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Rush to flash and collapse of PC market fingered for decline Disk drive shipments have a negative CAGR, and will fall by 3.7 per cent between 2013 and 2020, said spindle motor maker Nidec.…

The company with no CAPITALS wants to lend capital giffgaff claims to be “the network run by you”, so perhaps it shouldn’t be quite so surprised when the online community objects to what was a mobile phone company suddenly deciding it’s a bank.…

Buy 2000AD online, get DRM-free copies forever Rebellion, the games developer that owns 2000AD - British comics' finest product – has banished digital rights management (DRM) from Mega-City One.…

But everywhere is 127.0.0.1 for Uncle Sam Rackspace has completed its Crawley data centre in West Sussex, and claims that it is among the most power-efficient in the UK.…

Buy for old-skool servers, transfer to hipstercoverged boxen, irritate Nutanix et al VMware has announced what it's calling a “vSphere Loyalty Program” that allows vSphere usetrs to “apply their licenses to the purchase of VMware EVO:RAIL appliances from our nine Qualified EVO:RAIL Partners.”…

Only one stiff allowed per service The Chinese Ministry of Culture has announced that the government will begin working with the police to clamp down on families hiring strippers for funerals in order to increase in size (dare we say 'arouse') mourner attendance figures.…

ThinkPads burn two, turn punter's skin scarlet and burned their clothes Lenovo has extended the recall for bodgy batteries it shipped with ThinkPad computers between 2010 and 2012.…

Even with reduced on-board storage, 'the cloud ate my homework' isn't going to cut it Microsoft has quietly let it be known it's developed a cheap cut of the Surface 3 for schools.…

IP Infusion joins Round Rock's not-quite-white-box switching plan Dell has celebrated the first birthday of its open networking program by launching more products.…

Keep your eye on the OpenStack summit Seagate will hand over some of its Kinetic Storage platform to the world at the coming OpenStack summit in Vancouver, Canada, The Register has learned.…

Promises real-time least-cost routing in the back of cloudy Beetle Citrix has sold WAN optimisation kit for ages, but hasn't pushed its HDX technology far beyond its base of application and desktop virtualisation users. Until today, when it shoved the newly-badged “CloudBridgeVirtual WAN” into the sunlight.…

Danger lurks in shadow IT The mention of shadow IT can produce beads of sweat on the brow of any knowledgeable IT staff member. For those who do not know, the term covers any company systems and services that are not procured by the IT department.…

Slap on the wrist for his Thunder-balls-up General David Petraeus – the former head of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and briefly the head of the CIA – has been sentenced to two years' probation and fined $100,000 after admitting leaking America's secrets to his lover.…

Rocky BTC only good for laundering cash, not saving and spending RSA 2015 The falling price of Bitcoin is forcing ransomware masterminds to convert the crypto-currency as soon as they can. Rather than holding on to their ill-gotten BTC, the crims are simply laundering the ransom money as soon as possible.…

About 10 per cent missing from this time last year Microsoft weathered a punishing third quarter of its fiscal 2015, and despite some signs of growth in the cloud, its sales were dragged down by dwindling demand from consumers.…

Missed analysts' expectations again. How healthy is Mountain View's cloud biz? Google missed analysts' earnings estimates for the sixth quarter in a row on Thursday, despite the fact that its actual performance for the three months ending on March 31 was more than respectable.…

But dragging retail meant it lost money for the quarter anyway Amazon lifted the veil from the financials of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing business for the first time on Thursday, and it looks to be off to a fine start for the first quarter of the company's fiscal 2015.…

Upstart conference starts up with a splash near the lake Analysis "Last year, people were surprised that Vator Splash came to Oakland, this year they're thinking 'yeah, that's about right'."…

Cable giant sees writing on the wall, cuts bait in biz gobble battle, says insider Comcast is walking away from its proposed $45bn merger with Time Warner Cable (TWC), insiders claim.…

You wait ages for a computer security bill, then two come along at once The US House of Representatives has passed not one but two computer security bills that allow companies and Uncle Sam to share information about citizens, cyber-attacks and software vulnerabilities – and removes any legal liabilities for firms doing so.…

IaaS indeed, it's one helluva PaaS-ing contest Analysis It's probably not entirely a coincidence that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will all file their quarterly earnings reports on Thursday. But while these tech titans wage a tug-of-war for your public compute workloads, each is relying on other sources of revenue to bankroll its cloud land grab – and the three companies have very different core businesses.…

You can change a password. You can change a PIN. Good luck changing your skin RSA 2015 Malware can snaffle fingerprints used to unlock Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphones thanks to a security blunder, researchers claim.…

Political problems may yet deflate penguin-centric net coverage plan Google has posted a new video explaining the progress it’s made with Project Loon, the plan to float thousands of balloons into the upper atmosphere to provide internet connectivity for penguins.…

Ferrous Hillock offers cloud backup, replication and DR Backup, replication and DR services are being offered to EMC customers by backup bods Iron Mountain, thanks to it hosting Data Domain and Avamar replication targets in its data centres.…

From homemade nitroglycerine to Intel: Meet Gordon Moore Critics have had half a century to pick apart and predict the end of Moore’s Law, which marked its Big Five Zero birthday this week.…

Microsoft and open-source rivals lose it in the labs The hypervisor is a commodity. VMware's ESXi, Microsoft's Hyper-V and the open-source community's Xen and KVM are all right and proper tools for virtualising workloads. Does that mean we should all stampede away from expensive proprietary hypervisors and dine on the open-source freebies? This being IT, the answer is "it depends".…

Sneaky state-sponsored snoopery can be picked up by counting HTTP packets Security researchers have developed a method for detecting NSA Quantum Insert-style hacks.…

Fall-out from massive February data theft continues A fresh wave of scammers appear to be targeting TalkTalk customers, following a massive data theft earlier this year, The Register has learned.…

Two million dollars worth of kit now delivered Comment NetApp is supplying Data ONTAP storage for use on an Aussie supercomputer (Raijin), which already uses DDN storage, and we wondered about the whys and wherefores of adding three new hardware platforms and two new operating systems.…

The banker's offer just went through the roof It’s hard to escape the commodity niche in cloud, but Box.com is trying.…

Old storage wilts and there's not enough new stuff yet EMC’s first quarter results were like the curate's egg; good in parts, but hit by currency problems, job cuts and unsatisfactory core storage revenues in others.…

When it comes to coverage on the rail network, we're all in second class Comment Mobile coverage on trains is rubbish, Wi-Fi isn’t much better and battles between companies offering the services are not going to make it much better.…

A rich roast of fail could brew up a lot of trouble for members Costa Coffee is warning customers it may have suffered a security breach and, alongside resetting the passwords for all of its Coffee Club accounts, is going to implement a "new format" for users' passwords.…

The art of analytics is no longer restricted to data scientists Comment Teradata’s Aster Data software is a lens through which data scientists can create visualisations of Big Data. Sounds dull, right? Not when you see the beautiful flowery images it creates.…

These beasts really DID have two backs Differences in stegosauruses' armour plating may have had distinctly sexual origins, the University of Bristol's Evan Thomas Saitta suggests.…

No robbing Pietro to pay Paulo, please, Mr President MEPs are pushing back against European Commission plans to slash science funding.…

Cheer up Mark: sales nearly doubled at your content farm Profits at global ad platform Facebook plunged by 20 per cent on the year to $512m (£341m) for the company's first quarter, as it shelled out vast amounts of cash in pursuit of world domination.…

Slay distributed dragons with old-school skills Distributed computing is no longer something that only occurs in universities or the basements of the really frightening nerds with Beowulf clusters made of yesteryear's recycled horrors.…

New threats evolved in 2014, mainly aimed at the US RSA 2015 Banking botnets persist as a threat despite recent high-profile takedowns which only achieve a temporary calming effect, according to a new study from Dell SecureWorks.…

After waffling on, it's about to do something ‘inherently sensible’ After Uber’s woes in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain, Belgium looks set to overturn its existing ban on the (taxi and/or tech) service and bring it within legal regulation.…

48,000 PCs at TEPCO still run Microsoft's unloved child The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy complex, has been told to migrate 48,000 internet-connected PCs off Windows XP sooner rather than later.…

You'll need a machine with the right IOMMU tech RSA 2015 On Wednesday, at the RSA conference in San Francisco, Microsoft veep Scott Charney outlined a new security mechanism in Windows 10 called Device Guard. We've taken a closer look.…

Your PoS is a P.O.S., chortle hackers, uneasily RSA 2015 Fraud fighters David Byrne and Charles Henderson say one of the world's largest Point of Sale (PoS) systems vendors has been slapping the same default passwords – 166816 – on its kit since 1990. Worse still: about 90 per cent of customers are still using the password.…

WARNING: Contains strong imagery of drowned iThings from the outset A Japanese love-rat's misdeeds have left him, and his iGizmos, in hot water.…

Partnerships provide new analytics, threat detection, cloud, mobe capabilities HP has revealed a bunch of security analytics tools and services as part of an infosec portfolio launch.…

DHL deliverators to get one-time codes to pop keyless cars Amazon.com's German outpost, Amazon.de, is trialling delivery of goods direct into the trunks of buyers' cars.…

Fifty shades of серый, comrade Video Not all “space gecko” experiments end in fiery doom: a group of thick-toed geckos sent into orbit have been filmed seem to have enjoyed playing with a collar floating around their capsule.…