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'F***wits from Romford' hoping for VIP tickets to The Force Awakens premiere A couple of Brits have made a cheeky pitch for tickets to the premiere of forthcoming Star Wars flick The Force Awakens by sending a model X-wing fighter into the stratosphere.…

Yi qi baffles modern dinoboffins Chinese dinoboffins have announced the discovery of one of the oddest creatures that may have ever attempted flight. The critter lived during the Jurassic Period, about 160 million years ago, 10 million years before the appearance of the first bird.…

Perfect for security-conscious types who want cameras in every bedroom Breaking Fad Whether you’re a fan of the Internet of Things (IoT) or just a user of home technology, for many Reg readers IP connectivity is something that you probably want just about everywhere in your home, whether it’s to WhatsApp from the bath, or for things like media streamers and smart TVs in the living room.…

OS heading in the right direction at long last Build 2015 Microsoft has released preview Build 10074 of Windows 10 at its Build developer event in San Francisco.…

Cupertino idiot-tax operation junks haul of defective gear Apple scrapped a whole batch of Apple Watches after finding a fault with the wristjob's vibrating Taptic Engine, say reports.…

Come in Google, your time is up. Watson, we're watching you The brothers behind the powerful Wolfram Alpha search platform and Wolfram programming language want code-slingers to take on IBM and Google.…

Truth, lies and the website anyone can muck about with The story of Grant Shapps and Wikipedia – which dominated news coverage of the General Election for a whole day last week – shows that new media can make a monkey out of respectable old media – even with a tale that falls far short of old media’s standards of proof.…

Massive health database + leaky Euro government = what could possibly go wrong? Plans to centralise the storage of health data in France are being considered by the French parliament.…

Bumbling duffers using WinXP and old Android releases aren't helping The road towards phasing out the ageing SHA-1 crypto hash function is likely to be littered with potholes, security experts warn.…

Session jacking bug bores bug bounty boffins Clarified Security researcher Jaanus Kääp has disclosed a year-old cross-site scripting (XSS) bug in eBay's messaging service that lets attackers target victims through messages.…

A few cores in your modem and OpenStack driving network function virtualisation Intel has assembled a stack of technologies it thinks can give broadband modems a brain implant and change the nature of home broadband services.…

Latest New Horizons imagery shows odd features Pic The latest data beamed in across the huge void of space from NASA's far-away New Horizons space probe appears to show that dwarf planet Pluto has a glowing spot on its pole.…

12-Spectrum network assembles orchestra to play Mahler symphony Oxford's Museum of the History of Science have tackled, and solved, a problem posed in the 1982 manual for the ZX Spectrum.…

When we say 'butterfly' we mean... well... VERY NSFW Reg reader Mike W has sent us something rather interesting from Facebook, which asked him to prove he's human with the test below that asked him to pick out pictures of butterflies. We'll explain the white space at grid position A2 after the image.…

Take one photon and fake it 'til you make it “How good is your random number generator?” is a pretty ticklish question in cryptography that a bunch of Swiss quantum bods have set out to answer.…

$10k demands are paid, and plod stays away RSA 2015 RSA chief information security officer David Martin says ransomware scum may have reached the sweet spot between extorting users and avoiding law enforcement heat.…

Trolls strangle anonymous chat app In an almost-unprecedented move, a silicon valley founder is exiting a company before it's burned all its money: anonymous chat app Secret is looking for a graceful exit.…

New play bundles Citrix virty desktops and apps, plus NetScaler VCE, the converged infrastructure lovechild of Cisco, EMC and VMware, is starting to get into interesting competitive tangles.…

Fibre Channel endures the bizzare love triangle Brocade's announced another chunk of its IP strategy, this time with an eye to drawing network-attached storage (NAS) devices into its warm embrace.…

We've written a document, that's gotta be a good start Verizon has taken the leap into the world of software-defined networking, announcing a strategy and its initial partner list for a multi-year rollout.…

Reports suggest debt restructure didn't fly and a powerup's needed The low-cost Android gaming startup Ouya is on the brink of collapse and wants a buyer, fast.…

It's 2015 and half a million people will still click on stuff we knew was bad in the '90s Macro malware is making a comeback with one nineties nasty infecting half a million computers, Microsoft says.…

This is how Big Red is going to migrate you to the cloud Oracle and Accenture are cuddling in the cloud.…

Motion to axe rules will run right into Obama's veto stamp US Presidential wannabe Rand Paul (R-KY) has filed a motion under the Congressional Review Act that could block the introduction of the Democrat-driven net neutrality rules.…

Hang out the 'Gone Phishing' sign and relax Google's seen way too much phishing, it seems, so the Chocolate Factory has pushed out a Chrome extension to catch attacks against accounts on Google domains.…

SaaS upstart hires bean counters after mystery giant comes knocking Salesforce.com is being eyed up for an acquisition – and has hired financial experts to guide it through the biz gobble, it's claimed.…

Vulture South defrosts Turnbull 2012 to see if his opposition positions have kept well In what we believe to be a world first, The Register has secured the services Australia's shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, circa 2012, to interview himself as the nation's current government communications minister now, in 2015. Over to you, Malcolms ...…

We come in pieces Vid Roscosmos has written off the Progress supply capsule that was supposed to deliver tons of cargo to the International Space Station. The Russian space agency said the out-of-control craft will burn up within days as it falls back to Earth.…

Leather-clad Android 5.1 smartie will make a difference – if people buy it South Korean electronics giant LG is putting on its best face after its bottom line plunged by two thirds.…

Tickling IT buyers' sensitivities by hitting the G-spot With its greatly expanded VSP G-line of products, Hitachi Data Systems has opened a path to a single converged enterprise storage array platform – and has done so by eliminating proprietary hardware dependencies.…

Can YOU think of a reason to strap one of these to your face? Build 2015 Microsoft is serious about HoloLens, and it devoted some stage time during Wednesday morning's keynote at the Build conference in San Francisco to explaining how its futuristic headset will be more than just a fancy toy.…

Microsoft wants no developers to be left out Build 2015 Microsoft does plan to get Android code working with Windows 10 – so the rumors are true, sort of.…

Joint press conference promises to finally pass law A new bill that will bring about the end of patent trolls will be introduced to US Congress today (Wednesday). Its backers are confident it will be signed into law "in six months or less."…

FBI snitch exposes alleged account-emptying scam The FBI has charged a former JP Morgan employee with selling customer account information to thieves so that their accounts could be emptied without triggering any alarms.…

Bloke pepper-sprayed and kidnapped in online ad sting, it is claimed A "test model" iPad was stolen this month from a lonely-heart in his 20s, who is thought to be an Apple worker. The unnamed man had responded to a sex ad online – and got more than he bargained for.…

If robots can find planets, why can't they find the ingredients to get me a G&T? A robotic telescope enslaved by the will of astroboffins has done their bidding and discovered three "supersized Earths" orbiting a star in our galactic neighbourhood. Based at Lick Observatory, the robotic telescope scans the sky every night in search of new Earth-like planets for colonisation study.…

Imagine if GE owned EMC – that's Hitachi today Hitachi has whipped out a data-center outage tool, a health data storage product, and an analytics center of excellence – and put them under a social innovation umbrella. What gives?…

Redmond's new standards-compliant browser gets a real name at last Build 2015 Microsoft has announced the official name for its new, modern web browser for Windows 10, hitherto known as Project Spartan: Microsoft Edge.…

Hyper-converged box avoids the NameNode bottleneck The Hitachi Hyper Scale-Out Platform – announced on Tuesday – is a single system for ingesting, accessing and analyzing big data-type information. Its architecture differs from typical Hadoop systems in that it avoids NameNode resource contention.…

Microsoft's new cross-platform editor show non-Windows devs some love Build 2015 Microsoft has expanded its Visual Studio line of software development tools to platforms other than Windows for the first time.…

But he promises the company will still have his advocacy ONTAP NetApp CTO Jay Kidd has decided to finish his corporate career and is retiring.…

New York's Department of Financial Services ready to publish new rules Bitcoin will officially enter the mainstream financial world next month when New York State's Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) publishes a regulatory framework for the virtual currency, allowing virtual currency exchange itBit to become the first-ever legitimate Bitcoin bank.…

It all comes down to the word "any" Analysis The US government has argued that the rules around how and when it is allowed to shutdown phone networks must remain secret because the disclosure could endanger lives.…

Don't speak to the face cos the book is closed, m'kay? Facebook's Brussels lobbyist Richard Allan took to the pages of the Pink 'Un on Wednesday morning to have a good old moan about "multiple" EU nations digging around the free content ad network's data-slurping biz practices.…

Hidden form field let anyone take control of punters' cash Betfair has left consumers wide-eyed with worry after gaping holes in its its account recovery system were discovered by users.…

More chocolate dessert, Commissioner? Google doubled its EU lobbying efforts last year – but the real figure is likely to be much higher than it has declared, as it doesn’t include money spent on ongoing disputes.…

Surely they can't be that desperate... Build 2015 Microsoft’s annual developer conference Build kicks off later today, and rumours are swirling that Redmond has a bold plan to rescue Windows Phone from irrelevance. Aside from a modest 10 to 15 per cent share in some markets, the platform has gone nowhere, despite billions of dollars of support from Nokia and Microsoft.…

Seeing AND assessing more than one error at a time? Hold my coat, IBM got this +Vid IBM has claimed major breakthroughs in quantum computing after boffins in Big Blue's lab demonstrated the ability to simultaneously detect and measure bit-flip and phase-flip quantum errors for the first time.…

Moshe Yanai’s latest storage upstart unicorn bares its horn Symmetrix inventor and serial startup whiz Moshe Yanai has another startup exiting stealth; Inifinidat, which has a funding round and high-enough VC valuation for it to be a unicorn.…

Meanwhile, AWS and Microsoft duke it out in the cloud