This week we talk about Neil Armstrong, find out about the tech trends from IFA, sleep learning, the link between 17th century witchcraft and the London riots and the rest of the week in Wired news
By: Nate Lanxon,
A Tokyo court took a few minutes today to rule that Samsung's Galaxy gear does not infringe an Apple software patent. It hands the South Korean giant a small win after its $1bn thrashing by Apple in an epic US mobile phone patent trial that concluded last week.…
Little more than two years ago, in June 2010, one of the most astonishing space missions of recent times ended when Japan's Hayabusa mission landed samples of an asteroid in the Australian outback.
The successful outcome had beaten all the odds. The robot probe suffered engine failures, a loss of fuel and communication breakdowns on its seven-year, six billion kilometre trip to explore an asteroid called Itokawa.
By: Paul Sutherland, Sen.com, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Simply by signing documents at the start rather than end, people might be encouraged to behave more honestly.
The effect was demonstrated in a series of staged and real-world experiments, which included moving signature lines from bottom to top on car insurance reports.
By: Brandon Keim, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Mobile phone operator O2 will appeal against Ofcom's decision to allow a rival firm to launch superfast broadband services later this year using its existing network capabilities, according to media reports.…
Everything Everywhere is looking for a new name, and El Reg readers haven't been backwards in coming forwards with suggestions so we present a poll from which you can pick the best.…
NFC is finally sneaking into a range of hardware, with Sony and Nokia emphasising the audio-pairing capabilities while everyone else is just sticks it in there for laughs.…
Bring Your Own Device programs can help to keep staff happy and turn IT bods into "heroes" but the hard RoI from spikes in productivity is unproven, according to Intel’s IT manager for China.…
Huawei is betting on Android with its launch of four new smartphones and two tablets all running Google's OS, albeit with a customizable interface dubbed "Emotion" that the Chinese networking giant is opening up for customer's suggestions.…
A consortium of seven technology vendors, including enterprise software heavyweights Oracle and Red Hat, have teamed up to produce an industry standard that they say will make it easier for customers to manage applications deployed in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments.…
If you're considering building your cloud infrastructure on the latest version of vSphere, you probably weren't banking on Adobe Flash being part of your set-up.…
MVNO OwnFone is pitching a £55 handset which can only call up to 12 pre-programmed numbers, betting that the ability to create your own buttons and colour scheme will blind users to the price.…
One of the most famous boxers of all time said that it isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe. For small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), like mine, who are driving ICT Innovation in Europe, failure to create a unitary patent has been wounding our feet for too long, way too long.
Innovation is a risky business. European start-ups and tech entrepreneurs -- myself included -- need an overall environment that encourages us to take those risks and rewards us for doing so successfully. We need an efficient and standardised regulatory framework that provides us with flexibility and enables us to grow. After all, my success is based solely on my product, and what's its value if I am not able to protect it?
By: Guest Author, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Apple CEO Tim Cook might be pleased with the verdict in his company's recent patent legislation against Samsung, but Samsung customers are definitely not, according to the market watchers at mobile phone trade-in firm Gazelle.…
The Republican Party has decided on its official platform for the coming presidential election, and where tech is concerned, it's running on a ticket of reforming the FCC, dumping net neutrality, and selling off wireless spectrum as fast as it can find it.…
Intel has said it'll start shipping laptops and smartphones that can share power wirelessly towards the end of next year.…
Sony has revamped and upgraded its iPad competitor, the Tablet S, giving it a speed boost, a redesigned chassis and a rack of other upgrades.
The new Android-powered Tablet S was announced at IFA 2012 by cheerful CEO Kazuo Hirai. It's now positioned under Sony's Xperia brand rather than Vaio, meaning Sony is pushing this as a mobile device, not a little PC.
By: Nate Lanxon,
3beards, the company that organises the weekly Silicon Drinkabout networking events, has partnered with the Whitechapel Gallery to create an hackathon that will unite artists and coders.
The event -- called Art Hack -- aims to bring together 50 hackers and 50 digital artists and musicians for 48 hours to create whatever they like from publicly available data. The teams will be able to use a number of different datasets, including social data from Brandwatch, music data from Echonest as well as publicly available open data, such as TFL's live transport data. The brief is simply to "create something amazing" that will reframe the way we think about the data that surrounds us every day. The results will be showcased at a celebratory Digital Sizzle party at the Gallery on 26 September 2012.
By: Olivia Solon, Edited by: Ian Steadman
A Canadian who adorned his request for a free phone with a sketch of a dragon, and received a kangaroo in response, has now been rewarded with a custom SIII as Samsung spots some good PR.…
Apple is reportedly working with hi-fi manufacturers to stream music over-the-air directly to audio equipment - without the need for Wi-Fi.…
The New Zealand High Court has unleashed some of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's considerable assets in order to help the contentious entrepreneur cover his legal fees in New Zealand.…
Microsoft on Tuesday launched a preview of Windows Azure Mobile Services, a new capability for Redmond's cloud platform that allows software developers to deploy backend services for mobile applications without any server-side coding.…
Two new Bluetooth profiles will measure how fast the user is running or peddling, creating interoperability, but are also aimed at proving that the standard isn't slowing down.…
The word “google” is the top domain name on the internet, in terms of registrations, according to new research.…
Apple is seeking quick bans on eight of Samsung's phones after beating the South Korean firm to a bloody pulp in its US patent super-trial. Yet legal experts are unsure the verdict can hold up.…
A major internet routing outage struck UK telcos over the bank holiday weekend - knackering access to the World of Warcraft website*, the BBC, Amazon, Facebook and other sites for more than 24 hours.…
MasterCard has signed an exclusive deal to develop a pay-by-wave platform for Everything Everywhere over the next half decade – hopefully one with greater impact than the existing QuickTap service.…
Europe and the US tee off soon in the Ryder Cup. Whereas pros have unbridled talent on their side, you have science on yours. These tricks will help you bag an albatross or two.
By: Brian Mossop, Edited by: Ian Steadman
If you're looking to shape up, researchers at the University of Copenhagen say 30 minutes of rigorous exercise can be as effective as an hour when it comes to shedding weight.
The team studied 60 heavy but healthy men between 20 and 40 years old who wanted to lose weight. Twenty-one were directed to get 30 minutes of aerobic exercise -- running, cycling and rowing -- daily. Twenty-one were told to get 60 minutes, and 18 were assigned to a control group that remained sedentary. The results showed that exercising for 30 minutes at a pace hard enough to break a sweat was sufficient to promote weight loss.
By: Chuck Squatriglia, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Fans of simpering scantily clad vixens are furious after the online voting system to pick the next Miss Hong Kong was demolished by hackers, allegedly. The winner of the much-hyped beauty pageant, held on Sunday, was instead decided by a panel of judges.…
Facebook stands accused by a consumer lobby group of breaching Germany's privacy laws with the recent launch of its App Center.…
Telstra has outlined plans to extend the reach of its 4G network, revealing today it will bathe “approximately two-thirds” 66% of Australia's population in fast wireless in the next ten months.…
Australia’s Shadow Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently declared the IT media includes a number of “zealots” who won’t, such is their/my fanaticism, report fairly on his alternative National Broadband Network (NBN) plans.…
As part of its ongoing bid to convince Office customers to switch to a subscription-based pricing model, Microsoft has announced that Office 2013 subscribers will be able to access temporary copies of the desktop Office applications on any computer, delivered via internet streaming technology.…
Dropbox has followed through on an earlier promise and is rolling out two-factor authentication for its Windows, Mac, and Linux users.…
The world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, China Mobile, is finally jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon with its own iCloud rival, which will also be available to internet users outside the People’s Republic.…
The world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, China Mobile, is finally jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon with its own iCloud rival, which will also be available to internet users outside the People’s Republic.…
The founder of British charity ChildLine is calling on the government to take a hardline approach against what some consider to be hardcore pornography online - by enforcing an opt-in system for adults to protect kids from being traumatised by the images.…
Rackspace’s arrival in Australia last week – complete with a swipe at local player Macquarie Telecom – has brought a response back from MacTel.…
A jury of seven men and two women has just read the Apple v. Samsung verdict to a packed courtroom -- and it was all bad news for Samsung. The Korean electronics giant has been found to infringe all of Apple's utility patents and all but one of the four design patents asserted, and was ordered to pay $1.05 billion (£665 million) in damages to Apple.
That's less than the $2.75 billion (£1.4 billion) Apple asked for, but still a huge sum. If it holds up on appeal, it will stand as the largest patent verdict of all time. More importantly, it gives Apple a huge leg-up in the corporate patent wars, and immeasurably strengthens the company's negotiating position with regard to the Android phones it is struggling against.
By: Joe Mullin, Edited by: Nate Lanxon
The nine-member jury in the closely watched patent litigation between Apple and Samsung has returned a verdict decidedly in Apple's favor, awarding the fruity firm a whopping total of $1.05bn in damages.…
A neuroscience company called Backyard Brains made a Longfin Inshore squid dance along to Cypress Hill, by stimulating its chromatophore cells to the tune of Insane in the Brain.
The firm -- founded by University of Michigan graduates -- used a microstimulation system that was last used to make cockroach legs wiggle as researchers whistled into a speaker (which essentially works like a microphone, but in reverse).
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
The Wired.co.uk Podcast has been running for almost two years. Every week, tens of thousands of people enjoy it -- but only ever in audio. Until now.
We're presenting episode 90 as a live video edition. It's identical to the audio version, but you get to see us record in the trinket cupboard as well as see the things we're talking about.
This is a trial. It's something I've wanted us to experiment with for a while, but video production is much more demanding on resources in order to do properly. We've always been quite proud of the fact that we produce a polished weekly programme from -- as you can now see -- what is quite literally a storeroom in our Bond Street office. But before we move into producing regular video content created to the same standard we want to make sure we get the facilities in place that such an endeavour requires.
For now, this is a bit of a test as well as an opportunity to watch how we produce the show every week. Maybe it's something we'll do more often, maybe it's something we'll never do again. But your feedback is welcome in terms of helping us make that decision.
By: Nate Lanxon,
It's the end of one era and the start of a new one. This week's show is Duncan's last, as he prepares to up sticks and leave Wired for Sweden. But to celebrate we are presenting episode 90 as a video edition too -- watch us record live in the trinket cupboard for the first time.
On the show this week we discuss the sexual mating plugs of mosquitoes, how the ISS is getting shields to protect it from space debris, the closure of Lemmings-publisher Psygnosis and the rest of the week in Wired news.
You can stream and download the show as normal or watch the show on Vimeo in this story. You can also download a DRM-free high-definition version for free to watch on your TV, computer, tablet or phone.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Apple's piece of China's smartphone market has almost halved to just 10 per cent in the second quarter as fanbois wait for the next iPhone model or even, gasp, switch brands.…
Vodafone's One Net service has gone down, leaving businesses with no working phones.…
Samsung will be supplying Three's 4G network, squashing ideas that the network-sharing deal with EE would simply be extended and giving Samsung a significant foothold in an increasingly competitive market.…
Blighty's playboy Prince Harry isn't the only royal hitting tabloid headlines for inappropriate snaps: Norway's monarchy has defended one of its own blue-blooded teens after his web photo uploading spree supposedly sparked a security scare.…
As Microsoft prepares to roll out Windows 8 and its Surface tablet, the company has changed its corporate logo for the first time in 25 years.
The revamped design has a sleek new font (Segoe), and incorporates a colourful Windows-like symbol directly into the logo.
It's all part of Microsoft's plan to offer a seamless visual style across all of its software and operating systems. Soon enough, everything from Windows Phone 8 to Xbox will feature that colourful tile-based interface that used to be called "Metro".
By: Mark Brown,
Facebook is yet to crack the mobile revenue conundrum as its stock continues to be hammered on Wall Street, but in the meantime the company has finally updated its dog of an iOS app.…
Both Apple and Samsung got teeny fines and had some of their products banned in South Korea, after a court in Seoul found they infringed on each other's patents.…
We're not the only singing simians. Not only do gibbons sing, but a new study of one singing, helium-breathing gibbon shows they use the same vocal technique as human sopranos.
"This is the first study to show a non-human primate using a mechanism similar to humans to make the very distinct vocalisation of songs," said primatologist Takeshi Nishimura of Japan's Kyoto University.
By: Tanya Lewis, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Panasonic has announced an Android application to control home appliances. The only catch: users also have to be prepared to shuffle their data through a cloud service for it all to work.…
California-based Aerofex claims that it's built a hoverbike with a novel, but intuitive, control system -- you swerve it left and right with your knees.
The pilot of Aerofex's hoverbike grips a pair of control bars and leans left and right to control balance. "It essentially captures the translations between the two in three axis (pitch, roll and yaw), and activates the aerodynamic controls required to counter the movement - which lines the vehicle back up with the pilot," Mark De Roche, Aerofex founder, told InnovationNewsDaily.
By: Duncan Geere, Edited by: Liat Clark
When we think of how the best consumer technology is developed, the devices that make major breakthroughs in consumer experience, we tend to think of engineers or product designers -- whether it is the Jonathan Ive-designed iPod or James Dyson and his vacuum cleaners.
What we won't think of is a mathematician. However, as we look to the near future of consumer technology, mathematicians are going to be behind the next generation of 'must have' devices and services.
By: Guest Author, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Getting faster broadband connections in rural areas remains a bugbear for many of the locals who live in the harder-to-reach parts of Blighty. So clarification from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) on competition law relating to wayleave rates has been unsurprisingly welcomed by landowners in the countryside today.…
Nokia and Samsung have teamed up to try to standardise the technology used to for indoor location services.…
LG Display has fuelled rumours of the imminent arrival of the iPhone 5 as its CEO announced the production on a new, thinner display.…
Want to introduce your kids to electronics? Ditch the circuit boards and go with that sticky staple of early childhood: Play-Doh. The off-the-shelf variety isn't conductive enough, but adding the right amount of salt and cream of tartar to your homemade version lets you create circuits, illuminate LEDs and even make motors spin.
By: Christina Bonnington, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Sony Mobile is moving its headquarters from Sweden to Tokyo, where parent group Sony Corporation is headquartered, and laying off 1,000 people as it reshapes the company it took total control of back in February.…
Expanding waistlines may be caused by more than bad diets and sedentary habits. Antibiotics could be disrupting our gut bacteria, helping people pack on fat like farm animals.
This scenario is, for now, a hypothesis, but one that's fleshed out convincingly in two new studies. In the first, mice given antibiotics experienced profound changes to internal microbe communities that process food and regulate metabolism. In the other study, body weight in children rose with antibiotic exposures as infants.
By: Brandon Keim, Edited by: Ian Steadman
The government's pledge to provide countrywide broadband access by 2015 has received another boost from the Culture Secretary, who has promised the "fastest broadband of any major European country".…
Hong Kong telecoms giant PCCW (sometimes known as Pacific Century CyberWorks) is all-but-single-handedly keeping Syria online as US sanctions and probable infrastructure issues hit the war-torn country.…
Australia and New Zealand are considering legislation to prevent mobile carriers gouging customers when they use their phones overseas.…
Wireless carrier T-Mobile has what it describes as a "bold" new feature in store for its upcoming unlimited data plan: This time, it's actually going to be unlimited.…
Pissed-off punters can now benefit from what communications watchdog Ofcom has described as "an improved experience" when complaining about mobiles, landlines and broadband.…
Everything Everywhere will change its identity before the end of 2012 - but will NOT merge its Orange and T-Mobile brands, which will continue to confuse punters indefinitely.…
Amazon has opened a new cloud backup service called Amazon Glacier, that's designed to hold onto data for decades. Costs start at about a penny per month, but there's a catch: it can take up to five hours to retrieve your data.
Amazon says it's designed for "data you don't need to get to often" like database backups, image archives, digital preservation and a replacement for old fashioned magnetic tape-based storage. Anything where "retrieval times of several hours are suitable."
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Everything Everywhere has flogged its excess 1800MHz radio spectrum to rival mobile operator Three with one rather important condition. The sale briefly raised the possibility of the UK having competing 4G networks this year until EE crushed that dream by failing to relinquish the bands until September 2013.…
Facebook was given 24 hours to supply a court in Northern Ireland with the email addresses of account holders who used the site to post abusive messages about a Belfast company, according to press reports.…
They're done. Apple and Samsung have each given their closing arguments in the epic patent trial over whether the South Korean mobile maker infringed on Cupertino's iPhone patents. For the nine members of the jury, however, the next phase of the ordeal has only just begun.…
Kim Williams of Foxtel has become the latest high-profile executive to demonstrate a complete misapprehension of what the NBN is.…
Rackspace will take possession of one data hall in Digital Realty's new Sydney data centre, and pack it full of kit to serve Australian customers.…
Telstra has announced it will close call centres in Lismore and downsize another in Townsville, and cut other jobs around the nation.…
RIM is reshuffling its European management team ahead of the launch of BlackBerry 10, with a new UK boss and the creation of a new, EU-wide managing director.…
If you have ever seen the heart of a baby pulsating away on the screen of an ultrasound scanner you will also have noticed how much the success of the scan depends on the skill -- or luck -- of the operator to jiggle the probe to get the best image and then measure a skull or a limb lurking somewhere in that confusion.
With this in mind, Professor Alison Noble is working to improve the image quality and diagnostic power of this most widely used of medical imaging tools through her Oxford University spinout, Intelligence Ultrasound.
By: Mark Piesing, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Before Moshi Monsters, before FarmVille, even before Neopets, there was one name that to this day remains synonymous with the term "virtual pet": Tamagotchi.
Hatched in Japan during 1996, the Tamagotchi became a historic success story. In its first five months on sale in Japan, it sold 1.5 million units. When it launched in the UK the goal was to sell another million to Brits by that same year's end. Today, the total sales are in the tens of millions and the franchise continues to be exploited by creator Bandai.
Yet there was something dark about the Tamagotchi pets: they could die. In fact death was a chief marketing hook. For the UK launch, journalists invited to a party to pick up a Tamagotchi were warned that if they failed to attend they would be sent a funeral bill. Children, afraid that neglecting their pet during school hours would cause it to die, started having to literally send the toys to daycare -- a cottage industry of "Tamagotchi creches" rose to accommodate this need, and it achieved mainstream TV documentation. Stories about bereaved children needing counselling as a result of a dead Tamagotchi helped keep the toys in the public eye.
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Nasa is set to take a good look at Mars from the inside out with a 2016 launch mission designed to uncover the secrets of its evolution and "lay the groundwork for a future human mission".
The two-year long InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission will be a collaborative effort between Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France and Germany's Aerospace Centre, who will each contribute instruments set to probe the rocky planet's interior. InSight's priority will be to answer questions about the make-up of Mars' core and crust -- does it have a liquid centre like here on Earth, and why does it lack mobile tectonic plates?
"InSight will get to the 'core' of the nature of the interior and structure of Mars, well below the observations we've been able to make from orbit or the surface," explained pun-loving John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said he wants the UK to have "the fastest broadband of any major European country by 2015".
That's slightly different from his original pledge to have the "best" superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015. Hunt explains that while best also include factors like price and coverage, "to be the best you need to be the fastest."
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Amazon is digging deeper into the enterprise with a data back-up and archival service designed to help kill off tape.…
Apple and Samsung's chief execs have discussed their US patent trial but they weren't able to sort out their differences, a lawyer for the South Korean chaebol said yesterday.…
Thirty McDonalds outlets* in France will be accepting PayPal, using the eBay-owned processor's mobile client, as companies race to become the default mobile payment platform whether customers want it or not.…
Ofcom has given Everything Everywhere approval to use its existing 1800 MHz spectrum to deliver 4G internet in 2012. It's a contentious decision, which will give child companies Orange and T-Mobile a huge head start over its rivals.
The telecoms regulator says that letting Everywhere use its 1800 MHz licenses now will "deliver significant benefits to consumers". It says there is no "material risk that those benefits will be outweighed by a distortion of competition," and argues that delaying the 4G rollout would be "to the detriment of consumers."
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Duncan Geere
Everything Everywhere, the UK's largest mobile operator, will get a monopoly on 4G services in the UK, starting on 11 September and lasting at least until next year's spectrum mega-auction.…
The head of News Ltd's Australian outpost has urged for an overhaul of copyright laws to take on the “copyright kleptomaniacs” and “digital suckers” that are robbing the Australian economy of AUD$1.37 billion annually in pirated film and TV content.…
Sensing mounting frustration that movies Linux ISOs aren't downloading fast enough, the IEEE has announced a new group that aims to bring wired Ethernet speeds up to 1Tbps by 2015 and as fast as 10Tbps by 2020.…
Apple has responded to the discovery of a flaw in the iPhone's operating system, which lets users manipulate outgoing text messages and claim they've been sent from any phone number they desire. Apple's solution? Use iMessage.
Security researcher pod2g revealed the flaw on its blog. The site says that the flaw has existed since the iPhone's debut, "and is still there in iOS 6 beta 4." The writer urges Apple to fix the issue before the final release of iOS 6.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Olivia Solon
"Data scientist" is a term that, if not yet in common parlance, is certainly being used more and more as a way of describing a new type of role in business today. The people that fill these roles tend to be graduates with a Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) qualification and a talent for analysing large datasets to uncover patterns and correlations that may previously have remained hidden. Depending on what that data is -- for instance, customer buying behaviour or market conditions -- companies can potentially gain a significant competitive advantage by integrating the power of hard science into their operations.
On the face of it, this sounds like great news for Stem graduates. Traditionally, students in these disciplines were marked for jobs in scientific industries, engineering and academia. But today, mathematicians and scientists find that their skills are in high-demand across multiple industries. While the financial sector has tapped graduate talent for some time, a much wider range of businesses are now looking to recruit data scientists to solve a host of different problems.
By: Guest Author, Edited by: Olivia Solon
No, they weren't Nokia employees – we think – but on Saturday Finns gathered to hurl mobile phones into some concrete.…
Security researchers have discovered an iPhone bug that allows for spoofed SMSes with bogus return addresses to be sent to fanbois.…
Google's Motorola Mobility has filed a fresh patent infringement case against Apple over features on its phones, including the iPhone's voice assistant, Siri.…
Pea aphids may have an unprecedented ability to harvest sunlight, and use the energy for metabolic purposes. It would make it the only species of animal known to have photosynthesis-like powers.
It comes down to carotenoids, which are a type of pigment used in animals for crucial functions like vision, bone growth and vitamin production. All known animals obtain these by eating the plants, algae and fungi that naturally synthesis the orangey-red compounds.
By: Mark Brown, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Imagine a world where banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan; where headhunters hire you based on the expertise you've demonstrated on online forums such as Quora; where your status from renting a house through Airbnb helps you become a trusted car renter on WhipCar; where your feedback on eBay can be used to get a head-start selling on Etsy; where traditional business cards are replaced by profiles of your digital trustworthiness, updated in real-time. Where reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can't be trusted.
Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.
By: Rachel Botsman, Edited by: Ian Steadman
A small, flat rock known as Coronation suffered the wrath of Curiosity's laser when the Mars rover finally fired up its ChemCam instrument and delivered 30 pulses of energy at the rock over a 10-second period.
The laser pulses, each delivering more than 1 million watts of power for around 5 one-billionths of a second, turn some of the rock's atoms into a glowing, ionised plasma. By analysing the light from the plasma, the ChemCam's three spectrometers can determine what elements are in the rock.
By: Betsy Mason, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Standing on a first-floor balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the United States must "renounce its witchhunt against WikiLeaks."
"The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation, the United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters. The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light upon the secret crimes of the powerful."
By: Kim Zetter, Edited by: Ian Steadman
The chair of the EU committee on powerline networking has responded to the Radio Society's call to arms, claiming that every minute of filibustering pollutes the radio spectrum more.…
UK biz Iomart is spreading its cloud south and bolstering biz services by buying up Manchester-based Melbourne Server Hosting, in an acquisition announced last week.…
The Indian government has been forced to ban the sending of bulk SMS text messages over concerns migrant workers from the nation's north-east will be targeted by Muslims.…
China and Taiwan have edged just a little bit closer with the completion of the first submarine telecoms cables between the two nations.…
Onion routing – which in spite of its DARPA genealogy are disliked by national security types – could be made more anonymous, according to a an Iranian researcher now working on a PhD at Concordia University in Montreal.…
China Mobile has made a defensive move against Apple’s plans to launch a Chinese version of Siri by courting its own speech recognition investment.…
Property researcher BIS Shrapnel has shone a torch into one of the dark corners of the NBN debate: the cost of maintaining Australia’s copper network.…
Chinese telecoms kit peddler ZTE has unveiled what it claims are the world’s first USB modem and portable hotspot devices to support both versions of LTE, FDD and TDD, in a move which could be welcomed by international business travellers keen on sniffing out the fastest local networks.…
If you thought HP's decision to spin off its webOS division into a new subsidiary signaled the end of its adventures in the mobile market, think again. According to reports, the PC maker is reshuffling its Personal Systems Group to launch a new business unit aimed at getting HP back in the tablet race.…
A drug user in Lancashire has become the eighth person in Europe to fall victim to an anthrax-laced heroin injection in recent months, with experts suggesting the outbreak is far from over.
The death, reported by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), occurred in Blackpool just a few weeks after another incident in Lanarkshire some 273.5km away.
The case is a warning signal -- this deadly Bacillus anthracis bacteria infection is on the move and, as demonstrated by its location jump, tracking it will unfortunately be no easy matter.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Olivia Solon
SEC filings from Apple-acquisition AuthenTec state that fingerprint and secure-element technology is coming to Apple devices, and soon, but it still might be too early to call the NFC iPhone, and probably wrong to imagine the pay-by-bonk tech will use digit-scanning for authentication.…
This week we discuss how scientists have created the hottest heat ever created on Earth, the winner of the Bill and Melinda Gates' toilet initiative, why some snakes appear to be drunk, and the rest of the week in Wired news.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Motorola employees in Beijing and Nanjing were out this morning protesting the job cuts announced by Google earlier this week.…
It has been more than three years since Ars first started covering Facebook's inability to remove "deleted" photos from its servers, but this particular saga appears to be coming to an end. The company told Ars that its new photo storage systems are in place and are now deleting photos within a reasonable period of time, which we were able to independently confirm.
But this doesn't mean Facebook's privacy problems are gone. There are plenty of other issues that Facebook users have run into in recent years. As the company moves forward into its new role as a public entity, those issues will have to be addressed if Facebook wants to remain on top.
By: Jacqui Cheng, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Nominet, the .uk address registry, sought government help to protect its board of directors from a takeover by domain name speculators, according to its former policy chief.…
Two of Zynga's top titles, Draw Something and Zynga Poker, are coming to Nokia's Asha range of budget blowers, showing that there's life in the old platform yet.…
Twitter is tightening the rules for building applications that use its messaging platform, sparking outrage from twits and developers.…
An accountant on the stand for Samsung in its epic patent trial has said Apple overstated Sammy's mobile gadget margins, effectively inflating a potential payout for the iPhone maker.…
Want to emulate Aardman Animations? Here's how to make your own stop-motion film on your computer. You'll need imagination, a tripod, a camera, patience and probably the charmingly named GIMP software.
By: Jeremy Cook, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Verizon looks to have the green light to acquire around 20MHz of wireless spectrum from a consortium of four of the US's largest cable companies, with two government agencies having voiced approval of the deal, albeit in modified form.…
Application monitoring tool provider Boundary, which only peddles its wares as a service running on a cloud, is offering potential customers a freebie version of the service to scare up some business.…
The high points are easy: iiNet’s profit is up by 11 percent, the company is claiming 15 percent of the broadband market in Australia, and its revenue is well over the $AU800 million mark.…
Judge Lucy Koh has grown increasingly irritated with lawyers on both sides of the ongoing lawsuit between Apple and Samsung, but she hit a new boiling point on Thursday when Apple presented her with a 75-page list potential rebuttal witnesses for the four hours it has remaining in the trial.…
In a move that opens a new front in the ongoing bricks-and-mortar versus e-commerce struggle, a group of fifteen major retailers have joined forces to develop a new mobile payment system to challenge Google Wallet.…
