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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.…

A day out at James Bond's car maker Vulture @ the Wheel Aston Martin wants to take on Tesla with a 1,000bhp electric version of its Rapide S. The prestige British marque has also recently announced that it has secured funding to build an all-electric crossover car called the DBX. This is all part of a 200m expansion plan for the firm's factory in Gaydon, Warwickshire, and it seemed like more than enough of a reason for us to visit this modern (and yet retro) palace of technology.…

Assuming anyone votes for it, as I did Worstall @ the Weekend Now that the election's over (result unknown as I write) it's possible to perform for a reader request: what would the economic effect of Britain leaving the European Union be?…

It's not perfect but it is worth serious consideration Review We look at the Ring video doorbell security system.…

Hubble time! Does Milky Way have similar disk of light? A team of scientists have clocked a huge halo of gas surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy.…

Blames investment in staff, products and expansion plan Spotify's net losses jumped significantly in 2014 to $197m from $68m a year earlier, it has been reported.…

Two suspects face conspiracy and fraud charges Two men, who were indicted and arrested Stateside on Friday for allegedly breaching pic-hosting website Photobucket.com, face conspiracy and fraud charges.…

Millennials can’t compete with grizzled ex-Cold War spies Film Review Most serious spy movies seem to be pretty much the same these days: a parkour-fuelled, adrenaline-pumping, extremely violent rollercoaster through an occasionally thin plot, such as the Bourne and modern Bond franchises. However, every so often, you get the quiet, studied manipulations of a film like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, where an agent’s brains are worth infinitely more than their brawn.…

Looks like an Aston, drives better than a Prius Vulture at the Wheel Considering the number of Toyota hybrids that you see on British roads, it’s surprising that, despite Ford having offered a range of the things to the North American market since 2009, the new Mondeo Hybrid is the first one Uncle Henry has punted on this side of the pond.…

How to create your own IoT gadgets and gizmos Page File The Internet of Things (IoT) is all the rage at the moment, with dozens of manufacturers throwing out kit like remote-control lightbulbs, weather stations, thermostats and plenty more. Some of those are great products and some of them are also-rans.…

Just ask the young gonzo techblogsterz SFTW, Sir? Some people mature like a fine wine. Others mellow out like a smooth whiskey. Yet others get more sprightly and a bit fruity as they grow older, akin to a strong gin and tonic.…

Sell mobile chips in Europe? Regulators have questions Qualcomm may have settled its antitrust issues in China but EU regulators are still scrutinizing the chipmaker closely, a new report claims.…

A lot of people like their high tech titchy The success of the Raspberry Pi has spawned a cottage industry of imitators, but the budget hobbyist computer's $35 price tag is looking downright expensive compared to the latest arrival, the $9 Chip.…

CEO Jamie Siminoff welcomes The Reg to his Santa Monica HQ "You've come here at the absolute worst time," Jamie Siminoff tells us as we enter Ring's headquarters in Santa Monica.…

Bollocks, says Tiversa – he's making it up A former employee of well-connected security firm Tiversa has claimed in court that the company falsified information about the severity of a data breach at a cancer laboratory that was later forced to close after a government data security investigation.…

We think that plan for a $49bn buy is just fine, thank you AT&T has fired a fresh salvo in its exchange with Netflix over the proposed acquisition of DirecTV.…

Analysts couldn't be wrong this time, could they? Rumors of the much-fabled 12.9-inch iPad have surfaced once again, via a new analyst report.…

Request comes as latest plans put out to public comment The US government has asked the internet community how long they think it will take to decide on and implement changes to the top level of the internet, and so how long it will need to extend the current IANA contract.…

Our round-up review Collision 2015 We may have been a few miles from the famous Las Vegas Strip and all the noise and splendor, but there was no shortage of hubbub in the two giant, aircraft-hangar-like pavilions that hosted the Collision techbiz conference this week.…

The view from Italy on Big Grey's possible avenues ahead Comment Dell is a great IT company, but it is clear that they have to revise their storage strategy if they want to maintain some relevance in the IT infrastructure space. (and I’m talking about storage because I primarily cover this market … I’m sure that it wouldn’t be difficult to find similar weaknesses in fields like networking. From the outside they don’t seem all that brilliant there either).…

Cheating can be so much fun Vulture in the Saddle Eighteen miles an hour:It’s the difference between loving the Smart E-bike and hating it. This is because the bike is electrically assisted up to 15 mph – the legal limit for assistance in Europe – and beyond that pedalling the very heavy machine becomes exceptionally hard work.…

But both of them are eating hard for the win Analysis We're in a kind of phoney war right now as all-flash arrays, hybrid arrays and hyper-conveged arrays fight for mind-and wallet-share. The storage world is in stasis whilst customers work out what to do with the onslaught of SAN/filer alternatives coming their way. What are the suppliers doing to cover the various ways customers could jump?…

'Com Spammers' turned out to be US-based and within reach Watchdogs at the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) have obtained a restraining order against alleged diet pill scammers.…

There's still time to act It is time to upgrade. In about a month Server 2003 will receive its farewell set of patches and reach the end of its officially supported life.…

Maybe don't open any pdfs until then, eh? Adobe has pre-announced plans to release cross-platform security updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat next Tuesday (12 May).…

ISS 'nauts miss out on grub, also chance to jettison rubbish The latest Russian Progress supply podule destined for the International Space Station has burned up over the Pacific, the Roscosmos space agency has confirmed.…

Gordon Brown's vision to be realised at last? The long-delayed "Snooper's Charter" allowing increased interception of communications by the security services and the police is set to be introduced at last, Home Secretary Theresa May has suggested.…

Firm names new chief Revenue soared by 45 per cent at Chinese e-commerce and tat bazaar giant Alibaba to 17.43bn yuan (£1.8bn) for its first quarter, compared with the same period last year.…

The Microsoft love that dared to speak its name NetSuite, the ERP-as-a-service firm, is shifting its entire business – and therefore that of its customers - off Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) and onto Microsoft’s Azure.…

Cassini sniffs habitability in jets squirting from lunar bottom Astroboffins reckon they have discovered the pH value - the acidity or alkalinity - of water plumes spurting forth from Saturn's moon Enceladus. The findings are considered another step forward in the hunt for alien life, as the possible warm sub-icecap oceans of Enceladus are thought to be one of the most promising habitats off Earth in our solar system.…

Horrific turkey triad test: Gigli, Pearl Harbor and Battlefield Earth back to back The vital question as to whether it is humanly possible to watch celluloid trainwrecks Gigli, Pearl Harbor and Battlefield Earth back-to-back was answered last weekend when a crack El Reg Special Projects Bureau squad endured 403 minutes of continuous cinematic outrage and emerged alive, if somewhat shaken.…

It's not the Daily Mail's fault that Daily Mail readers exist - it's the other way round Given that the election results are nearly all in it's going to be some few femtoseconds before Polly Toynbee starts claiming that it's the right wing media that woefully misinformed the British public and that's why the forces of all that's good and proper didn't win.…

You thought the FRAND patent wars were over? Think again The expiry of patent licences from Ericsson means that Apple has been selling phones it should not have been, according to Ericsson, and the Swedish commtech firm has now asked Apple to pay up or stop doing it. Ericsson has filed suits in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands against Apple's products.…

Met Police at least have a plan: NHS doesn't even have a clue UK government departments still running Windows XP are now doing so entirely on their own.…

Steady as she goes, Number One Dot Hill is getting the trade winds behind its sails. The OEM disk array supplier continued its comeback with another quarter showing annual revenue and profits growth as new OEM customers like Teradata and Quantum took its arrays to market.…

More than 60 Met Police workers sacked for other computer, er, cockups A Met copper received "management advice" after it emerged he had "participated in a pornographic film aimed at the gay market for which he had been paid money," a Freedom of Information response to El Reg has revealed.…

Set you pipes free, within reason When you sign up for data centre services, it's easy to focus on the core stuff like uptime, cooling and cabinet availability, while forgetting that getting wide-area (private circuit or internet) links can sometimes be tricky. If you forget to examine how carrier-neutral your provider is, though, then you risk delays in moving, increased costs and even a potential loss of resilience.…

Storage array machinations to have cake and eat it Dell has dug a deeper bottom level for its SC Compellent arrays and piled up a new peak for its PS series EqualLogic arrays, expanding and enhancing both product ranges while still having an overall convergence strategy.…

VMware and friends offer cold water laundry list for containers When enthusiasm for a technology reaches fever pitch, as it appears to have done for Docker, it can sometimes be easy to forget that using it securely needs a lot more work than clicking on an installer and getting on with things.…

You live in a bubble you make, says Zuck Squad research Science has published research conducted by two Facebook staff and one academic from the University of Michigan on “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook.”…

Even worse when you tinker with it. A staggering 95 percent of enterprise SAP installations contain high-severity vulnerabilities that could allow systems to be hijacked, researchers say.…

Strictly no-nonsense justice meted out in MMORPG A hacker who had spent weeks pwning fellow Guild Wars 2 players got some stylised justice when the game creators made a spectacle of his banning and character destruction.…

The Nebula crew move to Big Red's infrastructure-as-a-service team Oracle's senior veep for cloud Peter Magnusson says the company has hired about 40 engineers from failed OpenStack startup Nebula.…

No workarounds means you'll patch or die trying Cisco has patched a remote code execution bug that could give attackers root privileges on its Unified Computing System (UCS) Central software used by more than 30,00 organisations.…

Citrix's experimental mouse to become official at Synergy conference next week Citrix will next week release a mouse.…

Pay up or we'll send up to 400Gbps your way New Zealand Internet Task Force (NZITF) chair Barry Brailey is warning Australian and New Zealand enterprises to be on the look out for distributed denial of service extortion attacks demanding payment of up to AU$7500.…

Who needs Google when you own your own maps? Transport's enfant terrible, Uber, has reportedly put in a bid to acquire Nokia's HERE mapping unit.…

Discipline comes to PCIe flash device driving It all started with flash devices upsetting the cosy disk world. Flash was faster than disk at responding to IO requests, if not at streaming data, and the easiest way to put flash drives, solid state drives, into servers and storage arrays was to use disk drive bays and interfaces such as SAS and SATA.…

It's rollback time, unless you want your VMs to be cut off from the world VMware has recalled a recent patch because that sees virtual machines using VMware NSX for vSphere 6.x or Cisco Nexus 1000v unable to communicate across their hosts.…