Login-stealing C&C server spotted Wordpress admins hoping for some feet up time after last week's Twenty Fifteen XSS plugin vulnerability appear to have yet another vulnerability to handle.…

Cops chase face mace space case A man from West Virginia has been jailed after he allegedly foiled his own robbery attempt by unhandily pepper-spraying himself.…

Privacy? You've heard of it but can't be bothered coding it Lack of people willing to keep its code updated has led the Tor Project to kill off its Amazon Web EC2 instances and the Tor Cloud service they ran.…

Fool the NSA by buying an underpowered, exotic SPARC machine Russia's Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies has started taking orders for PCs and servers using locally-developed “Elbrus 4c” CPUs.…

100Gbps Perth-Sydney link at 40 millisecond latency If you want to bring data from Europe or Asia to Australia, routing it to the city of Perth on the nation's west coast is a good idea because the bits spend less time on a submarine cable. For traffic from the USA, routes to Sydney on the east coast are similarly sensible.…

OSGP's DIY MAC is a JOKE Don't try crypto at home, kids: the Open Smart Grid Protocol project rolled its own crypto and ended up with something horribly insecure.…

Take $AU485 million and call me in the morning, says Doctor Ley Having failed to attract Australians to e-health records in any significant numbers, the cash-strapped federal government is going to pour nearly half a billion into “rebooting” the strategy.…

Desired State Configuration tool spans Windows and Linux In yet another sign that Microsoft is a very different animal these days, the company has released PowerShell DSC (desired state configuration) for Linux.…

Here comes the new levy, same as the old Australia's government has slapped the defibrillator on the Vertigan review of the National Broadband Network (NBN), and is asking for submissions about how subsidies for unprofitable services in remote areas should operate.…

Government mulls saving Telstra nearly nothing at all In its relentless search for regulations that impose unnecessary compliance costs on industry, the federal government is considering scrapping untimed local telephone calls in Australia, again.…

Another borked software upgrade gives Google's cloud hiccups Google's revealed that it has once again borked its own cloud with an update.…

Steven Spielberg chooses exec producer credit Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has thrown his weight behind a hotly-anticipated Minority Report TV series.…

Spaceship beamed back data to Earth before crash landing into alien world Boffins have learned that Mercury's magnetic field is nearly four billion years old.…

Plus: Chocolate Factory is still hanging on to stale pale males QuoTW The first full week of May saw Uber size up Nokia's map biz, while a Tiversa employee claimed he went rogue and Tesla caught flack for its new home battery pack.…

Ideal if you roll in pissed to find an empty fridge ... but a full pet cage. Or maybe not We at the El Reg post-pub nosh team are taking a break from the kitchen this week, and bringing instead a report from deepest Peru on classic cuy chactado (deep-fried guinea pig), courtesy of my old pal Gavin Wright.…

Reg readers handle sticky situations with grace and wit On-call (a bit NSFW) Welcome to On-call, our fortnightly look at readers' experiences when called off-site. In our last instalment, we recounted the tale of the reader who sprung a colleague pleasuring herself with cutlery. Which of course prompted readers to send tales about similar indiscretions.…