The Register

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is telling the people of Florida about his plans for a permanent base on the Moon, and suggesting it may be possible for the satellite to become the 51st US state.…

NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has identified a slew of new subjects, adding 26 planets in 11 systems to its inventory.…

A group of researchers at University of California Riverside hopes to chip away at one of physics’ ‘question of questions’ – why the blazes we’re here at all. Their hope is to make electron/positron pairs live long enough to measure the positron’s mass and find out if it’s different to the electron.…

Representatives of 21 of the EU’s member states, including the UK, have signed off on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) – the European version of the US SOPA and PIPA rolled into one and cranked up to 11.…

Two of the Megaupload executives arrested in last week’s raid on the company in New Zealand have been granted bail. Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato will have to submit to strict bail conditions including electronic monitoring.…

The father of 802.11a wireless chipsets, Dr David Skellern, is one of a bunch of tech-sector luminaries to be gonged in the Australia Day honours list.…

Somehow, we still manage to inch-out the limits of Moore’s Law: in a double-whammy to end the week, IBM has demonstrated the smallest carbon nanotube transistor, and has claimed the world’s fastest graphene transistor.…

We’re all familiar with the syndrome: someone forgets to fill in the price field in a database, and all of a sudden, an online store is offering products at zero dollars.…

Award winning digital technology start-up Digislide has been plunged into administration after collapsing in a mountain of debt and irate shareholders.…

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is to investigate a promotional campaign by confectionary giant Mars, which hired B-list celebrities to push its Snickers candy bars.…

Having bought rival Voltaire, Mellanox Technologies has pretty much ruled the InfiniBand adapter and switching roost for the past several years. But this week Intel shelled out $125m to acquire the InfiniBand chip, adapter, and switch businesses from QLogic, and the big question now is: what does this mean for Mellanox?…

NSFW A conceptual design for a new iPad case would let Apple fanbois get very personal indeed with their favorite fondleslab.…

In the latest maneuver of the tech industry's ongoing patent wars, Intel has struck a $120m deal with RealNetworks to purchase 190 patents and 170 patent applications, along with what both companies define as "next-generation video codec software".…

NEC is set to slash 10,000 jobs including 3,000 unlucky employees from its workforce outside of Japan, after its revised forecast revealed the Japanese electronics giant would make a year end net loss of ¥100bn (£820m).…

Fuming Virgin Media customers have taken to the telco's forum to complain that their email addresses have been used by Google, instead of being kept private.…

Napster UK has a new owner: Rhapsody, the company that killed the service off in the States.…

CPDP Google's privacy policy counsel in Brussels has questioned certain parts of European Commissioner Viviane Reding's freshly tabled draft bill on data protection law within the EU.…

The newly renamed Suomi NPP satellite has snapped a hi-res composite of the Earth from a number of swaths over the surface taken on 4 January.…

Fake anti-virus scams are on the wane but drive-by-download threats have rocketed over the past year thanks to the hugely popular Blackhole crimeware kit, while Conficker remains prolific some three years after its release, according to Sophos.…

WD has announced its new Thunderbolt-bolstered MyBook, telling us that we can soon eyeball the super speeded-up gear at a demo at the Macworld/iWorld show.…