The US military has issued a warning notice barring flights above a large area of the northern Pacific for two and a half hours early on Thursday morning. The stricken spy satellite marked for destruction by US warships will pass over the taped-off area just at this time, indicating that the first shot will take place then.…

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch has issued an update (pdf) on its investigation into the 17 January crash-landing of a Boeing 777 at Heathrow, indicating that there "were no anomalies in the major aircraft systems" and that the "autopilot and the autothrottle systems behaved correctly and the engine control systems were providing the correct commands prior to, during, and after, the reduction in thrust".…

A joint working group set up by the British government and US space agency NASA has recommended that the two countries cooperate on a "UK-led" unmanned moon mission.…

BT customers with Business PSTN lines will find their contract upgraded to include BT Business Line Divert come Thursday - but will find that upgrade locks them into a 12-month repeating contract unless they opt out before it kicks in.…

Upscale online supermarket Ocado has alerted its customers to the hitherto unknown threat of fake delivery vans and drivers. Its "security-conscious customers", says the company in an email, can now arrange to be sent the registration number of the van and the name of the driver a few hours before the deliver is due.…

The US site for Wikileaks, a website that makes it easy for whistleblowers to leak documents, has been knocked off the internet after hosting evidence that claimed a bank located in the Cayman Islands engaged in money laundering and tax evasion.…

Shuka-shuka-shuka-shuka-shuka.…

Unhappy that Comcast is busting BitTorrents, BitTorrent has decided to bust this BitTorrent busting.…

Spanish police have arrested ten Nigerians suspected of running a spam-fuelled lottery scam that raked in €19,000 ($28,000) in illicit earnings over three months.…

Finnish police are blocking more than 1,000 legal websites, including one belonging to a well-known internet activist, under a secretive system designed to prevent access to foreign sites that contain child pornography, according to a group that advocates for individual rights online.…

Database management systems (DBMS) are 20 years out of date and should be completely rewritten to reflect modern use of computers.…

The FBI on Friday revealed that human error led to surveillance of an entire email network back in 2006, rather than the single email address approved by the secretive court which approves domestic wiretaps and other forms of e-surveillance.…

Opera has taken exception to the manner in which Mozilla handled the disclosure of a security bug that affects both firm's browsers. The moderate severity flaw involving file input controls creates a means to upload arbitrary files, assuming hackers know the full path and name of the file.…

Painting on the Forth Rail Bridge is scheduled to end in 2012, concluding over 100 years of relentless brushwork which inspired the phrase "like painting the Forth Bridge", the BBC reports.…

The British government is to pilot the limited opening up of sex offender information to parents worried about specific individuals who have access to their children.…

Aficionados of blood-red Moons will, weather permitting, on Wednesday/Thursday be able to enjoy the last total lunar eclipse until 2010.…

US physicists are rather pleased with themselves having perfected a clock "so accurate it will neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years", Reuters reports.…

Virgin Media customers have been suffering email outages for several days, prompting the firm to call in Microsoft engineers to help with an urgent upgrade.…

Russia and China have expressed concern over US plans to fire interceptors at a malfunctioning American spy satellite in coming weeks before it plunges fully into the Earth's atmosphere. Meanwhile, it has emerged that Washington launched a crash effort to destroy the spacecraft early in the New Year, less than a fortnight after it was launched and failed to come online.…

Ron Sandler has quit his non-executive chairmanship at Computacenter with immediate effect following his decision to run Northern Rock while it is under public ownership.…

A woman who admitted rifling through emails in AOL accounts maintained by her former employer, Nannies Inc, while working for a competitor agency, has been fined £500 plus £60 costs.…

The Office of Fair Trading has sent out thousands of fake scam text messages to 18-24 year-old mobile phone users to raise awareness about scams.…

The Village People have joined forces with pint-sized popster Prince in an effort to slap The Pirate Bay with yet another copyright infringement lawsuit.…

Review Griffin makes some pretty cool bits and bobs for the iPod and iPhone, but its crowning achievement to date has to be the new Evolve iPod dock and speaker set.…

The former Thames Valley detective at the centre of allegations that police bugged MPs' and lawyers' visits to prison inmates says he still hasn't heard from the official enquiry. This has reportedly led "a friend" of his to brand the enquiry "meaningless".…

Toshiba shares jumped more than six per cent today as investors voiced their approval of the company's alleged decision to abandon the HD DVD optical disc format.…

The FBI yesterday detained an unnamed passenger who provoked a two-hour closure of a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport by making a "suspicious comment".…

Her Maj's Revenue and Customs apparently blew nearly £1.4m in 2006 while brainstorming its way to a new slogan which simply reads "HMRC Ambition".…

A Moroccan IT worker faces jail for setting up a Facebook account in the name of Prince Moulay Rachid, the second in line to the country's throne.…

!!!!! Some of Yahoo!'s institutional investors are keen for the proposed Microsoft takeover to go ahead, not because they're pleased with the offer price but because they own shares in both Microsoft and Yahoo!.…

Samsung only launched its new i780 Qwerty handset a week ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but the phone's already appeared on Orange's website.…

A Chicago court last Friday declared Steve Fossett officially dead - five months after he and his aircraft went missing in Nevada.…

Panasonic has designed a plasma TV which it reckons will withstand the force of a fiercely flung Wii Remote.…

A former Google contract worker is claiming $25m damages from the search monolith for allegedly stealing his idea for Google Sky - the heavenly Google Earth feature that allows users to navigate the universe.…

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome Centrino... 2. Yes, despite numerous annual updates since the launch of Intel's laptop platform, the next version, codenamed 'Montevina', will apparently be released as its second generation.…

The NHS's new Choose and Book system, it says here, is a "national electronic referral service which gives patients a choice of place, date, and time for their first outpatient appointment in a hospital or clinic." Ever wondered why they're called "patients"? Well, in recent weeks The Register's Mystery Croaker has had the opportunity to road test Choose and Book, and to find out.…

Hands on A directory service is an application that lets you store, retrieve and modify information about network-attached resources such as users.…

Fundamentally, there's nothing terribly new about the problems posed by Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) when it comes to security, we just need to apply some good old security principles to this new technology.…

Toshiba's board of directors will this week meet to put and end to the company's production of HD DVD machines, it has been claimed.…

Mobile World Congress With thousands of vendors plugging away at the Mobile World Congress, it's clear how difficult it is to find catchy marketing slogans. The barrel has been well and truly scraped. So what to do?…