Microsoft is taking a second run at platform-as-a-service clouds with a set of features to be included in Windows Server 2012 R2 that may give Redmond some credible tech to take on a field flush with rivals.…
Given the recent revelations about mass data slurping by the NSA, we were relieved to hear that a Chinese company has begun offering a whopping 10TB of free hosting to privacy-conscious punters.…
A Chinese clampdown on online rumour-mongers has netted 27 staff at Shui Jun Shi Wan, a firm which specialises in seeding stories across its microblogging network of 220 million followers.…
The Chinese government has pledged to provide nationwide broadband coverage by 2020, an ambitious goal which should see significant extra investment in all kinds of networks, both wired and wireless, in order to reach the country’s vast rural areas.…
Two years ago Lee Beaumont, fed up of receiving daily phonecalls from telemarketing agencies, connected his home landline to a premium rate phone number and started cashing in on cold callers - covering his costs in less than two months.…
Microsoft's Exchange Online service now comes with bigger mailboxes.…
Amazon has brought its automatic application deployment and provisioning tech to its government cloud service.…
EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes has reportedly dropped her plan to slash wholesale mobile roaming fees, a move that could have driven down Europeans' phone bills.…
Vodafone is back in talks with Verizon about selling its 45 per cent stake of Verizon Wireless, US's biggest mobile network operator.…
A submission to the ACCC's fixed line services declaration review has re-ignited an ancient debate about whether the regulator should pry open Telstra's and Optus' HFC cables.…
Mobe operator Three has abolished roaming charges. Well, in seven countries, at least, and only on calls and texts sent homeward bound.…
Berlin boffins have spotted a procedural flaw in the long-lived GSM protocol and created an exploit around it which can knock out a mobile network or even target an individual subscriber in the same city.…
Cunning MIT student boffins have come up with something marvellous: a keyboard that sends a jolt of electricity into those who spend too much time on Facebook.…
Microsoft has dramatically increased the default storage space available for customers of its SkyDrive Pro service.…
There are only so many ways you can build a gigantic infrastructure cloud, so it is with little surprise that Google has introduced a snapshot feature already found in Amazon Web Services.…
News Limited, a marquee customer for Amazon Web Services, has a little bit of Microsoft lipstick on its collar, courtesy an announcement that a new Australian Football League (Aussie rules) service is going to be running on the Windows Azure cloud.…
Problems in the Amazon cloud over the weekend crushed apps like Vine, websites like Airbnb, and numerous other services that depend on Bezos & Co's hulking cloud, and the problems were due to a familiar culprit – Elastic Block Store (EBS).…
The world's not so far away from asking “why can't our laptops be as secure as our mobiles?”, according to Good Technology's John Herrema.…
VMware has taken the wraps off the gigantic task-automation system that will marshal resources in its upcoming infrastructure-as-a-service cloud.…
Amazon has been testing its own radio network, seeing if Globalstar's private Wi-Fi technology fits the Amazon business model, and if customers would pay for better wireless networking.…
Chinese web giant Baidu has unveiled Light App – a new distribution model for mobile applications which could eventually help international developers to better promote their wares in the world’s biggest smartphone market.…
Google has started testing “Helpouts”, a new service that it says is “a new way to connect people who need help with people who can give help, over live video, anytime, anywhere.”…
OpenStack company Piston is donating hardware and developer expertise to the Cloud Foundry community, as the infrastructure-as-a-service specialist seeks tighter ties with VMware-spinoff Pivotal's grand platform cloud.…
Another day brings another wisp of data highlighting the difference in revenue between Amazon Web Services and the other megaclouds.…
Nokia plans to join the phone-cum-tablet "phablet" craze from next month to add to its Lumia line-up.…
Taking a break from the promotion of bloodsports, rural campaign group the Countryside Alliance is looking for help mapping mobile phone not-spots in the hope of embarrassing operators into filling them.…
Scottish broadband remains an elusive dream for many, despite the money being poured into BT's coffers, but pigeonhole a Reg reporter and you might just get lucky.…
Investors seem sold on the idea of Cleversafe's mad "terabyte-a-second" gobbling kit, so much so that the startup has received an injection of $55m to strengthen its big data and cloud-focused product and sell it more widely.…
There's a war going on for the future CPU cycles of the US Central Intelligence Agency, and behind closed doors and under fluorescent lights, representatives of IBM and Amazon are spitting blood at each other as they vie for the contract.…
B&Q won't let you do things for yourself at the moment, since its website, diy.com, has collapsed, presumably under the weight of pre-bank holiday DIYers.…
VMware's world has just become a little more complicated, after Rackspace announced it now offers “Dedicated VMware vCenter Servers”.…
BT's incoming chief exec Gavin Patterson will formally take the reins on 10 September, the telecoms giant confirmed to the City this morning.…
Microsoft Tag, Redmond's alternative to the QR Code which never took off, is scheduled to die on 19 August, 2015, following Old Yeller out behind the cowshed.…
LinkedIn, generally regarded as the premier social network for grown ups with jobs, has decided 13 year olds are now welcome as members.…
The disciples of Gartner's Magic Quadrant have sallied forth to reveal the latest findings of their uncaring quadrilateral god – and the results show that Amazon is the one true cloud, followed at a distance by enterprise supplier CSC.…
iiNet has launched what looks an awful lot like the telephony market's equivalent of a budget airline.…
Wholesale telco ISPOne appointed administrators who have cancelled its contract to resell Telstra mobile connections and appointed administrators, leaving some of its wholesale customers without a network connection with which to serve their customers.…
Amazon.com has dropped offline, amid widespread reports of trouble in the underlying Amazon Web Services infrastructure cloud.…
Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new tool that allows a single server with a gigabit Ethernet port to scan the internet so quickly that it can map 98 per cent of the world's IPv4 connections in under 45 minutes.…
London's Oxford Street has Europe's greatest density of Wi-Fi hot-spots - and almost a quarter of them are openly accessible to the public. That's according to a new study that also puts the UK behind the US in terms of free wireless connectivity.…
You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google's services for a brief time on Friday is over.…
It was only a matter of time until a company like Firebase appeared, saw some success, and went into general availability, but that isn't helping with the nauseous term for its tech: backend-as-a-service.…
The Department of Interior has announced a multi-billion dollar cloud procurement round that will see the land management organization shell out a maximum of $10bn across contracts with 10 major IT vendors.…
Legendary rockers The Who have announced they have no plans to ask One Direction to withdraw their new track Best Song Ever after a digital mob of rabid teenage girls bombarded them with death threats.…
Spreadsheets are pretty much the unsexiest invention since the chastity belt, but one app developer is hoping the idea of analysing their own performance in the bedroom will appeal to a generation of selfie-taking fanbois.…
Google has tossed a crumb of reassurance to people with cloudy security concerns by adding automatic server-side encryption to Google Cloud Storage.…
An apparent data leak is being blamed for nearly five hours of severe disruption for Salesforce customers last week.…
O2 has joined EE and Vodafone in using 4G to justify a jump in pricing, to £26 a month, leaving Three the only UK network selling connectivity rather than technology.…
The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel. That's the headline finding from a new study University of Michigan published on PlosOne this week.…
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has proposed a program to monitor and report broadband performance.…
Microsoft's Outlook, SkyDrive, and People technologies are experiencing problems, making it difficult for some people to access the cloud services.…
Cloud operator Tier 3 has added reconfigurable networking to its cloud technology in an attempt to make it easier for resellers to massage the tech to suit their needs.…
Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo will snub Samsung in its winter smartphone line-up after the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its summer sales targets.…
Radio boffins from the University of Washington have created tags and readers which reflect and feed off ambient radio frequency energy for communications - without needing a power source.…
Hollywood action hero Bruce Willis has been sensationally banned from appearing on the UK's small screen ... in misleading ads touting Sky broadband.…
Open source datastore Riak Cloud Storage has recieved an upgrade to let it plug into the OpenStack control freak.…
As the landmasses of the world buckle beneath the combined weight of the fondleslabs and glossy mobs being churned out by the China's industrial cities, companies are waking up to the need to control the technology, and so Amazon has added tech to its AWS cloud to give devs a cheap way to beam data out to Android, iOS, and Kindle devices.…
Learn how to leverage change for better IT And win a top of the range HP Spectre Ultrabook courtesy of HP and The Register.http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/hub/hpve2013/?td=rss
Miscreants broke into the Twitter profile of prominent advertising bloke Footloose star Kevin Bacon to scam his fans.…
Three UK's phone network has gone down for users in Scotland and the North of England.…
Facebook plans to buy speech recognition and translation app maker Mobile Technologies for an undisclosed sum.…
Learn how to leverage change for better IT And win a top of the range HP Spectre Ultrabook courtesy of HP and The Register.http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/hub/hpve2013/?td=rss
The good news first: there's light at the end of the tunnel for Australia's "we can never find the skilled staff we need" technology sector. And now for the bad news: the end of the tunnel is the year 2030.…
If it works like an enterprise piece of technology, has documentation like an enterprise piece of technology, and has enough ancillary costs to make it pound the wallet like an enterprise piece of technology, then it is probably ready for consumption by large companies.…
Troubled mobe-maker BlackBerry has confirmed it is "exploring strategic alternatives" to remaining as one enormous company - confirming wire reports last week of a potential breakup.…
The next-generation iPhone, one of the last devices conceived by Apple godhead Steve Jobs before his death, will hit the shelves on 10 September, according to fresh rumours.…
Ofcom, Blighty's fearless watchdog of the airwaves, wants to know if Wi-Fi needs more space.…
The board of BlackBerry is considering a private buyout of the company, saying that delisting would get shareholders off its back and give it freedom to move.…
Microsoft will publish data on the reliability of Office 365 to boost confidence in the online service – and yet it also warned that more outages are possible.…
A GPS-based satellite navigation system promises accuracy to within an inch by December this year – to those willing to stick a thousand dollars into the pot.…
Telefonica's freebie VoIP platform Tu Me will be shuttered next month as the mobile network pushes customers towards, er, Tu Go.…
Data center providers are expanding as enterprise facilities experience budget cutbacks, according to the bit-barn experts at the Uptime Institute.…
Rackspace Hosting may be growing its cloud business much faster than its overall business, but the company's rate of sales growth is declining and its profits are also getting pinched.…
Charity mogul Bill Gates couldn't give a flying clippy about Google's broadband balloon PR puffery.…
Web hosting company DigitalOcean has taken $3.2m in funding to help the company expand its engineering team and buy in more server hardware for its four colocation facilities.…
Google has added load balancing to its infrastructure-as-a-service technology, as the company closes the gap between its cloud and those operated by Amazon and Microsoft.…
Vodafone's new 4G mobile broadband package, announced today for the UK, will include live football or a Spotify Premium subscription, plus three months of unlimited downloads and calls - all for £26 a month.…
Speedy broadband networks in cities continue to infuriate country bumpkins who are running out of patience with their painfully slow internet connections.…
Dominant French mobile operators Orange and SFR have been hit with a compensation claim from their diminutive rivals after a court ruled their offer of free calls was anti-competitive.…
Syntheo, the joint venture between Lend Lease and Service Stream Limited that won contracts to build Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) in the States of West Australia and South Australia, will down tools forever in those States early in 2014.…
Sustained violations of civil liberties at home and abroad? Yawn. The manifestation of Orwell's nightmares? Snooze. The potential loss of scads and scads of money? Egad, we should really do something about this!…
Microsoft has warned IT departments to batten down their Wi-Fi networks following the discovery of a security vulnerability in Windows Phones that leaks users' passwords.…
A three-month experiment in Brighton has proved that Digital Audio Broadcasting can be cheap and easy to transmit, opening the way to community and local stations – and perhaps a pirate or two.…
BT won two more government-subsidised contracts to rollout rural broadband on Monday when it scooped up deals in Oxfordshire and Worcestershire.…
iiNet has announced it will acquire Adam Internet for $AUD60m.…
Startup database company GenieDB has announced a cloud-hosted database named – we apologize in advance for what you're about to read – GenieDB Globally Distributed MySQL-as-a-Service (DBaaS).…
Startup cloud company ProfitBricks has been lashed by a security researcher for some security screw-ups discovered after it revamped its prices to undercut Amazon Web Services.…
Having failed to set the world on fire, BlackBerry's flagship Z10 smartphone is now being touted at knockdown prices.…
Twitter's UK operation has been forced to apologise to a number of high-profile women who were targeted with abuse by users of the micro-blogging site.…
A terrifying weakness at the heart of global mobile phone security has turned into a damp squib: networks scrambled so fast to patch the flaw that the researcher behind the discovery isn't making the details public.…
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has attacked "absolutely ridiculous" network-level porn-blocking systems that are being introduced by the UK's biggest telcos over the course of the next few months.…
Hipsters concerned that their footwear is lagging in the cool stakes will soon be ordering Bluetooth-enabled socks, even if they do make them look like a young offender with an electronic tag.…
The Old Reader, the RSS reader that drowned in new users after Google switched off its own RSS reader and then decided to boot out those refugees, has reversed its position and will continue to operate as a public service.…
The Obama administration has used its presidential veto to prevent a ban being imposed on the import and sale of some iPhones and iPads following a court victory for Samsung.
Apple and Samsung have been fighting a protracted battle over patents across the globe. In June the US International Trade Commission found that some older iPhones and iPads infringed a Samsung patent, and banned their import.
By: Duncan Geere,
Fourth-ranked US wireless operator T-Mobile has become the latest mobile carrier to join Canonical's Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), bringing the group's total membership to 13.…
NASA's cloud strategy has been panned by its own auditors, proving that even technically competent oganizations can sputter when trying to soar into the tech stratosphere.…
On Monday the US Navy will fire up its mighty, six-megawatt AN/SPY-1 raygun radar while academics run an LTE mobile-data base station in the same band, so both sides can establish if coexistence is a workable proposition.…
Broadcasting watchdog Ofcom's latest research shows living-room TV watching is on the rise: picture families gathering round in front of the goggle box even if half their eyes are elsewhere.…
Material scientists have managed to move and reconfigure a type of gel using only light.
A research team from the University of Pittsburgh has demonstrated the ability to manipulate hydrogels -- the material that most contact lenses are made out of -- and has published their work in Advanced Functional Materials.
Lead author Anna Balazs, a Pitt Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, explains: "Imagine an apartment with a particular arrangement of rooms all in one location. Now, consider the possibility of being able to shine a particular configuration of lights on this structure and thereby completely changing not only the entire layout, but also the location of the apartment. This is what we've demonstrated with hydrogels."
By: Olivia Solon,
Virgin Media reported flat second quarter revenue this morning as it presented its first results since falling into the clutches of US cable giant Liberty Global.…
In April, when bombs ripped through the finish line of the Boston Marathon, there was a defining online visual of the explosion. It wasn't a photograph or a YouTube video; instead, it was a short, looping video called a Vine. Owned by Twitter and launched in January, Vine is to short videos what Instagram is to snapshots: you shoot, edit and share clips, all through a mobile app. As Boston showed, Vine has quickly become an integral part of online culture. Wired chatted with the service's three young founders -- Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann, and Colin Kroll -- about how Vine grew up.
By: Mat Honan,
No, it's not Google Glass -- it's a Japanese rival called the Telepathy One, due to hit the market later this year. Created by technology entrepreneur Takahito Iguchi, based in Tokyo, it has a simple purpose: to make human connections more intimate. "It's to video stream what each person is viewing and share that experience," Iguchi says. "If every human being could understand what each person is thinking and feeling immediately, it would be an amazing, lovely world."
The Telepathy One is a sleek headset covering one side of the head, with a micro-projector in front of one eye. "It looks as if there's a five-inch screen floating in the air, about 45cm from your eye," says Iguchi. A camera captures what you see, communicating via your smartphone's data connection, and by Bluetooth.
By: Jeremy Kingsley,
New York-based entrepreneur John Kluge wants a toilet revolution. "The last cool thing that happened in sanitation was in 1854, when John Snow ended the cholera epidemic in London by smashing the Broad Street pump," he says. "We need some innovations."
So in September 2012, Kluge, the son of the late billionaire and TV mogul of the same name, launched Toilet Hackers, a sanitation innovation hub. It then co-hosted a global hackathon with the World Bank in 17 cities including Lahore, Mumbai, Dakar and Manila to generate inventions in hygienic sanitation worldwide. Projects that came out of it include mSewage, an app that crowdsources the locations of open defecation sites and sewage outflows, and Fix-a-pit, which collects data and reports broken latrines.
By: Madhumita Venkataramanan,
A team of European boffins has hoisted a mobile network base station into the air from a balloon/kite combination. Yet unlike similar schemes, this one is intended for everyday use, not just for emergencies.…
The weak yen and strong sales of its smartphones in Japan combined to help Sony report a better-than-expected operating profit in its fiscal first quarter.…
Hutchison's Three network in the UK has seen a ten per cent increase in active users over the past year, it says, with a 14.4 per cent increase in contract punters. The six months to the end of June saw 3 with 9.2m users (7.5m active) of which 5.5m were on contract (5.37m active) - the rest being on prepay.…
Nokia Here will be sharing its global floorplan database with Qualcomm, putting indoor maps together with indoor positioning in an assault on the last place one can get lost.…
Twitter has seen a 40 per cent rise in requests from governments around the world for users' personal information in the first half of this year, with the United States topping the list.…
Listen this week for an entertaining 30-minute look at the most interesting technology and science stories from the last seven days, with Wired.co.uk's Nate Lanxon, Olivia Solon and Liat Clark.
By: Nate Lanxon,
Parents with kids of pestering age will know of Skylanders, Activision's video game that expands with the addition of collectible toys. Disney Interactive's upcoming Infinity aims to go one better though, with an entirely customisable Toy Box mode where players get a backdoor introduction to game design.
While players of the standard toy sets get standalone digital adventures featuring the likes of The Incredibles or Jack Sparrow, items earned in-game can be transferred into Toy Box for more creative uses.
By: Matt Kamen,
Facebook users' status updates, videos and photos can now be embedded in websites beyond the free-content advertising network.…
Social games designer Zynga is suing the makers of casual sex app Bang With Friends for trademark infringement.…
Twitter's trolling heatwave intensified on Wednesday night when a number of journalists were targeted with terrifying bomb threats.…
US pay-by-bonk platform ISIS will go live across the US later this year following the pilots in Salt Lake City and Austin, as network operators make their big play for big data.…
Apple chief Tim Cook has been doing the rounds in China with national telcos, drumming up interest in carrying iPhones and iPads to the country's massive mobile market.…
As a geek father, I have a reputation to uphold. And BearDuino has helped me maintain some shred of credibility with my kids... while creeping them out a bit in the process.
The BearDuino is a hardware-hacked Teddy Ruxpin -- the infamous animatronic talking story-time teddy bear unleashed in all its uncanniness on the world in the 1980s -- that has been turned into a kit for use with an Arduino microcontroller, ready for would-be makers to use for good or evil.
I've been itching to do something with the open-source Arduino for a while. I like to break things to figure out how they work and then reconstruct them, and I have a closet full of projects completed or in progress -- and the associated debris to prove it. But for the most part, I've shied away from electronic hardware hacks.
By: Sean Gallagher,
O2's 4G network will go live in London, Leeds and Bradford this month - followed by ten more cities by the end of the year. The rollout will end EE's virtual monopoly on high-speed mobile internet connectivity.…
Almost half of UK flyers admit not bothering to switch their phones to flight mode (or off) while in the air, despite the dire warnings. While most just forget, the rest think they know better.…
Coffee mega-chain Starbucks has announced that Google will replace AT&T as the internet service provider for its company-owned stores in the US.…
Increasingly people are watching shows on the main TVs in their living rooms again, but they're doing so while also using other devices, the latest Ofcom results show.
Figures show that 91 percent of UK adults tune in to the main TV once a week (up from 88 percent in 2002), but around 53 percent of us multi-task by looking at other media simultaneously. A quarter of us also communicate opinions through text messaging or social media about shows as we watch them.
Most people do this using smartphones -- which isn't surprising as now around half the UK adult population owns one -- but increasingly people use tablets to do so too. A quarter of people now own a tablet -- of which 11 percent use them in the bathroom -- and on average households now own more than three internet-enabled devices.
By: Katie Collins,
